[-empyre-] introductory questions

[Matthew Brower]

Hi Chaya and Owen,
Chaya, I want to ask you to expand on the idea that the destabilization of interpretive frameworks in documentation could be linked to its effectivity. On the one hand, this seems linked to Butlerian notions of performativity that would stipulate that attempting to assert the reality of pregiven categories is a dangerous fantasy. On the other hand, I worry that a focus on the destabilization of categories, for its own sake, can evacuate political effectivity through the paralysis of analysis. In other words, destabilization of what – and to what end?

Owen, to respond to your questions about the shape of artivism and its relation to political effectivity I want to return to the Ai Weiwei’s video work from the initial provocation.  My aim is to try and think through the political significance that the video is thought to gain through its circulation – moving from dissent to resistance through being embedded in art institutions. What exactly is the political significance that the work gains? Can we speak of the work’s political effectivity if most of the audience circulating it in cannot actually understand the transgressive charge of the title’s wordplay – fuck your mother style and its context within internal Chinese politics. Is that the piece’s effectiveness in that it parasitizes the PSY phenonomen thereby making it acceptable for the artworld and intelligentsia to perform the early 21st century version of the chicken dance / Macarena? Is it that the piece’s politics aligns with the digital libertarian obsession with censorship and being able to say or do anything on the internet? Is it simply that the piece is taken to have embarrassed the government, as evidenced by the censorship, and therefore the piece provides evidence of art’s ongoing political effectivity and our repetition of it gives us access to that effectivity? Can you help me think through this?

Best,
Matt
________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of Owen Mundy [omundy at gmail.com]
Sent: November-11-13 11:31 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] introductory questions

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