[-empyre-] "Queer Relational" : Parker and Parker
Christina McPhee
christina at christinamcphee.net
Fri Jul 3 08:37:58 EST 2009
dear -empyreans all,
I remember the first time I was struck by an impression -- that
relational aesthetics might end up being kind of like activities-
directing in drag. -- Artist as reality TV producer--. Hmm, there's
an idea, I wonder what network will 'have' me? ? (And actually I just
learned today there's going to be a new reality show about
contemporary artists--organized by Sarah Jessica Parker's production
company. http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/film_video/sarah_jessica_parkers_contemporary_art_reality_show_begins_casting_120595.asp?c=rss
( how perfect. )
It was at Documenta 12, summer of 07, there on behalf of our list dear
-empyre-. There, at Kassel, we the audience were wandering and
wondering around, looking at minimal wall tags giving very little info
about each artist--as if we were to 'make our own connections' ; whoa,
wait: I get it ! -- like playing animal lotto in kindergarten, a
matching game. Like to like?
Did that mean that all artists and us were supposed to be the 'family
of man" (shades of Edward Steichen and the early fifties)?
I thought that perhaps the curators of Documenta saw themselves as the
activities directors. Sort of like mad tea party proto- Physical
Education instructors. Do these exercises for your betterment! Or
else!! One felt a bit forced into it. into a position of acceeding to
a formal system we can all get -- you know-- just instinctively,
because we are all wired the same. Yep:
ART-R-US . ?
Well, but who dat? who is us? Or, as Pogo once said, "We have met the
enemy and he is us." I felt like staring at a blank wall for a long
time.
After Documenta 12 I was lucky enough to stop in at the "Martha Rosler
Library" in Berlin. That evening the Berlin/Vienna based writer Tom
Holert was giving a fascinating talk about, among other things, how
surrealism in late forties New York painting and film circles took a
dive into obscurity at the pen of Clement Greenburg. Tom spoke about
the film critic Parker Tyler, who in that period, made some writings
on the 'monstrous' . He had close ties to the surrealist painting
scene, and was a friend of James Agee (Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men). Agee and Tyler influenced Pauline Kael, the great
New Yorker film critic (whose raucous words I drank up as a lonely kid
in Nebraska, as I imagined film after film in a dream parade). Here
in Berlin, Tom Holert was telling me an American story I had no idea
of-; surrealist connections sublated in the general rush towards
formalism in the fifties. http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/4455
So wait-- the tradition of the avantgarde in Greenberg crushes or
anyway (sublates) this surrealist turn. For awhile. Sleeps for 20
years like old Rip van Winkle, til the dawn of the seventies. Fifity
years ago, in the first blush of the postwar period, painting is to
be henceforth about flatness, its essential nature. Each according to
each, each kind to kind. Sculpture cannot be theatre. All the arts
are equal, like the animals. But some animals are more equal than
others (see Painting Department). The wars over this formalist dicta
rage for several decades.
Scene three: I'm reading Claire Bishop, editor of the super-
invaluable tome "Participation" (MIT/Whitechapel, 2006). Claire
weighs in with some trouble about relational aesthetics, the
marvelous term concocted by Nicholas Bourriaud, and enacted at the
Palais de Tokyo in the nineties. As the earlier avantgarde formalism
had struggled to keep identity and politics out of 'high art', by
making a cognate of art criticism with phenomenology (or, the thing in
itself?), forty years on, Bourriaud develops an aesthetic from the
tropes and commonplaces of DUY (do it yourself).
Wikipedia condenses it all for us. " Bishop also asks "if relational
art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is
what types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why?"She
continues that "the relations set up by relational aesthetics are not
intrinsically democratic, as Bourriaud suggests, since they rest too
comfortably within an ideal of subjectivity as whole and of community
as immanent togetherness."
Now here on -empyre- we are immanently together of course, famously on
facebook, tweeking twitter. Vive la difference ? I want to get at
whether there's something about queer theory that can help out all
this 'togetherness'. I don't really want to direct activities, and I
am not sure what or with whom i am relating. I look into Prospero's
books, and under the waves surrounding my library. Do I see Caliban
and Ariel?
Returning to monster-ing, our guest Micha Cardenas with her 'Becoming
Dragon" stories on -empyre-'s own html texts is the immediate
inspiration for this month.
So please join me in 'queer relations' !~ I will begin by introducing
Robert Summers in my next post.
all my best with a (Northern-hemispheric) smile of a summer night-
Christina
On Jul 2, 2009, at 2:28 PM, Christina McPhee wrote:
> Please join us in July 2009 on -empyre- soft-skinned space....
>
>
> "Queer Relational"
>
> with -empyre-'s special guests Micha Cardenas (US), Felipe Zuniga
> (MX/US), Emily Roysdon (US/SE), Marc Léger (CA), Virginia Solomon (US/
> CA), Tara Mateik (US), Amy Wiley (US), and Robert Summers (US).
