Cover – Tennant Creek Brio 'Artist Studio' (2020)

OAR Issue 4 / MAY 2021 Tennant Creek Brio ‘Artist Studio’ 3

Cover – Tennant Creek Brio ‘Artist Studio’ (2020)

Statement

‘We are the creatives and the culture men, we can travel in our dreams – Winkarra. We’ve got to go back to country for those dreams. Our country has spirits – its alive – and it needs us: ‘our spirits and country are crying for us,’ because we are not practising on our grounds. We need strong resolve.

Our ArtIt’s a new cultural art for us mob where we can express our stories – it’s not inside our culture – it’s on the edge, coming in. Some of our dreams have different kinds of effects that come in the night, in our head, and we create something stranger. They’ve got meaning and it’s part of healing. The healing is also found in our ceremonies and our expression, it keeps people together and strong – if we lost that it would harm us and it would harm our future – if we lose it now what will we have for our future generations, they’ll never know anything, they’ll miss out on what we know.— Kamarnta wilyanka pakamarra (we are holding it strong)

The Italian word brio means mettle, fire, or vivacity of style or performance. It expresses the energetic, experimental and transformative spirit of the Tennant Creek Brio, whose collective work is a dynamic interplay of influences including Aboriginal desert traditions, abstract expressionism, action painting, found or junk art, street art and art activism.

The Tennant Creek Brio is an artist collective based in the Barkly regional town of Tennant Creek, (population 3,200) which is located in Warumungu country in the Northern Territory. The collective began in 2016 as an Aboriginal men’s art therapy program through Anyinginyi Aboriginal Health Organisation to help men with issues of alcohol and substance misuse. Under the direction of artist Rupert Betheras and supported by fellow artist Fabian Brown, Joseph Williams and the more senior David Duggie, the collective quickly gained traction amongst local men. The collective soon grew its core membership to include Marcus Camphoo, Simon Wilson, Lindsay Nelson, Clifford Thompson, Matthew Ladd and Joseph Williams alongside several occasional members and fellow travellers. By 2018, the art therapy program had moved out of Anyinginyi and under Nyinkka Nyunyu, the Tennant Creek’s art and culture centre, where the collective was joined by artist Jimmy Frank.

To cite this contribution: Tennant Creek Brio. ‘Tennant Creek Brio ‘Artist Studio’ (2020).’ OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform Issue 4 (2021): cover, http://www.oarplatform.com/cover-tennant-creek-brio-artist-studio-2020.

Tennant Creek Brio


Each artist had been exposed to various traditional forms of cultural expression, i.e. sand, rock and body painting, along with canvas, print, TV, film, social media and religious and protest imagery before joining the Brio. The seeds of Brown’s iconic figurative style, for instance, were planted when he was young, producing sketches on the walls of his childhood dwellings. As a teenager, Williams learnt to carve from his grandfather, while Wilson also developed an interest in painting during his teens. Additionally, Betheras’ early teenage years were marked by Melbourne 1980s graffiti subculture. The artists share a rebellious streak and commitment to unsettling the status quo born from a shared experience of outsider status.

Working collectively, the artists are also challenged to reinvigorate their individual practices through exposure to new materials and mediums, and through new approaches that are collaborative and dialogical. No individual’s authorship necessarily takes priority over the others. At times one artist might finish the work of another through reimagining the intentions and possibilities of their art in the act of both making and presenting their work. While the collective remains true to its art therapy origins, it has also developed a significant social and cultural voice reflecting on the rigours of life in a frontier town that remains marred by the ongoing impacts of colonisation and the unending struggle to maintain cultural identity.

Some of the collective’s ‘found’ materials – such as disused metal, plan drawings from a nearby abandoned mine site, and disused poker machines – potently feed into the force of this commentary and outsider status.

(Artist Statement by Tennant Creek Brio and Nyinkka Nyunyu Arts and Culture Centre)

Cover Image: Installation view from Tennant Creek Brio artist studio, including works by:Lindsay Nelson, Clifford Thompson, Fabian Brown, Marcus Camphoo, Joseph Williams, Jimmy Frank, Simon Wilson and Rupert Betheras, left to right: Pot of Gold, 2 Woman 5 Dragons, Country/Swagman, Indian Dreaming, Titan, and One-eyed Man. Image courtsey of Nyinkka Nyunyu Arts and Culture Centre.

1 Jimmy Frank and Joseph Williams, in consultation with Michael Jones, Norman Frank and Fabian Brown, ‘Minngalangala Anyula Wilyangka Pakkamarra, From the Edge We’re Holding it Strong, Living on the Edge’, in NIRIN NGAAY, Jessyca Hutchens, Brook Andrew, Stuart Geddes and Trent Walter (eds.), published by the Biennale of Sydney Ltd, Sydney, 2020, available online: https://nirin-ngaay.net


Studio view, works by various artists, central works by Fabian Brown and Rupert Betheras. Image courtesy of

Nyinkka Nyunyu Arts and Culture Centre.

Left to right: Lindsay Nelson, Marcus Camphoo (Double-O), Clifford Thompson, Fabian Brown and Rupert Betheras.

Image courtesy of Nyinkka Nyunyu Arts and Culture Centre.


The Tennant Creek Brio is an artist collective based in the Barkly regional town of Tennant Creek, (population 3,200) which is located in Warumungu country in the Northern Territory. Following their debut exhibition in 2016 at Nyinkka Nyunyu, in 2017 the Brio’s exhibition ‘Present Tense: Tennant Creek Men’s Centre Art’ was held at the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art in Darwin, garnering, albeit limited, acclaim. In 2019, the Brio exhibited ‘King of the Roosters’ at Raft Artspace, Alice Springs and also ‘Wanjjal Payinti’ (Past and Present) as part of the 2019 ‘Desert Mob’ group exhibition, Alice Springs. In 2020, The Tennant Creek Brio were participants in the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, titled NIRIN, contributing major installations of work at Cockatoo Island and Artspace.

Fabian Brown and Rupert Betheras, 2019, Ancestor Boards series: Blue-bird and Trump, She-Wolf, Enamel and mixed media on board. Image courtesy of Nyinkka

Nyunyu Arts and Culture Centre.

7CreditsOAR Issue 4 / MAY 2021

Issue Four, May. 2021 Working with you,

Editors Jessyca Hutchens, Anita Paz, Naomi Vogt, and Nina Wakeford

Contributors Jessyca Hutchens, Anita Paz, Naomi Vogt, Nina Wakeford, Francois Blom, Garth Erasmus and Esther Marié Pauw, Elisabeth Lebovici (translated by Naomi Vogt), Martina Schmuecker, E.C. Feiss, Katherine Guinness, Charlotte Kent, and Martina Tanga, Rib Davis, Marie Caffari and Johanne Mohs, Sarah Jessica Rinland, Johann Arens, and Mihai Florea

Design Julien Mercier

Issue Design 0ffsh0.re

Advisory Board Kathryn Eccles, Clare Hills-Nova, Laura Molloy, and David Zeitlyn

ISSN 2399-5092

Jessyca Hutchens, Anita Paz, Naomi Vogt, and Nina Wakeford

OAR is published once a year by OAR: The Oxford Artistic & Practice Based Research Platform.

E-mail [email protected] www.oarplatform.com

Author generated contentOAR Platform attempts to provide a range of views from the academic and research community, and only publishes material submitted in accordance with our submission policy.

The views expressed are the personal opinions of the authors named. They may not represent the views of OAR Platform or any other organisation unless specifically stated. We accept no liability in respect of any material submitted by users and published by us. We are not responsible for its content and accuracy.

RepublishingAll contributions published by OAR Platform are done so under a Creative Commons – Attribution/ Non Commercial/No Derivatives – License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). This means that material published on OAR Platform is free to re-publish provided the following criteria are met:

1. The work is not altered, transformed, or built upon, and is published in full. 2. The work is attributed to the author and OAR Platform.3. The work is not used for any commercial purposes.

Further information can be accessed here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.

SubmissionsAbstracts for submissions (approx. 300 words) should be sent to [email protected] may propose either a response to this issue or a contribution for future issues.A more detailed call for responses and submissions can be found on the final page of this issue, and at http://www.oarplatform.com/contribute/.

Introduction 8OAR Issue 1 / APR 2017

Cover – Tennant Creek Brio ‘Artist Studio’ (2020)

10 Introduction – Working and not working with you, Working with you, and you, and you Dear Jess, Naomi and Anita Working with you, Alone Together With Them,

19 What do we learn from listening back to a decolonial Khoi’npsalms?

31 TO EXPOSE, TO SHOW, TO DEMONSTRATE, TO INFORM, TO OFFER

59 Re:Site (after R.M.), 2018

61 The Art of Resource Development: Here to Support in the Institution of Art.

74 Collaborative Reflections on The Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative

80 Talking about Oral History

81 In the Name of Art: Literary Mentoring as a Collaborative Process

Tennant Creek Brio

The EditorsJessyca Hutchens Nina WakefordAnita PazNaomi Vogt

Francois Blom, Garth Erasmus and Esther Marie Pauw

Elisabeth Lebovici Translated by Naomi Vogt

Martina Schmuecker

E.C. Feiss

Katherine Guinness, Charlotte Kent, and Martina Tanga

Rib Davis

Marie Caffari and Johanne Mohs

Contents

Contents Page 8OAR Issue 4 / MAY 2021

Introduction 9OAR Issue 1 / APR 2017

90 Hand in Glove

111 Immobilisation

113 Collaborating with a stick — Algernon Schtick Meets Nina Bambina

Jessica Sarah Rinland

Johann Arens

Mihai Florea

Contents

Contents Page 9OAR Issue 4 / MAY 2021

OAR Issue 4 / MAY 2021 Working and not working with you, 10

Working and not working with you,Jessyca Hutchens, Anita Paz, Naomi Vogt, and Nina Wakeford

To cite this contribution:Hutchens, Jessyca, Anita Paz, Naomi Vogt, and Nina Wakeford. ‘Working and not working with you,.’ OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform Issue 4 (2021): 10–18, http://www.oarplatform.com/working-working/.

In this, our fourth and final issue, Working with you, we decided that instead of our usual co-authored editorial introduction, we would each contribute our own separately authored introduction on the theme, both as an ostensible nod to collaborative research relationships and as a final subversion of our own prior adherence to editorial norms. As it has worked out, an extensive series of delays and disruptions have effected this issue in particular, leaving us feeling particularly sheepish about making introductions on behalf of ourselves and others, while making claims about the nature of working relationships that are set in motion by OAR as a project. And yet, we also couldn’t resist presenting some collective thoughts on the contributions to this issue, precisely because our performative separation as editors (our individual pieces will directly follow this one) proved to re-engage us with the stakes of this issue and the complex ways contributors have articulated relations as something greatly moved on from reductive notions of individual versus collective authorship.

Currently, in art making and practice based research, working under the rubric of the collaborative, the collective, or the participatory is frequently rhetorically celebrated but in our view, often not materially or conceptually supported in-line with the specificities demanded by new working relationships, with participation, networking, and interdisciplinary dialogue often offered as their own reward. Debates more specific to contemporary art that have centred on the aesthetic, affective, ethical, and political stakes of community engagement and artistic representations of social projects are moreover not necessarily widely applicable to the wide spectrum of collaborative acts elicited through artistic and practice based research. But rather than setting their arguments against the failure of the potential of the collaborative, this issue seems to rest on the way very particular research contexts engender certain modes of relating, and their associated processes, rituals, materials, and outcomes. They suggest our working relationships always need attentiveness, wherever they may sit within any particular scale of autonomy and heteronomy.

Several contributions to this issue reflect a growing interest on the collaborative nature of research processes that are less examined on these terms, or might usually be considered to undergird forms of creative autonomy, drawing out the subtle social and artistic exchanges that are usually in the background of more individuated projects or projections. This includes a piece by oral historian Rib Davis, presented in the form of a recorded conversation between himself and three other historians, on how interviewees shape their own narratives through the dialogic process. Marie Caffari and Johanne Mohs investigate the underexamined collaborative exchanges that take place between creative writing students and mentors/supervisors. Mihai Florea, meanwhile, progresses an examination of the anxieties of preferring


lone research within a Theatre Studies department and the potentialities of performative thought processes, through a ludic collaboration with a stick. Indeed, collaborations with and between non-human actors are a major theme within this issue. Jessica Sarah Rinland’s essay expounds upon the artistic research processes that led to the creation of a ceramic replica of an elephant tusk, as a means to reflect on and replicate museum conservation practices. Johann Arens’s video work explores the intimate tactile relationship between objects being packed and sent and the customised cradles (created from foam moulds) that ensure their care and safety.

Pieces that turn more towards collaborative contemporary art production each refute reductive framings of identity-positions, such as between artist and participant, collaborator, community, or audience. The cover for this issue, by the artistic collective the Tennant Creek Brio, reflects their shifting set of artistic positions and collective formations across artworks and mediums, their practice forming a diverse mediation of issues inherent to the contexts where the artists live, work, practice culture, and resist on-going colonialism. A text by Elisabeth Lebovici, translated from French to English by Naomi Vogt, considers the role of collaborative exhibition cultures acting within the social transformations of the Lower East Side in New York during the midst of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and early 1990s. Martina Schmuecker’s filmed performance collaborates with other artists across time, re-enacting and re-working pieces by Robert Morris and Carolee Schneemann. In a study of self-organised groups in the Netherlands, E.C. Feiss unpacks the complex mechanisms of collaboration between undocumented people and the contemporary art world.

Other works more directly grapple with artistic collaborations as participants, reflecting back on their involvements. Katherine Guinness, Charlotte Kent, and Martina Tanga reflect on a specific collaborative endeavor, a workshop titled FAAC YOUR SYLLABUS, that they ran as participants of the research group The Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative (FAAC), pushing past the often utopian ideals of collaboration to also explore its challenges and performative aspects. Three musicians, Francois Blom, Garth Erasmus, and Esther Marié Pauw listen back and reflect on recordings of the music theatre production Khoi’npsalms, exploring its multiple meanings as a work of decolonial art, and its creation of both tensions and intimacies through collective sound-making.

Finally, in the four pieces that begin this issue, four OAR editors (Jessyca Hutchens, Nina Wakeford, Anita Paz, and Naomi Vogt) consider what it has meant to work together on this collective project, which has entailed various forms of coming together (often across four time-zones, and sometimes in shared physical space), as well as a various forms of working with contributors and institutions. We left the title of this issue as an unfinished sentence, ‘Working with you,’ because there is rarely only a singular you, but a great many you’s that form our creative working relationships. Rather than a simple valorisation or critique of the collaborative, this issue hopes to be attentive to the relations of our working lives, and the multitude of ways they produce creative work.


WORKING WITH YOU, AND YOU, AND YOU Jessyca Hutchens

Ideas around artistic autonomy have made a comeback in recent years, largely within the context of discourse around creative labour as a model for the ideal neoliberal subject – one who is both highly individuated but also sociable, flexible, mobile, networked, and able to leverage vast horizontal social networks. On the one hand, ideas of artistic autonomy are now said to be imbedded within the professional values of neoliberalism, and its conditional promise of greater personal freedom and flexibility, while also often leading to precarious conditions and a blurring of work and social life. At the same time, theorists are still optimistic about the potential for artists to reclaim forms of autonomy away from neoliberal professional values and labour conditions.1

Fidelity to self, to one’s own ideas, to deeper relationships that exist in excess of or outside of productive relations, as well as to certain forms of rootedness, slowness, and retreat from hyper-productive environments are now often being positioned as oppositional to dominant modes of production. Papers extol the radical political potential of everything from friendship to remote artist retreats. But there is also much critique around how such forms and practices have also been long incorporated into the stop-start patterns of neoliberal work, even part of a broad imperative to self-manage: to find time, to take time-out, to retreat, to set boundaries, to re-centre, to be mindful, to find that ever elusive work-life balance.

OAR is highly exemplary of the on-going negotiations that collaborative work now so often demands. As editors we schedule and re-schedule meetings across three or four time-zones, divide and re-divide up tasks in response to our own shifting workloads and the time pressures of those we work with, we regularly type out the familiar scripts of apology and appeals for more time, another time, a better time. We make space for our friendship, and also sink into long delays and silences. We place and face pressure, retreat, and re-emerge. Instead of a regular shared time and place to work, we have only our shared commitment to a collective project to keep us going, which is itself an amorphous, highly flexible entity.

The idea of the ‘project’ has been much theorised as a particular mode of production within contemporary art, generally understood as an on-going processual way of working that tends to exacerbate the blurring of professional and personal domains. Bojana Kunst describes art projects as ‘processual, contingent and open practice’, a mode of working she argues unduly focuses on possibilities in the future at the expense of connections to social life in the present, leading to a kind of unending speculative mode of working/living.2 This way of thinking about projects has particular relevance to the paradigms of practice-based and artistic research, that place high value on open processual modes and forms of research documentation. OAR is explicitly a platform that accretes outputs from open-ended research-based projects, and itself eschews the traditional temporal modes of most journals. On the one hand, it seemed valuable to actually help give ground to some of this on-going, iterative work, which often exists through even more ephemeral formats, yet are we also contributing to work cultures that become all-consuming due to their endless deferrals?

Boris Groys has written of the loneliness of the project, due to the way projects immerse subjects in a heterogeneous time that is desynchronised from the time experienced by society.3 Groys acknowledges that while projects are often a collective effort, loneliness


persists in the form of ‘shared isolation.’4 The demand (and also pleasure) of large collective projects like exhibitions, or films, or journals, is to retreat from the time pressures of ‘regular’ social life, into a more immersive and separate time-space. This notion of the project shares with traditional conceptions of artistic autonomy the idea of a separate space of creation away from the mundanity, routine, and utility of daily life and labour. Project-time is antisocial in one sense, yet also promises an intense and exciting form of sociality through a shared endeavour.

If only we could be alone together more often…

Yet, with OAR, like many other kinds of on-going projects, we only rarely step into project-time together. Most notably, we undertook a residency together at the remotely located Bibliothek Andreas Züst, spending our days balancing frantic working with long alpine walks, the ultimate form of enacting collective isolation to immerse in our project. More often though, OAR takes a backseat to the demands of other projects we’re each involved in as researchers, only asserting the heterogenous time of the project intermittently through global video calls, periods of intensive work, and our on-going sense of commitment to something that no longer has an institutional home or on-going funding. In many ways the loneliness of a single project begins to sound ideal in comparison to the variegated time of multiple, overlapping, open-ended projects.

Although strongly associated with contemporary forms of precarious labour, project-work perhaps also offers pleasures that have been eroded elsewhere, creating intimate forms of collective engagement amidst widespread social isolation and work based around competition and self-management. I often wonder in regard to OAR if we would we have stayed in such close contact as friends without the promise, excuse, demand, and energy of a collective project. Recently I made a film with my 92-year-old grandmother, a project that entailed us completely up-ending the usual routines and spaces of the house we currently share with other family, in ways that felt exciting and bonding. Is it that domestic and social life is now more subject to project-logics (do we need ‘projects’ to justify time at home?), or maybe it is more that work has long managed to co-opt something of the collective spirit of family and community life, the heterogenous time of communal ritual or the kind of community or civic projects that once committed to distant futures. Maybe we need more communal projects that strengthen our social bonds outside of our working lives. While OAR is definitely a form of work within our respective fields, unaffiliated to any of our current places of employment, it allows for certain kinds of freedom and interruptions to our work for institutions.

Maybe it is always pertinent to ask: what is a particular project interrupting to instantiate its own collective autonomy away from things? While project-work is a dominant form of labour, we should be attentive to the specific textures, demands, energies, and pleasures that different projects create. Pascal Gielen has argued that ‘autonomy can only be through heteronomy’, and also that ‘artistic autonomy does not coincide with individual discretion and exemption from collective obligations.’5 Perhaps this means finding forms of mutual support and collective passion that are generous and attentive to our lives and obligations as individuals. Autonomy, not as lone researchers within precarious institutions, but through collective arrangements that are consciously protective.


OAR has teetered on drifting away at times, becoming increasingly unmoored as we have moved to live and work in different places. Keeping it going is more than just the time-puzzle of administering collective work, it’s marshalling a kind of shifting collective energy that feels special and particular to this project and to us. I wonder now if that’s sort of what we were thinking about when we titled this issue ‘Working with you,’ an unfinished sentence that addresses a particular subject, a you, instead of focusing on particular collective forms: collaboration, participation, social engagement or so on, terms which all have their own way of reducing the nature of social/working relations down to a kind of desired product or outcome. Through OAR, I am working with you, and you, and you…

DEAR JESS, NAOMI AND ANITANina Wakeford

Hi there. It has been such a joy working with you, three. We have lived through many of each other’s rites of passages – educational, paid employment, domestic. I was remembering recently the afternoon we pitched our proposal to the (was it IT?) grants committee at Oxford. I recall that we were up against ‘ap developers’ and it seemed improbable that a small, fine art-led humanities project led by four DPhil students could be convincing in terms of what appeared to be criteria tipped more towards entrepreneurship or digital ‘quick wins’. What prompted me to also work with Hannah for our first issue – revisiting Adrian’s words on capture of art by academia. The University funding scheme was geared to an outcome much smaller and more discrete than this has ended up being. This morning, when we all discussed the introduction, I showed you these photos of us in the Alps. It was when we were trying to sort out the article order for one of the issues, and we cooked together the large kitchen so generously at our disposal. (You didn’t expect me to avoid sentimentality, did you?). And then the group shot – I think another resident took this? This morning three of us agreed that we’d share them here (So I hope Anita is ok with that). I’ve followed them with a diagram I found in an article on ‘team effectiveness’ and I’d love to know what you thought an OAR version of this diagram would look like!


Figure 1: from Kozlowski, Steve W.J., and Daniel R. Ilgen. “Enhancing the Effectiveness of Work Groups and Teams.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 7, no. 3 (December 2006): 77–124.


WORKING WITH YOU, Anita Paz

Working with you was a negotiation. Give and take. You give some thoughts; not all – some you may want to keep for later, for and to yourself. You take some thoughts; not many – after all, take too much and it’s no longer with you. At times a conquest, at others, a surrender. Working with you is working in the space between not giving too much and not taking too much. It is there that a compromise must be found. A middle line of no-one.

Working with you was a translation. An attempt to think, to talk, to write in at least four different languages, and to do so at once. Negotiating my owns for yours, and all of yours for all of mine. And at the end of that, all these different forms of expression, all these languages which are ours, condensed into a single one. Which is of no one. All the thoughts that we gave pushed into a single utterance. No longer a plurality, but a hybrid. It is ours, but it is not yours, nor is it mine.

ALONE TOGETHER WITH THEMNaomi Vogt

From the very start, establishing OAR required mapping out all the issues we would publish, with timelines and themes. This was the lot of a hopeful project that needed a handful of hard facts to demonstrate feasibility, including when it came to convincing ourselves. Thus an editorial arc was traced with Jessyca Hutchens, Anita Paz, and Nina Wakeford: the colleagues with whom I would end up editing this journal. Working with them, in a sense, meant imagining our collaboration until its end. And building that required methods not unlike those of make-believe.

We would write and put together a prologue, which we would call issue zero. Because one of the platform’s aims was to foster forms of dialogue, citation, and response which we felt were lacking in the arts and humanities, we found a designer – Julien Mercier – who would not only make space for these features but would structure an entire platform according to them. When he finished building the site, he thought OAR would need its own typeface, so he half-secretly designed a full alphabet font and called it Oar. Everywhere around us, artistic research seemed to be proliferating without formally accreting. So we decided that any work responding to a previous output would become quotable as a response. And the timeframe to submit response proposals would be unbound. The published responses would present as horizontal reactions to a primary output. This way, pairs or clusters of publications would stand in relation to each other like shot-counter-shots in a film, rather than forcing the reactions to gather at the bottom, creating vertical hierarchies and the suggestion of increasing remoteness. On this platform, we wanted researchers and artists to be able to think, work, research, write, and produce together, whether at once or asynchronously.

Once we started working together as an editorial team, the day-to-day facts of this collaboration became as salient as the ideals at the heart of the journal. For me, the strongest realization remains – perhaps quite unspectacularly – the experience of sharing an inbox with three other people. It was unsettling at first, this decision to trust in three individuals to share my mail, to address someone I might admire, to handle prickly administration or to hold a


meeting with a contributor on my behalf if needed. None of this involved the assumption that they would think or act similarly to me – sometimes quite the opposite. This shared custody of communication and email became natural in a way that still feels meaningful now. I don’t think I would want to share an inbox with anyone else, including with people whom I might know even better and whose work I trust just as much.

Of course, working with my co-editors has entailed many other events, some of which are more conducive to narrative. We spent a week in residency at an Alpine library barely sleeping to get our first issue out while the weather turned from hot sun to piles of snow overnight. We presented our work at conferences, standing for the first time in front of an audience not alone (an audience that would occasionally remark on the fact that we were a team of four women – to which we tended to answer: ‘Yes’). We had long debates on the rare occasions where a submission would receive both the highest and lowest review rating, followed by the strange experience of trying to convey why something is very bad or very good to people who – by then I had started to assume – read, watch, listen, and judge in ways that are coextensive with mine. Yet somehow the form of collaboration I still find most remarkable continues to happen mundanely via the interfaces of electronic mail systems and word processing software. I can fathom the fact that I work with them most clearly when I am able to identify which one of us has edited (or, more nerdily still, copyedited) a piece we are publishing based solely on the nature of the suggested changes.

In this issue, the two submissions that I followed are a sound work by Rib Davis and an article by E.C. Feiss. Davis led a workshop on oral history interviewing which I attended at the British Library a couple years ago. Intrigued by the course’s approach to oral history as a form of research where ‘the product is the process’, I invited Davis to submit something to OAR. He developed a project akin to a short oral history of oral history practice. The work generously weaves together three conversations between Davis and other historians. Together, they explore the ethics of their work, the benefits of simply listening, and the peculiar ways in which subjects shape the narratives of their lives by expressing them orally. Feiss’s article carefully unpacks the complex mechanisms of collaboration between undocumented people and the contemporary art world. Her research here focuses on We Are Here (WAH), a self-organised group of undocumented people based in the Netherlands. The text considers another group’s practice, called Here To Support, which quietly orchestrated the insertion of WAH into the Dutch art system. Simultaneously emerging from Feiss’s article is an analysis of the ubiquitous incorporation of refugees into contemporary art.

