[-empyre-] Response to Earlier Post by Virginia: Agonism, Vaginal Davis, Recuperative Reading/s

[Robert Summers]

Virginia Wrote: "In the interest of agonism, precisely not antagonism,
could you clarify your strategy of recuperative readings? I agree
wholeheartedly that just because something evidences problems along
one axis, that does not in any way mean that it thereby loses any kind
of efficacy. however, I do think that it is important to be mindful of
the problem that one strategy presents, so that we might retain what
is useful and adapt whatever is problematic, on the basis of its blind
spots.

I think Vaginal Davis' work, as presented by Jose Munoz, in fact,
provides us with a great example of this, and so I wonder if you see
her work in particular, qua her work, not qua Fanon, as making and
employing tactics that offer recuperative readings?"

Virginia,

I think she does both reparative readings and recuperative readings.
On the level of reparative reading is the surfacing of love for and
hope in an object (be it an image or a text).  Let me turn to
Sedgwick's reparative reading, which is a counter to paranoid reading,

"The sculpture in this picture [of Judith Scott who is a textile
artist] is fairly characteristic of Scott’s work in its construction:
a core assembled from large, heterogeneous materials has been hidden
under many wrapped or darned layers of multicolored yarn, cord,
ribbon, rope, and other fiber, producing a durable three-dimensional
shape, usually oriented along a single axis of length, whose curves
and planes are biomorphically resonant and whose scale bears
comparison to Scott’s own body.  The formal achievements that are
consistent in her art include her inventive techniques for securing
the giant bundles, her subtle building and modulation of complex
three-dimensional lines and curves and her startlingly original use of
color, whether bright or muted, which can stretch across a plan,
simmer deeply through the multilayered wrapping, or drizzle
graphically along an emphatic suture. All of Scott’s work that I have
seen on its own has an intense presence, but the subject of this
photograph also includes her relation to her completed work, and
presumptively also the viewer’s relation to the sight of that dyad.
(Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 22)"

Indeed, there is a loving and reparative tying, holding, together.
The way that Scott holds her finished work, and the way that this work
holds Scott, can be understood as the way Sedgwick holds her own work,
and the way I hold all three.  More broadly, this holding together can
be understood as the ways in which "queers" hold those objects and
subjects that can (for whatever reason) bring pleasure and even pain.
There is a queer-intertwining that connects, interconnects, and binds
together (for however long and to what ever ends) seemingly disparate
bodies (in the broadest sense of the word).  And, I think that Vaginal
Davis does such work when she creates her nightclubs or performances
-- we know there is violence, we know the outside hates "queers," we
know that people are dying, but how to make a space, if only
momentarily that, that doesn't surface what we already know, but
rather there is a space that is  created that explores other modes of
not-knowing, other spaces that have yet to be explored, which can be
incredibly transformative,and none of this is to argue to a willing
forgetfulness or a ignoring of that pain that covers the earth, but it
is to give primacy to love and hope.  Another mode of enacting a
reparative practice can be seen in this video, and one may argue that
it is also a modality of what Munoz calls "disidentification" (I
wonder if there is a connection between reparative readings and/as
practices and disidentification):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEdaUvW81Zw

In "Chicken Man" Vaginal Davis re-routs and recycles racist images,
enactments, and stereotypes in a way that deflates them (one can
employ a Munoz reading of disidentification.  I would argue that Davis
can only do this through the superhuman love of queer, which is to say
that images, etc. can be manipulated in ways not intended to be
manipulated and deployed by the minoritarian subject/s.  Similarly,
isn't this also a type of recuperation via an enactment of the
shameless -- and shame and shameless are only a suffix a part -- and
there is always the risk (precarious life and visualities, indeed) of
having the image/s, enactment/s, etc. be re-recuperated, if you will,
by the majoritarian sphere, the State apparatus.  In this way, I think
"everything" "progressive," "un-becoming," and "radicle" -- so from
reparative, to recuperative, to deconstructive, to queering -- needs
to be constantly and chronically re-done and re-deployed: the critical
and creative work is _never_ done, but only ever just beginning.
Without a doubt we must remain, as Butler has argued, "critically
queer."

I guess what I am trying to say is that all (?) of Vaginal Davis's
(art)work is both reparative and recuperative.  I think even her name
gestures toward this: sexualizing Angela Davis for other ends and
purposes, which is a beginning and revitalizing.  I guess this is why
I am hesitant to cast aside (almost) anything from Genet, to leather
boots, to queer, to relational aesthetics -- because these can always
be read otherwise and in multiple directions and I think that the work
of Vaginal Davis demonstrates this, at least for me: interestingly,
she is a fan of Genet.

Does this lead to an answer?  Have I lost myself and the answer -- as
well as the question?

As ever,
Robert

Robert Summers, PhD/ABD
Lecturer
Art History and Visual Culture
Otis College of Art and Design
e: rsummers at otis.edu
w: http://ospace.otis.edu/robtsum/Welcome