Hope Failure

Global alien

investiGatinG the american Dream

investiGatinG the american Dream

Hope Failure

With the project Hope and Failure we were interested in questioning the idea of the Ameri-can Dream today. Beyond the atmosphere of financial crises and the 9 /11 decade — how can this idea be re-imagined? All documented actions in this publication show our methods and approaches of sketching, performing and provoking these dreams together with the au-dience in Portland, Oregon in May 2011. Work-ing with our appearance in a humorous way, we use our visibility to come into contact with other people. Using aesthetical strategies of activism, like banners and workers’ outfit, we provoke in order to mobilize the question of our current agenda. All our actions took part in the public and re-sumed in a gallery space of galleryHOMELAND.

We arrived from the Pacific Ocean to the Willa-mette River over the Hawthorne Brigde into the city, arriving at the City Hall, where the Tent- performance was installed. During the lunch break, when people would need a restful nap, we invited the public to come inside our tent and take part in a short hypnotic performance. The understanding of sleep, as described in Nam-See Kim’s following text, was our starting point. Installing this performance in front of the City Hall of Portland made a link to the homeless protests in 2008 / 2009. Camping over-night, a group of homeless people were protest-ing against an ordinance, which criminalizes those who are forced to sleep in public spaces at night, because for them there is no access provided to shelters.

In the gallery space we continued with the Beamer-performance: the visitor was filmed and projected onto the wall nearby, surround-ed with the stories and dreams, he told to us and which somebody drew and drafted for him. The installation Build up your dreamhouse where your dreamland is is a continuation of this approach: The visitor was invited to create his house in colored clay and to choose a land on a table with a world map. With the project Hope and Failure we left the idea of a classical exhibition behind by trans-forming the gallery space into a collaborative and creative platform. The visitors were able to actively participate and become a part of the process of playfully reinventing the American Dream.

Global Alien

at the harborwe came

over the bridgewe came

the citywe entered

the city hallwe saw

to the peoplewe talked

in the tentwe slept

togetherwe dreamt

as products of sleep, are proof of our disconti-nuity and severance from what exists. We at-tempt to mitigate this fear through dream theo-ries that try to hide the true nature of dreams —as interrupting, discontinuing, and, thus, de-structive acts — by interpreting them through narratives of time and continuity. These theo-ries then say that dreams are only shadows and footsteps of the past, or absurd figments of the imagination. They bind dreams to the past and to irreality in order to suppress their revo-lutionary energy 3 as forebodings of new times and new lives. The neurotic obsession with self-identity and continuity that we see here has been exacer-bated by the financial turbulence of the last few years and the collapse of neoliberal theodicy that is, the collapse of faith in the rationality and efficacy of capitalism and the free market, 4 that it has led to. The neoliberal world-order requires continuous labor and competition from the world’s people, forcing them to com-pete endlessly with meaningless debris from the past to ensure their own perpetuity. In this way, neoliberalism seeks to eliminate oppor-tunities for discontinuity and severance from history, and fosters a sense of post-historical continuity that urges that there is no better

For me there can be no art revolution that is separate from a science revolution, a political revolution, an education revolution, a drug revolution, a sex revolution or a personal revo-lution. i cannot consider a program of museum reforms without equal attention to gallery re-forms and art magazine reforms which would aim to eliminate stables of artists and writers. i will not call myself an art worker but rather than an art dreamer and i will participate only in a total revolution simultaneously personal and public.

Statement for open public hearing of the art workers coalition, new York, lee lozano, artist, april 10, 1969

Sleep is the discontinuation of intentionality in the human conscious. We must discontinue our

waking life and sleep in order to survive. The “fatality of sleep” ( Fatalität des Schlafs ) 1 creates a dynamic in which we are severed from our past and are therefore capable of going down new paths in our lives. At times, we fall asleep from excessive fatigue, sadness, or exhaustion. Our life is then renewed, our batteries recharged, by sleep’s interruption of the heavy continuity of time. Our fatigue before falling asleep, more-over, loosens the solid “latch of individuation” that binds us, letting more worlds and people enter the place of “reduced identity ( Mehr des weniger ichs ).” 2 In this regard, it is understand-able that sleep brings us colorful and surrealis-tic dreams in which the boundaries between us and the world, as well those between us and others, vanish.