My role in a third contribution to this issue was more involved. I translated to English the text by Elisabeth Lebovici ‘Exposer, montrer, démontrer, informer, offrir’, which was first published in 2017 in her book Ce que le sida m’a fait – Art et activisme à la fin du XXème siècle, but which partly originated in 1983 as a chapter of her doctoral thesis. In this text, the city of New York and particularly the Lower East Side is connected with the transformation of contemporary art exhibitions. In the 1980s and early 90s, HIV/AIDS provoked panic and silence. At that time, collaborative exhibitions – which Lebovici experienced and participated in directly – created time and space for the epidemic’s political visibility.

Translation work is how I funded most of my life as an undergraduate. I started by working for a search engine dedicated to design products, and was later hired by a film festival. Only very rarely did I translate texts written by an identifiable person. This time things were


1 For example see Pascal Gielen, Mobile Autonomy: Exercises in Artists’ Self-Organization (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2015).2 Bojana Kunst, ‘The Project Horizon: On the Temporality of Making,’ Maska, Performing Arts Journal 27 (2012): 149–50.3 Boris Groys, Going Public, 1st edition (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), 70–84.4 Ibid.5 Op.cit., Paschal Gielen, p. 78–9.

different – I specifically wanted to translate something written by Lebovici. I had admired her work and read her art criticism when I lived in France. Her focus on queer histories and feminism was in many ways the diametrical opposite of the art history I was studying at the Sorbonne, as was the seminar ‘Something You Should Know’ which she has co-convened with the EHESS for fifteen years. I was excited to help translate a small piece of this world into English. And I enjoyed doing it partly while living in New York, walking through streets whose existence was differently vivid in Lebovici’s text. I liked imagining this text reaching a wider Anglophone or polyglot readership, since English of course also holds this dubious role of lingua franca.

Describing the collaborative work of translation is delicate. This is in part because my theoretical understanding of it is limited. I attended a translation study day once. In the French-to-English seminar I chose, we looked at Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le petit prince (The Little Prince), pausing on a famous passage in which the little prince asks the narrator: ‘S’il vous plaît… dessine-moi un mouton!’ (‘Please… draw me a sheep!’). We discussed the impossibility of conveying the French sentence’s cherished strangeness which results from the child’s mixed use of ‘vous’ – the polite form – and ‘tu’ via the imperative ‘dessine’ – the informal form – in a story that is all about making friends via taming animals and people. It came up that certain translations had later opted for the English sentence: ‘Please… draw me a lamb!’. Since the connotation of innocence stemming from the French bumbling conjugations was untranslatable, it was the animal in the sentence who, instead, had been rejuvenated and made tenderly inexperienced.

This philosophy of the lamb is what I turn to every time I am stuck in translation. Most of the time translation can indeed feel both lonely and too crowded – a constant tug between faithfulness to and emancipation from the original author, who often becomes an imaginary interlocutor. In this case, I was lucky to find a generous and responsive real interlocutor in Lebovici. I wondered if I had undertaken a translation as an act of scholarly fandom. But by the end what mattered was how this text taught me to work with even more people than before. There was the researcher and writer of 2017 who had written the chapter; the emerging art historian who had experienced the matter first-hand in the 1980s and had later lost to AIDS friends she made at the time; and the embodied author and reader of my translation in 2019-2020 (namely all three Elisabeths), as well as, from the start, my co-editors as readers, and myself as a translator, collaborating alone, together with them all.

OAR Issue 4 / MAY 2021 What do we learn from listening back to a decolonial Khoi’npsalms? 19

What do we learn from listening back to a decolonial Khoi’npsalms?

Francois Blom, Garth Erasmus and Esther Marie Pauw 1

To cite this contribution: Blom, Francois, Garth Erasmus & Esther Marie Pauw. ‘What do we learn from listening back to a decolonial Khoi’npsalms?’ OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform Issue 4 (2021): 19–30, http://www.oarplatform.com/what-do-we-learn-from-listening-back-to-a-decolonial-khoinpsalms/.

Khoi’npsalms is the title of a music theatre production that took place in March 2018, in Stellenbosch, South Africa, and that was presented by a flutist, an organist, and a Khoi memory music instrumentalist. The three musicians in Khoi’npsalms are also the three authors of this article compilation in which we reflect on aspects of our collaboration. Our music event was conceptualised over a period of ten months, but then improvised in live performance. The production did not make use of props other than our instruments, made use of occasional dramatic body gestures, and audiences were supplied with programme notes2 that indicated context and sources of the material that we improvised on. The source materials for our improvisation came from (what we call) ‘Khoi memory music’ (music, largely extinct, made by pre-colonial peoples of South Africa) and six Genevan Psalms (16th century psalm tunes and texts still in use in some Reformed church liturgies today).

What do we learn about our collaboration, as we each listen back to a selected clip from a recording made of our performances – performances that we conceptualised as a narrative that explored historical settings of colonial, postcolonial and decolonial tension? To explore this question, and taking impetus from scholars such as Walter Mignolo (2012, 2013, 2018) who explore decolonial art, this essay sketches our conceptualisation to the music event and presents four sound clips, chosen by ourselves and taken from one of our performances. We provide our individual reflections to these sound clips to explore a ‘listening back’. We conclude by commenting on aspects of our collaboration, and these include reflections on decolonial art that delves into aspects of harm to also find sensings of intimacy and trust. Photographs are included to support some of the arguments made.

CONCEPTUALISATION TO KHOI’NPSALMS

Khoi’npsalms translates as ‘Khoi and Psalms’, and is a new word that we coined. The word suggests an impossibility for South African colonial history: the merging, (in one space; in one music-making) of Khoi music and Genevan Psalms, never before sounded together in church spaces. In our live music event, South African Khoi music on bow, saxophone and ‘blik’nsnaar’ (an instrument built from an oil can and strings) was played by Garth Erasmus. His music laced into fragments of Genevan psalm melodies played by Esther Marié Pauw (flute) and Francois Blom (organ).


Historically, Genevan Psalm melodies and psalm texts, translated into Dutch, were brought to South Africa by the ‘Hollanders’ of the Dutch East India Company in 1652. In 1937, Totius – an Afrikaner cultural activist – translated the texts into Afrikaans (and the texts and melodies are still in use today). In our music event there appeared no sustained, worded dialogue, but extracts of the Afrikaans psalm texts were printed in the programme notes. Sonically, the psalm fragments were woven into remnants of Khoi memory music to engage with shared, violent histories, including imperial genocide and violence from apartheid social engineering of people, legislated in 1948 – harms that, in aftermath, continue to persist.

‘THERE’S SOMETHING IN THE CHARGE OF THE AIR’

Our 45-minute travelling production was performed on four occasions on an art festival (the ‘Woordfees’) in Stellenbosch. Each of the four church venues where we played have, over the years, carried particular histories of complex and complicit entwinement of racial history, with colonial and apartheid readings of religion, enmeshed with political power. One of the venues’ complete audio recording is available online.3

The photographs were taken at a rehearsal in the ‘Moederkerk’ (‘Mother church’, one of the Dutch Reformed Church congregations in Stellenbosch) and these show the grandeur of the building. The built structure has prominent white-washed pillars, a cathedral-high ceiling, stained glass windows, three separate galleries, an imposing ‘preekstoel’ (sermon lectern: a two-story high wooden structure with a roof and chamber that is reached by climbing ten stairs), and, at the back, a pipe organ that is considered by some to be the best church organ in Stellenbosch.

Hildegard Conradie, South to North view, Moederkerk, 2018.


At a rehearsal, a filmmaker, Aryan Kaganof, was present, and he filmed a few sentences spoken by Garth.4 Garth talks about each space being different, and the differences stemming from ‘something in the charge of the air of each church’.

Afterwards, Garth reflects on his words: ‘There is something special about the space where the air we breathe is the air of the Moederkerk.’ He notes that this church has

…a particular charged air that reverberates with the history of sermonic orations amidst a history of specific calender dates from our shared colonial and apartheid timeline. This Dutch Reformed Church represents the chapter and verse of ‘apartheid divine’, as the justifications for apartheid legislation were based on theological arguments emanating from Reformed interpretations and teachings.

Garth also notes that his comment delves for critical self-awareness, asking questions such as: ‘How will our collaboration be received? Will we be seen to be desecrating the sacred canon of Genevan Psalms? Will our audiences join us as we improvise and perhaps decolonise? The air is fraught…’

When Garth speaks of ‘the charge of the air’ in Moederkerk, he alludes to various aspects about the venue that influence ‘mood, acoustics and timbres of the instruments’. Garth’s comment also alludes to aspects that relate to the socio-political contextual history of the church, as well as the building’s architecture: The building stems from the first colonial church congregation in Stellenbosch, from a church denomination that descends from the Dutch church traditions brought to the Cape in the 1600s, traditions that are still alive. In

Hildegard Conradie, West to East view, Moederkerk, 2018.


the aftermath of South Africa’s material-racial privileges of colonialism and apartheid, the Moederkerk congregation is the most well-to-do, and most racially ‘white’, congregation of the four church venues where we performed.

The subsequent film that was made by Aryan Kaganof concludes the section screening Garth’s words by inserting a poetic text written by Garth prior to our music event:

ek onthou my kinderstem skreemaar wie gaan my lippeverniel met ‘n soen?

This text translates as, ‘I remember my child voice scream, but who will harm my lips with a kiss?’ This text, inserted into the film by the filmmaker, alludes to the bodily, spiritual and psychic injury that emanates from the present-day aftermath of colonialism and apartheid.

LISTENING BACK: WHAT DO WE HEAR?

The sound clips presented here appear in the chronological order that they were improvised on during our music-making. The first and second clips are from the live performance on 8 March 2018, whereas the final clip was recorded during an open rehearsal in the same venue, a week earlier, when passersby were welcome to attend.

LISTENING BACK: DECEIT: ESTHER MARIE’S REFLECTIONS5

Listen to audio clip of Khoi’npsalms 1, available here: http://www.oarplatform.com/what-do-we-learn-from-listening-back-to-a-decolonial-khoinpsalms/

It is in the liturgical space at the front of the Moederkerk, underneath the imposing ‘preekstoel’, that the Khoi music bow begins to play, quietly at first, as if tuning the instrument. People in the audience, who have arrived for the fourth 7am performance of Khoi’npsalms, keep on talking, coughing, but then begin to fall silent. A Khoi music bow, reminding of the hunting bow, has not been heard in this church before. The bow is disconcerting for its simple, direct appeal; its quiet invasion of a space usually filled with organ playing, hymn singing, sermons and prayers. The ongoing bow music serves to increasingly establish the Khoi presence in this space. This presence affirms the notion that bow music ‘belongs here’, in the South, and perhaps that bow music ‘knows how to live here’. The bow music player appears intent on exploring the act and skill of music-making, taking pleasure in the various melodic and percussive sounds that emit in a slow working-through of the playing and listening body, the space, and the listeners in the church pews.

Without announcement, I enter from the back of the church, with many steps to take in order to cover the distance between myself and the bow player at the front. My flute plays sounds of air, mimicking the winds that have blown the Dutch sailors from the north. I move down the aisle deliberately, to the front, playing air (sails billowing in the wind), and then play tones that erupt into overtones: the tones wisp


and disappear. I arrive, still playing, at the front of the church, meet the bow player, and emit a single, ‘exhausted’ note that resonates into the ample space. The note is pitched on F. (The note asks for water. The Khoi can show the sailor where the water is. This is a psalm that sings of a deer that ‘pants’ for water.)

I then play the first three notes of the psalm melody: pitched F—GA, with the first note twice as long in duration as the other two. The flute’s notes are gentle, pleading, tired, on the verge of physical disintegration and need. (The Khoi bow player knows how to help: recognises a fellow human in need, offers water.) But already in the taking, there lies deceit. In Khoi’npsalms, Psalm 42 is the disguise for an imperialist who has come to take, expand, convert, use, impose and report back to Amsterdam that the ‘refreshment station’ at the southern tip of Africa is now well-regimented and in good order.

After those three flute notes, there is a moment of hesitation and listening, after which the organ responds by playing the same three notes. ‘F—GA, Soos ’n hert…’ (As the deer). I listen, lingering, and then play a B natural pitch: a pitch that is not included in the scale or the melody of this psalm (to announce secretively to the colonizer: here will be betrayal in the receiving: We will take their water, land, culture, their souls, and convince them by force that our god is now their god.) The organ takes up the deceit and plays the fully harmonised psalm melody, pretending to ask for water and blessing amidst hardship. The bow continues to play, but now with scratches and a persistent rhythm, as if already signifying some trepidation of not adequately sensing the subtle nuances of power between colonizer flute and colonizer organ.

The scene is set for centuries of slow genocide, penned to a date of 16 April 1652 (called Settler’s Day in the former ‘national’ South African calender) when the Dutch (and before them the Portuguese and the Arabs, and after them the British) began harvesting southern Africa’s labour and natural resources. The genocide slips easily into South African apartheid of the 20th century where white-ness is perceived as superior to all shades of black-ness. The racial knowledge spills into a religious knowledge, and an assumed identity of racial superiority that enmeshes with a Christian way of doing, especially where religious and political power are intertwined uncritically. The treachery that lies in the acceptance of the water, after those first three notes, becomes a festering boil that infiltrates the habits, beliefs and humanity of people who live in South of Africa.

I learn the power of a single note: its symbolic strength of being out-of-place, in the same way that a Khoi music bow in a Reformed church is ‘out of place’, disconcerting, and therefore powerful. The flute’s potent B natural note, later taken up by the organ, becomes not only a symbol of (what I call) deceit, but is also an intentional offering of collaboration that states-asks: ‘Take this or not? Play with it?’

I learn that music-making in collaboration thrives on my intent to occasionally remain quiet, to listen, before responding in sound. I learn that our collaboration is a fragile discussion ‘laying bare’ thoughts in sound. That we have to trust that what we say will add to the conversation, and will be responded to.

I also learn, listening back, of a moment when I had in actuality ‘pre-decided’ the course of our improvised collaboration, and hear, in the flute’s insistent sound, when I had disagreed


with organ (‘on stage’): When I had thought Psalm 42 had almost been brought to its closure, I afterwards ‘hear’ dismay in my own playing when the organist then breaks into prominent melismatic, variation-like treatment of the hymn, to me overstepping a moment that ought to have belonged to a quiet closing and seeming-neutral statement of sonic material.

I learn that there are few securities (of prior rehearsal tropes repeated or written-out score) that steer our playing, even though I know ‘in which key’ the Genevan psalm is written (F major), and even though I can hear ‘in which pitches’ the organ and I talk to one another.

I learn, now, that these aspects (listening, conversing, fragility, laying bare, moments of apparent dispute, the symbolic nature of our music-making) are not things we musicians could have planned before the time: they happened in safe-unsafe collaboration, during live performance. These aspects perhaps hinged on three things in particular: First, our individual and collective acute sensings of the material we were working with: Genevan psalms and Khoi memory music placed in a contextual symbolic history; and, second, our willingness to explore as musicians and engage a mode of collaborating-in-waiting through sound. Third, these aspects could occur because we never knew whether what we were doing would be good enough, would work, would be convincing. As Garth put it: ‘The air is fraught…’

POWER-FUL

A sonic representation of colonial power enmeshed with religious sanction that celebrates the subjugation of ‘heathen’ people, amidst unwavering praise for an imperial god, is relayed in the audio clip that follows. While the flutist’s outstretched arm gestures a military suppression of the Khoi musician’s bow, the organ plays Psalm 47 with triumph, using tropes such as chromatic harmonic passages, cadences with delayed endings, and a slow tempo.6 The Khoi bow rasps and scratches in pitch-less throes.


After Psalm 47, the flutist exits the ‘preekstoel’ space, and the Khoi musician is left alone, playing a rainfall of teetering sounds, and then speaking into the calabash as he crouches to the floor. The clip that follows depicts this scene.

LISTENING BACK: MY HART, MY TONG: FRANCOIS’S REFLECTIONS7


In the clip from Psalm 45, I hear laments of longing and mourning, audible through the spoken – but structurally broken – words that are recited. Garth recites fragments from the words by a still-living Khoi chief, Chief Margaret: ‘Ons is krom en skewe instrumente’ (We are bent and mangled instruments). He also recites from the Afrikaans psalm’s text ‘My hart, my tong’ (My heart, my tongue) as well as the motto on the South African national coat of arms, ‘’!ke e:/xarra//ke’ (which translates as


‘Diverse people unite’ in a KhoiSan dialect). By using a playback recording and loop pedal, the voice, with flute interjections on single, drooping notes, interact with the organ, and combine into an aurality of intensity and brokenness. Painful subjugation is signified by the flute’s downward-falling notes, in counterpoint with the organ’s hymn and its melismatic tropes of church organ-like improvised passages, while the spoken voice carries the counterpoint as a firming bass. The voice’s broken utterances, the flute calls, and the persistent, variated hymn, all weave as a tapestried outpouring of lament and pain. Towards the end, the organ falls silent, leaving spoken words to resonate forth. ‘My hart, my tong…’

When I listen to my chosen excerpt I remember how I sat playing the organ, attempting to sound a sense of pain: Pain from our individual and collective pasts, both in the story we were referencing, as well as other stories of subjugation, violence, and abuse.

I also hear moments of dissonance in our playing, moving from dissonance to resolution, and sometimes in reverse order. The previous three psalms (42, 8 and 47) had ended on markedly strong claims to consonance (suggesting successful colonial power). However, Psalm 45 became the voice of the subjugated Khoi, speaking form the heart, in broken narratives, and after a while the flute returned (as if to ask, ‘Where is the pain? What is going on?’). The organ then responded by playing the same hymn, celebrating ‘a just king’ (and justice) that may have existed for the Khoi. However, the organ’s insistent trope-like chromatic and melismatic passages perhaps portrayed the irony: ‘a just king’, was not enacted by the colonial powers. The dissonances in sound, I suggest, relay some of these tensions.

When I listen to this clip, I learn that our collaboration was a sonic weaving of strands. Throughout Khoi’npsalms, I sense that we played amidst various aspects of being-different, re-imagining through sound how to perhaps pull together the unravelled strings of our past into a sonic understanding of the present South African political and human tapestry. Khoi’npsalms was the result of a collaboration by three individual musicians, each identifying

Aryan Kaganof, My hart, my tong…, 2018.


with their own pain, but also strengths, spiritual awareness, musical input, cultural roots, placements and identity within present-day society. Our music exploration possibly gave a re-interpretation of the South African motto by symbolically uniting us (and perhaps our audiences included) into a multi-stranded improvisational music essay that relays South African history through sonic collaboration of improvisation, innovation and imagination.

LISTENING BACK: A WALL PUSHED OVER: GARTH’S REFLECTIONS8

The clip that I’ve selected is taken from the rehearsal at Moederkerk, a few days prior to the series of concert events. Before Khoi’npsalms, I was ignorant of the socio-historical significance of this church, but as we rehearsed there, and I experienced the space, I wanted to comment, in sound, on our collaboration as a form of ‘heightened awareness’ in response to that space.

We had arrived on a day when there was noisy activity in the church: tourists casually passing through, as well as a maintenance team at work. In the recording, these sounds are distinctly audible while we are rehearsing – up until the point at which I have chosen my clip. In the clip, the extraneous sounds fall completely silent.

In the moments before this clip begins, Esther Marié had been playing a brief, delicate flute solo with high-pitched notes that I had not heard her play before. Instinctively, I wanted to emulate these sounds on the saxophone to begin a conversation.


The sounds are a free interplay between the flute and saxophone, with both exploring their highest pitch ranges. There are moments where I cannot distinguish the flute sound from the saxophone’s sounds. The organ enters to provide the altissimo sounds with a foundation so that the music acquires a forward-moving momentum with a sense of (what I call) inevitability. Having started, there is no turning back: For the first time all three of us are ‘together’, sounding the same mood, and the same story. Our togetherness, sounding brokenness, ‘a wall that has been pushed over’, is retained throughout the remainder of the piece.

Up until this music rendition, our playing had been exploratory and tentative, as we were becoming musically acquainted with one another while grappling with the sonic and symbolic material of Khoi’npsalms. Our improvised collaboration of ‘togetherness’ forced us out of exposed self-awareness and perhaps taught us to be collectively brave. We increasingly relied on being sonically involved to build a collective installation around the material of this psalm.

Collaboration is perhaps about surrendering individuality for the well-being of the collective, but not at the expense of individuality. Instead, when the music improvisation is at its most intense level (as is sounded in the clip that I chose) there is a sense of the affirmation of individuality and equality.


What I also learn from this collaboration is that (what I call) ‘application-involvement’ is even more important than technical facility, because application is a key to taking part, being involved, and being committed. In our country of separate histories with regard to geographical spaces, racial sociality and separated musics, our collaboration is perhaps a metaphorical template that offers a way of dealing with our troubled past: What better reason has one for existing other than to be involved with what is being created in one’s particular time and space, and with one’s particular creative capacities? Collaboration is perhaps an antidote to forced separation and to idle standing-by – as if watching from the outside. Collaboration demands involvement.

THINKING BACK COLLECTIVELY: WHAT DO WE LEARN ABOUT COLLABORATION?

In the quagmire of being sonically human – in and out and between cultures, beliefs and ways of doing – there lies the tension of the sounds that Khoi’npsalms brought to the fore, playing through fragments of six Genevan Psalms, with Khoi memory music, to tell the story.

In the processes of individual listening back (to the clips we had each selected), we learn that collaboration with one another as musicians, and collaboration around a history of harm, combine to make us vulnerable, and create music that is fragile, unsettling, despite (and maybe as a result of) the appearances of triumphant psalms (Psalms 8 and 47) that marked the first half of the music production. (These psalms were sonically so violent, that they served to unsettle us for their sheer force.) After Psalm 45 our emotional-sensing was alerted to agonies perhaps too harmful ‘to play about’, except for the capacity of allowing ourselves ‘to play into’ these harms through the creative space that art offers. We now collectively know that we cannot heal the past, or slip into easy ‘reconciliation’, but we have also learned that we are able to tell the stories as we hear them from our source materials in the interpretative space that art and music theatre offers. Fragility comes with our medium: improvisation, but fragility also comes with the harsh harmed topic that we are speaking to: a shared history that still infests and infects our ways of living and music-making.

Our collaboration ended with a psalm that references rain, crops and harvest, and as the flutist walks out, and the organ quietens, the Khoi memory musician is left alone at the front of the church playing the ‘blik’nsnaar’. The symbol of a pre-colonial person becomes the last person (standing) that bears witness to a complex story. However, there is more: the Khoi music is what ‘holds’ our complex stories, as if to say, in sound, ‘I am here, I hold you; I hold us, whether I play bow, or calabash, or sax, or blik’nsnaar.’ Khoi ‘belongs here’, ‘knows how to live here’, and, as a ‘firming bass’, takes us with: we all are here, together, making newly imagined music.

As a form of decolonial art that speaks from the global South and engages aspects of a harmed past that emanates from colonial encounter, our music theatre used aspects of mimicry and symbolic representation. However, what we were mimicking and representing were also our real and perceived ourselves: we are familiar with the Genevan psalms; with ‘imported religion’; with a South African nation of many heritages; with the harms that emanate from ruthless racial classification; with the perceptions of superiority of certain person-types and of some music-types. A film press release described the musicians in Khoi’npsalms as a flutist


and organist – ‘two Dutch descendants – and a Khoi descendant’ (International Encounters Documentary Film Festival and film premiere, June 2018). Together with the visible racial classification that our bodies showed to be decolonising (music-making together), it is perhaps our music instruments that were the strongest decolonizing tools – a church organ telling Khoi history; a transverse Western flute sounding notes of lament into a calabash, and a blik’nsnaar, built by Garth from an oil can and strings – that weave us together. These all signify decolonial, new ways of being and sonic storytelling. The capacity of Khoi memory music to perhaps ‘hold us’, is the strongest trace of art that is ‘decolonial’, speaking with a voice that comes from this place, at this time; music playing from a place of harm and sounding into options for a better, caring, more respectful pluriversal world.

DECOLONIAL ART AS INTIMACY

Our storytelling in 2018, metonymic of the historical meeting of cultures, set out to explore some of the violences and erasures that occurred in our past. However, as we worked together, driven by the dramatic energy of live performance, we found that the bringing together of historically impossible relationships of music-making (and friendship) helped us to re-imagine not only trauma, but also aspects of intimacies, care and conflict management amidst remembering.

As we each listened back to our individual clips, we noted, to one another in discussion, some moments of dis-ease with one another: the flutist noted that the organ’s melismatic tropes, at quiet, sensitive times (in Psalms 42, 45) when the stage could perhaps have ‘belonged to’ the Khoi musician, were present; and the Khoi musician noted times when the flutist had become overly prominent (Psalms 47, 62). The organist, in return, noted that there were moments when the two musicians ‘at the front’ seemingly excluded the organist ‘at the back’ (Psalm 65).

We suggest that intimacies, and tensions that are allowed-for in the space of intimacy, lie at the heart of decolonial arts projects that move through troubling history to traverse into archaeological, improvisatory and unexpected engagements with the present.9 We therefore found that, through listening to music-making, we were drawn into a collaboration of companion-ing honesty and of taking pleasure in our music. We found that we were surprised and delighted by the improvised sounds that emitted between us, and showed us inroads to our human natures. We also found that we were challenged existentially, as the production of sounds of horror and anguish, and a meandering into realms of history that senses ghosts not lain to rest, are physically and sensorically and emotionally taxing; emptying. As we listen back, we realise that our collaboration drove us into spaces of openness in our relationships, so that aspects of care, as well as moments of disillusionment with one another, arose. Our performances, and our experiences of ‘re-performance’ (as we listened back to the recording), impacted on our-selves and on our ways of music-making. We found that collaboration, and listening back to collaboration, changed us – in the act, on stage – and enabled us to reflect critically – afterwards, listening back.


