[-empyre-] -twerkw or placebo

[naxsmash]

I felt a certain puritanical-- perhaps hygienic-- fastidiousness in  
"Relational Aesthetics'; to be sure the Thatcher/ Reagan
years immediately precede the nineties and  Bourriaud's invocation,  
without apparent irony,  of a general human or 'general audience'
interacting with/as the artistic work.  Fastidious because this  
aesthetics is wanting to shed any taint of beauty, mixed relations,  
sleeping with beauty, sleeping beauties, and worrying about
the consequences.   A hygienic "its so Good for you! " this  
interactivity neatly packaging for us something artful but lacking   
that quality Judith here insists on,  that  'not then yet-'
meaning some kind of slippage between event and meaning, between overt  
action, the 'work' and interpretation, a time lag or latency....

without [ not then yet-] the space of the participatory art in the  
classic "Relational Aesthetics" reminded me, sometimes, of walking  
into a nice semi-private, semi-public waiting room where, here and  
there, attractive popular magazines,
and toys for the kiddies, stack up; maybe,   a doctors office  
reception, freshly redone.  A mistake no doubt, this feeling of  
unease.  One wasn't supposed to feel this dread or pleasurable  
dread?    one was supposed to feel correct...
Or corrected?  Liam Gillick's striped units, impassive and cheerful,  
Were they a placebo or a real drug?  Were 'relational aesthetics'
corrections?  An exact duplicate of reality (as in the old saw: "all  
my belongings have just been stolen and been replaced with exact  
duplicates!")

>> ot then yet" is important, inasmuch as those historical projects  
>> not only
>> established certain areas of productive material inquiry

General Idea got into this business of the placebo as a productive  
material inquiry.  Probably Virginia has something interesting to say  
about this work-- the giant placebo pills installations---- Taking on  
placebo in the height of the AIDS crisis:

> Placebos are pseudo-medications that in fact do not contain an  
> active ingredient—"candy-coated sugar pills [that] fake your body  
> into feeling better while leaving it defenseless."9 When used for  
> experiments testing drugs for terminally ill patients, placebos  
> raise ethical dilemmas by endangering individual lives for the  
> ultimate good of the many. As General Idea tells us, the etymology  
> of the term placebo goes back to the Latin placere, meaning "to  
> please.". ..... (Lilian Tone)


http://home.att.net/~artarchives/tonegeneralidea.html








On Jul 14, 2009, at 7:15 PM, Judith Rodenbeck wrote:
> . In my own thinking I've
> been interested in Bourriaud's *active 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.
>
> ....
> 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...
>
>
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