>
>
> https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2009-july/
>
>
> subscribe at http://subtle.net/empyre
>
> moderated by Christina McPhee (US)
>
>
> How might queer theory and practices inflect/torture/distort or
> otherwise improve 'relational aesthetics'- ? Is the relational
> aesthetics meme often complicit, if accidentally, with
> heteronormativity? How does queer practice and theory
> politically develop the space of the democratic 'violence of
> participation"? A paranoid concern launches our topic-- may cliches
> of relationality mitiigate against excess, ephemera, and the variable
> and uncontrollable power of the engaged artist/writer?
> Asking what is a queer space of participation, the list itself enacts
> its own making for an intersubjective 'queer' text. A hypertext and
> linear edit of the conversation will be published in 2010 and
> presented in the Queer Caucus for Art panel at College Art
> Association, Chicago 2010.
>
>
> Please join us! subscribe at http://subtle.net/empyre
>
> ----------------------->Micha Cárdenas / dj lotu5 / Azdel Slade is a
> transgender artist, theorist and trouble maker. She is an Artist/
> Researcher at the Experimental Game Lab at CRCA and at Calit2
> University of California-San Diego. Her interests include the
> interplay of technology, gender, sex and biopolitics. She blogs at
> TechnoTrannySlut.com. Micha holds an MFA from the University of
> California San Diego, an MA in Media and Communications with
> distinction from the European Graduate School and a Bachelor's degree
> in Computer Science from Florida International University. http://bang.calit2.net/tts/
>
> ------------------->Felipe Zuñiga is a visual artist, independent art
> promoter, and art facilitator. Zuñiga lives and works between Tijuana,
> Mexico, and San Diego, U.S.A. He is part of the artist-run space, Lui
> Velazquez Space, which organizes exhibitions, art residencies, and
> cultural events in the city of Tijuana. He obtained an M.F.A. degree
> in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego and a
> bachelor in visual arts for the UNAM, in Mexico City. http://www.luivelazquez.com/old_site/pr/lasse/index.html
>
> ------------------>Emily Roysdon is a New York and Stockholm based
> interdisciplinary artist and writer. Her work is invested in language,
> memory, collectivity and the processes of history and she uses video,
> photography, text, and performance to that aim. She is editor and co-
> founder of the queer feminist journal and artist collective, LTTR.
> Roysdon's work has been shown at Participant, Inc. (NY); Generali
> Foundation (Vienna); New Museum (NY); Power Plant (Toronto); and
> Studio Voltaire (London). Her videos have been screened at Whitechapel
> Gallery (London); Arsenal: Institut fur Film and Videokunst (Berlin);
> The Kitchen (NY); and at the International Short Film Festival
> Oberhausen. Her writings have been published in numerous books and
> magazines, including Cabinet Magazine, the Journal of Aesthetics and
> Protest, and Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory.
> Roysdon completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001
> and an Interdisciplinary MFA at UCLA in 2006. For six months in 2008
> she was a resident at the International Artists Studio Program in
> Sweden (IASPIS). She is a recipient of a 2008 Art Matters grant and
> 2009 Franklin Furnace grant. She is currently curating an exhibition
> on 'ecstatic resistance' at Grand Arts. http://www.emilyroysdon.com/
>
> -------------------->Marc James Léger is an artist, writer and
> educator living in Montreal, Canada. He has published essays on
> critical cultural practices in Afterimage, Parachute, Art Journal, C
> Magazine, Etc, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and the Canadian
> Journal of Film Studies. An essay on the cultural theories of Henri
> Lefebvre was published in Andrew Hemingway, ed. Marxism and the
> History of Art (Pluto Press, 2006). He is editor of Bruce Barber's
> collected essays and interviews, Performance, [Performance] and
> Performers, published in 2007 by YYZBOOKS, as well as the forthcoming
> Spleen: Institutions of Contemporary Art Practice, a collection of
> essays on political dissidence in the context of the neoliberalization
> of cultural institutions. http://www.joaap.org/6/another/leger.html
>
>
> ----------------------->Virginia Solomon is an art historian and
> critic completing a doctorate at the University of Southern
> California, specializing in modern and contemporary art, culture and
> politics. Her dissertation considers the work of Canadian artist group
> General Idea as an archive of queer avant-garde art practices in the
> context of an evolving conversation concerning the relationship
> between politics and subjectivity. Other interests include feminist
> theory, cultural studies and visual studies. Virginia was a Helena
> Rubensteinfellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program for the
> 2007/2008 academic year and is a 2009/2010 Canadian art research
> fellow at the National Gallery of Canada. She has published and given
> public talks on queer and feminist art and cultural politics, and was
> a co-curator of the recently closed Tainted Love, a group show that
> considers love as a political tactic in art after 1987. http://www.lamama.org/
> . http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D02EEDF173CF93AA25755C0A96F9C8B63
>
>
> ----------------------->Tara Mateik is an artist and educator living
> in New York City. In his videos and performances he casts himself as
> theoretical and cultural transvestites from pop music, competitive
> sport, and weird science. In 2002 he founded The Society of Biological
> Insurgents (SBI), an embryonic cell organization that wages strategic
> operations to overthrow institutions of compulsory gender. Mateik’s
> work has been exhibited at venues that include The Solomon R.