1 The authors wish to thank Mario Pissarra (Director: Africa South Art Initiative, University of Cape Town), and Antoinette Theron (musician and artistic researcher, Amsterdam) for their comments made on a draft version of this article.2 Programme notes can be viewed in the section on concept in the article at <http://www.ellipses.org.za/project/khoinpsalms/>. Erasmus, Garth, Francois Blom, Marietjie Pauw & Andrea Hayes. 2020. ‘Improvising Khoi’npsalms’ in Ellipses journal <http://www.ellipses.org.za>, Issue Three http://www.ellipses.org.za/project/khoinpsalms/. An adapted version of the article (with visual editing by Aryan Kaganof) is available at: Erasmus, Garth, Francois Blom, Marietjie Pauw. 2020. ‘Improvising Khoi’npsalms’. Ellipses article adapted and republished in Herri journal, Issue no 4. <https://herri.org.za/4/marietjie-pauw- garth-erasmus-francois-blom/>.3 Blom, Francois, Garth Erasmus & Marietjie Pauw. 2018. Khoi’npsalms (45-minute sound recording of final performance of Khoi’npsalms (8/3/2018, Stellenbosch). <https://soundcloud.com/francois_69/khoinpsalms>.4 The film can be accessed at https://vimeo.com/260032997, as well as on the Ellipses online journal <http://www.ellipses.org.za/ project/khoinpsalms/> and Herri online journal <https://herri.org.za/4/marietjie-pauw-garth-erasmus-francois-blom/>. The film is titled Nege fragmente uit ses khoi’npsalms (‘Nine fragments from six Khoi’npsalms’), and it is a 21-minute film made by Aryan Kaganof (2018). The film makes use of material shot at the four improvised performances and the one rehearsal in the Moederkerk. The section in the film we are referring to takes place at 03’56”-04’23”. Duration of clip: 0’27”.5 The programme note reads: Khoi, wind, water / Psalm 42: Khoi music on bow reminds us of the first peoples who lived at the Cape. These people saw foreign ships with sailors come to land, brought to the tip of Africa by winds from the north and the east. Sailors were shown where fresh water was to be found. Psalm 42 (Bourgeois, 1551) reminds of the thirst for water: Like an antelope in arid stretches of land, my soul thirsts for water, for quiet [...] (Totius, 1937, translated freely).6 The programme note reads: VOC Song of triumph / Psalm 47: Jan van Riebeeck delivered a prayer that was scripted by the VOC when he arrived at the Cape in 1652. The prayer conflates religious justification for land, commerce, power of the VOC, and the subjugation of ‘these wild and barbaric peoples’. The VOC began an imperial reign at the Cape. Psalm 47 (Bourgeois, 1551) claims the Imperial God as the highest King over all peoples: Rejoice, oh nations, rejoice! Clap your hands and testify [...] to the Lord your joy [...] He is King of the heathen [...] He is the highest, He is exalted (Totius, 1937, translated freely).7 The programme note reads: Khoi Song for highest justice / Psalm 45: Khoi music became quiet, erased. For human survival, Khoi persons learnt new languages and new skills. Psalm 45, a love psalm in the Judaic texts, sings of a ‘just’ king, as also scripted by Totius. When the text becomes the poetry of a Khoi speaker, he longs for ‘highest righteousness’. Flute and organ sense an outpouring of emotion, and are drawn to accompany the Khoi narrative: My heart, moved by sensing, will sing intimately, strongly, of a King. My tongue, moved by poetic fire, is like a pen that writes with artistic skill [...] Clothe yourself with weapons for a victorious battle, oh Hero, so that Your Majesty may ride in all glamour and triumph to find highest righteousness [...] From your house of ivory there sounds a wonder-filling stirring of calming string music (Totius, 1937, translated freely).8 The programme note reads: Song of anguish / Psalm 62: Khoi musicians learnt to play new instruments—to adapt. The saxophone (with flute and organ) sounds a song of mourning that becomes a song of anguish. The song wails of a wall that has already been destructed, ‘pushed over’, as in the words of Psalm 62 (Franc, 1542):

Aryan Kaganof, Decolonial intimacy, 2018.


For how long, still, do you seek the downfall and injustice done to a man who is deeply in need, oh cruel tormentors? [...] You seek the destruction of a stone wall that has already been pushed over (Totius, 1937, translated freely).9 In an article published in the Ellipses journal <http://www.ellipses.org.za> we discuss how the film that Aryan Kaganof made revealed to us aspects of intimacy and care that emerged amidst large-scale themes of addressing genocide, colonialism and racial prejudice. See the article by Erasmus, Blom, Pauw and Hayes titled ‘Improvising Khoi’npsalms’ in Issue 3 of Ellipses at http://www.ellipses.org.za/project/khoinpsalms/. The article was republished, with an Addendum, on <http://www.ellipses.org. za/project/khoinpsalms/>.

Francois Blom was organist at the Dutch Reformed Church, Stellenbosch West Congregation, South Africa, for eleven years (until 2018), and now free-lances as organist in the Eastern Cape. He is a trained choral singer, an actor, cabaret pianist, choral assistant and accompanist. [email protected].

Garth Erasmus is a visual artist and musician and founding member and chairperson of Africa South Art Initiative (ASAI). Garth plays with groups such as Khoi Khonnexxion, and As Is, and is publishing a book of his work with artist book maker Helène van Aswegen. [email protected].

Esther Marie Pauw’s doctoral artistic research explored intersections of interventionist curating, landscape as critical lens and her performances of South African flute compositions. She improvises with a collective of improvisers at Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation, University of Stellenbosch, where she is also an affiliated research fellow. [email protected].

OAR Issue 4 / MAY 2021 TO EXPOSE, TO SHOW, TO DEMONSTRATE, TO INFORM, TO OFFER 31

TO EXPOSE, TO SHOW, TO DEMONSTRATE, TO INFORM, TO OFFER 1

Elisabeth Lebovici Translated by Naomi Vogt

To cite this contribution: Lebovici, Elisabeth, translated by Naomi Vogt. ‘TO EXPOSE, TO SHOW, TO DEMONSTRATE, TO INFORM, TO OFFER.’ OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform Issue 4 (2021): 31–58, http://www.oarplatform.com/expose-show-demonstrate-inform-offer-1/.

PREAMBLE

This text was originally the fourth chapter of the book Ce que le sida m’a fait (What AIDS did to me). It connects the city of New York, and particularly the Lower East Side (with some forays into Times Square), with the transformation of the nature and concept of contemporary art exhibitions. My direct experience of the exhibitions I discuss here left its mark on me, as did an exhibition organized years later by Douglas Crimp and Lynne Cooke: Mixed Use, Manhattan (Reina Sofia, 2010). These exhibitions set about examining how, in the midst of the city’s recession since the 1970s, Lower Manhattan became a central scene for the experimentation of new artistic practices and forms of sexual contact. Thus, this chapter seeks a genealogy for the rather exemplary forms of display manifested through the different versions of Group Material’s AIDS Timeline, at the turn of the 1990s. This genealogy is structured by the idea that the exhibition site can also be a context of and for sociability and public assembly. At a time when HIV/AIDS provoked panic and silence, the time and space of certain exhibitions opened themselves to speech, to information, to exchange, to protest, in short, to the epidemic’s political visibility. All images used for this translation are scanned pages excerpted from Ce que le sida m’a fait, published by JRP Ringier et La maison rouge in 2017.

Our mourning strives to be public, and to engage public institutions, because it is in the public domain that the value of the lives of our dead loved ones is so frequently questioned or denied. Thus the epidemic requires a public art, which might adequately memorialise and pay respect to our dead. — Simon Watney, ‘Memorializing AIDS,’ Parkett, 1993.

Every genealogy is a fiction. There is no such thing. There’s only one genealogy. It takes place in our dreams. Every specific genealogy is a fiction.— Jill Johnston, ‘Untitled’, Marmelade Me, 1998.


‘The East Village stinks. Garbage covers every inch of the streets. The few inches garbage doesn’t cover reek of dog and rat piss. All of the buildings are either burnt down, half-burnt down, or falling down. None of the landlords who own the slum live in their disgusting buildings. In the winter when temperatures average 0º, these buildings have no hot water or heat, and in the summer at 100º average, roaches and rats cover the inside walls and ceilings.’2 This is how the astounding writer Kathy Acker described the area of Manhattan situated below 14th Street on the urban grid. Since that time, the East Village has undergone a full process of gentrification.3 The word – first coined in 1964 by the sociologist Ruth Glass regarding neighborhoods of London – was also used by Acker’s friend, the writer and lesbian activist historian of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power), Sarah Schulman. ‘Kathy is emblematic to me of one of the stages of gentrification, the forgetting of pioneering artists and their innovative contributions’, she writes. ‘Her death, in the midst of the AIDS crisis, was another elimination of free space, another shrinking of the community of non-corporate thinking. Another victory for the power of homogeneity’.4 For Schulman, the gentrification of minds occurs simultaneously with the urban policies that follow real-estate speculation. Both bear the responsibility for discarding people with AIDS – those who are dying, their lifetime belongings, the partners of those who are dead, as well as gays of color, lesbians, and socially fragile human beings who cannot afford apartments at market rates. Gentrification reshapes the material of lived urban experience. It affects the ways in which people make contact, think, and interact, restricting the availability and viability of the ebullient, inventive forms of culture that are jointly created through the mix of residents and their neighborhoods.

Traditionally, the East Village and more broadly New York’s Lower East Side were rallying points for populations in transit, for refugees of various origins fleeing wars, pogroms and poverty, and for gender minorities. This geographic area, described by Acker and Schulman, comprises the East Village proper, Chinatown, Little Italy, Tompkins Square, Astor Place, Knickerbocker Village and the ‘Bowery’. From the 1970s on, these were largely immigrant neighborhoods where Italian, Polish, Romanian, Ukrainian, European Jewish, and Chinese communities were brought together. In the process of adapting to the dominant culture, they borrowed from other immigrant cultures engaged, like them, in mechanisms of resistance, interaction, and friction. Jewish performer Harpo Marx, for instance, first learned the ropes of performance by engaging with a Chinese ritual drama, The Yellow Jacket, a combination of traditional music hall and Cantonese opera. These migrant populations were housed in tenement buildings, rental constructions in brick that were relatively narrow and often low-rise – five to seven stories tall – and erected on cramped lots. The tight alignment and confined living conditions of this type of housing, along with the absence of air and light, were documented as early as 1890 by the journalist Jacob Riis. The neighborhood long remained a pocket of poverty. This condition deteriorated when two financial crises (1929, 1987) and the near bankruptcy of New York City in 1975 delayed the fulfillment of promoters’ whims. And yet, between Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 and the 1988-89 recession, building programs had taken an aggressive turn. The sale of ‘assemblages’ – in essence, devastated house blocks which the city had left to rot, coupled with a tax exemption for the construction of luxury flats – provoked the forced displacement of ill and impoverished residents. Landlords who could no longer make their investments profitable with the low rents chose to abandon buildings. Deprived of housing, hundreds of people found themselves living under bridges, in the streets and parks or in shelters, vacant lots, and the city’s underground.


Whether or not one has a home often draws the decisive line between living and withering. But it is not only a matter of having a place to stay; one must also be able to stay alive and to survive in it. Owners developed tactics that ranged from making financial offers in exchange for vacating the premises, to bypassing maintenance or doubling the rent unlawfully, to verbal and physical harassment. The municipal authorities were accused of spreading the epidemic due to the neglect of garbage collection, building inspection, and fire safety. ‘In New York, life masquerades as pathology’. After reading this graffiti inspired by a Lewis Munford quote in the toilets of Strand,5 the second-hand bookshop where he worked part time, photographer Ken Schles decided to confront his everyday life, namely the place in which he lived. A former student of Lisette Model and Hans Haacke at Cooper Union, Schles inhabited an abandoned building on Avenue B. A rat hole. AIDS, drugs, and violence were killing his generation. In 1988, he published a photobook and called it Invisible City.6

The housing battles in the Lower East Side (which date back to the construction of ‘First Houses’ in 1935)7 spawned an inspired following throughout the 1980s. The debate was focused on property, accessibility, the availability of public space, and the allocation of governmental subsidies to private investment and public housing. These issues gave rise to an array of local activisms. Actors of a conflict emerged: the young homeless people occupying Tompkins Square Park, regularly removed with violence by the police,8 the squatters of abandoned homes turned into ‘shooting galleries’, the older residents, the tenants, the lessors and the owners, the ‘developers’, as well as those who put their own bodies on the line in attempts to restore their homes (because of ‘homesteading’, which consists in granting rights on a building in exchange for refurbishing it), without forgetting the homeless who camped on the Bowery.9 All took part in a permanent conflict hinging on the political definition of the ‘neighborhood’.10 Through this word, an area becomes legible in terms of vicinity – physical proximity as well as social texture.

For artists who resided there, the stakes were high. ‘For $225 a month, I live in a slum with my two kids and two hamsters’, Judy Rifka told me in 1980. But the issue mobilized artists as artists too. Already in 1972, the sculptor Robert Smithson had declared that ‘art should not be considered as merely a luxury, but should work within the processes of actual production and reclamation,’11 a singular word evoking recuperation, retrieval, the conversion of a terrain. Ever since her Maintenance Art Manifesto in 1969, the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles dedicated her artistic activity to making visible both maintenance processes and the handling of waste, which was always expanding in public space. Thus in the early 1980s, the conditions for a strategy of reclamation were present in New York, a city where entire populations had been thrown onto the pavement by real-estate politics, cuts in anti-poverty programs, and the liquidation of several psychiatric hospitals. Following Reagan’s election, the pruning of public subsidies did not spare the arts, either. Unfailingly treated as strangers in the very streets which they had populated for so many years, the ‘artistic intelligences’ – a reference to the artists and craftspeople rallied during the 1871 Paris Commune12 – eventually began to pool their political imaginations.

In her film The Man Who Envied Women (1985), the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer brought a feminist nuance to the reclamation strategy. The latter was sometimes taken all the way to court by members of Manhattan’s artistic community. Rainer superimposed recordings of public hearings about the Lower East Side with shots of Donald Judd’s sculptures and Leon Golub’s paintings, two white male artists who were strongly involved in political


struggle. In this way she uncovered certain contradictions at the heart of their activism. Indeed, reclaiming a space always implies subjecting someone else to its loss. As the scholar Peggy Phelan suggests, ultimately this film explores the effects of the battles for urban spaces which, paradoxically, were setting artists – vastly white – against the predominantly non-white working classes. ‘Almost overnight we met the enemy,’ explains Trisha, a protagonist in the film, ‘and it was us’.13 Indeed, the Lower East Side was anything but a white cube. Within the area, variants of cultural radicalism practiced by racialized minorities had flourished. In 1970-71, the Basement Workshop Collective was formed by Asian artists and poets. From the 1960s on, cramped apartments became a place of black production and assertion, through the first African theater of the poet and therapist Rashidah Ismaili-Abubakr, the Negro Ensemble Company (a black youth and cultural center), publications such as Freedomways, Valerie Maynard’s open-air arts and craft courses, and the bars where Archie Shepp performed as a neighbor.14 It is here, at the New Federal Theatre, that the plays of Amiri Baraka a.k.a LeRoi Jones were produced. It is here, also, that Ellen Stewart opened La MaMa complex on East Fourth Street, and that painter Joe Overstreet and his wife Corinne Jennings created in 1974 on Second Street East the alternative gallery Kenkeleba House.

Part of the Lower East Side – notably Alphabet City, with its A, B, C, D avenues – became a place of assertion for Nuyorican cultures. Hence the term Loisada, derived from Spanglish pronunciation, to describe the decrepit quarters where, from the end of the 1970s, Latino and African-American families lived next to poets and musicians, graffiti artists, rappers, but also dealers and bad boys. At the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a space of expression was forged for oral poetry. One of its pillars was Miguel Piñero, an author who had written most of his texts and plays in prison. In A Lower East Side Poem (1985), he demands that his ashes be dispersed within the bounds of the barrio, the neighborhood described as a field for identities that rebuff binary choices, be they about race, nationality, or gender. He hopes his remains will crash where ‘the hustlers & suckers meet’, where ‘the faggots & freaks’ stand ‘from Houston to 14th Street, from Second Avenue to the mighty D’.15 Not far from there, in Ridge Street’s flat 9 at the corner of Stanton Street, lived the flamboyant Martin Wong.16 Established in New York since 1978, he painted brick walls relentlessly throughout the eighteen years of his life on the Lower East Side – brick by brick. They made up the frame of public and private life, from facades to interior walls. He also painted the communication codes used by minorities – sign language, astrology symbols, graffiti, calligraphy, tattoos, sexual signaling – which overlapped with his erotic inclinations. The latter surface through depictions of strong men – the prisoners, policemen and firefighters who populate his visual culture as superheroes, and where Piñero sits front row.

In contrast to SoHo (South of Houston) and its distinct industrial architecture, with cast-iron housing and wall-less loft levels, the Lower East Side was a place initially populated by poets, performers, writers, directors, and musicians. Witness John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Joe Brainard and John Ashbery, Charles Ludlam, Jack Smith, Taylor Mead, or Ron Rice. There, they found contact zones with Latino, Cuban, and Caribbean cultures, traces of which lingered on in various experimental and explicitly queer productions, and in works considered foundational to queer practices today.17 Here, two histories call for cultures and figures to converge; their respective forms of ‘visual excess’ come with a revision of the internationalist avant-garde model, which had rebuked vernacular forms. Witness allusions to South-American movie stars and their transvestite impersonations, the relocation of Middle-Eastern and Spanish motifs in Smith’s films, or performances in John Vaccaro and Ronald Tavel’s The


Playhouse of the Ridiculous, followed by those in Ludlam’s Theater of the Ridiculous and, finally, the recycling of Latino cultures, which were no more accepted than the cultures of sexual minorities. Mario Montez, a superstar for Smith, Rice, Andy Warhol, and Hélio Oiticica, embodied the escape from naturalized visions of Puerto Rican masculinity, installing in its stead cross-dressing practices and the undecidability of genders and borders.

One border, however, stood: the one we erected in front of the bourgeois, the white collars and the stuffed shirts, and which we made a point of honor not to cross.

Rachid, whom I met while he was shooting a film with Teri Toye and Rudy Laurent, had never gone anywhere above 14th Street. (Toye would become the first transgender model of the period; Laurent, an actor who trained with Antoine Vitez, directed us on stage in No Trifling With Love – Alfred de Musset’s On ne badine pas avec l’amour – which we presented in the spring of 1981 at the Braathen/Gallozzi gallery). Below 14th Street, an alternative city could be outlined, described in turns as ‘bohemian’,18 rough, a Beirut in ruins, or zone of Roman decadence. Indeed James Nares’s Super-8 costume drama Rome 1978 formulated an analogy between Caligula’s reign and Downtown Manhattan. But the actresses and actors (musicians, artists and performers including Lydia Lunch, David McDermott, James Chance, John Lurie, Eric Mitchell, Judy Rifka, Jim Sutcliffe, Lance Loud, Mitch Corber, Patti Astor, Anya Phillips) never took this motif seriously and snickered throughout their performance. Thus, rather than a blank slate, archaeological stratification (so to speak) was at stake in these zones. Until galleries began penetrating the area – by 1986, 176 had appeared – this part of town had mostly bred makeshift spaces, such as basements and parish halls, or Bill Rice’s boutique and backyard. Turned actor at age fifty, Rice appeared in a bunch of Super-8 films (and plays such as the No Trifling With Love in which I acted).19 Having become one of the last tenants of a building on East Third Street, he made his asphalt ‘garden’ available to the various shows, readings, demonstrations, events, and screenings that were already happening around him. They were advertised through photocopied or re-photographed flyers, which I have kept. It is they that give me my memory back, along with my dog-eared copies of local papers: the East Village Eye, launched in May 1979; and Baseline: ‘It’s all true’. It was the neighborhood’s megaphone, its free radio, with its tons of static. Behind the duotone-printed, sometimes neon-colored cover, various forms of graphic expression were melded in cut-ups, which could overlap or be superimposed. The editor wanted it a freed zone. Walter Robinson, who came from Edit DeAk’s Art-Rite magazine, encouraged artists – such as Jane Dickson, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer – to intervene in it directly. The musician James Chance made the first cover: he and Lydia Lunch were two stars of this publication. David Wojnarowicz contributed a text. At any given time, one could read a review by Gary Indiana on VALIE EXPORT or Werner Schroeter, a column on the electric eye by Willoughby Sharp, or a user manual on how to self-organize an exhibition in a park. Quoting Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Hell wrote long texts from his position within the rough musical underground. Cookie Mueller wrote a medical section. As everywhere else in the neighborhood, the women who wrote were also those about whom columns were written; and the women who acted in films were also playing music; those who were beheld were also casting their own gaze. The unpredictability of roles remains one of the pleasures of that thing we no longer dare call ‘crossover’ or ‘interdisciplinarity’.

A more fortunate expression would perhaps be ‘Schizo-Culture’, coined by William Burroughs and used by Sylvère Lotringer and John Rajchman when they were professors at Columbia


University. In 1978, they titled an issue of their journal Semiotext(e) after it. The term refers not to clinical schizophrenia but to ‘the fact that the culture is divided up into all sorts of classes and groups, etc., and that some of the old lines are breaking down. And that is a healthy sign.’20 In the now cult issue, a fire of confusion and disruption was lit by Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem, Jean-François Lyotard, Kathy Acker, Jack Smith, Martine Barrat, the filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, and the artist Denise Green. But the same can be said of the many women and men who performed at the Mudd Club, which opened in 1977 on 77 White Street. The owner, Steve Mass, even invited Keith Haring to open a gallery on the second floor.

My other favorite issue of Semiotext(e) is ‘Polysexuality’.21 Within it too the texts were multifarious in nature. Leafing through the pages of ads, papers, flyers and tracts, we see the obsessive, tireless reprise: sex. The word was on everyone’s lips, whether it referred to an event, an exhibition, the nth sado-masochistic film variation, the feminist projects that were at the time broadly using psychoanalytical terminology, or the character sporting a salient platinum blond quiff named John Sex (1956-1990). The Erotic Art Show was one of the first exhibitions organized by Haring in the cellar supplied by the Holy Cross Polish national church and re-baptized Club 57. It is where Sex performed with his snake Delilah. He performed increasingly in the wake of the launch of the Pyramid, the gender performance cabaret. Practice, before theorization. Pyramid is where the first drag king competition happened. And it is at the Pyramid, again, that the genderqueer activist Leslie Feinberg chose to be filmed while she explained the intersectionality of her own position, as a person subjected at once to transphobia and homophobia (Outlaw, 1994). Not far away, in 1982, the WOW Café (Women’s One World) was opened following the second edition of the eponymous itinerant festival. It presented itself as a ‘City of Women’, open to any kind of woman-on-woman aesthetic – particularly the most anarchist and chaotic ones. But showing up was not enough to belong. Something similar to a long corridor was divided in two by a kitchen – with the hall on one side and the dressing rooms on the other. The space framed a revival of the lesbian feminist ‘scene’, here a term to be taken literally. From performances to unpredictably titled balls (‘I Dreamed I Paid the Rent in My Maidenform Bra’), every woman was encouraged to take action. Here, the Split Britches (Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw, Deb Margolin) and performers Carmelita Tropicana and Holly Hughes cut their teeth. In 1983, the latter performed her version of The Well of Loneliness, after Radclyffe Hall’s desolate 1928 novel, turned Well of Horniness. As Sarah Schulman observed, ‘it has taken over 65 years for historians to reacknowledge what the community knew all along, that lesbians were at the centre of radical organizing on the East Side, and that their relationships influenced radical politics and strategy.’22

In her texts, Kathy Acker addresses the theme of sexuality in order to question what belongs to the private or the personal – a search for ‘one’s self-truth’. To do so, she mixes these motifs with the tropes, and perhaps even the stereotypes, of gender. Obscene language irrigates her writing, which she borrows or juxtaposes to other, less obviously sexual forms. The latter thus become ‘contaminated’ by way of a coupling, for instance to fragments of Sade’s Justine. The produced effect is a reformulation of well-rehearsed debates around the reader’s role – the figure that is positioned, in classical narrative structure, as external to the text. The language of sex allows for the articulation of a desire, or a rejection, and their activation within the reader. The reader is turned spectator and placed at once outside and within the text: in short, at the threshold, always about to exit or enter. Acker’s practice ought to be compared with that of Wojnarowicz when he, as theorist Jennifer Doyle suggests, ‘deploys writing in order to force the spectator to become a reader, and that reading is hard because the text is written as a breathless rant.’23 Here


is an example: ‘I’ve been looking all my life at the signs surrounding us in the media or on peoples lips; the religious types outside st patricks cathedral shouting to men and women in the gay parade: ‘You won’t be here next year — you’ll get Aids and die ha ha’ . . . there’s a thin line a very thin line and as each T-cell disappears from my body it’s replaced by ten pounds of pressure ten pounds of rage and I focus that rage into non-violent resistance but that focus is starting to slip my hands are beginning to move independent of self-restraint and the egg is starting to crack […].’24 This long flow of words by Wojnarowicz has been used multiple times – filmed, read out loud, recorded, broadcast, turned into a ‘multimedia’ written form and mode of disobedience and disrespect precisely towards a fully written destiny, towards anything definitive that would put writing away as a discrete object, into a determined library shelf.

