[-empyre-] Re-Igniting the Conversation By Someone Else

[Robert Summers]

I came across the quote again.  I assume one would have be familiar
with Miwon Kown's essay in October or her book of the same title "One
Place After Another" ...

"In her absolutely insightful historical and theoretical investigation
of site-specific art practices, Miwon Kwon ultimately argues for
contemporary cultural practices that bear a 'relational sensibility,'
as the only means of 'demarcating the relational specificity,' that
[John Paul Ricco is] attempting to think here.  she goes on to argue
the '[o]nly those cultural practices that have this relational
sensibility can turn local encounters into long-term commitments and
transform passing intimacies into indelible, unretractable social
marks.'  Yet it is precisely in refusing the necessity of these
effects and transformations (in the form of identification,
permanence, and legibility) that certain spatial, social, and visible
practices can be understood as queer". (Ricco, _The Logic of the
Lure_, 94-95).

So indeed -- and via ones angle(s) of vision, ones orientation(s)
(sexual and positional and ???), ones political, aesthetic, ethical,
and embodied subjectivity -- how, why, and when are some "things" left
out and other "things" left in?  How to use one project in a way that
can highlight queer relations, aesthetics, etc. -- even if said
project was never meant to "queer"?  What can be said (more than has
been said) of "queer relational" -- as well as a "queer politics of
aesthetics"?  What politics -- normative ones, to be sure -- are at
work in dominate art history, which October is an exemplary model/mode
of dominate art history in the US (and beyond)?  What antagonisms --
or agonisms -- need to take place for queer to emerge -- flash up in
that moment of danger?  What -- or more to the point -- how and when
is queer ... relational?  Backing up ... is "queer" dangerous,
anymore?

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