[-empyre-] Invocation of the Queer Spirits

Sat Jul 25 05:27:54 EST 2009

as I understand, AA did this performance in New Orleans too, adjacent to but
not part of the biennial.

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Christiane Robbins <cpr at mindspring.com>wrote:

> In an jump here, by chance, has anyone seen this recent piece by Bronson
> and Hobbs ... and, if so, might you have any comments as to how it may or
> may not add to our "dinner conversation" re: relational aesthetics?
>
>
>
> AA Bronson & Peter Hobbs
>
> AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs' Invocation of the Queer Spirits (Governors
> Island), a séance held here on June 25, 2009, invoked historical, queer, and
> marginalized practices as a way to heal the past and acknowledge the
> present. As Bronson described, the ritual includes "drawing a circle, asking
> for protection, and invoking the spirits, naming the various histories and
> communities of the dead." This intervention underscores how queer
> communities have overlapped with the histories of Spiritualists and shamans,
> as well as all-male communities such as the military population that called
> Governors Island home. Inspired by the countless lives and deaths that took
> place on the island, the project invites us to think again about what is
> valued and what is excised from our collective history. The physical remains
> of the ritual are presented here.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 23, 2009, at 11:00 PM, Robert Summers wrote:
>
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> 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
>

-- 
Virginia Solomon
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20090724/600fe9fb/attachment.html 