‘Piles of Trash.Impersonal

Street is a Lover To Me’25

1979. The year I arrive in New York. Sol LeWitt composes On the Walls of the Lower East Side. Grids of photographs, 666 of them squared to the same format. All are in color, taken (with a Rolleiflex 2 ¼’’) in the neighborhood streets, including the entrance of 117 Hester Street, where LeWitt occupies a loft. All frame, often quite tightly, graffiti and inscriptions painted or posted onto walls. In these images, streets speak languages: English, Chinese, Spanish, Spanglish, Yiddish, Hebrew, and ‘sign languages’, if one may call the numbers and signatures of graffers that. Mostly, these are nicknames and sobriquets in embellished letters, sometimes accompanied by toponyms, ideograms, phone numbers, fragments of frescoes, public notices, signs, and piercing and often radical political declarations. Each wall unit with its text is isolated in a square photograph, before being integrated to the modular overarching composition. But how? The series’ structure does not seem to reference the topography of travelled streets, nor does it prescribe a direction of reading. Beyond the absence of hierarchy among the different units – none of which is ‘worth’ any more than another – urban disobedience is implied both by the iconography (the insurrection of walls) and by the lack of conformity between the spatial organization of the images and a given plane of reference. Here too, the viewers’ exteriors are drawn in. It is their bodies, your bodies, our bodies that produce the narrative of these wall drawings, drawings that are effectively made by the street – the street and its ways. LeWitt’s photo compositions, like the writings of Acker, are tracking shots without the cinema, without film; tracking shots that dispense both of the technical operations which normally produce them and of the continuity of a gaze which they usually imply. What they retain, however, is the potential for de-centering, for the strolling of the flâneur and, in the spirit of Viriginia Woolf, for the ‘street hunting’ of the female passerby (indeed through détournement, the ‘street haunting’ formulated by Woolf morphs into a hunt). In the impersonal trash-filled streets that American lesbian poet Eileen Myles turned into fertile ground, nameless people circulate. In English, the word ‘nobody’ can translate as ‘without body’. And I am one of those no-bodies when I move among my archives. I do not appear in the photographs, I am not ‘tagged’ in the newspapers, on the websites, or in the texts, which I have not written… Many of the friend-bodies that have accompanied and loved me, corresponded, conversed, and shared what I saw with me, have disappeared. So, more than thirty years later, I find myself wanting to describe what this surviving spectator experienced physically.

When I brutally changed the subject of my doctoral thesis – from a study of the Journal of Thomas Blaikie, a late eighteenth-century Scottish gardener, to L’Argent dans le discours des


artistes américains, 1980-1981 (‘Money in the Discourse of American Artists, 1980-1981’), I was asserting the field of my inquiry: the here and now which, through my writing, I can now hear and see. This decision, which drew me inside the New York I landed in, was first and foremost the consequence of an exhibition. The Times Square Show augured my transformation into a (hopefully emancipated) spectator.26 Thus I began: suddenly last summer…

Times Square in 1980 concentrated the squalid and the marvelous – a territory made up of adult movie theaters, sex shops, topless bars, fast foods and various appliance stores, animated by the ceaseless traffic of neon signs, cars, pedestrians, and underground wagons. 8000 pedestrians per hour. Indeed, Times Square had been the object of a ‘century-long struggle for dominance between three industries: real estate, the performing arts, and sex’. In 1980, the neighborhood was given over to a tight fight between ‘queer freedom, advertising overkill, cultural diversity, and brutal urban violence’.27 Nested in this land of all promiscuities stood a massage parlor, one among many others. On 201-205 West 41st Street, between the 1st and the 30th of June and for almost twenty-four hours a day, a former brothel hosted an exhibition. Open to all – passersby, prostitutes, dealers, art clients – it kept track of its own environment. For it, artists built a ceremonial archive. Times Square is no doubt New York’s first and last public ‘square’, in the European sense of the term. And indeed the exhibition functioned as one. It saw itself as a replica, in a seismological sense, of a place crossed by different energies. It translated those energies into figurations, including ‘knives and guns and money and dirt and cocks and cunts and blood and gore’. Less enthusiastic, Lucy Lippard accused the exhibition of imposing itself over the voices of Times Square’s users.28 But the show certainly enabled the assessment of precarity in an area threatened by imminent change, in debacle-bound New York. The building’s four floors (including ground level) were fully invaded. Amassed on top of each other in varying thicknesses, all media mixed, the works proliferated from cellar to attic, devouring the most incongruous of places, including the restroom (Joe Fyte, Becky Howland)29 and staircase (Jane Dickson and Jody Culkin, Kiki Smith, Mike Glier, etc.). They appeared in the nooks where one normally finds only dust; one would brush against them in narrow hallways or in the cubicles that bore witness to the local sexual architecture (Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf). In fact, this show ‘of’ Times Square was an attack on the methods – laundering and neutralization – usually employed by museums and galleries to separate artworks from the contagion of the world.

This old ruined building had nothing to do with the lofts converted into galleries which had by then overtaken SoHo, from where artists, little by little, were being removed. The plaster crackled. Graffiti showed signs of indeterminate age. The first-floor windows had been dismantled. This was a way of opening the exhibition to the sounds of the street. Boomboxes, voices, and cars blended in with tunes from a juke-box, the words of peddlers, the music of carnival (Bobby C) and the throat sounds of a puppet imitating James Brown. Connected to a record player, the puppet served as the building’s doorman. Light from outside penetrated generously, sometimes filtered in red. Outside: a display of the building’s plan drawings (Tom Otterness), graffiti (Fred ‘Fabulous Five Freddy’ Braithwaite), and a frieze made up of emblems taken from advertisement and recomposed with the familiar commercial signage. Jean-Michel Basquiat had spray-painted ‘Free Sex’ onto the door, but the inscription was removed – on the pretext that there was, in fact, no free sex in this massage parlor. The signage for the exhibition was a series of painted boards hanging from the first-floor windows, boasting the attractions supposedly available inside: hand-painted portraits and a painted grotto, ‘thrift shop, sex machines, business advice, real mermaid, and accidental death’.30 Over a hundred


artists participated in the project; the vast array of pieces imposed a compacted display that left no room for the isolation of artworks. One always saw many things at once; sometimes, one collided with them. Works intruded on the spectator’s space just as the spectacle of the street infiltrated the space of the works.

The show’s conditions of existence, as well as many of the materials used by the artists (plaster, plastic, industrial waste, cardboard, papier-mâché, photocopy) made the objects vulnerable to the attacks of time and excessive manipulation. The lifetime of artistic objects only barely exceeded that of their perception. Thus, the event merged with the process of urban alteration itself. Many of the exhibited works – especially those by female artists – were committed to evoking the site’s former destiny: sex work and industry, whether applied to domestic life (Jane Dickson), or not. A waitress’s sexual exploitation is described in detail; allusions to sadomasochism proliferate, sometimes manifesting through explicit photography (Jimmy De Sana and Mike Glier). Leather, steel, and rope are the materials in vogue. But the artists’ interest in S&M seems to be a cover, used to express their ambiguous feelings towards institutions.

The building’s larger rooms were like multiple private salons: the one somewhat melodra-matically named ‘Money, Love and Death’ housed a tight display of paintings, statues and drawings against the background of a patterned wallpaper titled Gun, Dollar, Plate (Coleen Fitzgibbon and Robin Winters). A ‘Portrait Gallery’ brought together anonymous individuals and the high dignitaries of the ‘phallocracy’ (Caz Porter and Janet Stein). It was as if The Great White Way (Joe Lewis) must always be disowned, as if the show’s austere abstract ‘black paintings’ (Olivier Mosset) must always be associated with the shambles of an ‘open-air fashion fair’. These stark contrasts among the works revealed a desire to rectify the existing idea of this New York new wave as a white, bourgeois movement. Even though this was in fact the case. Yet at the same time, the movement succeeded in securing the alliance and participation of black and Latino artists,31 who had too often been confined to categories of ‘ethnic’ art to which the institutional world remained closed. Some of these works further disrupted the affects of racism. A sculpted pantheon (John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres) was thus dedicated to the inhabitants of the South Bronx, then New York’s most dilapidated neighborhood. The monument’s plaster busts had been molded publicly beforehand, on the street. The Black Panthers were commemorated too (Candace Hill-Montgomery), and a ‘war room’ was dedicated to the urban guerilla and border issues in the Middle East (Peter Fend). The living conditions of vast homeless populations were explored, while half-burnt photographs of abandoned ruined buildings in the South Bronx were placed in bottles (Marc Blane).

Art was playing with the risks and the detritus of consumption in urban environments. David Hammons recycled bottles of cheap wine found on the streets by breaking them against the staircase, which was so narrow that passersby were at constant risk of stumbling. Inviting the crowds of the city’s undergrounds to emerge in the exhibition, Christy Rupp built a real fountain made of false rats perched on beer cans. It was surrounded by growing waste, produced both by the artist and the visitors. The figure of the rat, repeated on sheets of paper placed anywhere an empty space appeared, roamed the floors of the Times Square Show. With Rat Patrol (as the work was called), the animal cruised seamlessly outside and in, since rats know none of these borders. A well of oil resting on two dollar-bags functioned as a flush, spreading a concoction that smelled of gasoline into a public urinal (Becky Howland). Stalls taken from Canal Street, where merchandise was sold at knocked-down prices, were used to display a pharmacy of vaguely expired drugs and pills (Bobby G.). On the side of 7th Street,


known as Fashion Avenue (the heart of the garment district), a collective shop was installed, where shabby shelves displayed piles of clothes, erratically enhanced by layers of paint (Mary Lemley, Sophie VDT, Paul Greif, Karen Lunar, Ester Balint, Vicki Pederson). A fashion show, on the theme of white, brought the exhibition to a close. Cleaning and laundering (in French blanchiment, literally ‘whitening’) paradoxically became a signal for the end of hostilities through aesthetization.

In the meantime, most of the show’s fervent organizers and viewers (including myself) were beginning to set up camp on site. A surviving poster informs me retroactively of the artists’ performances32 and films33 programmed over the weekends, coupled with political docu-mentaries and cult movies like Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour (1950). Nan Goldin showed her slide-show travelogue (Ballad of Sexual Dependency), John Ahearn and Jim Jarmusch, their films. The calendar becomes vaguer when it comes to Jack Smith, the veiled hero in a Hamlet costume, captured in one of the hilarious trailers produced for the exhibition. His presence, scheduled from Friday midnight until late Saturday night, caused a riot within a few square meters. In them, he performed Exotic Landlordism of the World, one of those projects he had been fomenting for almost twenty years and which, one day, would be named Normal Love. ‘Since ‘Flaming Creatures’, I’ve been involved in a working method that might be called ‘LIVE FILM.’ Some of the work goes on through the screening itself. Someday, this might be imitated for there is almost no other way to dislodge film out of the bankrupt state it is now in which can only be goosed up by more and more violence and synchronized chatter.’34 His company, adorned with caftans and turbans, answered to the name of Sinbad Glick & the Brassiere Girls of Bagdad. He had formed it in an Orientalist craze of some sort, together with two prostitutes from the neighborhood and a multitude of available objects – an adventure through the texture of slides. ‘Jack Smith lights a bunch of incense and his veil catches on fire. The belly dancer helps put it out. A guy wearing ripped pantyhose, binocular-shaped false boobs and leather boots falls down the steps to join them. Nothing really happens, just a lot of bumbling. Jack Smith smokes a pipe of dope or something, holds up an empty beer can, shakes it, strokes it (hoping for a genie?), picks up an overloaded extension cord and pronounces it ‘the Octopus of Atlantis.’ He asks ‘Sinbad’ (the Brassiere Boy) to read a story – ‘Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves’ – aloud from a children’s picture book. The guy does so in a flat, fast monotone’. This is how the Soho News tells it. It did not appeal to people then. But posterity praised to the skies this materiality that ‘infects time’, which director Richard Foreman described as a witness to ‘human behavior turn[ed] into granular stasis, in which every moment of being seemed, somehow, to contain the seed of unthinkable possibility’.35 In its relentless resistence to the temporal economy of cultural productions, Smith’s obsessive hostility towards the capitalism of exploitative landlords began to spread.36 Fully immersed in the world of the exploited, the Times Square Show replicated it on the scale of an exhibition. Through it, the conflicting affects linked to the aggressive circulation of capital reverberated and spread.

This mode of intervention – the impregnation, indeed the contamination between context and project – was precisely how the artist cooperative Colab (Collaborative Projects) had decided to work. The group was formed in 1977 as a reaction to the ways in which public and private funds were being distributed to artists via intermediary bodies.37 About sixty artists ‘concerned with conceptual ideas and the political figurative in art’ composed Colab,38 but not without conflict. These artists had split the task, first of obtaining, then of organizing the building of the Times Square Show, dividing into groups of two or three per floor. They


were finally in charge of communication for the exhibition, which was handled through collectively made satirical films.

The issue of real estate opened the 1980s and was further broached by another exhibition, the Real Estate Show. Organized by a Colab collective,39 it was intended as a communal realization of ‘the way money controls where and how people live in New York City’,40 property speculation, and the demographic shifts triggered by the latter in traditionally poor neigh-borhoods such as the Lower East Side. ‘Real estate is not about people living or working somewhere. Actual real estate, both private and public, means buying, financing, subdividing, renting, selling, demolishing, mortgaging, constructing, for profit.’41 Opposed to this pattern, these artists questioned the ‘old conception of the creative artist realizing his aim of freedom through contemplation of art pieces’.42 Hence the curatorial dynamics that would give shape to this discourse had also aimed to be open, process-based, egalitarian, and without any limitations regarding the space dedicated to each work. A little while before the Real Estate Show opening, and following several scouting missions, more than thirty artists entered a municipal building, which had been abandoned for over two years, on 125 Delancey Street near the Williamsburg Bridge. Together, they cleaned, repaired the plumbing, built in a heating system – it was the end of December – and installed their works. Unrestrained by medium, they addressed methods and usages, acts of arson brutally perpetrated to dislodge residents, and made proposals for viable alternative energies. We spent the night of December 31st 1979 there. The exhibition lasted exactly one day. We discussed speculation, the rights of tenants, abuse, real-estate undertakings, the arbitrariness of urban planning. On January 2nd 1980, seals were affixed to the doors. On January 11th, the police seized the works.

A press conference, in the presence of Hans Haacke and Joseph Beuys, ensued from the seizure. Following negotiations, Colab was given permission to use a storefront on Rivington Street, which became an exhibition space under the name of ABC No Rio.

As the art historian Miwon Kwon writes fiercely, ‘certainly, site-specific art can lead to the unearthing of repressed histories, provide support for greater visibility of marginalized groups and issues, and initiate the re(dis)covery of ‘minor’ places so far ignored by the dominant culture. But inasmuch as the current socioeconomic order thrives on the (artificial) production and (mass) consumption of difference (for difference’s sake), the situation of art in ‘real’ places can also be a means to extract the social and historical dimensions out of places.’43 Thus, while it reinvigorated the old model of artist salons, the Times Square Show could not escape the hold of an art market which has the capacity to absorb the works that parody it. This same market also takes on the careers of artists who, in this case, did not all resist for very long the temptation of exhibiting in the very spaces that the show had seemed to castigate. In this turn of events, artist and critic Walter Robinson even sees a critical juncture, where the East Village scene was about to become a ‘mockery’, a professional refuge for the art world that went there to find its place before occupying the premises.44 As for the site of Times Square, it was, more than any other, the laboratory of a renovation politics aiming to change a ‘shameful’ neighborhood into a more respectable district. The rise of panic linked to the AIDS epidemic supplied the setting for a discourse that could request the general ‘disinfection’ of the city.

A few months after the Times Square Show, collaborative galleries opened in the East Village. ABC No Rio, whose name was borrowed from an old street sign, declared from the start on


its May 1st inaugural celebration that it wished to be a bridge between artists and the local working-class population. Christy Rupp explained to me then: ‘We were put here for free because we were an organization of white artists – to reassure people and assure them that they could move into the neighborhood. But we are trying to use the space to bring in communities and allow them to participate’. ‘It’s easy to get the press, but harder to get the neighborhood folk. We’re a façade but our aim is the opposite. At a minimum, it is about documenting the area’s disintegration; at best, it is about raising consciousness about the consequences of a renovation.’45 In addition to new spaces such as Fashion Moda in the South Bronx (which would become one of the platforms for hip hop and graffiti art), or El Taller Boricua (a group of Puerto Rican artists started in the 1970s to serve the Puerto Rican community), collectives multiplied: PAD or PADD (Political Art Documentation/Distribution), CUD (Contemporary Urbicultural Documentation), and soon the gallery Exit Art.46 In October 1980, a front window on 244 East 13th Street opened under the name Group Material. This collective of New-York artists was mainly made up of former students of the School of Visual Arts grouped around conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, as well as former students of the University of Maine at Augusta and of the AMCC, the movement of artists for cultural change,47 plus friends and friends of friends.48 More than the production of objects, this heterogeneous collective was motivated by the necessity to pursue conversations and practices that would hold together through shared ground – not a space, but a place, our own laboratory – painted, not in white-as-in-white-cube, but in grey and red.

Rising here was a ‘movement’,49 one that sought to rethink the interactions between exhibitions, objects, and context. And production involved a movement of collecting, ‘in which multiple points of view are represented in a variety of styles and methods’,50 mobilizing a community of users. Everyone joined in the conversation with varying expectations, objectives, and appreciations. The arguments and quarrels of sometimes irreconcilable differences in ideology or personality led to declaring: ‘dissensus is an emotional invention of great beauty’.51 Alienation, consumption, elections, gender, food, enthusiasm: keywords turned into an ensemble of artifacts in a scenography. Invited to the 1985 Whitney Biennial, Group Material flooded the museum’s ground floor. Under the spotlight of theater lamps, in a décor of wallpaper strips over Marcel Breuer’s original architecture, the scenography of Americana was conceived like a (photo)montage. It created radical interactions between Reagan-era consumer items (a TV monitor turned-on, two washing machines, detergent) and the works of artists neglected by the institutions and aiming all their critical potential at American culture. Americana proposed a deconstruction of curatorial norms and their excluding practices – a strategy which the group’s Kafkaesque The Castle would repeat at Kassel’s documenta VIII in 1987. Other techniques of spatial distribution, borrowed from the world of political activism, were also explored: poster campaigns, inserts, the production of bags, the writing of timelines.52 Thus, the narrative about the 88 interventions by the US government in Central and Latin America since 1893 was publicly reproduced via a timeline at P.S.1 in 1984 in the work Timeline: The Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and Latin America. This presentation technology of historical time allows one to revisit contemporaneity in a critical way, by splitting the times of production and reception of artworks: Diego Rivera suddenly becomes associated with the 1980s and John Heartfield with the nineteenth century. In 1988, Group Material, whose work had already occupied the Dia Art Foundation several times, proposed four ‘subjects for democracy’ over four months in the institution.53 Education, Cultural Participation, and Politics and Election constituted the first three. The fourth part


was dedicated to a case study: AIDS and Democracy (December 1988-January 1989). It was dedicated to William Olander, the New Museum senior curator who had author(iz)ed the first spectacular museum gesture in the struggle against AIDS, namely the installation Let The Record Show in the museum’s main window on Broadway in Lower Manhattan (1987). Under a version of the slogan SILENCE=DEATH in pink neon, the piece included a large photomural of the Nuremberg trials. In front of it stood alternately lit cardboard cutouts of six public figures, five of which were held accountable for their statements written on a plinth beneath them, and the sixth, President Reagan, accused for his notorious silence on the AIDS crisis. Below the neon sign, a LED sign displayed running text on statistics, government inaction, and elaborations on the defendants’ records.54 At the time of Group Material’s opening, Olander was very ill. A ramp was built, allowing him to access Dia’s 77 Wooster Street space with a wheelchair. Various emotions, such as ‘sorrow, rage and fear’, largely uncalled for or unwelcomed in traditional militant discussions, emerged within commitment to shared goals fostered by collectives such as ACT UP and WHAM (a collective for women’s health). These collectives were made active in the installation, through printed matter and looped videos. Political emotions collided with artworks. The colorful works up on the walls were contaminated by concrete data about AIDS, and reciprocally. One had to face them both, in solidarity. No one emerges unscathed. In other words, it was also about exposing the institution’s works (by Gretchen Bender, Ross Bleckner, Louise Lawler or Jannis Kounellis) to information about AIDS and, thus, to affect them. As Elizabeth Hess explained, although some predated the epidemic (a 1942 photograph by Dorothea Lange, for example), the exhibition conveyed a particular significance to the works already on display.55 Part of the installation AIDS & Democracy. A Case Study was presented in 1989 at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (nGbK) in Berlin, in the context of the show Vollbild AIDS. Eine Ausstellung über Leben und Sterben.56 Organized by the activist-curator Frank Wagner, it was the first exhibition dedicated to AIDS curated in Europe.

Group Material had become involved in the AIDS Timeline at the invitation of Lawrence Rinder, curator at the Matrix gallery of the Berkeley University Art Museum, which would house the first iteration of the work at the end of 1989. A black vinyl band, running horizontally around the gallery with data and charts documenting the AIDS-related ‘line of time’ of the 1979-89 decade, was compiled with the help art historian Richard Meyer, then a doctoral student at the University.57 The band was interspersed with objects, artifacts, texts and media, turning the exhibition into a powerful critique of institutional heteronormative delineations of historical time. It achieved this first (but not most), by using ephemera as evidence, displaying compiled data and documents – posters, stickers, flyers, magazine articles and covers – in the similarly ephemeral field of the exhibition, where ‘facts’ are provisional. AIDS Timeline is at once an installation, an exhibition, and a 3D ‘montage’ in the cinematographic sense of the term. It is also a (counter)-historical synoptic tableau, in which the dateline numerals are displayed in reverse order to customary Western reading, with years regressing instead of progressing. In such a representation, a certain rhythm is turned in on itself: time runs, time is running out. For individuals living with HIV/AIDS, time is not only counted and compressed, it also holds the potential for the intensification of the present tense.

In this inclusive show, artworks and artifacts (two ACT UP ‘SILENCE=DEATH’ T-shirts displayed on two hangers), photocopies of newspapers, paintings, texts, masks, photographs, flyers, brochures, typography, and quotes constitute the material for a tridimensional experiment. Data, design, and objects suggested altogether that ‘AIDS has been constructed


through both a bio-medical discourse of infection, incubation, and transmission as well as the cultural vocabulary of innocence and guilt, dominance and deviance, threat and threatened, self and other’.58 In other words, the timeline translates the extent to which mainstream discourse and dominant media partake in, or rather construct, the materiality of the AIDS epidemic. Next to the year 1985, one reads: ‘In late July Rock Hudson discloses that he is ill as a result of AIDS. President Reagan, who has never said the word AIDS in public, calls to wish Hudson well. The American media quadruples its coverage of the syndrome’. The AIDS Timeline goes on ‘to expose, to show, to demonstrate, to inform, to offer’ an epidemic of representation. Three charts are dedicated to tracing the ‘demo-graphics’ formed by HIV-positive diagnosed Americans, deaths caused by AIDS, and governmental resources provided for AIDS-related research. Equally significant are the memories of the disco anthems displayed by title for each year (selected by Stevan Evans: High Energy in 1984; Sylvester’s Take Me to Heaven/Sex in 1985; Never Can Say Goodbye in 1988…). The AIDS Timeline monopolizes the queer pop culture that developed from the mobilization against the epidemic. Darth Vader’s figure from The Empire Strikes Back (1980) is juxtaposed to a photograph of Reagan taken during his presidential inauguration. And the promiscuity of certain works is contagious. Intimacy and remoteness are ‘locked in symbiosis’, according to the words of Felix Gonzalez Torres, member of Group Material. Certain contributions function through reactivation: Nancy Spero’s embroidered feminist slogan of 1970, for instance. ‘This womb does not belong to doctors, legislators, judges, priests, the state, etc.’ In 1986, it was projected onto Times Square’s electronic billboard. This Womb Does Not Belong to Lawyers has reappeared on paper, as part of an advertising insert for the May 22, 1988 Sunday edition of New York Times, during Group Material’s Democracy Project at the Dia Art Foundation. The work’s journey resonates critically in the AIDS Timeline. In return, being placed in the exhibition’s context affected the materiality of the works on display. In Michael Jenkins’ American-flag painting June 30, 1986 of 1988, the voided rectangle is stripped down to nine stripes, and a blank space marks the absent field of stars. Hanging downwards, mimicking a Daniel Buren stripe painting, June 30, 1986 is situated according to its date-title. Indeed on June 30th, 1986, the nine Supreme Court judges made one of the most far-reaching decisions concerning LGBT rights in the United States. Known as ‘Bowers v Hardwick’, the decision upheld the constitutionality of Georgia’s sodomy law, condemning sexual activity between people of the same sex. Next to the date 1979, Nayland Blake placed a vitrine made in 1989. In it, five different softcover editions of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) are chained together, constituting a retrospective of the early days of the epidemic, or at least a version of it. A history ‘projected backwards from 1989 […] by which point the crisis had fully metastatized, and forward as though proleptically from 1970…’.59 This careful game of re-situating objects is not dissimilar to a chessboard, which art historian Hubert Damisch used as a metaphor to describe exhibitions concerned with history. ‘On a chessboard, one can play different types of games, not only chess. […] What does it mean? It means that in order to acquire a sense of history, one has to refer to a delimited space, in which history is to take place’.60

In its first version at Berkeley, the exhibition had been contextualized for the here and now of the Bay Area, namely a moment and place massively affected by HIV and AIDS. Blue and gold signs inside the museum invited the university community to fill in a questionnaire, which tackled individual consciousness: How does AIDS affect you as a person, your lifestyle? The show was aimed at local action: a series of videos, in the university’s sports facilities, offered forms of homoeroticism as resistance to the phobia of AIDS. A full page of The Daily Californian was handed over to Gran Fury, ACT UP’s sister graphic collective. On December


1st, 1990, the date of World AIDS Day which was designated as ‘Day Without Art’ by the organization Visual AIDS, Group Material’s Timeline was turned into printed matter. In order to challenge a totalizing and synoptic reading, it was cut up in double-page fragments published separately in eleven art magazines,61 which came together as a community to disseminate the work. Likewise, for each of its reconfigurations – in 1990 at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Hartford or in 1991 at the Whitney Biennial – the work was updated. And Group Material itself was transformed as a collective. It became a ‘collaborative’ body. By preserving everything, down to the last piece of paper, by combining personal notes and meeting minutes, applying no more hierarchy among registers than among their respective media, the creation of the group’s archives became a creative project, which Julie Ault undertook following the group’s dissolution in 1996. Today, another form of the AIDS Timeline as an archive is available at NYU’s Fales Library, within the ‘Downtown Collection’, and includes the leftovers from its different displays.

