[-empyre-] a beginning...

[lotu5 at resist.ca]

hi all,

i'm excited to join this month's discussion. i feel honored to be an
"invited" guest this month, but i also feel like my subversive position as
outside commenter has been somewhat usurped and i've been feeling
surprisingly shy about posting! so i'll just dive in...

I'm curious about asking what we mean by queer and by relational. I
decided to look back at Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics for this
discussion, and I think that I would even claim that relational aesthetics
has a certain queerness about it, or an affinity with queer world
building, or a statement like michael warner's saying in Publics and
Counterpublics that "by queer culture we mean a world
making project". Bourriaud states

"before long, it will not be possible to maintain relationships between
people outside these trading areas... You are looking for shared warmth,
and the comforting feeling of well being for two? So try our coffee... The
relationship between people, as symbolised by goods or replaced by them,
and signposted by logos, has to take on extreme and clandestine forms, if
it is to didge the empire of predictability... Herein lies the most
burning issue to do with art today: is it still possible to generate
relationships with the world"?

In this initial gesture of relational aesthetics, I actually see a queer
gesture, in that if the relation is the form of the artwork, then the role
of the artist is to invite new forms of relation. (although later
Bourriaud tosses newness aside as a criteria for relational aesthetics)
Admittedly, I have a lot to learn about relational aesthetics and am
looking forward to learning from you all this month... Yet, if global
capital offers heteronormative couplings around a cup of starbucks coffee
(and this leaves aside a discussion of quer cooptation for later...), than
the move by artists to create new spaces to reimagine relationality can be
seen as a move outside of the heteronormative structures of biopower.

Here I am reminded of a quote from Myron Kreuger that "the only aesthetic
concern should be the quality of the interaction." My own work has been in
the new media trajectory, which can be seen as in a trajectory with the
interactive environments of Myron Kreuger. In Becoming Dragon, I sought to
explore the subject in transition, in a way creating a space of relation
between the audience and a subject who's state of being-in-transition or
becoming is foregrounded. The performance coincided with the beginning of
my hormone therapy, so it was also a meditation on the resonances between
a physical becoming or transformation and a digital becoming avatar,
becoming mythopoetic and becoming the body-in-transmission. I definitely
can see this as a queer relational piece, between genders as well as
between spaces, the physical space and the space of second life.

Which brings me back to an opening the question of queer. I appreciated
the quote from Foucault about homosexuality, but do we see queer in this
discussion as an active blurring of binaries, or of boundaries and
categories themselves? My own conception of queer began with my experience
in the alter-globalization and No Borders movements, in which I regularly
organized and struggled with people who had notions of creating their own
gender outside of male/female binary restrictions, and these notions
energized and were energized by anarchist and world-building political
strategies.

Ok, that's enough for now. I just wanted to get out some of what I was
thinking about...

  micha