Reinventing the language of contestation

The book "The Beautiful Language of My Century" examines the language of contestation, specifically Situationist 'aesthetics' of appropriation and 'detournement' which gave cultural form to a struggle over meaning, and agency. The author, Tom McDonough also examines the inheritances in the work of Pierre Huyghe, Phillippe Parreno, and the curator Nicolas Bourriaud, and their [in] sensitivity to the failures of detournement, and subsequent strategies for 'post-production', itself a denial of reification [the transport of life to 'thingness'] that Situationism addressed, an affirmation of the pure objects, and events, of the grotesque quality of commodities...to be contested and continually adjusted by art as absolute commodification.
MIT PRESS, October Books

THE LAUNCH OF WEBSITE _ IDEAS

The website is being constructed as a skeletal structure for your uploaded work, which will comprise the blog [ selections?] and essay - also the images you have collected - selected. It can also have a live function - video /sound - and Alex will work with you next session. I will give examples of press releases. We will also see how to invite by email out. A later event can be staged at the Bowling Alley - performance / interventions. We need to think about sponsors- for an event outside.

During the next week I will be attempting to comment on your blogs - anyone not having already provided the address please send. I have collated 32 addresses so far.

The final image here attests to a fact - meat or corpse- the glamour of fashion is a denial founded in the sexual or sensual appeal of the inorganic. The deathly, blank image of fashion, neither 'alive' nor 'real' is the truth of the cadavar, that hides the fact that there is no truth hidden in the image.

Alex Keating visited to talk about website design - what was possible, and how we would work together on the design. The first step would be to ask for images to create avatars for each participant. These could be selected from the documentation. What would the website present? The essays, the blogs, in some reedited form, and documentation [ ongoing] of the events, with updates of the exhibition in formation and operation.

The images that are produced in mass, thirty million copies a time, for example, in Vogue, that carry the stereotype forcibly into archetype, conspire as a mythology of the body, emaciated at a level of inorganic energy. If televisual fragments of bodies also disperse the sign of the transmuted body as an exploded and reanimated detritus of living bits, transmitted at speed to a mass, what cultural signification has the human corpus? It would be impossible to return to the body as a unity, as essence of 'human' being, or transformed as avatar. The reconstruction process at best would be difficult, as its machinic possibility is also to be coerced as commodity, or as terminal for a production of more images, circulated as reproduction. The body is a terminal for the machine, yet there is a sense that a desiring mechanism remains in the sex appeal of the inorganic.

The caption or label becomes more than a guide in re-presentations of events. Here, in two identical images, one could imagine bending or warping, skewing the perception of what happened, or is happening in the depicted. By variously describing the contents of the image, fictions that support it, might be drawn out, or overlayed, so that interpretation overtakes actual content. The ambiguous reading therefore is one of the ways that 'detournement' found escape routes, or entry points, in the organisation of iconic images' power to persuade. Advertising, spectacle and ideology co-incide. The detourned image resists this process by a number of tactics; tearing up the image, re-aligning by photo-montage [ think of John Heartfield's anti-nazi works] or re-writing captions that contradict expectation or 'advertise' an alternative ideology, one that attacks the organisation of power.

A détournement, is a variation on a previous media work, in which the newly created one has a meaning that is antagonist to the original.

THE ART BOWL

We will meet to discuss the arrangements / dates and possible sponsors for an event at AMF Bowling. Please advise to ideas for the participation of artists.

UNFASHIONING THE OBJECT - VOGUE TRASH - DERELICTION - EXCESS

We discussed excess - the excess that Bataille wrote of as more a problem than scarcity. How does excess figure in art production, and value permanence? Does value continually shift? When does an artists' work reach a plateau of historical significance that its value begins suddenly increasing at the rate of infinite increment? There is an implicit [intentional] contradiction in the ideologues of conceptual art, quoted by Douglas Huebler, in not wanting to add anything more to the world of images /objects, yet to projects that are in process of recording 'everything' or 'everybody' in the world. The Impossible destination. If we video everything that occurs as an 'event' then there is no event. What process of censoring the image then is called for? How is that kind of subtraction from excess in any way effective as bringing change, or as a truth process? Does the arbitrary construction and destruction of immediate images recorded on mobile phones imply a different [better] cognizance of the world? Reading Roland Barthes' Empire of Signs gives a clue to the Japanese mentality of surface of a world without any hidden inner necessity or 'soul'. No guilt, no permanence, no morality, just what it is...is this the 'fashioning' of surface that Vogue represents without anxiety about death, or the transience of things, and the inevitability of corruption?