AIDS Timeline is a major marker of what AIDS did to exhibitions. It is the place where the aesthetic regime of exhibiting was contaminated by the activist discourse produced by the graphic and videographic activities of groups struggling against AIDS. And as with any exhibition, AIDS Timeline had also necessitated prior research, the procurement and collection of documents and artifacts – posters, magazines, photographs, stickers, trinkets – including those arising from the collectives that were part of the endeavor (ACT UP, Gran Fury, GANG, etc.). AIDS Timeline thus devised a stock of quotations – verbal, visual, musical, emotional – that ‘replayed’ and rerouted the historical form of conceptual art exhibitions. AIDS unsettled the relationship between ‘doctor’ and ‘patient’. Indeed the Denver Principles in 1983 were initiated with the declaration: ‘We condemn attempts to label us as ‘victims,’ a term which implies defeat, and we are only occasionally ‘patients,’ a term which implies passivity, helplessness, and dependence upon the care of others. We are ‘People With AIDS’. Similarly, Group Material unsettled the relationship between the institution and its memory. From early on, they explicitly referred to Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, and to André Malraux’s Imaginary Museum, in the spirit of countering conventional forms of art collection and distribution. It is significant that this event took place at a museum in 1989, while the fall of the Berlin Wall was proving the inability of grand narratives to organize the world. AIDS Timeline stirred the relationship between ‘facts and figures’, declining both the supposed objectivity of facts and the constrained subjectivity of figures. By endlessly cementing this polarity, these groups were also endlessly questioning it, through forms of collective representation and the production of public space, namely the kind of history that is written by exhibitions.

TRANSLATION OF THE IMAGE CAPTIONS

All scanned pages are excerpted from Ce que le sida m’a fait, published by JRP Ringier et La maison rouge in 2017.

Images p.34–35 Hersterical Festival, W.O.W. Café flyer, 1997. The Wild World of Lydia Lunch, Pyramid Club flyer, 1980s.Image p.40 Flyers for the Times Square Show, 1980.Images p.41–42 ABOVE: the ‘Fashion Lounge’ and its bundles of clothes, notably by Sophie VDT and Mary Lemley, first floor;


1 This text was adapted from L’Argent dans le discours des artistes américains, 1980-1981, doctoral thesis supervised by Gilbert Lascault, Université Paris-X, Paris, 1983. The new title is borrowed – and was originally translated into French as Exposer, montrer, démontrer, informer, offrir – from an eponymous exhibition and catalogue (edited by Matthias Michalka) at MUMOK, Vienna, in 2015, addressing art practices from around 1990. 2 Kathy Acker (1978) Blood and Guts in High School (London: Penguin Classics, 2017).3 Concerning the gentrification of the East Village, see Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan, ‘The Fine Art of Gentrification,’ October 31 (1984): 91-111. 4 Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2012), 76. 5 Lewis Munford, The Culture of Cities [1937] (New York: Harvest Books, 1970), 4.6 Published in 1988 by Twelvetrees Press; republished in 2014 by Steidl.7 See Janet L. Abu-Lughod, ed., From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New York’s Lower East Side (Cambridge: Wiley- Blackwell, 1995) and John Brigham and Diana R. Gordon, ‘Law in Politics: Struggles over Property and Public Space on New York City’s Lower East Side,’ Law & Social Inquiry 21:2 (1996): 265-83.8 The summer of 1988 was particularly violent. See Clayton Patterson, ed., Resistance: A Radical Political and Social History of the Lower East Side (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006). 9 See Lionel Rogosin’s beautiful film On the Bowery (1957).10 In English in the original text.11 Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1986), 380.12 See Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. (London and New York: Verso, 2015)13 Peggy Phelan, ‘Spatial Envy: Yvonne Rainer’s The Man Who Envied Women,’ in Unmarked. The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 80.14 Rashidah Ismaili-Abubakr, ‘Slightly Auto-biographical: The 1960s on the Lower East Side,’ African American Review 27:4 (1993): 585-92.15 Miguel Piñero, ‘A Lower East Side Poem,’ in Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (Oxford: The Oxford University Press, 2002), 239.41.

BELOW: the ‘portrait gallery’ with Duncan Hannah, Gregory Lehmen, Jane Dickson, Walter Robinson, first floor. ABOVE: John Stephens, sitting in front of the works of Andrea Callard, Aline Mayer, Mitch Corber, John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, lobby; BELOW: ticket office and door leading to the ‘Gift Shop’ with works by John Ahearn, Rigoberto Torres, Andrea Callard, SAMO aka Jean-Michel Basquiat, Scott Miller and L. Abrams, lobby. All images: Andrea Callard, photographs of the Times Square Show, New York, 1980.Image p.44 ABOVE: Keith Haring, invitation flyer to his exhibition New Drawings, ‘Des Refusés’, Westbeth Painters Space, New York, 1981; BELOW: Jack Smith, business card, 1981.Image p.47 ABOVE: Colab, ‘Real Estate Show’, 1980, article published in Cover Magazine, p.12; BELOW: Flyer for the Anti-gentrification festival, and Loisaida War Party musical comedy, interpreted by the Seddition ensemble, c. 1983, New York. Image p.48 ABOVE: Housing Works and Nicholas Blechman, Fight AIDS not IRAQ, 2003, Visual AIDS compliment slip; BELOW: Group Material, Project AIDS & Insurance, 1990, poster campaign, Hartford, Connecticut.Image p.49 Group Material, AIDS Timeline (Magazine Version), 1990, series of double pages reproduced in eleven art magazines in their December 1990 issues, in collaboration with Visual AIDS. Here: the year ‘1985-1986’ published in Artforum 4 (1990).Image p.50 Group Material, AIDS Timeline (Magazine Version), 1990, series of double pages reproduced in eleven art magazines in their December 1990 issues, in collabora-


16 The thousands of objects and ephemera accumulated by Martin Wong were the subject of the exhibition I M U U R 2, organized in 2013 at the New York Guggenheim by the artist Danh Vo. The eponymous publication (Berlin: Galerie Daniel Buchholz, 2013) included texts by Julie Ault, Heinz Peter Knes, Danh Vo, and Martin Wong.17 Juan A. Suárez, ‘The Puerto Rican Lower East Side and the Queer Underground,’ Grey Room 32 (2008): 6-37.18 See Alan Moore and Jim Cornwell, ‘Local History: The Art of Battle for Bohemia,’ in Alternative Art New York. 1965-1985, ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2002).19 See François Peraldi, ed., ‘Polysexuality,’ Semiotext(e) (1981).20 Sylvère Lotringer, ed., ‘Schizo-Culture,’ Semiotext(e) 2 (1978) This issue came out three years after an ‘event’ at Columbia, in which Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Jean-François Lyotard shared the stage with William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Richard Foreman, John Giorno, and John Cage.21 Peraldi, Polysexuality.22 Sarah Schulman, ‘When We Were Very Young: A Walking Tour through Radical Jewish Women’s History on the Lower East Side 1879-1919,’ in My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years (New York: Routledge, 1994), 136.23 Jennifer Doyle, Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 128.24 Ibidem.25 Eileen Myles, ‘Hot Night,’ in Not Me (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991).26 This was my first text, which I had written for Libération but never sent to the editors. Thus I recycled it into my doctoral thesis, borrowing one of the artworks, a gouache on photocopy by Robert Goldman (Money Talks, 1980), to reproduce it on my cover. The pages that follow are an almost faithful transcript of this first text.27 See Samuel Anderson, ‘Inherent Vice: Contagion and The Archive in The Times Square Show,’ accessed http://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/e-misferica-61/s-anderson/.28 See Lucy Lippard, ‘Sex and Death and Shock and Schlock: A Long Review of The Times Square Show by Anne Ominous,’ in Postmodern Perspectives: Issues in Contemporary Art, ed. Howard Risatti (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1990), 77-86.29 Names are given on an indicative basis. For more details, see the plans drawn by John Ahearn and Tom Otterness: Times Square Show Floor Plans, 1980. Accessible at http://www.timessquareshowrevisited.com/. 30 See Anderson, ‘Inherent Vice’.31 Many of them come from Bronx’s Fashion Moda, managed by Joe Lewis and Stefan Eins, both also members of Colab (Collaborative Projects).32 Illona Granet : Rape, Ravage and Roll Utopia, Or Else ; Gary Indiana : Psychic Plague, Michael Smith…33 Films by Scott and Beth B, James Nares, Betsy Suller, Michael Oblowitz, Stuart Sherman, Dara Birnbaum, etc.34 Jack Smith in Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith, ed. J. Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell (New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), 149.35 Quotes from the Village Voice (1980) by the artist Nayland Blake and the director and playwright Richard Foreman are from Anderson, ‘Inherent Vice’.36 Marc Siegel, one of Jack Smith’s most fervent exegetes, mentions Exotic Landlordism (1964-9), Song for Rent (1969), Boiled Lobster of Lucky Landlady Lagoon (1969-72), Spiritual Oasis of Lucky Landlord Paradise (1969-70), and Irrational Landlordism of Bagdad (1977). 37 Among Colab’s projects that received funding (other than the artists’ own contributions) were the ABC No Rio space, the Real Estate Show and Times Square Show (1980), the New Cinema, the cable shows Potato Wolf, All Color News and Red Curtain, the publications NightShift Theater, X Motion Picture Magazine, Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine, the gallery Fashion Moda, and the A. Moore Store.38 Coleen Fitzgibbon’s account, http://www.timessquareshowrevisited.com/.39 To which Becky Howland, Alan Moore, Peter Mönning, Edit De Ak, Anne Messner, and Peter Fend belonged.40 Lehmann Weichselbaum, ‘The Real Estate Show,’ The East Village Eye (February 1980): 8-9.41 Bethany Haye, ‘The Real Estate Show,’ The East Village Eye (February 1980).42 Unsigned announcement, Cover Magazine (Spring/Summer 1980).43 Miwon Kwon, ‘One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,’ October 80 (Spring 1997): 85-110. 44 See also Craig Owens, who compares the East Village to a ‘junior’ model for the cultural industry. Owens, ‘The Problem with Puerilism,’ Art in America 72 (Summer 1984): 163.45 Christy Rupp, interviewed during my doctoral research. In 1979, Beni Matias and Marci Reaven documented the issues of ‘our’ housing and ‘our’ Puerto Rican community in The Heart of Loisaida.46 For a full panorama of these artistic genealogies, see Ault’s indispensable Alternative Art New York (full reference above).47 A movement in which critic Lucy Lippard and artists Kosuth, Nancy Spero and Leon Golub campaigned.48 They were Hannah Alderfer, George Ault, Julie Ault, Patrick Brennan, Liliana Dones, Anne Drillick, Yolanda Hawkins, Beth Jaker, Mundy McLaughlin, Marybeth Nelson, Marek Pakulski, Tim Rollins, Peter Szykpula, Michale Udvardy. In 1980, departures were recorded: Pakulski, followed by Drillick, Alderfer, Jaker, Nelson and other members of Group Material, reduced to three members by 1981! Doug Ashford joined the collective in 1982, followed by Felix Gonzalez-Torres; and Tim Rollins left it in 1987 to focus on his pedagogical project KOS, Kids of Survival, as he felt the presence of Gonzalez-Torres would secure the collective’s continuity. Karen Ramspacher, anti-AIDS activist and assistant curator at Dia, joined the group in 1989. See Ault, ed. Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material (London: Four Corners, 2010).49 See Julie Ault, http://www.as-ap.org/oralhistories/interviews/interview-julie-ault-founding-member-group-material.50 Group Material, Democracy: A Project by Group Material (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1990), 2.51 According to Doug Ashford. See Jonathan Griffin, ‘Arroz con Mango (What a Mess): Group Material,’ Mousse Magazine 23 (2010).52 DA ZI BAO, Union Square, New York, 1982; Subculture, New York subway, 1983; Inserts in the New York Times, 1988; MASS, kit project ready to be exhibited, 1985-86; Shopping Bags, Hamburg, 1989.53 See Democracy: A Project of Group Material, op.cit.


Elisabeth Lebovici, an art historian and critic based in Paris, was a journalist for the newspaper Libération (her blog: http://le-beau-vice.blogspot.com/). Her publications include (with Catherine Gonnard) Femmes/artistes, Artistes/femmes, Paris de 1880 à nos jours (Paris : Hazan, 2007) and Ce que le sida m’a fait. Art et Activisme à la fin du 20è siècle (Zurich : JRP Ringier, « lectures Maison Rouge » 2017), which received the Pierre Daix award (2017). She cocurates (with Patricia Falguières and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez) the weekly seminar at the EHESS (Paris) «Something You Should Know: Artists and Producers »: http://sysk-ehess.tumblr.com/.

Naomi Vogt (translation) is assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history at the University of Warwick. Her current book manuscript examines the emergence of new rituals in relation to moving-image work since the millennium. Her writing has been published and is forthcoming in Third Text, Cineaste, Art Journal, JAR, TDR: The Drama Review, and edited volumes. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford in 2018 and has been a research fellow at CUNY, UCL, and Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte. She is a founding editor of OAR.

54 See Lebovici, Ce que le sida m’a fait – Art et activisme à la fin du XXe siècle (Paris: JRP, 2017), chapter 14. 55 The Village Voice, 10 January 1989. On January 17th in the same newspaper, the critic Kim Levin reckoned that Group Material had now stepped into the traditional mould of the ‘curator’. Various texts were written in response to this.56 In English, AIDS Panorama. An Exhibition on Life and Death. In 2013-14, Wagner organised, still at the nGbK, a second version of the exhibition, called LOVE AIDS RIOT SEX. 57 The following descriptions are largely inspired by the text ‘Group Material: MATRIX/Berkeley’, signed by Meyer and published for the occasion. See http://bamlive.s3.amazonaws.com/MATRIX_132_Group_Material.pdf, and by Claire Grace’s study of the AIDS Timeline, a contribution to the series ‘The artist as curator’ conceived by Elena Filipovic for the magazine Mousse. Claire Grace, ‘Group Material, AIDS Timeline, 1989,’ Mousse Magazine 45 (2014). 58 Meyer, ‘Group Material’, ibid.59 Grace, ‘Group Material, 10. 60 Hubert Damisch, interviewed by Annette W.Balkema and Henk Lager, ‘Genealogy of the Grid,’ Series of Philosophie of Art and Art Theory 13 (1998) : 49-54.61 The magazines were : Afterimage, Art&Auction, Art in America, Art New England, Artforum, Arts, Contemporanea, High Performance, October, Parkett, and Shift.

OAR Issue 4 / MAY 2021 Re:Site (after R.M.), 2018 59

Re:Site (after R.M.), 2018

Martina Schmuecker

To cite this contribution:Schmuecker, Martina. ‘Re:Site (after R.M.), 2018.’ OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform Issue 4 (2021): 59–60, http://www.oarplatform.com/resite-r-m-2018/.

Originally commissioned by Beaconsfield 2018 for the exhibition ‘In Whose Eyes?’, this work is an adaptation of the performance piece Site by Robert Morris. In the original, Morris ‘dances’ with an 8 x 4 ft. sheet described as plywood, while Carolee Schneemann sits naked on the bench (in the pose of Manet’s Olympia). A four page long choreography script of this performance describes the movements in detail. I asked the artist Robert Luzar to work with me on this idea, and we subsequently developed the current version of this performance together.

In my adaptation of this script by Morris, the roles of the performers are swapped: here, ‘Robert’ sits on the bench – with clothes on, in no particular pose – while I follow the choreography of the original piece, still naked, as Schneemann had been in the original performance.

The original script of the choreography had to be changed at certain points, to be adjusted to new bodies. Working through the script together with my co-performer, we compared the scripted movements to a ‘working reality’ of handling 8 x 4 boards of plywood. We discussed

Martina Schmuecker, video still from Re:Site (after R.M.), 2018, video, 18’, 2018. Available at: http://www.oarplatform.com/resite-r-m-2018/.

OAR Issue 4 / MAY 2021 Re:Site (after R.M.), 2018 60

the possibility of executing these instructions without causing injury. The instructions make no allowance for safe handling, even for a strong and highly experienced performer. Indeed the gestures – presented as dance movements inspired by a physical work situation – don’t correspond to anything a person in their right mind would do on a construction site/in a workshop. Looking at available footage of the original performance, we concluded that either the original board wasn’t plywood, or Robert Morris is a super humanly strong man. Thinking further about the roots of the movements both in dance and working environments, we decided to use our experience in the latter to change parts of the script to suit our abilities, while still retaining as much of the overall original choreography as possible.

At a point half way in the performance, I drop the board and break from the routine as it was scripted, sit down next to Robert on the bench, and take off my working gloves. Robert takes the gloves, puts them on and gets up to do the next part of the routine for about 2 minutes. He then stands still. I get up, he hands over the gloves, and I do the rest of the routine, ending with him hidden behind the boards, as in the beginning. The performance is 15 minutes long in total. For me, the interaction – the break and swap of positions in the performance – is crucial to the work. Apart from the art historical references which this work makes to minimalism, painting, and dance performance (including the break and swap of active and passive role in it), in doing and showing it I want to know what my version does to address power relations. I also want to know what it does in terms of dealing with specifically work-related movements and their relation to different bodies. To simply swap the roles without the interaction between the performers would turn the work into something less interesting and questioning for me. It would also only retrace the power relations which are already questionable in the original, without disrupting them.

This led me to question the supposedly work-related choreography, whose roots are described as a situation of physical labor. My reactions to this are twofold. First, in a real-life work situation, physical labor with this kind of material means different things for men and women. We handle material differently because the physical makeup of our bodies is different – women’s gravity centers are lower, and all of us regardless should lift ‘with our legs’ as opposed to our arms. But these fields of labor are so male-dominated that potential changes to the language of instruction are never raised. Yet in this case my co-performer and I were both in the same situation, we needed to do the same work. Secondly, the performance required of us to deal at once with the reality of the instructions (written for the male body of Robert Morris in the 1960s) and with our own reality at the time of the re-enactment: a physical reality grating against that of its precedent. In a way, we had to learn how to ‘collaborate’ with a pre-existing performance. Our own performance based on a re-enactment thus required working together not only as a duo, and not only with a script, but also with individuals and bodies from the past.

Martina Schmuecker is an artist and teacher of fine art in UK Universities. She further works as a freelance art technician for various institutions in the UK and abroad. Martina trained and worked as a cabinetmaker and woodcarver before studying at the University of the Arts Berlin and the Royal College of Art London. She is currently developing the project The House, an investigation into cooperative living spaces in cities. Her art work shifts between performance and sculpture, using elements of architecture and furniture as props. Her most recent exhibi-tions include Basement, an exhibition/residency at Palfrey Space, London, 2019, and In Whose Eyes? at Beaconsfield Gallery, London, 2018. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/martinaschmuecker/

OAR Issue 4 / MAY 2021 The Art of Resource Development: Here to Support in the Institution of Art. 61

The Art of Resource Development: Here to Support in the Institution of Art.

E. C. Feiss

To cite this contribution: Feiss, E.C. ‘The Art of Resource Development: Here to Support in the Institution of Art.’ OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform Issue 4 (2021): 61–73, http://www.oarplatform.com/art-resource- development-support-institution-art/.

The following essay attends to the appearance of We Are Here (WAH), a self-organized group of undocumented people based in the Netherlands, within the Dutch art system. Since 2013, WAH members have been hosted by major art institutions, artist residencies and art schools, presenting alongside contemporary artists without significant differentiation, almost as if the organization was itself an artistic one.1 Rather, WAH is a direct-action organization composed of undocumented refugees stuck in the Netherlands, who began organizing under the name in 2012. Since, the group has held several dozen public demonstrations, occupied and inhabited more than fifty buildings as part of a campaign to secure shelter, and become a visible organization in the Dutch media, which often misrepresents the role of Holland’s imperial legacy in the contemporary migration crisis from formerly colonized regions of the global south. The group’s agitation has secured an estimated one hundred and six residence permits, its members a roving group of those still waiting for Dutch papers or to begin an asylum process elsewhere.2

The example of WAH’s seamless and unaccompanied appearance within the Dutch art system, when its members are unrecognized by the state, provides a telling contrast to the abundance of contemporary art that works with undocumented people. Recent examples include the Swiss artist Christoph Büchel’s creation of a functional shelter and social space for refugees within the gallery space at SMAK, Ghent in 2017. The artist also collaborated with ‘real refugees’ as Metropolis M reports, to create a replica of the exhibited Congolese village and human zoo shown in Belgium ‘world expos’ during the 19th and mid 20th centuries, one of which was staged at the site of SMAK. While the artist certainly implicates the museum in a long history of colonial dispossession, the conditions of the collaboration – both to offer shelter and to author ‘with real refugees’ – remains uneasy.3 Another is the rationale of Manifesta 12 in 2018, the ‘nomadic biennale,’ which chose Palermo as the site for the 2018 exhibition because of the city’s widely reported rise in undocumented population from the Mediterranean basin.4 We could go so far as to say that collaborations between artists and groups of undocumented people constitutes a standard formal practice of art in the current period, spurred by (and dated to) the same processes of economic globalization that have dictated the global landscape of contemporary art in the era of artistic nomadism, ‘biennialization,’ and chain museums and art fairs.5

Unlike the contemporaneous and common circumstance of an art work co-constituted with a group of undocumented people, WAH appeared without an apparent artist collaborator. How has WAH appeared on the podiums and in the white boxes of Dutch art institutions,


managing at times to benefit from ever receding cultural funding, when its members have virtually no rights in the EU? Without a brokering European artist in sight, WAH’s appearance in art seems to occur directly between the direct-action group and art institutions themselves, the implausibility of this relatively frequent phenomenon unremarked upon in the space of its occurrence. Rather than the goodwill of leaders within the Dutch art world, this illusion of direct partnership has been produced by Here to Support, an organization founded by two white Dutch women, former dancer Savannah Koolen, and artist Elke Uitentuis in 2013. Here to Support began as the ‘We Are Here Cooperative,’ a satellite organization of We Are Here run by Koolen and Uitentuis. It is under this name that the majority of the art events were produced. The organization was retitled ‘Here to Support’ as part of expanding its operations beyond the art field. I have chosen to use the name Here to Support for clarity, and as this is the name of the existing organization.6 The sole purpose of Here to Support’s engagements with cultural institutions was to funnel art’s resources toward WAH; Here to Support itself does not author works of art with or about WAH.

Rather than a winning example of artistic solidarity, I seek to address Here to Support’s refusal to collaboratively author with WAH as an attempt to create the conditions for undocumented people to represent themselves within the institution of art.7 This refusal, on the one hand, identifies a salient limit of contemporary collaborative artistic practice amidst the ongoing crisis of statelessness fueled by economic globalization, or in other words, the free movement of capital but not of people. On the other hand, as I argue, this practice merges with the governance structures of contemporary NGOs. Here to Support seeks to exploit the particular capabilities of art to aid the causes of undocumented groups: such as the ability, for example, to pay the group in the absence of their legal right to work. Büchel’s creation of a shelter is a similar gesture of an artist utilizing the resources of an art institution to aid the causes of undocumented groups; a practice termed ‘infrastructural critique.’ Here to Support however sought to employ the art institution while circumventing the representa-tional problems posed by collaborative authorship between structurally unequal participants. I consider this strategy as an attempted amelioration of contemporary art’s standard part-nerships with undocumented people, and as presenting new and critically informative political problems with regard to working across hierarchies of state recognition within Western institutions.

I argue that Here to Support’s silent choreography began its life as an art practice, rather than the machinations of the NGO-like entity it has become. This practice developed as a response to the problem of collaborative authorship in situations of material inequity, the ubiquitous equator between documented artist and undocumented participant. To historically ground the dispossessive structures of ‘economic globalization’ and give a basis to this insurmountable authorship equator, I depart from what the philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva names as the entwined ‘total violence’ and ‘total value’ extraction of colonization and enslavement of Africans that has shaped the global distribution of power, resources and life chances.8 Insisting on Here to Support’s activities as art offers a productive counter example to the employment of a re-radicalized understanding of artistic autonomy by recent artists’ social practices that seek to assist the undocumented, and a renewed critical appraisal of claims for art as a privileged site for working for social justice. Works which espouse a critical autonomy (the claiming of art’s resources by an artist – space, money, time or other material or immaterial goods – which are then offered to undocumented persons or groups) have been termed ‘infrastructural critique’ and situated as a historical-critical response to


institutional critique, most thoroughly by the theorist Marina Vishmidt.9 Here to Support’s sustained negation of authorship both participates in and seeks to remedy this form of contemporary practice. I expressly depart from Vishmidt’s article on infrastructural critique also because she identifies WAH’s use of the art institution as an example of the infrastructural gesture, yet it is not the focus of her article to delve into the political parameters of the group’s entrance into the ‘institution of art.’10 Vishmidt’s noting of WAH is in a sense paradigmatic of the group’s reception in art, i.e. that being as the art institutional landscape is saturated with activist entities, their arrival can be cited without question of the conditions of their appearance. Instead, we will see how the claims of artistic autonomy as or in the service of political autonomy resident in renowned works by the artists Tania Bruguera and Ahmet Öğüt are reinterpreted by Here to Support’s refusal of authorship, the normatively required basis of artistic autonomy. In its suppression or management (not eradication) of the standard authorship problem, Here to Support’s activities bring to the foreground the bind of reparation at the heart of all such practices, one located in the politics of support, aid and the question of material solidarity between constituencies ultimately located on either side of the border between empire and periphery. Rather than an important example, Here to Support makes clear the impossibility – yet ongoing imperative – of what we might call the attempt at reparational authorship, or collaborative production in the context of state violence and exclusion.

