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

Wed Jul 15 09:53:52 EST 2009

so in terms of how I have come to my thinking on queer relationality, I
think in particular of GI's Pageant project, which I look at a lot in terms
of the 1975 performance Going Thru the Motions, which re-performs an event
that actually was a contest, the pageant in 1971, in the first half of the
performance and then the second half of the performance is the after-party,
with scripted and unscripted interviews, a red carpet, a bar, etc.

to give some brief examples -
**they bring about a decidedly queer notion of time, rehearsing audience
reaction for the 1984 pageant via a re-performance of the 1971 award
ceremony that will also be the 1984 performance.

**they demonstrate how identification is communal and iterative, rehearsing
the purportedly most automatic of responses and emotions - sleeping when
bored, laughing when amused, gasping when surprised.  and they don't just
say laugh here, they say you are amused here, so laugh.

**they formalize their queer subcultural milieu in more direct ways, not
just in terms of the identificatory operations present therein but by
including the figures in the performance.  rough trade, a band GI designed
album covers for, played, for example

**they formalize the practices (artistic, sexual and theoretical) within
which they locate themselves - talking about the miss general idea car with
the dada saw blades and interviewing Jaque Oasis, a clear reference to
Jackie O and Warhol's paintings of her, discussing the Golden Shower
cocktail at the Colour Bar Lounge, and talking about myths and fetishes.

I think you're totally right about relationality and mediation as objects of
inquiry themselves, and I think projects, such as GI's and yours, that
investigate queer modes of identification almost have to do that, as queer
identification operates as relationality and mediation. rather than essences
etc.

when I use the term avant-garde, I use it in a historical framework in which
it described a particular social relation within a particular moment of
capital.  a book that I really love, Juan Suarez' Bike Boys, Drag Queens,
and Superstars does an amazing job of breaking down a distinction between an
avant-garde that is interested in re-purposing mass/commodity culture in a
manner to make space for marginalized groups to image themselves. This of
course is in distinction to high modernism that withdraws from mass culture
into a notion of autonomous art. The fascination with the new, I think,
comes from the modernism side more than the avan-garde side, though they are
often co-existent in practices. But I wonder if this fascination with the
new is also another vestige of modernism that still determines our values
and structures our literacy?

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 3:45 PM, dj lotu5 <lotu5 at resist.ca> wrote:

> 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
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
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>

-- 
Virginia Solomon
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