IMMEDIACY

two workshops, which were practical sessions designed to illuminate the theory we have been examining in the first four sessions. These workshops have produced a kind of hybrid situationism, with points of discussion arising from what has been produced. The debates also around digital imaging in relation to object-making, and the decentring of individual practice to group authorship. [ Individual practice is not deserted however. These simple dialectics and conditions establish a question of 'practice' : provisions for a new grounding for radical art, at least ostensibly so. The very site of production being a lecture theatre is itself interesting as an alternative [ there is always an alternative] being 'inside' the system, and yet historically always having provided radical views and social activism to be incubated. The relation therefore to a kind of production within the sphere of the academic, that is at the same time uncertain and oblique, allocates a space for provisional development of anti-aesthetic procedures nominated as 'dirty' space, or 'context responsive curating'.

There are two objectives immediately at hand. The text explication [the blog] and the essay of 2000 words to complete by the end of the vacation period. The three weeks space will generously allow time for the 2000 word essay to be undertaken. I have cut the text explication requirement to one only, placed more emphasis on the blog and its potential for research material, and brought the essay back, so as to concentrate later on the potential for an exhibition and the pragmatics of setting it up with time, for mailing press releases, invitations etc. and coinciding with the construction of the website. The exhibition / event might be possible in the AMF Bowling, Merrion Centre. I imagine the group can invite performances, and artists to participate. Alex Keating will arrange for meetings with the management.

UNFASHIONING THE OBJECT

UNFASHIONING THE OBJECT

The seminar set up a workshop, using Vogue magazines and objects with simple tools to 'fashion' a fluxus table of readymades adjusted in one hour - these were photographed and projected to examine the rupture between the real presence of a collection of objects and the images produced by the immediacy of the digital image. How can production be delimited at this scale and register of information? Where was the event to be located? These images would constitute with the first performance of drawing and writing in charcoal and displayed in the context of string [ a mile of string] a layering of image-events as a website platform for further additions [and subtractions] at a later date. The choice of these images as avatars would be organised by the designer Alex Keating, in discussion with the group.

Ist Mir Egal

Ist mir egal

Du hast dein Leben auf den Kopf gestellt
Und seitdem kämpfst du gegen die Welt
Selbstmitleid raubt dir den Mut
Doch glaub mir - ich kenn das gut
Sie wollen den Blick in deine Welt
Sie wissen sicher was dir fehlt
Dann führ sie auf die falsche Spur
Sie warten nur

Ist mir egal
Es interessiert mich nicht
Völlig egal
Ob euer falsch mein richtig ist
Zum letzten Mal
Wenn du denkst du bekommst was du kennst
Ja dann irrst du dich
Dann bin ich das nicht

Sie sagen du brauchst Personality
Doch den Beifall ernten sie
Und schleichen sich in dein Gesicht
Versprich mir - vergiss das nicht
Loslassen kann man lernen
Sonst ertrinkst du in deinen Plänen
Führ sie auf die falsche Spur
Das wollen die nur

Ist mir egal
Es interessiert mich nicht
Völlig egal
Ob euer falsch mein richtig ist
Zum letzten Mal
Wenn du denkst du bekommst was du kennst
Ja dann irrst du dich
Dann bin ich das nicht

Es scheint dir alles zu banal
Dann überhörst du das Signal
Du wirst sehen ich lass dir keine Wahl

Ist mir egal

Ist mir egal
Es interessiert mich nicht
Völlig egal
Ob euer falsch mein richtig ist
Zum letzten Mal
Wenn du denkst du bekommst was du kennst
Ja dann irrst du dich
Dann bin ich das nicht

Ist mir egal
Völlig egal
Ob euer falsch mein richtig ist
Zum letzten mal
Wenn du denkst du bekommst was du kennst
Ja dann irrst du dich
Dann bin ich das nicht

English

I don't care

You pulled your life upside down
And since then you fight against the world
Self-pity robs you your courage
But believe me - I know that closely
They want the look into your world
They know for sure what's wrong with you
Then lead them on a false track
They only wait

I don't care
I'm not interested
Totally indifferent
If your "wrong" is my "right"
For the last time
If you think that you get what you know
Yes, then you're wrong
Then it's not me

They say you need personality
But it's them to get the acclaim
And they creep into your face
Promise me - don't forget it
You can learn to let go
Otherwise you drown in your plans
Lead them on a false track
That's what they want

I don't care
I'm not interested
Totally indifferent
If your "wrong" is my "right"
For the last time
If you think that you get what you know
Yes, then you're wrong
Then it's not me

Everything seems to be too mundane for you
Then you don't hear the signal
You'll see I'll let you no choice

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From: http://lyricstranslate.com

Sessions 5 and 6 used the space at hand with simple materials to question practice (i) the lecture as spoken language (ii) group authored works where it is not difference but the same that constitutes a new appearance - from a decision to enactment