To briefly address the context of Here to Support’s formation: We Are Here was inaugurated on September 4th 2012, when a loosely organized tent camp of refugees in Amsterdam first self-identified to the press, and began to organize for shelter with assistance from local squatting initiatives. The organization of WAH coincided (or all three were mutually stimulating) with two other politicized occupations of urban space in Amsterdam that year: the Occupy wall street camp and the seizure of empty property by squatters groups as demonstration against the criminalization of squatting legislated that same year. Much of the press focused on the initial demonstrations around the first evictions, but protests continued in the form of occupying vacant buildings.11 These squatters groups provided assistance by helping to open and secure vacant buildings, such as WAH’s first major occupation of a church in the center of the city. In more recent years, these groups have helped to broker deals with the city for WAH’s legal occupation of vacant buildings.12 The occupation of vacant property continues to be WAH’s main form of civil disobedience as well as the condition of their livelihood. It is within this larger milieu of support that Here to Support was formed in 2013. It is important to note that Here to Support is not in WAH, as membership is only through an undocumented status. Decisions about the internal organization of the group, its goals and protest strategies are devised within WAH itself. This separation sets Here to Support’s practice resolutely apart from parallel works of infrastructural critique, such as Tania Bruguera’s celebrated Immigrant Movement International (2011-ongoing), an ‘artist-initiated socio-political movement’ which I’ll shortly discuss in more detail.13 Rather than formed by the institution of art, WAH is an autonomous group (by which I mean a collective which is self-organized) who is positioned to benefit from what art can offer. This positioning – the management involved in its execution – is what constitutes Here to Support’s practice.

Here to Support was initially founded as an ‘action center’ which began to carefully construct these intersections between WAH and the Dutch art system. This work takes various forms, but generally operates in the following way: an art institution (school, museum, art center) invites one of the women who head Here to Support to participate in an event. Or, as artists,


they apply for residencies, funding or exhibition opportunities within the still functional Dutch cultural sector. Having secured a particular engagement, they instead provide it to WAH members to make themselves visible as a political organization; one which has a developed critique of the Netherlands, but also of nationhood more generally.14 WAH’s status as a political organization is what is most easily denied in their representation in the Dutch media, where their portrayal runs the gamut from the centrist screed of ‘unfortunates’ to the far right refrain of thieves and dependents. Much far right focus has centered around WAH’s ‘criminality’ in alignment with squatters, with an increasing number of ‘law and order’ trolls leaving hateful comments on the groups’ Facebook page.15 The space of art, by contrast, has offered WAH the conditions needed to extrapolate the group’s motivating critique of European exclusion as well as their demands. Here to Support’s practice has resulted in WAH members appearing in dozens of art and cultural institutions in the Netherlands, including the Jan van Eyck Academie, Frascati Theater, Nuit Blanche in Brussels and BAK and CASCO in Utrecht, thus mediating the groups’ presence on the national stage.16

I return to a comparison with Bruguera’s ‘artist-initiated socio-political movement’ to further isolate the character of Here to Support’s practice. While its address is ‘global rights’ for the undocumented, Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International (IMI, 2011-ongoing) is made possible by a U.S. network of art institutions and their patronage systems.17 Bruguera conceives of this relation as ‘black mailing’ the institution, where the money she extracts as an artist is utilized for the construction of a direct-action campaign and a community space in Corona, Queens.18 For Bruguera, ‘blackmailing’ is an artistic exercise, and the term names her posturing in relation to the project of infrastructural critique.19 Made clear in IMI, blackmailing the institution is part of the total work, an art practice in and of itself, which offers immediate access to funds and resources, but also inscribes the artist as the dependent center – materially, conceptually, and symbolically – of what is described as a ‘long-term project intended to create a lasting, global movement.’20 Bruguera precisely understands her authorship as the dependent center, required for the social center in Queens to remain open. Towards this end, she frames the project as a work of durational performance, which imports the focus on a radical extension of temporal structure from 1970s works of performance, such as by artists like Marina Abramović or Tehching Hsieh, onto a multi sited social practice art work.21 This move transforms the 1970s idea of ‘radical duration’ in performance from a terminus in formal experimentation by incorporating it into IMI, an art work which has the express goal of legally measurable social change. In effect, Bruguera’s employment of durational performance time within IMI manages to link a central problem in performance art, the representation of durational performance, to a critical problematic in critical race studies, namely the measurement of long term, incremental social change.22 In the same gesture, Bruguera’s emphasis on duration has also ensured continued institutional sustenance for IMI, whose storefront is still open today eight years on. Functionally successful, the project cannot disentangle itself from Bruguera, despite its rhetorical desire to do so: IMI’s website for example, while listing Bruguera as the initiator, uses a collective first person, ‘we’ and ‘our,’ to describe the history of the project’s first year. While Bruguera was undoubtedly working in concert with a range of constituents, the presentation of IMI as a collective movement is easily undone. One immediate example is the project’s press section, which contains a plentitude of articles inevitably centering the artist. While it is possible IMI could develop into a sustainable movement, it would undoubtedly continue to bear the artist’s name. I point to this desire and failure to construct a collectively organized social movement not to fault the artist, but to identify the essential problem with


artistic authorship in an avowed scenario of infrastructural critique. The site of artistic authorship – the hierarchy of voice and patronage that it governs – is indelibly caught up with the same structures of power that distribute the borders of political community. The use of artistic authorship’s particular autonomy against the structures making it possible is the classic work of institutional critique; indeed the imbrication of the art institution with state violence its hallowed subject.23 It is this form of authorship as a site of paradoxical power – one able to critique its conditions of being – that Bruguera and Here to Support both harness but attempt to displace, seeking to further release their respective political projects from the binds of artistic hierarchy. Where Bruguera leans in towards her inevitable position, hoping singular authorship will develop into collective movement, Here to Support inserts an existing social movement into the temporary frameworks of autonomy art enables, utilizing art’s financial and institutional structures in the absence of an identifiable author. Both projects recognize themselves as durational, requiring the documented artist (visible or invisible) for sustained manipulation of the institution. I draw together this comparison not to locate critical winners and losers, or condemn one as part of a valorization project of the other (perhaps the most popular method of analyzing Left oriented art) but to call attention to a shared infrastructural strategy with a crucial distinction: one attempts to negate the authorship function altogether, disappearing from the scene.

Here to Support’s employment of the institution of art is not a marked negation (‘black mail’) but rather a very plain instrumentalization, visible if one chooses to look at the seams and contours of WAH’s movement in the art system. For example, WAH has appeared as part of various art initiatives at BAK in Utrecht, so much so that the institution has a bio page on its website for the group. Here to Support does appear in this bio, but is positioned almost as an art project the undocumented group had formed itself, rather than the brokering organization between BAK and WAH.24 Unlike the paradox of artistic negation characteristic of the avant garde – that it must be announced and therefore exists in spite of itself – Here to Support recedes into the sidelines, under cover of reproductive work. By this I mean that they often appear as women doing administrative and sometimes domestic work for WAH, although they have often designed and executed the art event they literally clean up after. Another way to understand this artistic positioning would be through Hito Steyerl’s phrase for ‘institutional critique’s third wave, or the artist’s integration into precarity.’25 After extrapolating that the act of critique itself has been dismantled by ‘neoliberal institutional criticism,’ by which she means literally the defunding of public institutions in neoliberal governance, she furthers: ‘this produces an ambivalent subject which develops multiple strategies for dealing with its dislocation.’26 Here to Support is an institutionalization of such strategies, a formation materialized through the work of two seasoned members of the artistic precariat, its founders well versed in ‘developing multiple strategies for dealing with their dislocation.’ Steyerl continues: ‘(this subject) is on the one side being adapted to the needs of ever more precarious living conditions. On the other, there seems to have hardly ever been more need for organizing the new struggles and desires that this constituency might embrace.’27 Here to Support represents an attempt to connect artistic precarity, and the strategies this subject has developed to the aligned but more steeply impacted precarious lives of the undocumented. Their practice thus temporarily empties art from its backing, harnessing WAH to the social and financial valuation that the institution of art can still offer. This position manifests in a flickering visibility; at times they must claim what they are doing as art in order to get it done, at other moments they successfully remain absent from the frame. Even as budget cuts continue to dismantle public institutions and funding for the arts in the Netherlands, social practice, for


its ability to rhetorically plug the gaps left by a receding welfare state is the form of art that can be justified within austerity. WAH is inserted where an artists’ social practice would normatively be: how then to name Here to Support’s productions? The question has bearing in excess of the staid ‘is it art?’ for it equally concerns the parameters of resource strategy for an urgent social movement, and the conditions of visibility around the practice of solidarity as it is increasingly attempted in, as, or instead of, art.

This next section reviews recent theories of artistic autonomy that argue for its contemporary political capabilities, against decades of post 60s art and theory that shunned the term. Here to Support and the institutional landscape it enters into has been significantly informed by this body of critical literature and its review allows us to discern their work as what the art theorist Sven Lütticken terms an ‘aesthetic practice.’ Subsequently, I argue that their employment of performative negation, the basis of their aesthetic practice, resident in their present disappearance or back stage management, while responding to an impasse of collaborative authorship also reproduces a set of normative relations to insidious detriment. One is particular to the invisibility of gendered labor and one to the NGO as contemporary pillar of what Ferreira da Silva calls ‘colonial architecture,’ or the set of expropriating apparatus stemming from African slavery and the seizure of Indigenous land.28 In the latter sense, I will show Here to Support’s evolution from aesthetic practice to NGO.

Alongside renewed artistic investment in autonomy came accompanying theories which test the possible relationship between political and artistic autonomy.29 Tracing the notion of autonomy from 18th century aesthetic theory to contemporary art, art theorist Sven Lütticken finds that while artistic and political autonomy remain resolutely distinct, never able to fully overlap, a ‘productive back and forth’ can exist, ‘even within single practices.’30 The crux of this argument lies in a separation of the aesthetic from art and its institutions, with the aesthetic being ‘that which is a constant renegotiation of autonomy and heteronomy.’31 Lütticken draws on Rancière’s idea of the ‘aesthetic regime’ of art, which negotiates the boundary between art (and its institutions) and life.32 For Rancière, the aesthetic regime keeps art alive. Art without the aesthetic regime is art pushed to either ‘entropic’ extreme of the art/life dialectic – as entirely self-referential, absent any critical purchase or entirely absorbed into life – both of which entail the end of art as such. Lütticken extracts the movement of the ‘aesthetic regime’ as its own destabilizing entity, reformulating it as a possible ‘aesthetic practice.’ Aesthetic practice re-politicizes artistic autonomy as an ‘act rather than a fact,’ a gesture which tests the border of arts’ separation from the world. Temporally bounded, aesthetic practice is a conception of autonomy as unstable and as always in dialogue with heteronomy, rather than the fixed fact of artistic autonomy (the enduring autonomy of modernist painting or sculpture) claimed by mid-century art criticism. Rather than either a political or artistic certainty, Lütticken extrapolates this newfound autonomy as a ‘persistent problem, and artistic practice becomes properly aesthetic practice when problematizing the limits of art and of artistic autonomy.’33 Aesthetic practice is then that which takes place in confrontation with art and artistic autonomy, but which itself is not exactly, or always a work of art. Such a concept helpfully describes the work of Here to Support and could also apply to any number of operations within the field: Lütticken names the activist group Gulf Labor, which organized against the labor practices of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, and we could add the boycotts of biennales that have persisted since Occupy, at Sydney (2014) Sao Paulo (2015) and most recently, the Whitney (2019). Further, this model allows the connection of art adjacent political activities with the aesthetics of protest, such as recent ceremonies by Extinction Rebellion in London.34


While it is difficult to physically see, Here to Support’s persistent management of their authorship is an instantiation of aesthetic practice in its ongoing attempt to allow WAH to appear within political community via the platforms of art. What I mean by this is that the undocumented are a structurally invisible population, lacking the rights of citizenship that would entail representation (the ability to speak and be heard) in the political community of the EU.35 As works of infrastructural critique claim to provide their autonomy to the cause of statelessness, Here to Support challenges the possibility of artistically nominated (and therefore inherently temporary) autonomy through placing the speaking subjects of a hard won political autonomy (aka subjects of a self-organized political movement) in the institution of art. ‘Autonomy’ here remains endlessly difficult, as WAH are of course subject to the force of the Dutch immigration service; as a group they are the inverse of the sovereign’s ultimate power. Here to Support’s productions make visible however how the group’s processes, strategies and internal legislation – perhaps akin to the ‘self-legislating’ quality of artistic autonomy – have secured a degree of livability in the Netherlands, a basis which makes possible a fragile political autonomy, despite overwhelming exclusion. One salient example is the system of food procurement, transportation and preparation WAH developed to feed its’ constituents in multiple squatted residencies, a process made visible by Here to Support in a cook book project that described it and its common recipes. Lütticken stresses that autonomy is ‘an exceptional occurrence in the realm of established, factual relations – including art and its institutions’ as part of designating the temporally bounded ‘act’ of aesthetic practice. Here to Support posit instead a sustained act of solidarity in support of WAH, redefining the meaning of duration in temporally grounded conceptions of autonomy, such as we have seen in Lütticken and Bruguera. Further, Here to Support’s aesthetic practice identifies the limits of re-politicized conceptions of artistic autonomy, pointing out how when the unaffiliated undocumented (the stateless of IMI or Büchel’s project) appear within an ‘art work’ they remain a ‘stateless’ feature of that work, still relegated to the periphery at the side of the author.

Here to Support, by contrast, attempts to answer the question of the relationship between artistic and political autonomy central to contemporary social practice and theory through a practice which lands a political movement in the institution of art, absent art and artist, taking ‘infrastructure’ to its barest of bones. Precisely in its problematization of recent social practice, Here to Support produces an empty infrastructural frame – the artists’ talk, or the studio visit, or the exhibition – which they relinquish to WAH for fulfillment. Lütticken also identifies that ‘while an act’s aesthetic and political qualities may never quite converge, some acts may function in different registers simultaneously, or successively. It may precisely be the passage from one aspect to the other that is of most interest – both politically and aesthetically.’36 Where procurement of a negative frame constitutes Here to Support’s ‘aesthetic practice,’ the events produced within them precisely toggle between the frame of Here to Support’s making, and WAH’s occupation of the institution of art. Another way to look at this might be through WAH’s manifesto, which names their current condition as ‘living in a political and legal vacuum.’37 Here to Support temporarily transposes this vacuum from a legal to an aesthetic loop hole, by reincarnating it within the art institution, effectively procuring an ‘aesthetic’ appearance (allowing WAH temporarily into political community, where they speak without accompaniment) under the guise of art.

In a central discussion of the Gulf Labor Coalition, Lütticken argues that the group ‘put (migrant) laborers, these sub-subjects, on the agenda as stubborn and opaque persons, rather


than as purely abstracted labor power.’38 ‘Aesthetic practice’ here is thus that which makes visible the way that artistic labor – in all its forms as the production, distribution and circulation of art – enables or participates in the separation of such ‘cultural’ labor from the forms of precarious labor produced in economic globalization. Lütticken points to how Gulf Labor identifies artistic labor within a steep hierarchical separation of ‘performance based labor’ in a ‘genuinely aesthetic economy,’ or the way that artistic work is bound up with the ‘performance based labors’ of neoliberal capital, the service based economy of which depends on increased precarity and undocumented labor.39 In other words, the group isolates ‘precarity’ as a disproportionately shared site for cultural workers and migrant workers. The protest withheld artistic labor (artists like Walid Raad’s refused sale to the Guggenheim) in order to halt the exploitative conditions of construction, effectively ‘putting sub-subjects, on the agenda as stubborn and opaque persons’ through a structural equation with artistic work. By contrast, Here to Support seeks to furnish a situation where ‘opaque persons’ speak themselves. In so doing, they obfuscate their own practice, paralleling the invisibility of reproduction in capital at large. While the suppression of their authorship responds to a constitutive problem in adjacent practices, it also disallows the joining up of two forms of alienated labor as is made evident in the case of Gulf Labor’s protest. Without this connection – without being able to identify Here to Support as ‘producers’ in the Benjaminian sense – they deliver an illusion which carries with it its own compromises.

Towards illustrating how Here to Support’s compromise manifests, I turn to a particular engagement alongside the artist Ahmet Öğüt. The above image documents a panel that took place as part of ‘Beyond Allegories,’ an artwork as congress held in Amsterdam’s city hall in 2014. Produced by the artist Jonas Staal, the congress was made in collaboration with local politicians in Amsterdam and was composed of talks dedicated to pressing social problems. Titled ‘Representation Beyond Citizenship’ the panel pictured proposed self-initiated educational initiatives as a method of civic enfranchisement in the absence of citizenship.

Carolien Gehrels, Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal, Beyond Allegories: Resolution No. III ‘Political Representation Beyond Citizenship’ presented by Yoonis Osman Nuur (We Are Here)

and artist and initiator of Silent University Ahmet Öğüt, 2014, Amsterdam, Netherlands, courtesy Jonas Staal, photo by Roos van Trommelen.


On the left is Yoonis Osman Nuur, a Somalian refugee and WAH member, who spoke as a representative of the We Are Here Academy.40 WAH and Here to Support instigated the free school as the educational arm of the group’s direct-action activities. The We are Here Academy prepared WAH members for state citizenship tests and interviews, taught the undocumented about Dutch law and available recourse to European human rights law, and recruited local activists and academics to run courses on the history and practice of direct-action campaigns. On the right is the Turkish-Kurdish artist Ahmet Öğüt, who initiated the project The Silent University in 2012. The Silent University (SU) is an art work, dubbed with ‘autonomous knowledge exchange platform’ instigated and launched by Öğüt with the goal that it is ultimately run with undocumented people. The SU takes the form of an academic program, taught by migrants who are ‘unable to use their skills’ – their professional or academic training – because of their illegal status in Europe.41 The SU is an internationally recognized art work. Its first instantiation was at the Tate Modern in London, and it has since been hosted in many cities around Europe, at museums and universities alike. Öğüt has been the recipient of multiple awards, specifically the Visible Award, a significant cash prize for art that connects with ‘emancipatory social change.’42 Aside from the structural locations of these two pedagogical organizations (an art work as school and a school as part of an active direct-action organization) the subjects of the image exist on opposite sides of state recognition. Regardless of political identification (Öğüt identifies as Turkish-Kurdish and is a Turkish national) Nuur is an undocumented refugee unable to freely cross international borders, and Öğüt is a documented artist who frequently does so as part of his labor function. I assert this difference in their positions in relation to the state not to prescribe the actions of either actor or even to suggest a qualitative difference in the two organizations, but rather because the implications in terms of the stakes of their discussed activity – for Nuur, organizing for his life, for Öğüt, as part of a life’s work – was not an aspect of their public conversation. Instead, Nuur became a rights bearing citizen, and Öğüt a more steeply ingrained activist than the requirements of an artistic career feasibly allow.

Rather than argue for or against this elision of structural location, this moment demonstrates how Here to Support’s work creates a continuous illusion of WAH’s inclusion in European political community through the uninterrupted and seemingly unmediated equivalency with Öğüt and his work. This illusion reaped direct material value: on a platform next to the SU, WAH was offered six thousand euro and partnership with GroenLinks, the Green party in the Netherlands.43 Less immediately apparent are the various vectors of value absorbed through WAH’s new found relation to the SU’s status as an art work, which carries financial, critical and institutional value in its considerable success and circulation. What this matrix of value means to WAH’s project is for a longer discussion; I note it here as part of Here to Support’s operation. Rather than ‘transforming the cultural institution from the inside out,’ Here to Support provides – in its unannounced delivery of WAH – a form of legitimacy to art and its institutions that is unwarranted. Where this entire text has sought to describe what kind of relations current art has to undocumented social movements, equivalency – art and political autonomy at the same time – is shown, in theory and practice, to be impossible.

Here to Support’s march toward the total suppression of authorship concluded with the groups’ reification into an NGO like entity, of the social-entrepreneurship type that increasingly allows the integration of corporate processes into the public sector.44 This is evident in Here to Support’s nomination for awards such as, ironically, the European Citizenship Award 2017, which ‘recognizes innovative initiatives and contributions which give real substance to


European values, create ownership of public space, and improve the lives of our communities in terms of democracy, social justice and universal access to rights.’45 A French organization called the ‘European Civic Forum’ administers these awards, described as a ‘transnational network that brings together over one hundred associations and NGOS across twenty seven countries in Europe.’46 Where the imbrication of non-governmental practice and neoliberal globalization has been well documented, the figure of the ‘social entrepreneur’ and the ‘social enterprise,’ both of which make up the majority of the award’s nominees, are perhaps less well known. Marxist feminist theorist Silvia Federici’s work on microfinance provides contextualization, identifying both the structure of entrepreneurship and the language of empowerment as destabilizing agents of subsistence commons in the global south through new forms of development enterprise. Such non-governmental entities ‘transform (poor womens’) daily micro-reproductive/marketing activities into sources of value creation and accumulation for others.’47 Federici’s work from the 1990s has elucidated the ways that microfinance – and other iterations of contemporary ‘aid’ to the global south – structure debtor/creditor relationships which function to consolidate wealth on a global scale. I cite this scholarship to identify that forms of social entrepreneurship signal a function to concentrate wealth in the global north; as such the European Citizenship Award inevitably serves the interests of Europe beyond its stated generation of humanist ‘values’ for the continent, despite its sponsoring of a number of NGOs focused on the undocumented in the EU. Such organizations further obscure the necessity of the category of statelessness for the European economic project. The language of social enterprise – with its ‘innovative’ approach to human rights – illustrates the intimate relations of contemporary social practice, non-governmental organizations, and multinational capital.

While the façade of the social enterprise offers yet another formal device through which Here to Support can recess even further from authorship, its calcification produced the ultimate negation: congealment into a ‘positive institution of social change’ or as philosopher Theodor W. Adorno put it, when politically committed intentions ‘negate art as well as themselves’ by exiting the limited space of art’s separation and integrating fully with capital.48 Namely, the group’s ultimate form is that which its earliest experiments resolutely reject, as micro performances which attempt to resist a tangible relation of aid. The institution it inevitably becomes – surely through attachment to funding streams – should serve as a warning to all such practical artist allies, wherein the suppression of the invisible aesthetic hand returns as arguably something more violent than the art it sought to undo. The example of Here to Support further allows more immediate appreciation of the aesthetic and logical likenesses of recent social practice (Bruguera and Öğüt alike) and the NGO industrial complex, the ever-developing forms of which arguably parallel the expansion of the social genre in the fine arts. Shared funding sources, platforms and aesthetic or linguistic typologies constitute the increasing imbrication of art and development regimes: Renzo Martens’ ‘Institute for Human Activities,’ ‘an arts-based development program in the Democratic Republic of Congo,’ provides another Dutch example. It is worth noting the total fluidity between art and ‘global development’ in Martens’ project, with the artist taking up a fellowship at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs as a ‘World Fellow.’49 An earlier project of Martens’ expressly connected art and development in a ‘critical project’ of arts led gentrification for the Congo, a process meant to generate wealth for plantation workers.50 The apparent lack of critique of global development, of its connection with the colonial expropriation the project purports to indict and remedy, or even a grasp of the basic function of gentrification as not simply a wealth generating but an inherently dispossessive and divisive spatial regime, are easy summaries of Martens’


project. More insidious is its celebration in the fields of both art and global development, consolidating a form of a practice that forecloses their separation. Martens work signals the coming of an unfortunate and perhaps inevitable partnership. Here to Support’s earlier productions, now of a bygone moment, did generate something in the way of immanent critique, as delivered by the ‘opaque’ persons their practice procured and imaged. The following image was taken at a WAH protest, by an associate of Here to Support.

It depicts a WAH activist holding a sign with the famous anti-colonial quote by Thomas Sankara, the Marxist leader of independent Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987. It reads ‘he who feeds you, controls you.’ Plainly, WAH works with Here to Support and all allies within an overall program of strategic visibility, which is clearly on display in this image: the group accepts aid while simultaneously identifying it as a method of control. Where Here to Support may have gone the way of Martens, its demise signaling perhaps a new era of social art in capital, WAH’s critique of aid reverberates through Here to Support’s foregone ‘management system.’

