[-empyre-] Response to Virgina Re: Robert's Response on Queer Mésentente

[dj lotu5]

hi,

i think i'm mostly caught up now, and want to come back with a few 
thoughts i had this weekend.

virginia, it would be wonderful if you should share with us more of 
general idea's work, or suggest a particular piece you have have written 
about so we can see more of the specifics of their approach. i think a 
lot of the issues you're raising through their work are crucial to this 
discussion.

as we've been teasing out some of what "queer relational" might mean or 
be, i think we've covered a lot of important ground and want to go back 
a bit in order to go forward! it seems like we're getting towards a 
broader idea of what relational could be, looking not only at relational 
aesthetics but at relational objects, mediation and realitionality 
itself as objects of inquiry or as working materials. i wonder how you 
see GI's work in this frame.

also the discussion of queer has been very rich, and there's more than a 
little irony over having serious (political) disagreements over the 
definition of queer... perhaps robert's reference to queer as a 
deleuzian-guattarian war machine is closest to how i think of the term, 
although i'm not excited about holding on to war metaphors, so i wonder 
if we can think of it as more of a love-machine that breaks down by 
binding and reconfigures relationality along new configurations? can we 
think of queer as an anti-categorical category? i often have a suspicion 
that when we discuss artwork as queer we're actually talking about art 
done by people who identify as l, g, b, t, q or i, but perhaps the 
self-identification of work as queer is the best indicator? i'm not an 
art historian, so excuse me if i'm asking naive questions... personally 
i find haraway's recent writing in When Species Meet to be most fruitful 
on "queer mess making" (mess as in eating together) and rethinking 
kinship and relationality by thinking through cross-species and 
transspecies relationships and the kinds of communication necessary and 
operations that unfold there...

lastly i think the questions about avant-garde that have been raised are 
still very important and fruitful. as a practicing artist, i feel that 
there is still a privileging of the "new" regardless of bourriard's 
tossing it aside as a criterion for judging work and regardless of the 
obsolescence of ideas like vanguard, avant-garde and proletariat, both 
politically and artistically. in my experience the focus on the new, i 
feel, comes largely from a demand for knowledge production in a research 
based academic environment, which was discussed in the excellent recent 
article by tom holert (http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/40). yet it is 
still deployed in lots of other contexts about art and used as a 
criteria both by artists and the public, i feel. so how do we update our 
notions of the avant-garde to better match this sort of paradox of 
quasi-avant-garde amidst the acknowledgement of irony and the death of 
originality? is the gramscian notion of organic intellectual a useful 
bridge here?

thanks,

  micha



naxsmash wrote:
> Political aesthetics eapecially as you refer to Butler--- crucial and  
> important.... Also your analysis and perceptive remarks about General  
> Idea are of keen interest...please jump back in with this.   More,  
> please!
>
> christina
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Jul 11, 2009, at 6:18 AM, virginia solomon <virginia.solomon at gmail.com 
>  > wrote:
>
>   
>> There are many points upon which we strongly disagree, with  
>> significant political consequence.  No one else seems to be jumping  
>> in, however, and with that as an indication of indifference from the  
>> rest of the group I too will be brief and say I am more than happy  
>> to continue this conversation directly but remove it from the  
>> listserv.
>>
>> If I may propose another couple possible avenues of conversation:
>>
>> Shall we follow up on some of the work that has been posted to the  
>> list thus far, as a concrete set of stuff we all know we can  
>> access?  I apologize for not yet posting on them myself but I am  
>> slow with work.
>>
>> I also have a question that relates to medium, as per Robert's  
>> thought piece.  Other than the collage, if I recall everything that  
>> has been posted is either a mediated performance or a video work.   
>> How does relationality relate to medium, and how might considering  
>> the relationality of less obviously relational media (sorry to use  
>> the same work a million times in one sentence!) push us to think  
>> about wider ramifications of that operation?
>>
>> -- 
>> Virginia Solomon
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>     
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