> Guggenheim Museum, The Project, and Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New
> York, LACE in Los Angeles, British Film Institute in London, England,
> Oberhausen Film Festival in Oberhausen, Germany, and Museu de Arte
> Moderna in São Paulo, Brazil. Mateik’s writing and work has been
> published in Felix: A Journal of Media Arts and Culture, LTTR, a queer
> feminist art journal, North Drive Press #2, and Art Fancy. His awards
> include a three-year fellowship at the Rensselaer Polytechnic
> Institute, a grant from the Creative Capital Foundation in film/
> video, an Electronic and Film Art Grant from the Experimental
> Television Center, and a BCAT/BRIC Rotunda Gallery Video Residency. In
> addition to his own work he has collaborated with collectives and
> artists including Paper Tiger Television video collective to produce
> short videos that demystify and democratize the media. In 2000 he co-
> founded Dykes Can Dance with Emily Roysdon and JD Samson. From
> 2004-2009 he brought contemporary art to New York City's public school
> children managing over a dozen collaborations between teaching artists
> and public school teachers for the Education Department at Art in
> General. http://www.taramateik.com/
>
> -------------------------->Amy Wiley is a scholar of performance
> theory and rhetoric. Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, U. C. Davis,
> 2001. Lecturer, Cal Poly State University, Department of English.
> Primary Fields: Late 20th Century Literature of the Americas
> (American, Canadian—Francophone and Anglophone—and Spanish American);
> Postmodernism; postcolonialism; applications of performance theory to
> textual analysis; theories of state/domestic terrorism, separatism,
> violence, and identity formation. Co-author, with Christina McPhee,
> "Bare Life and the Traumatic Landscape" (Documenta 12 Magazine
> Project, 2007). http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/article.php?IdLanguage=1&NrArticle=1740
>
>
> ----------------------->Robert Summers is a lecturer in art history
> and visual culture at Otis College of Art, Los Angeles. He is a board
> member of Telic Arts Exchange and The Public School. He has published
> papers in art and academic magazines and journals, and has published
> essays in anthologies, such as "Vaginal Davis _Does_ Art History" in
> _Jonathan Harris's Dead History, Live Art_ (University of Chicago
> Press). He has also presented papers and has chaired panels both
> nationally and internationally -- the latest panel being
> "Intersectional Queer Visualities" at the annual Association of Art
> Historians (AAH) conference in the UK. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=toc&bookkey=168958
>
>
> ------------------------->California-based visual and media artist
> Christina McPhee is an artist and filmmaker working with landscape,
> memory and environmental/eco-spatial practice. Her current project
> Tesserae of Venus opens in October 2009 at Silverman Gallery San
> Francisco. http://www.silverman-gallery.com/artist/view/1615. A clip
> from her environmental site study on Ballona Wetlands is new on
> Version.org , curated by Caleb Waldorf and Jordan Crandall (http://version.org/videos/show/1
> ) , Her "La Conchita mon amour" on environmental devastation and
> shrine building showed at Sara Tecchia New York in 2006 and is
> featured Sharon Lin Tay's forthcoming "Women on the Edge: Twelve
> Political Film Practices," Palgrave/Macmillan 2009 https://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=305775
> . She was the lead editor for -empyre-'s contributions in the
> Documenta 12 Magazine Project in 2007 http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/index.php?IdMagazine=59
> New 2009 projects include Recipe [evacuee cake] /Recette-
> Gâteaux_à_évacués for VIDEOFORMES 09 Clermont Ferrand, France http://www.vimeo.com/5262390
> , and PLAZAVILLE with GH Hovagimyan, a Turbulence.org variable
> cinema commission which showed at Pace Digital Gallery NYC and Art
> Cologne (screenings at Open Space / Vernissage.TV) http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville/
> , She contributed drawing for the "Space of Europe" drawing
> exhibition within 'VIolence of Participation' , a book and
> participatory exhibition project edited and curated by Markus Miessen
> for the Lyon Biennial, 2007 http://www.sternberg-press.com/index.php?pageId=1205&bookId=100&l=en
> . Her solo exhibition "Carrizo Parkfield Diaries,'" on seismic memory
> linking post-traumatic stress syndrome visualization with earthquake
> geomorphology, was shown at the American University Museum/Katzen Arts
> Center, Washington DC in 2007 and in video installation at Bildmuseet
> Umea, Sweden in 2006. http://christinamcphee.net
>
>
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