Untitled, undated, copyright Manette Ingenegeren


1 Deanna Dadusc, ‘Squatting and the undocumented migrants’ struggle in the Netherlands,’ in Migration, Squatting and Radical Autonomy, eds. Pierpaolo Mudu and Sutapa Chattopadhyay (London;New York: Routledge, 2016) 275-284.2 We Are Here’s website provides a helpful history of the group. ‘Over Ons / About Us: We Are Here,’ accessed January 14, 2019, http://wijzijnhier.org/who-we-are/. Marieke Borren details the Dutch policy of ‘non-deportment,’ unique among Western border regimes, which is the situation many in We Are Here find themselves. Marieke Borren, ‘The Human Condition of Being Undeportable,’ Open, accessed January 14, 2019, http://www.onlineopen.org/the-human-condition-of-being-un deportable. More recently however the group has begun to face deportation and criminalization. In December 2018, despite extensive protests by We Are Here members and allies, one deportation of a refugee to Sudan occurred, with three other Sudanese refugees imprisoned and facing deportation. ‘The Netherlands Deports Sudanese to Khartoum,’ Radio Dabanga, accessed April 27, 2019, https://www.dabangasudan.org/en/all-news/article/netherlands-deport-sudanese-to-khartoum. In 2019, a We Are Here member faced criminal charges for civil disobedience, the first time such action has been taken against one of the activists. ‘We Are Here Press Release April 1l’ accessed April 27, 2019, https://www.facebook.com/events/556059584916072/.3 Ory Dessau, ‘The Museum as a Shelter for Refugees - Christoph Büchel at SMAK, Ghent,’ Metropolis M, accessed January 15, 2019, https://www.metropolism.com/en/features/33022_christoph_buechel_smak.4 Dorian Batycka, ‘At Manifesta, Artists Address Italy’s Migrant Crisis,” Hyperallergic, accessed January 15, 2019, https://hyperallergic.com/459887/at-manifesta-artists-address-italys-migrant-crisis/. ‘Manifesta 12,’ accessed April 27, 2019, https://manifesta.org/biennials/manifesta-12/.5 In her now canonical study of site specific art and the rise of ‘artistic nomadism,’ Miwon Kwon references the parallel situation of ‘the migrant and the refugee’ in the introduction but does not further theorize the relationship between the two, or how the forms of art she historicizes, site specific art in contemporary biennales dating from the 1990s, often incorporate what she identifies as its ‘other,’ the refugee. Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) 166.6 Uitentuis left the organization in 2016 and Koolen continues as its coordinator. ‘Organization,’ Here to Support, accessed January 15, 2019, http://heretosupport.nl/organization/. For a recent biography of Uitentuis see: ‘Elke Uitentuis’ Instituto Buena Bista, accessed January 15, 2019, https://institutobuenabista.com/2017/elke-uitentuis/.7 By the phrase ‘institution of art’ used throughout this text, I draw on Andrea Fraser’s definition as not only the museum, ‘nor even only the sites of production, distribution, and reception of art, but the entire field of art as a social universe….It also includes the sites of the production of art discourse…and the sites of the production of the producers of art discourse: studio art, art history, and now, curatorial studies programs.’ Andrea Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,’ in Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009) 412. 8 Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World,’ The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 82.9 Marina Vishmidt, ‘Beneath the Atelier, the Desert: Critique, Institutional and Infastructural,’ in Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists: A BAK Critical Reader in Artists’ Practice, eds. Tom Holert and Maria Hlavajova (Utrecht: Valiz/BAK, 2018) 218-235.10 Vishmidt, ‘Beneath the Atelier,’ 222.11 Toby Sterling, ‘Violent Protests after Dutch Outlaw Squatting,’ Washington Post, October 1, 2010. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/01/AR2010100105354.html.12 Dadusc, ‘Squatting and the undocumented migrants’ struggle in the Netherlands,’ 13 ‘About Immigrant Movement International,’ Creative Time, accessed January 15, 2019, https://creativetime.org/projects/immigrant-movement-international/ 14 See image in ‘Squatting and the undocumented migrants struggle in the Netherlands,’ Wij Zijn Hier, accessed January 15, 2019, http://wijzijnhier.org/tijdslijn/squatting-and-the-undocumented-migrants-struggle-in-the-netherlands/.15 Sarah Tilotta, ‘Worse than Wilders? Why Refugees Fear Status Quo in Netherlands,’ CNN, accessed January 15, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/14/europe/netherlands-refugees-wilders-we-are-here/index.html. ‘Succesvolle Vluchteling: Krakers We Are Here Moeten Gewoon Terug,’ Telegraaf, June 5, 2018, accessed January 15, 2019, https://www.telegraaf.nl/nieuws/2125456/succesvolle-vluchteling-krakers-we-are-here-moeten-gewoon-terug.16 A selection of the dates of these appearances: At BAK, Utrecht in November 2013, multiple events at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht between February 2014 and March 2015, at the Frascati Theater, Amsterdam, January 2015, at CASCO, Utrecht multiple dates throughout 2014 and 2015, at the Deutches Theater Berlin in June 2015.17 ‘Partners and Collaborators,’ Immigrant Movement International, accessed January 15, 2019, http://immigrant-movement.us/wordpress/partners-and-collaborators/.18 For a helpful overview of the project: Larne Abse Gogarty, “‘Usefulness’ in Contemporary Art and Politics,” Third Text 31, no. 1 (October, 2017) 117-132.19 Tania Bruguera, Artist talk as part of ‘Common’ event, Trashing Performance series, Toynbee Theater, London, UK, October 29, 2011, accessed April 23, 2019, http://www.thisisperformancematters.co.uk/trashing-performance/home.html.20 ‘Years One, Two and Three,’ Immigrant Movement International, accessed January 15, 2019, http://immigrant-movement.us/wordpress/year-one/.21 For a historical account of endurance performance: Frazer Ward, No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience, (New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2012). For an account of endurance performance in interaction with contemporary forms of labor, see: E. C. Feiss, ‘Endurance Performance: Post-2008,’ Afterall,” accessed April 27, 2019. https://www.afterall.org/online/endurance-performance-post-2008#.XMUVk5NKiqA.22 I locate the problem of representing incremental, legally obtained social change from a debate between Critical Legal and Critical Race scholars around the utility of civil rights in the U.S. context. This context is pertinent to IMI because the project addresses the U.S. legal system. For a summary of this debate: Wendy Brown, ‘Rights and Losses,’ in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995).


23 A canonical example, consistently cited as one of the first works of institutional critique, would be Hans Haacke’s MoMA Poll (1970), a work which indicted MoMA’s board and directorship for connections to the Vietnam war.24 ‘We Are Here’ BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, accessed April 25, 2019, https://www.bakonline.org/person/we-are-here-2/.25 Hito Steyerl, ‘The Institution of Critique,’ Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2009) 491.26 Ibid.27 Ibid., 492.28 Ferreira da Silva, ‘Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,’ 82.29 Peter Osborne, ‘Theorem 4: Autonomy; Can It Be True of Art and Politics at the Same Time?,’ onlineopen.org, May 1, 2012, Sven Lütticken, Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice After Autonomy (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017), Kerstin Stakemeier and Marina Vishmidt. Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art, London Berlin: Mute, 2016. 30 Sven Lütticken, ‘Autonomy as Aesthetic Practice,’ Theory, Culture & Society 31, no. 7–8 (December 1, 2014): 83. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid.33 Ibid.34 Aamna Mohdin and Molly Blackall, ‘Extinction Rebellion Holds Hyde Park Rally to Mark ‘pause’ in Protests,’ The Guardian, April 25, 2019, sec. Environment. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/25/extinction-rebellion-holds-hyde-park-rally-to-mark-pause-in-protests.35 ‘Political community’ is the theorist Hannah Arendt’s well-known formulation. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalita rianism, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966) 296. Many theorists have drawn on Arendt to address the current crisis of the undocumented in the EU, reformulating claims about political visibility and agency in the contemporary moment that apply to WAH’s formation and subsequent appearance in art but that I don’t have space for in this text. One examples include: Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 2004) 118. Jacques Rancière, ‘Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’ The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2 (June 10, 2004): 297–310.36 Ibid., 91. 37 ‘Squatting and the undocumented migrants struggle in the Netherlands,’ Wij Zijn Hier, accessed January 15, 2019, http://wijzijnhier.org/tijdslijn/squatting-and-the-undocumented-migrants-struggle-in-the-netherlands/.38 Lütticken, ‘Autonomy as Aesthetic Practice,’ 92.39 Sassen points out how the rise of the financial services industry in ‘global cities,’ has entailed an increase in undocumented or migrant labor in services that support that industry. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its discontents: essays on the new mobility of people and money, (New York: New Press, 1998)40 ‘We Are Here Academy,’ Here to Support, accessed January 15, 2019, http://heretosupport.nl/we-are-here-academy-3/.41 ‘Home,’ The Silent University, accessed January 15, 2019, http://thesilentuniversity.org/.42 ‘Shortlisted Projects for the 2019 Award,’ Visible Project, accessed January 15, 2019, https://www.visibleproject.org/blog/the-ten-shortlisted-projects/43 E. C. Feiss, ‘On Beyond Allegories,’ Open! Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain, August 19, 2014, accessed January 15, 2019, http://www.onlineopen.org/essays/on-beyond-allegories.44 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015) 49.45 ‘Mission,’ European Civic Forum, accessed January 15, 2019, http://civic-forum.eu/civic-forum/missions46 Ibid. 47 Max Haiven ‘Occupations and The Struggle Over Reproduction: An Interview with Silvia Federici,’ Politics and Culture, March 10, 2014, accessed January 15, 2019, https://politicsandculture.org/2014/03/09/occupations-and-the-struggle-over-reproduction-an-interview-with-silvia-federici/.48 Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment,’ in Aesthetics and Politics (London; New York: Verso, 1980) 192.49 ‘Renzo Martens | Yale Greenberg World Fellows,’ accessed April 28, 2019, https://worldfellows.yale.edu/renzo-martens.50 Stuart Jeffries, ‘Renzo Martens – the Artist Who Wants to Gentrify the Jungle,’ The Guardian, December 16, 2014, sec. Art and design. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/dec/16/renzo-martens-gentrify-the-jungle-congo-chocolate-art.

E. C. Feiss is a writer and PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in Afterall, Camera Austria, Radical Philosophy, and Texte zur Kunst, among other places. She is a member of the collective KIAD, whose work has appeared at or in the Jan van Eyck Academie (2014-2015), Metropolis M (2017), Beursschouwburg art center Brussels (2018) and WIELS Contemporary Art Center (2018).

OAR Issue 4 / MAY 2021 Collaborative Reflections on The Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative 74

Collaborative Reflections on The Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative

Katherine Guinness, Charlotte Kent, Martina Tanga

To cite this contribution: Guinness, Katherine, Charlotte Kent and Martina Tanga, ‘Collaborative Reflections on The Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative’ OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform Issue 4 (2021): 74–79, http://www.oarplatform.com/collaborative-reflections-feminist-art-architecture-collaborative.

The Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative (FAAC) is a research group consisting two architectural historians, Ana María León and Olga Touloumi, and two art historians, Tessa Paneth-Pollack and Martina Tanga in 2013. The group formed to conceive of alternate models of teaching and research, ones that would overturn the art and architecture historical canon that they had inherited, upend traditional teaching methods, and place the construction of class, race, and gender at the center of the understanding of history in the two disciplines. FAAC considered those subjects historically excluded from these canons, such as women, non-whites, and lower-income peoples, problematizing agency and authorship in art and architectural history.

Combining each member’s expertise, FAAC conceived the syllabus ‘Contested Spaces: Art, Architecture, and Politics.’ The course used ‘space’ as a structuring device, tracing the construction of modernity and critically examining how specific sites and objects have participated in unfolding of power dynamics and repressed identities. FAAC co-taught ‘Contested Spaces’ at various institutions, collaboratively transecting different institutional settings: Bard College, Michigan State University, and the University of Michigan. FAAC has also carried out a number of other academic initiatives, such as conference presentations and publications, seeking feminist allies and accomplices in the fields of Art and Architecture.

One such initiative was FAAC YOUR SYLLABUS, which was funded by the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative, and held at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University, New York City, April 21-22, 2018. The workshop provided the opportunity for peer-review of each participant’s syllabus, and to discuss the challenges we face at the level of the classroom, the institution, the discipline, and in our scholarship. The product of this collaborative workshop was the drafting of a Manifesto, which has been published in Harvard Design Magazine.1

In this contribution, three participants, Katherine Guinness, Charlotte Kent, and Martina Tanga share their personal experiences of the workshop FAAC YOUR SYLLABUS, highlighting the ways that feminist collaborative endeavors challenge normative forms of work in academia and highlight the ways of tracking the performative aspects of working with others. While we see collaboration as productive, we challenge the concept of collaboration as simply utopic or idealistic. Collaborations are, instead, a conscious, intentional engagement with others’ situations and ideas. To demonstrate this, as well as to show the challenges and process of a collaborative


effort, our essay presents the personal experiences, the reflexive engagement, and some of the critical positions we embraced and embodied throughout the workshop experience.

After an initial conversation about the organization of what we would present, this essay was produced across several Google docs, both individual and collective, as well as multi-person Skype calls. Those technologies permitted the chronological flexibility necessary in academic lives that are not simply about teaching, research and extensive service work, all while juggling complicated, sometimes transnational, personal lives. Across the text, we have tried to model the effort of collaboration, the kind of self-reflexivity that is necessary to work honestly with others. This requires recognizing your own experience, considering the experience of others, and developing a method to cohere as equals. In the end, collaborations depend on the specifics of the group and so our experience is an example, not a dictate.

Katherine Guinness:I was initially reluctant to work collaboratively, having labored in a series of temporary adjunct positions for years prior to this experience. The isolation of precarity had me feeling the ever-growing strictures of hierarchy throughout the neoliberal university. I thought that collaboration would be a good way to challenge institutional structures of power and question my own wavering marginality. Working through the parameters of the FAAC Collaborative renewed my faith in the power of non-hierarchical collaboration and alternatives to the limitations imposed by academic labor, while pointing out just how much I had unknowingly internalized the injurious and individualized norms that define intellectual labor.

For instance, while writing the manifesto I found myself not sharing, hesitant to add my imprint to the group’s document. I was not alone. Offshoots and pairs spoke to each other separately. This was, of course, antithetical to the project, and one member began loudly directing us to, ‘SPEAK OUT OF YOUR MOUTH!’ to break up the insulating pair-speak. This woke me to my own worst, isolating impulses. My whole life I’ve sought the primary ‘authority’; throughout second grade, whenever I wanted to participate, I would raise my hand, wait to be called on, then walk to the front of the room and whisper my sentiments in the teacher’s ear – to share with the class only at her discretion, to be my ‘power-interlocutor’. It can often feel, in academia, that the weight of power-locutors are inescapable; there will always be someone else to boost your voice, or to take control of it. The FAAC collaboration pointed out this problem, and just how powerful speaking in one’s own voice, speaking out of one’s own mouth really is. There is a difference, as Sara Ahmed points out, in being positioned at the table versus actually being orientated towards it.2 Charlotte Kent:As someone who relishes a schedule, when the introductions started running late, I got nervous. I wanted to interrupt and hurry others, who seemed to me oblivious of the time slipping away from what I perceived as the far more important work of the group: the assignments and syllabi to be reconsidered from a more inclusive perspective. The irony did not escape me that I wanted to exclude–or at least minimize–voices in order to maintain a schedule most of us had no part in creating; I was devaluing individuals for the sake of paperwork. When the organizers acknowledged the time yet allowed things to continue, I decided to merge into the experience. This was my first lesson in collaboration: whatever ideas and plans I have must morph to sustain the relationship.


We split into groups of four to review our individual syllabi. Sitting at a square table, my group became two sets of two. I was nervous that we were breaking rules but also recognized that in the loud room, a two-person review worked better. This anxiety surrounding following rules made the lack of formal guidelines, in much of the efforts produced at the workshop, particularly challenging. Collaborations are dynamic. People work as they are able. The experience can shift away from a preconceived end goal or product, but attention to those changes and self-reflexivity around why they appear and whether they serve a purpose permits projects to become more interesting, with opportunities for new challenges and discoveries.

Since the collaborative had no hierarchy, decisions had to be made as a group. I find this particularly difficult as it leads to ongoing points and counterpoints. Attentive to others without the need for a set conclusion, I learned about issues and concepts that I had certainly missed in the past by insisting that a schedule be maintained and decisions made. Collaborations are challenging because they require overcoming cultural conditioning about the how groups produce together. Committing to real collaboration requires a willingness to rediscover how work can work: conceptions of time shift, labor changes, but the rewards are generative and transformative.

Martina Tanga:Despite the best intentions, it took FAAC a few years to learn to work collaboratively. We needed time to understand each other’s strengths and to step in to compensate for each other’s weaknesses. After working on ‘Contested Spaces,’ I was curious to expand my network. I wanted to forge new relations – find feminist peeps, co-conspirators – to break the silo of academia.

The workshop had an ambitious agenda: to collectively write a manifesto outlining our shared voices. I was concerned that producing a collective manifesto would be a nearly impossible task, especially with only one day designated to it. I experienced one of the pitfalls of non-hierarchical collaboration is that it feels as if too little is accomplished; too many disparate points of view lead to a lot of positive conversation, but no tangible consensus and results. The crux is how to balance process with results. Yet, I am also aware of the enrichment that is lost in moving through conversations too quickly, and that time for discussion is essential for collaboration. The original, messy google doc that recorded our manifesto writing beautifully reflects this; it is raw and erratic, and highly cryptic. And yet, it was a beginning, because we each continued to work on this document after the workshop, each putting in time on her own terms at home, to continue to refine and define this collaboration.

THEORIST AND ACTIVIST REFERENCES

These texts represent a sample of some of the ideas we brought to our collaborative experiences. Citing them as influences but taking a personal distance from them (through limiting their names and voices to this bibliography) allows us to inform and cite without being as dependent on hierarchical citational practices, and to allow you, our reader, to recognize that these minds, and many others, permeate this text, and are not limited to these individual lines.

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. — Ahmed focuses on the material, perceptual ways that bodies come together and appear to


and for each other. In her citational practice, she often purposefully chooses to not cite white men (which she perceives as ‘an institution’ needing to be seen as such, so that this countering work of visibility can begin).

Arendt, Hannah. ‘Crisis in Education.’ In Between Past and Future, 170-193. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.— This 1954 essay positions the pedagogical challenge of historicity versus contemporaneity. Its insights on wanting students to know ‘classics’ even as the world changes and it becomes urgent to share with them new insights, alongside its discussion of the awkwardness of being an ‘authority’ in the classroom remains vital.

Boys, Jos. Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment. London: Pluto Press, 1985.— This book, produced by the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative – one of the first architectural groups in Britain to take an overtly feminist stance in their way of working and designing – explores the socio-political context of designing the built environment, and traced the implications of feminist theory and critique on urban design, such as the viewing of domestic work also as a form of labor. One of the main claims is that because women are brought up differently in our society we have different experiences and needs in relation to the built environment. Cixous, Hélène. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: The Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine. Translated by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.— The philosopher Hélène Cixous reflects on the writing process, encouraging us to consider the requirements for great writing, even as she lucidly dismantles the power structures of language. She presents a more dynamic intellectualism, one with a place for the personal or aside, with a typography full of meaning.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.— The philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari continue their argument from Anti-Oedipus in this second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The essay on the rhizome is one of the most accessible sections and a good introduction to the bee-bop aesthetic of their intellectual activity. The non-linear presentation is notoriously challenging but the opening ‘since each of us was several there was already quite a crowd’ helped set the tone for thinking about collaboration.

Negri, Antonio. Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy. New York, NY: Verso, 2005.— In 1970s Italy, Marxist theorist Antonio Negri conceived of two critical workerist concepts to challenge capitalist structures of labor: ‘Refusal to Work’ and ‘Self-Valorization.’ The first indicates the workers’ rejection of wage labor to terminate their dependence on the capitalist system and its ability to define them. The second term calls for defining one’s subjectivity in one’s own terms as a corrective to exploitation in the factory. By refusing capitalist mediations of productive and reproductive relations, workers could engage in liberated labor, which would lead to a process of self-emancipation. This process was a means of seizing agency over the formation of one’s identity.


Nochlin, Linda. ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ in Women, Art, and Power, and Other Essays. Ed. Maura C. Reilly. London: Routledge, 2018.— In this essay, Nochlin explores the institutional – as opposed to the individual – obstacles that have prevented women in the West from succeeding in the arts. The essay was a groundbreaking moment not only in feminist writing but in considering the social structures of the discipline of art history.

Wittig, Monique. ‘One is Not Born a Woman.’ In The Straight Mind and Other Essays, 9-20. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. — Monique Wittig grapples with how identity is negotiated, formed, and reformed – and how to acknowledge that an individual is only produced as an individual (or individuated) within a collective body. She explains that while everyone must act both and simultaneously as an individual and a member of a class, and one does not mean the suppression of the other.

CONCLUSION

Throughout this process, we each took time to reflect on each other’s experiences, distilling the ideas that resonated with our personal involvement in the workshop. Some of the parallel themes to emerge were about output and efficient production, collectivity versus individu-alization, hierarchies within academia and beyond. The question of voice within a collective working dynamic is a delicate balance. Guinness was grateful to see Kent discuss how the collaboration was also a challenge to her due to cultural conditioning since childhood (and to be honest relieved that she wasn’t the only one discussing this). We all noted how collab-oration challenges power, as it is constructed in space, time, relationships, which we have absorbed–at least since our childhood as Guinness poignantly shares with her anecdote about being in second grade. Finally, time – what is lost when we move too quickly and the negotiation a personal desire to stay on schedule. Time is especially a challenge in a 24/7 society that always wants to know the results before you’ve even started. What’s important to remember is chronological flexibility.

In all our narratives, we heard our wariness, our fears that a collaborative ideology could complicate our desires to become established in academia. We are all early-stage academics, vulnerable to power, to hiring and tenure clocks, to showing up as expected. We hope writing about collaboration encourages others to discover a new point in what we do. But for this to be successful, we need time, patience, understanding, and most of all, courage.

1 Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative, ‘To Manifest’, Harvard Design Magazine, No. 46, No Sweat, available at: http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/46/to-manifest2 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).


Katherine Guinness, PhD is a theorist and historian of contemporary art. She is Assistant Professor and Director of Art History in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Katherine’s first book, Schizogenesis: The Art of Rosemarie Trockel, was published with the University of Minnesota Press in 2019. She is the academic director of the downtown Gallery of Contemporary Art in Colorado Springs and co-founder of the Female Emerging Artist Residency Series (FEARS).

Charlotte Kent, PhD is Assistant Professor of Visual Culture at Montclair State University with research interests in the rhetoric around art and digital culture. Currently, she is co-editing a collection on the absurd in contemporary art and speculative design. She writes for both academic and general venues, to include Word and Image, Journal of Visual Culture, Brooklyn Rail, CLOT Magazine, among others, while contributing a monthly column on the Business of Art for Artist’s Magazine.

Martina Tanga is a curator and art historian, with an interest in art that engages with social concerns, feminism, and the built environment. She is a specialist in Italian 20th-century Italian art, and her book, Arte Ambientale: Urban Space, and Participatory Art, released by Routledge Press, examines radical artistic practices sited in Italy’s 1970s urban landscape. She held positions at the Worcester Art Museum, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and is currently at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Tanga earned her BA and MA in the History of Art from University College London and a Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from Boston University.

OAR Issue 4 / MAY 2021 Talking about Oral History 80

Talking about Oral HistoryRib Davis

To cite this contribution:David, Rib. ‘Talking about Oral History.’ OAR The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform Issue 4 (2021): 80, http://www.oarplatform.com/talking-about-oral-history/.

To listen to this work, please visit http://www.oarplatform.com/talking-about-oral-history/.

THE PARTICIPANTS

Nnenna Samson-Abosi works for SPID theatre company, which specialises in helping young people to explore and present the lives of people living in public housing. Rachel Oakes formerly worked in television documentary before becoming a freelance oral historian. She has worked on a number of oral history community projects. Natasha Ruskin works for Kent Wildlife Trust. She is an interviewer for the Fifth Continent oral history project in Romney Marsh. Rib Davis has worked with all three of the other participants.

Rib Davis has been working in oral history since the later 1970s, producing documentary theatre scripts, books, websites, exhibitions and events. He is also a playwright and community engagement worker. He delivers many training courses in oral history in this country and abroad, particularly on behalf of the British Library and the Oral History Society.

OAR Issue 4 / MAY 2021 In the Name of Art Literary Mentoring as a Collaborative Process 81

In the Name of ArtLiterary Mentoring as a Collaborative Process

Marie Caffari and Johanne Mohs

To cite this contribution:Caffari, Marie and Johanne Mohs. ‘In the Name of Art: Literary Mentoring as a Collaborative Process.’ OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform Issue 4 (2021): 81–89, http://www.oarplatform.com/name-art-literary-mentoring-collaborative-process.

Mentors, editors or writing colleagues are involved in processes of literary production, sometimes over long periods of time, without anyone ever really paying attention to them. They seemingly disturb a prevalent image cultivated since the Romantic period: namely that of the author drawing only on the self and its solitude. However, along with an increasing professionalisation of writing, collaboration in the form of mentorships has become an integral component of creative writing courses and higher education programmes for emerging authors. A long tradition of mentoring programmes is also well established in Anglo-American universities.1 The most common approach to teaching creative writing is, however, the workshop, in which students discuss their manuscripts with their peers and a lecturer. In addition, one-to-one tutorials may be organised by some universities.

The idea of the author as a solitary worker – however central dialogue may be to his or her writing process in practice – is based on the largely accepted notion that writing requires secrecy.2 Thus, according to Roland Barthes, the literary work in progress belongs to the realm of the secret and the ‘unnameable’3 – whether out of embarrassement, a strong sense of responsibility or the fear of losing the creative energy that exclusively flows between text and author. The very moment of writing, its potential conflicts with the act and mediums of creation, is not disclosed before the work is published or at least completed. This moment, referred to as ‘the writing scene’ in recent studies4, can only be commented on retrospectively, if at all. Usually, authors then focus on their struggles with characters or language and rarely mention the role or potential of their conversations with others about their writing processes or works in progress.

Our research project Writing as dialogue – literary mentoring and authorship has observed these moments of disclosure regarding writing processes through conversations, which we have called ‘mentoring scenes’5 – thus echoing the notion of ‘writing scenes’. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2014–2018), the study was conducted in creative writing workshops and mentoring situations at three European universities and several German publishing houses. The material we collected consists of recorded conversations between mentors and students as well as interviews with authors and their editors. In the present analysis we shall refer to a few examples selected from twenty-two conversations in total – five in French, nine in English and eight in German – recorded between September 2014 and August 2015 at the Bachelor in literary writing, Swiss Literature Institute, Bern University of the Arts; at the Master of Arts in Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, Norwich; and at the Master en Création littéraire, Université Paris 8. All our examples are


part of individual mentoring situations that accompany the students’ development of their final diploma projects. Based on the terminology of the different courses, we use the following terms to refer to the two mentoring partners: on one hand, the ‘student’, on the other, the ‘mentor’ or ‘supervisor’. During our research, we recorded three to four meetings of each of our seven mentoring duos.6 We also collected different versions of the students’ manuscripts discussed in these conversations.

The three universities we worked with have different terms for their mentoring courses: ‘Mentorat’ in Bern, ‘supervision’ in Norwich and ‘suivi individuel’ in Paris. They also have different ways of integrating these courses into the curricula of the respective MA or BA programs. In Bern, students meet their mentors every two weeks over the course of their three-year bachelor’s degree; in Norwich, ‘supervision’ only takes place in the last three months of the master’s degree and in Paris, mentors and students regularly meet during the last year of the master. The notions of ‘Mentorat’, ‘supervision’ and ‘suivi individuel’ all refer to a common understanding of what literary mentoring is or can achieve. Mentoring processes occur when individual supervision takes place over a long period and follows the elaboration of students’ projects, which will later be presented as literary BA or MA dissertations. In all of these courses, the pool of mentors is limited and students are not (entirely) free to choose their supervisor. Rather, the latter will sometimes be assigned by the course organisers and may not know the student yet – or only from their common participation in a writing workshop.

