[-empyre-] AQR stuff

[esquizo trans]

Hello, interesting this thread.

Esquizotrans has been quiet for a while but got warmed up by all this cute
fuss about queer. Virginia says something that is very close to what we have
been repeating for some time; v. says: "This is more than just making art
out of throwing parties, but throwing parties is an important part of it."
Indeed, we have been throwing parties - less than we wanted - and people
come up to us and ask about the politics of throwing parties (and of
exploring the micro-erotic). We feel that we ought to interfere in the
underskin of desire producing mechanisms. We believe in the asthetics (in
virginia´s sense) of the slightly off porn as a tool to infect people with
building bricks of different desires. Infection. We take infection as the
micropolitical equivalent of a rally.

Lately we have been exploring sexual difference. We tried to get women to
talk about their own male genitalia, roughly informed by recorded speech by
men on how they feel their cocks. Sexual difference is an instance of
difference - we take it as a nomadic instance, as Braidotti would put it -
and it gets expressed mostly beyond the layers of concepts that we use to
arm ourselves. We want to spot sexual difference in the gestures, in the way
the discourse is delivered, in the movements of the mouth. We´re still in
the process of broadcasting the results of this explorations of sexual
difference, but as we welcome comments from this thread on some of our
previous stuff, especially:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rzyanpuK_o   an angry intervention in
Istambul over the Pipa Bacca issue
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnGkEmgBXgI&feature=channel_page the
presentation of a character
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWQ8Vf-O30M&feature=channel_page everything
is capital
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q16h8FuFEo&feature=channel_page a short film
showing that dicks dance (they don´t speak - phalus is "falo" in Portuguese,
and "falo" means also "I speak" - they dance)

yours, esquizotrans





On 7/7/09, virginia solomon <virginia.solomon at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
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