However we also possess a contrasting desire for individuation and continuity, a desire for existence without the interruptions in identity and life that sleep brings. This desire leads us to ward off the interruptions of sleep with an anxious fiction built out of the belief that the world we return to after sleep is the same world that we left behind, as well as that the person we are after sleep is the same person we were before. It is the paranoid possessive-ness of this belief, in its continuous desire to return to an image of the self built in the imagi-nation and to an aggregation of discarded mo-ments from the past, that seeks to polish over the discontinuity and severance of sleep with fictions of continuity and identity. Our fear of dreams is based in such fictions since dreams,

economic system than the one in place. This crafty ideology seeks to colonize sleep and dreams, the forces of discontinuity and sever-ance dwelling within our lives, for its own ben-efit and growth. It pushes a continuous flow of labor and consumption onto the breadth of our lives, calling sleep a phenomenon anachronis-tic to modern life and seeking to excise it as a form of laziness and disease anathema to com-petition, and thereby invalidates the original revolutionary potential of dreams by interpret-ing them through gaudy frames of success based in the existing order of capitalism. The recent terrorist attack in Norway reminds us how the obstinate desire for pure identity for the isolated individual and for the group can engender tragedy. The current obsession with discrete individuality, and with undis-turbed cultural continuity and identity, con-ceives of diversity and otherness as an exter-nal, foreign threat to cultural purity that must be eliminated. It is a paranoid desire to perpet-uate oneself in a singular wave of pure indi-viduation that disdains religious, cultural, and linguistic diversity and strikes out in spasmodic violence against it as a foreboding otherness. This was the mode in which the far-right extrem-ist Anders Behring Breivik, a man who gave

himself over to the violence of video games in-stead of the severance of sleep, killed 76 inno-cent people in Norway, taking multiculturalism as his enemy instead of abiding in the de -iden-tity /de-individuation of the dream. Residents of Portland, Oregon, are currently being invited to a tent installed in front of Port-land City Hall. There, they are encouraged to talk about their dreams after taking a short nap. This performative installation is intended to symbolically publicize the positive energy to be found in the discontinuity and severance of sleep and dreams, and seeks to awaken people to the political potential of the de-identity/ de-individuation implied by sleep and dreams, forces that we are in desperate need of in the current global era.

1 Hans Blumenberg, Begriffe in Geschichten, Frankfurt am Main 1998, p. 90

2 see Peter Handtke, Versuch über die Müdigkeit, Frankfurt am Main 1992

3 see Ernst Bloch, das prinzip Hoffnung, Frankfurt am Main 1974

4 see Joseph Vogl, das Gespenst des Kapitals, Berlin 2011

Sleep and dreamS aS diScontinuity

and Severance

Nam-See Kim

Upside down tentExhibition at galleryHOMELAND

Beamer PerformanceExhibition view

where your Dreamland is.Build up your Dreamhouse

Published in connection with the exhibition:Hope and Failure – INVESTIGATING THE AMERICAN DREAM

galleryHOMELANDPortland, Oregon, USAMay 6th – May 28th, 2011

Design and Concept:e o t . essays on typography, BerlinPrinted at Conrad, Berlin500 CopiesTranslation: Yuni Choi

Thanks to the galleryHOMELAND staff:Paul Middendorf – Director and FounderReese Kruse – Exhibition DirectorThanks to further supporters:Linda M. Wysong – Associate Professor, Pacific Northwest College of Art,Friends, families, and the Global Alien Kids

Supported by Danish Art Council, Korean Art Council, Berlin Senate Cultural Affairs Department, The Historic Ford Building, Widmer Brothers Brewing Company, Stumptown Coffee, Milepost 5 Lofts and galleryHOMELAND

Images are all made by Global Alien © Global Alien, 2011

The artist group Global Alien is spread over the globe with a junction point of members in Ber-lin. Their projects are concerned with the frag-mentary nature and effects of globalization, power relations and cultural identities. The aim of each action is to create a fluid space of performativity, which leads to a permanent ex-change with local conditions. Working with aesthetical visibilities of social and urban re-alities Global Aliens’ approach is inventing ways of communication to overcome borders and meet each other where we are.

Global Alien is: Youngjoo Cho, Thorbjørn Reuter Christiansen, Lizza May David, Marte Kiessling, Nam-See Kim, Kuo-Wei Lin, Jakob Schaible, Jae- Hyun Yoo.The group has exhibited and performed at Mein-blau Space in Berlin ( 2006 ), Ssamzee Space in Seoul ( 2007 ), Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien Berlin ( 2008 ), Rum46 in Arhus ( 2009 ), Dam /Stuhltrager Gallery in Berlin ( 2010 ) and ISCP in New York ( 2011 ).

www.globalalien.net

Global Alien