[-empyre-] AQR stuff

[virginia solomon]

Ok, on to the stuff.

I just took down a show that I curated with the amazingly brilliant Steve
Lam, called *Tainted Love*. There is a link to the catalog for that show
here: http://www.thebody.com/visualaids/current/tainted_love.html . Many
thanks again to discussant Emily Roysdon for her contribution to it!  The
point of that show was to consider activist practices that offer a different
model of politics than that which was mandated by ACT UP in the late 80s and
early 90s, practices that believed in the political operation of art as art
that spoke to cultural politics, rather than art as agit prop that spoke to
policy change and electoral reform.  Clearly we have no intention of
deriding direct action, but we did want to think about what the insistence
upon direct action as the only possible form of political artmaking
excluded.

We tried to select work that engaged with a hermeneutic of love, in which
love functioned not as that affect that I feel for you that makes me my most
realized self, but as that affect which breaks down precisely that
understanding of the subject.  This is part of my larger interest in
practices that pick up a politics of subjectivity, of presenting different
possibilities for being in the world as part of the art work.

This interest stems from my work on Canadian artist group General Idea.  GI,
I think, establishes an archive of a queer avant-garde (the latter term I
use because it was theirs, but also because I think what GI set up carries
many of the problems that we see in the formulation of the avant-garde as a
concept, problems and contradictions that are important both to the
avant-garde's being but also as an indicator or the limits of a certain kind
of understanding under our moment of capital) from Dada and Surrealism
through to their contemporary moment that formalizes queer sociality, queer
relationality.  This is more than just making art out of throwing parties,
but throwing parties is an important part of it.  These practices cohere not
around a specific style, by any means, but rather a critical operation that
insists upon subjectivity as relational and mutable.  But rather than simply
a negative assertion, this aesthetic of queer relationality creates a
being-in-common-in-difference, creates a semblance of collective being (to
avoid that term - community -) that is an important part of the aesthetic's
cultural politics.



-- 
Virginia Solomon
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