[-empyre-] -twerkw

[Judith Rodenbeck]

Hello, all, and thanks, naxsmash, for inviting me on board. I've been trying
to catch up on the conversation (Google the word; it's quite interesting and
symptomatic what comes up), so my apologies in advance for the swerving I'll
do in the next couple of days.

I want to go back to "relational aesthetics" for a moment, because it seems
to me that the term seems to have gotten awfully baggy, and I'm going to
attach it specifically to Bourriaud, even though his articulation of the
concept in the 1990s essays and the later (French 1998; English 2003) book
is, as Molly Nesbit once said to me blithely, "student work." Marc laid out
some terms for one kind of pretty strong critique of Bourriaud, and Simon
gave a quick sketch of the reception of Bourriaud. In my own thinking I've
been interested in Bourriaud's *active suppression* of historical precedents
for the kind of work he subsumes under his relational umbrella and in trying
to come to some articulation (roughly lines up with the force, though not
the rhetoric, of Marc's analysis) of the stakes, for our moment, in that
suppression of the event works--not then yet "performance"--of e.g.,
happenings, Fluxus, task dance, and eventually expanded cinema. Because the
"not then yet" is important, inasmuch as those historical projects not only
established certain areas of productive material inquiry but also, more
importantly, engaged in meta-critical art-driven analysis of the art
world--avant la lettre of and, at least to my mind more poignantly than, the
now become-capitalized (and generic) Institutional Critique.

It may also be worth throwing a few of the less successful contemporary
umbrella terms, like "littoral art," "dialogical art," "new situationism,"
(yikes!) "participatory art," "new genre public art," "site specificity,"
and even "social practice" art (which Harrell Fletcher teaches up in
Portland) against the wall to see what sticks.

And lastly, I'd be interested in thinking "queer" not through art made of
specific bodies and their comparative innies/outies but as vectored and
filiated querying. Unlike Marc, I found the slapping piece distressing to
watch. It made me think of, in no particular order, the Milgram experiments,
waterboarding and wingnut excuses for it, the rather twisted story of
Blanchot and Levinas before and during the war, bullies in the White House,
gender stereotypy, bulimia, dysphoria, the bathos of so much body art... It
can't help that this past few weeks I've been consumed with reports from
Iran, the rapid tarnishing of the Obama administration, and then the last
two days with the Sotomayor hearings. The stream of cell phone videos from
Iran seem pretty queer, and deeply relational, to me.

Judith


On 7/14/09 7:46 PM, "naxsmash" <naxsmash at mac.com> wrote:

> ... thinking about 'queer' as a functional
> shift, or even 'clinamen' (swerve)-- just trying to develop
> an nominative (naming ) of queer as noun makes it disappear (rather,
> it is in transaction, translation.  Thats why...