[-empyre-] AQR stuff

Wed Jul 8 04:47:59 EST 2009

This presents an interesting question that Steve and I were trying to work
through in Tainted Love, which stemmed from an amazing show that Juli Carson
did in 2007, called Exiles of the Imaginary.  In that show Carson took a
very psychoanalytic look at desire and the politics of practices that engage
with desire.  But though I find it useful at times, I always am hesitant to
just go there with psychoanalysis.  This, through Emily's wonderful
contribution to a conversation in the context of Carson's catalog, brought
me to thinking through love as a queer contribution to Carson's show, which
did not particularly deal with queerness despite featuring many artists that
engage with queer issues in their practices.  What does the queer contribute
to the political operation of art?  Does love offer a different kind of
affective and political engagement than desire?  Might my affinity for love
over desire have something to do with a personal taste for Barthes that I
don't have for Lacan?  Is that really a reason to discount that affinity?

I think that the incorporation of the queer into art insists upon art as a
space of cultural politics in addition to any kind of electoral engagement,
so I'm thinking about changing how people understand rather than changing
how governments act.  Clearly love and desire are not entirely disseparate,
and I don't mean to create any kind of binary between them that would then
be mapped onto some queer/hetero binary, again because I see queer as an
operation and not a position.  But if we do want, for the purpose of
conversation, to set up a kind of queer theory/love as offering different
possibilities than psychoanalysis/desire conversation, I would be very
interested in how that would play out. How is love different than desire?
Not in their ontologies, but in their operations?  How do those differences
materialize in practice? Or, to be more precise, since both certainly appear
simultaneously, what operation does desire inact in a work, and what
possibilities present themselves if we think in terms of love and not
desire?

Emily, I'm particularly interested in your thoughts on this question, given
that text and its appearance in that conversation that was very much about
desire.

real quick, when I'm talking about love here I consider it as Barthes does
in *A Lover's Discourse*, which is very much informed by Chela
Sandoval's *Methodology
of the Oppressed* in which she traces the hermeneutic of love as a political
tactic within various women of color and third world feminist movements
since the 1960s.  So not romantic love, but the love of the rejected lover,
love that rather than affirms, dematerializes or disidentifies the subject.
I see this as different than desire, at least in a Lacanian sense, because I
understand Lacan positing desire as that affect which leads to the
solidification of the subject, which requires the presence of the Other but
nevertheless, through desire for the Other, confirms the self as a being.

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 12:59 PM, esquizo trans <esquizotrans at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
>>
>
>

-- 
Virginia Solomon
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