In the writing process, literary mentoring is situated between the moments of initiation and publication. The individualised process of literary mentoring integrates a young writer in a ‘community of practitioners’,7 in which a more experienced writer accompanies the work of their junior colleague with a critical eye. The literary mentor’s attention in itself encourages the less experienced writers to take seriously their desire to write and to affirm their identity as a writer. If the more junior writer has not yet published their writings, the dialogue with a mentor can serve as a space of pre-publication: through mentoring, they becomes aware of the effect of their writing and of varying perspectives on their text. The mentor participates in both these processes as an external agent with the power to advance or hinder the writing process. He or she is hence involved in the process of literary initiation and publication – ‘publication’ in the sense of a heterogeneous contemporary literary practice as described by Lionel Ruffel.8 Yet the mentor is seldom regarded as a collaborator of the prospective author. The analysis of our material, however, has shown that dialogue in literary ‘mentoring scenes’ tends to be highly collaborative. This manifests itself when the two interlocutors step back from their personal perspectives on the text and think about its needs or inherent rules – when they, as it were, act in the name of art. In what follows we describe three moments of this collaboration: namely, the idea of the agency of the text, the mentors’ immersive acting, and the use of the pronoun ‘we’ in mentoring conversations.

THE AGENCY OF THE TEXT

The dialogue between mentor and student focuses on the text which the student is writing. Both dialogue partners are concentrating on one and the same object or emerging world of ideas. The context – institutional framework or forthcoming diploma – is thereby rarely mentioned. Mostly, timelines and the external diploma pressure are ignored. One mentor at the Swiss Literature Institute even points out that writing is an emotional process, which cannot


be gone through only in order to be gone through. He argues that writing requires time and that loss of control is important.9 However, at the Swiss Literature Institute, mentors sometimes remind students of the approaching deadline. One mentor, in particular, repeatedly asks his students to organise and structure the accumulated material.10

In the ‘mentoring scene’, the two interlocutors are thus focusing on the manuscript. The written words guide their conversation. This joint attention corresponds to a definition of dialogue by Karlheinz Stierle. For Stierle the characteristic of dialogue is, first, a continuous and mutual attention of two dialogue partners for each other and, second, a common focus on an object, relation or problem.11 The joint attention of the two dialogue partners also provides the condition for collaboration in the mentoring scene, namely the idea of the text as a third actor or agent within the mentoring process. The dialogue is in fact based on a triangle between the student, the supervisor and the text, or, as one of the project participants has pointed out: ‘In the beginning it was a discussion and then it increasingly turned into something organic; she reads my text and something is coming out of that and that is going back into me and then back into the text again.’12 The text becomes part of a chain of actions which include writing, reading and discussion – it is formed by the conversations, but also actively forms those in turn. As a ‘feedback loop’,13 this chain of action could, theoretically, keep going and produce a never-ending story.

The agency of the text emerges indirectly, for instance when the conversation follows the manuscript page by page. The text is hence not only the object of conversation but also guides its course. And it can have an impact on the tonality of the conversations, for example when humorous texts lead to humorous conversations.14 There are also examples of the manuscript influencing the way mentor and student refer to themselves or each other. At the Swiss Literature Institute a student was writing his grandmother’s life story, but at the time of the recording, his own involvement in the story was not clear yet. This uncertainty manifested in the conversation with the mentor often misspeaking or hesitating over whether to address his student as ‘the author’, ‘the narrator’ or a ‘character’ of the text.15

The agency of the text becomes more directly apparent in the common interest of both dialogue partners, when it comes to revealing the potential of the text. In an interview, one of the institute’s mentors explains that he always knows quite quickly what the text would ‘need’16 to become more complete. After a first reading he already develops what he calls ‘his own vision of the finished work’.17 But he also mentions his scruples over whether to express this vision for fear of hindering the student from developing their own vision of the text. A mentor from Norwich similarly argues that the supervisor should ‘encourage students to explore the possibilities, which can emerge’18 and that ‘a fine-tuned emotional and intellectual judgement’19 is therefore needed. The exploration of possibilities, in turn, does not happen on behalf of the mentor or the student or any other (abstract) reader, but ‘for the benefit of the story’.20 This, however, does not mean that supervision is a ‘conversation on techniques’.21 The question is rather: ‘What is the optimal form of this text? What can the text be? How can the novel achieve its world, its corporality?’22

In a conversation between the duo working on the text about the student’s grandmother, the mentor argues in a similar way to get his student to delete self-referential passages. At the time of the recording the manuscript also included a meta-story reflecting on the writing process. The mentor justifies his suggestion as follows: ‘Not everything that was in the text


served the text, that’s just what it is. It is more productive when the writing process is reflected by the text itself instead of being discussed on a meta level.’23 Most of the time, however, conversations in the name of the text are based on elements that have not been written yet. The existing version of the text inspires an exchange about its potential expansion.

COLLABORATION AS A NARRATIVE IMMERSION

During the different stages of the elaboration of the literary text, from the very start of the process until the revision of an already thought-through and sometimes nearly written up narrative project, we have observed two main forms of collaboration within the dialogical setting of mentoring. The first happens by way of an immersion in the text. Characters, plot, the ‘elements of fiction’ become the space in which the collaboration between mentor and student takes place. In a ‘mentoring scene’ recorded at the Swiss Literature Institute, a supervisor encourages a student to focus more clearly on the protagonist of his story. According to the mentor, so far too little attention has been paid to this character, whose traits constitute a mere caricature of what could be a much more complex personality. But the story seems to work quite well and provoked a series of very pleasing laughs from the audience at an end-of-term reading, which in turn strengthened the author’s confidence in the comic portrayal of his main character. The superviser then explains the need to further explore this particular character’s potential through the text itself by retelling a scene of the story. In said scene the protagonist is sitting by the fire and reading a dubious legal report, with which he hopes to recuperate most of his mother’s inheritance money: ‘So in the foreground, him sitting by the fire has to be outlined clearly, maybe by this one phone call. And then: Lean back, nose the whiskey, take a sip, look out the window, look into the fire, look at his own slippers – and then ponder what’s just happened.’24 At this point, the mentor is clearly focusing on the character, positioning himself within the narration, exploring the potential of this particular scene from within the character’s situation. His aim here is to encourage the narrator to be closer to the protagonist; according to the supervisor, this is the only way the effect-driven caricature can be overcome.

This collaboration on the development of the text from within the narration also takes place in another conversation, recorded at the University of East Anglia. In this example, student and supervisor agree that the narrative project is going very well. However, the structure of the story has not been fully elaborated yet, and the reader must be brought to understand the inner motivation of the main character better. The supervisor argues from within the protagonist’s inner monologue:

I sat down on the couch and wondered what to do. Maybe I needed to go to the gym, … maybe I needed to get a really good job, so I had some cash, maybe that would bring her back, but in the bottom of my heart, I knew that, none of these things were really going to work with… what’s her name? 25

Here, giving feedback implies talking from within the emerging story, collaborating, as it were, with and through the text, as well as with its author. In another conversation of the same duo, both supervisor and student are engaging in the development of narrative elements; in this project, the central plot is centred around a jobless but enterprising man, who intends to participate in feline shows with his cat in order to win back his estranged spouse:


Supervisor: And what if the love rival is the bodyguard of, like the kind of super successful cat show shower?Student: (laughs) That would be really funny.Supervisor: And that the missing cat is the one that belongs to that super successful figure. The kind of mister big… . That might be one way of integrating them.26

At this point in time, both the supervisor and the author are evoking a story, which – unlike in most supervisions – is not placed in front of them. Indeed they are speaking about a text, which the student has started but has not yet sent to his supervisor. The elaboration of the story, from the characters’ point of view, occurs here as a narrative projection in which both can participate. Further along in the conversation, the student adds: ‘I think you are right that his romantic rival should have something to do, there must be a meeting that has to happen between them, because that would up the stakes.’ Here, the story and what it artic-ulates are being developed via a highly dialogical process. Wether or not the novel pursued these directions, the supervisions sometimes took the form of collaborative story-telling. Although student and supervisor speak as separate entities, at this point they seem to engage in a common prospective enunciation of the text.

WE – COLLABORATION AS A COMMON ENUNCIATION

This way of speaking together from a common position, as expressed by the use of the personal pronoun ‘we’, is another feature of the mentor-student conversations we recorded. While far from being a persistent trait of mentoring dialogues, it nevertheless occurs in key moments.

Towards the end of an hour-long discussion, during which a supervisor and his student adressed a series of problems posed by a novel manuscript, the author jokingly asked: ‘Is there anything you liked?’27 With the sense of humour that characterises this dialogue the student here was clearly expressing uncertainty. His supervisor reacted by reminding him of the very positive overall evaluation he made at the beginning of their meeting (‘It’s great, coherent, … the prose is very clean, you know, it works.’28) Concluding their supervision meeting, he then added: ‘We will crack it!’29 Although they are not constantly using ‘we’, the pronoun appears when the supervision is about to close. This ‘we’ here voices encouragement and the assurance that the supervision will enable student and supervisor to jointly solve the problems identified in the text. The pronoun also indicates that both interlocutors share (some) responsibilities within the dialogical process.

In a conversation we recorded at the Swiss Literature Institute, a mentor also used the pronoun ‘we’ to encourage his student during the writing process: they were discussing different fragments of a text that still lacked a vision of the whole story. Through the exchange with his mentor the student was becoming aware that, in fact, most of the passages could have functioned as the beginning of the text, that he had many characters and descriptions but still no clear plot. As he was complaining about the story stalling, the mentor said: ‘No, sometimes it protects us a little to procrastinate and to say “I have to first do this, and that” – and then to suddenly jump into the cold water.’30


The mentor here uses ‘we’ in an impersonal way, in the sense of ‘we writers’ and not in the sense of ‘you and me’. In order to encourage his student, he tries to explain the conflict as a typical part of a writing process that the author will surely find a solution to. Unlike the Norwich supervisor, this mentor does not refer to a collaborative perspective, but tries to encourage his student through a more general common experience – the practice of writing.

The previous examples show that collaboration is marked by discreet forms of a common enunciation; the ‘we’ can also be a point of controversy. Thus, in another recording from the Swiss Literature Institute, the use of ‘we’ denotes a form of over-identification by the student. The above quoted student who tended to caricature his main character recapitulated the decision to change the name of his protagonist as a collaborative understanding between his mentor and himself: ‘You said it would be sort of desirable if we no longer referred to him as uncle. I somehow saw this as process of maturation.’31 The student’s use of ‘we’ in his wording of the modification reveals his wish for collaboration, whereas the mentor often reproached him for not acting more autonomously.

A COLLABORATION WHICH DOES NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

Students and mentors believe in the dialogical process and consider it a potentially very productive interaction during the writing process. Looking back over a three-year mentoring period with author Silvio Huonder at the Swiss Literature Institute, the German author Matthias Nawrat notes how he regarded his mentor as an ‘adventurer’: ‘That is to say, to engage with everything, really everything, the author writes – also with the meandering of which there may be traces, at most, in the finished text, once the writing process has been successfully completed. This is the kind of reader one wishes for: a true adventurer.’32 He further explains that having a reader at his side enabled him to disconnect his self-critical gaze on the text while writing and thus helped free his imagination. A supervisor at Norwich told us how effective the supervision process can be, when collaboration – a term which he does not use, however – is based on an equal degree of interaction: ‘The more interactive the position of the student is, the more productive it is for the production of literary texts.’ The adventurers here are both student and supervisor: ‘There is risk involved, in writing, as in supervising.’33 Being an open process, literary mentoring cannot guarantee a specific outcome.

However productive the process may be, neither students nor mentors ever consider it as leading to collaborative authorship. Within the institutional framework, students make the decisions and their work is assessed. Although the student is clearly responsible for the final assessment, supervisors are often personally concerned about final grades or feedback given to MA or BA literary dissertations. Sylvain Pattieu, a supervisor in the MA course at Université Paris 8, comments on how involved he still may feel at the end of the dialogical process, when his students are facing other examiners’ comments; in this particular MA course, supervisors are part of the final jury for the MA dissertations and are thus directly confronted with the reception of the literary projects they have accompanied over the course of several months:

We generally agree [on the evaluation of the dissertation], but last year, a student, whose text I appreciated, was heavily criticised. I felt for her, I had the impression that I had done something wrong…. It is always difficult, at the end, to give grades,


which do not necessarily mean much, which just reflect a general opinion regarding the text, a jury consensus, and even some negotiations.34

So even though the authorship of the text remains unquestioned, supervisors are closely involved. However strong that involvement may be, it is obvious that supervisors have to let students create, write and rewrite according to their own agency. Claire Genoux, a mentor at the Swiss Literature Institute, emphasises that ‘the text does not belong to me. If anything I try to suggest ways of working and, mostly through questions, to interrogate the author himself, rather than the text.’35

This division of responsibilities seems a topos of all the mentoring duos we have examined. This division is echoed in the statements of two editors whom we interviewed about their collaboration with authors. Jo Lendle, the editor in charge of Germany’s renowned publishing house Hanser Verlag, said: ‘A very simple rule seems important to me: we make suggestions and the author decides. This is the principle, which always applies’,36 even in cases when the editor may be convinced that his idea would improve the text. Caroline Coutau, the editor in charge of Zoé, a literary publisher based in Geneva, also draws a clear line between the role of the editor and the one of the author: ‘It’s about … supporting the elaboration of the text, not about participating in it.’37

Authorship thus remains a solo performance in the eyes of those who accompany the work of authors, sometimes over years and across several texts. Interestingly, this is being underlined by mentors and editors at a time, when, at least in France, the emergence of literary works is often marked by collective practices. Indeed, if one considers the field of publication at large (and not only its mainstream players), authors are navigating their publishing careers between different poles, ranging from conventional publication to alternative channels, such as performance, collaboration with other artists, self-publishing and collective writing. In our research, most mentors and supervisors belong to a generation in which there is little interaction with unfinished works. The students belong to another generation (often born after 1980) and many of them strongly rely on dialogue when it comes to their writing processes. A graduate of the German Literature Institute in Leipzig told us that she considered her peers as the ‘feedback generation’.38 Like her writing friends she often seeks the advice and feedback of other writers as well as readers, thus clearly relying on an intense degree of interaction regarding unfinished works.

Traces of such collaborative practices, which mostly consist of conversations about work in progress and of mutual feedback on unfinished manuscripts amongst peers, can sometimes be found in the acknowledgement lists of literary books. Ben Lerner, for instance, precisely lists the (many) people who, in one way or another, contributed to the writing of his novel 10:04,39 which itself reflects on the at times highly collaborative practice of writing, submitting and editing a book. In continental Europe, such acknowledgements remain rare, but young authors’ literary practices are certainly more clearly embedded in a chain of feedback, sometimes starting in the framework of a university course and continuing beyond the completion of their BA or MA degrees in creative writing. Authorship, though not an explicitly collaborative notion, is making the heretofore invisible presence of others in the writing process more visible.


1 See for instance Michelle Eble and Lynée Lewis Gaille, eds., Stories of Mentoring: Theory and Praxis (West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2008).2 In the words of Claudia Dürr and Tasos Zembylas, mentoring and editing conversations belong to the ‘phase of opening up’ of authors in the midst of writing processes. This refers to times during which the writer searches for inspiration, distraction or exchange. Such ‘phases of opening up’ alternate with ‘phases of shutting in’, when the writer withdraws and wishes to write alone as much as possible (see Tasos Zembylas and Claudia Dürr, Wissen, Können und literarisches Schreiben: Eine Epistemo logie der künstlerischen Praxis (Vienna: Passagen, 2009), 95).3 Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture courses and seminars at the Collège de France 1978 - 1979 and 1979 – 1980 (New York: Columbia, 2011), 11.4 The ‘writing scene’ – German: ‘Schreibszene’ – is a term introduced by Rüdiger Campe. In a research project directed by Martin Stingelin on the genealogy of writing, it was developed into a concept to analyse literary writing processes by taking into account the language, the tools and the physical, respectively gestural, aspects of writing. Rüdiger Campe, ‘Die Schreibszene, Schreiben,’ in Schreiben als Kulturtechnik. Grundlagentexte, ed. Sandro Zanetti (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2011), 269-283. See also Davide Giuriato, Martin Stingelin and Sandro Zanetti, eds., ‘System ohne General’. Schreibszenen im digitalen Zeitalter (Munich: Fink, 2006), Davide Giuriato, Martin Stingelin and Sandro Zanetti, eds., ‘Schreiben heißt: sich selber lesen’. Schreibszenen als Selbstlektüren, (Munich: Fink, 2008), Martin Stingelin, ed., Mir ekelt vor diesem tinten klecksenden Säkulum. Schreibszenen im Zeitalter der Manuskripte, (Munich: Fink, 2004); Davide Giuriato, Martin Stingelin and Sandro Zanetti, eds., ‘Schreibkugel ist ein Ding gleich mir: von Eisen’. In Schreibszenen im Zeitalter der Typoskripte, (Munich: Fink, 2005).5 Cf. Marie Caffari and Johanne Mohs, ‘La scène de mentorat – (Se) raconter la création littéraire en plein travail,’ Nouvelle Revue Synergies Canada 1 (2017); https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/nrsc6 All participants of our research project are anonymised. The relation between male and female participants is balanced: seven women and seven men. Three of the women are mentors and four are students, whereas the male participants provide four mentors and three students.7 Cf. Zembylas and Dürr, Wissen, Können, literarisches Schreiben, 14-15.8 See Ruffel, Lionel, ‘Publier en dialoguant. Sur les formations en ‘création littéraire’,’ A Contrario: Écrire en dialoguant 27 (2018):, https://www.cairn.info/revue-a-contrario-2018-2.htm9 Cf. 1st series, 4th supervision, 20.4.2015, supervisor.10 Cf. 2nd series, all supervisions, supervisor.11 Stierle, Karlheinz, ‘Gespräch und Diskurs – Ein Versuch im Blick auf Montaigne, Descartes und Pascal,’ in Das Gespräch, ed. Karheinz Stierle and Rainer Warning (Munich: Fink, 1984), 301.12 Abschlussgespräch mit dem Studenten aus SLI, Serie 1, geführt am 19.6.2015. ‘Am Anfang war es eine Diskussion und dann ist es immer mehr zu so etwas Organischem geworden; dass sie meinen Text liest und da kommt was raus und das geht wieder in mich rein und dann geht’s wieder in den Text.’13 Carl Bereiter, ‘Entwicklung im Schreiben, Schreiben als kognitiver Prozess,’ in Schreiben als Kulturtechnik, 410.14 Cf. UEA, 3rd series, 1st supervision, all supervisions and SLI, 2nd series, all supervisions.15 Cf. SLI, 1st series, 3rd supervision, 16.12.14, supervisor.16 SLI, 2nd series, interview with a supervisor, July 2015.17 Ibid.18 UEA, 2nd series, interview with a supervisor, 7.7. 2015.19 UEA, 2nd series, interview with a supervisor, 7.7. 2015.20 Ibid.21 Ibid.22 Ibid.23 SLI, 1st series, 2nd supervision, 10.10.2014, supervisor. ‘Nicht alles, was im Text gewesen ist, dient dem Text, es ist einfach so... . Es ist produktiver, wenn sich der Schreibprozess im Text selber wiederspiegelt und nicht auf einer Metaebene.’24 SLI, 2nd series, 4th supervision, 23.4.2015, supervisor. ‘Also im Vordergrund muss dieses Sitzen am Kamin die deutliche Kontur haben, vielleicht dieses eine Telefonat. Und dann: Zurücklehnen, am Whiskey schnuppern, ein Schluck nehmen, aus dem Fenster gucken, ins Feuer gucken, seine eigenen Pantoffeln angucken – und dann über das sinnieren, was jetzt passiert ist.’25 UEA, 3rd series, 2nd supervision, 2.6.2015, supervisor.26 UEA, 3rd series, 1st supervision, 13.5.2015, supervisor and student.27 UEA, 1st series, 1st conversation, 13.05.2015, supervisor.28 UEA, 1st series, 1st conversation, 13.5.2015, supervisor.29 UEA, 1st series, 1st conversation, 13.5.2015, supervisor.30 SLI, 3rd series, 2nd supervision, 20.2.2015, supervisor. ‘Non, parfois cela nous protège un peu, en se disant, il faut que je fasse ça, puis après… Tout à coup de se jeter à l’eau… .’31 SLI 2nd series, 3rd supervision, 14.1.2015. ‘Du hast gesagt, es wäre sozusagen erstrebenswert, wenn wir jetzt nicht mehr vom Onkel reden. Ich habe das als Reifungsprozess irgendwie gesehen.’32 Matthias Nawrat, ‘Der kritische Abenteurer ein Erfahrungsbericht aus dem Mentorat bei Silvio Huonder,’ in Writing as dialogue. Practices of editors and mentors in contemporary fiction, ed. Johanne Mohs, Marie Caffari and Katrin Zimmermann (Bielefeld, transcript, 2019), 44. ‘Nämlich sich auf alles einzulassen, und auf wirklich alles, was der Autor schreibt auch auf die Irrwege, von denen in einem fertigen Text, nachdem der Schreibprozess erfolgreich zu Ende gelaufen ist, höchstens Spuren zu finden sind. Einen solchen Leser wünscht man sich: einen echten Abenteurer.’33 UEA, 3rd series, interview with the supervisor, 7.7.2015.34 Sylvain Pattieu, ‘En lisant, en dialoguant. À propos du cours “suivi de projet” dans le Master de création littéraire de Paris 8,’ A Contrario: ‘On tombe généralement d’accord, mais l’an dernier, une étudiante dont j’aimais le texte a été fortement critiquée. Je me suis senti mal pour elle, j’ai eu l’impression d’avoir eu tort,... . C’est toujours difficile, à la fin, de donner des notes, qui n’ont forcément pas grand sens, reflètent un avis général sur le texte, un consensus de jury, et même quelques négociations.’


Marie Caffari (*1968) has been in charge of the Swiss Literature Institute since it was created in 2006, at the Berne University of the Arts, in Biel. She studied French, German and Russian literature at the University of Lausanne and holds a PhD from Queen Mary College, University of London (Butor’s Collaborative Writings: Exploring Border Territory, 2003). She teaches French contemporary literature and was a member of the research team of « Writing as Dialogue », a project funded by the Swiss National Science Fondation (2014-2018).

Johanne Mohs (*1981) studied Romance languages and literatures, art history and journalism at the University of Hamburg and the University of Barcelona. From 2007 to 2010 she held seminars on French and Spanish literature at the University of Hamburg and since 2010 she works first as a doctoral candidate and now as a postdoctoral researcher at the Bern University of the Arts. Her research interests include intermediality between literature and photography, poetics of European Avant-gardes (especially Tel Quel and OuLiPo), material aesthetics, collaborative writing cultures, representations of death and the interplay of art/literature, technology and science.

35 Claire Genoux, ‘Écrire librement. Accompagnement et exigence – un aller-retour de l’autre à soi ?,’ A Contrario. ‘[L]e texte ne m’appartient pas. J’essaie plutôt de proposer des pistes et surtout, par des questions, de sonder l’auteur lui-même plus que le texte.’36 Jo Lendle, ‘Non pas savoir mieux, mais savoir autrement. Expériences et pratiques d’un éditeur,’ A Contrario; ‘[U]ne règle toute simple me paraît importante: nous faisons des propositions, et c’est l’auteur qui tranche. C’est le principe qui vaut dans tous les cas.‘37 Caroline Coutau, ‘L’éditeur et son auteur,’ A Contrario; ‘Il s’agit de... soutenir, sans non plus participer au deploiement du texte.‘38 Interview with Judith Keller, January 24th 2018.39 Ben Lerner, 10:04 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

OAR Issue 4 / MAY 2021 Hand in Glove 90

Hand in GloveJessica Sarah Rinland

Hand in Glove constitutes a part of a multi-layered art work which culminates in a ceramic replica of an elephant’s tusk currently housed at London’s Natural History Museum, a feature film titled Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another, and a book titled A Replica of Conservation. The art work deconstructs museological and ecological conservation, inviting reflection upon forms of representation, replicas, and embodiments of various materials, disciplines, and institutions.


Analia’s cabinet, 2017.


Analia keeps each item of clothing individually wrapped in her cabinet. Some are in old dry-cleaning bags, others in the bags the clothes came in, or re-used plastic bags. When you compliment her outfit, she does not say ‘thank you,’ she says ‘oh, it’s old’ then tells you where she bought it, thirty years ago in Argentina with her mother, before immigrating to England, while her mother was still alive, at a time when she was surrounded by family.

She is generally a very clean and organised person. She has been told on numerous occasions that her house is like a museum – everything is looked after and impeccable. Even the objects that are not kept in plastic bags are regularly dusted and polished. Each object is placed on a surface – a table or a wall, deliberately, as if being allowed the space to breathe. She has been collecting small boxes for as long as I have known her. Her favourites are empty, laid out on one particular fingerprint-less glass top table.1

She is actively exhibiting, caring not only for each object but also how visitors experience her home. Of course her home is private, those who enter have been invited in.

Analia’s garden is similar to the interior of her house. The colours of each plant are chosen and arranged in specific locations, trimmed regularly, with weeds consistently removed from the root. In England there is a tradition dating back to 1959 called the National Garden Scheme where people choose to open up their private home gardens to the public once a year.2

Similarly, within public museums there are occasional ‘open days’ and guided tours to selected private and restricted areas such as the archive collections and storage spaces not readily available to the public.3 Otherwise, access to a particular part of the museum or to view a specific object often involves a long and arduous process with multiple forms and delays.

Within most museum archives, objects are stored under specific conservation regulations. In the Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia in Saõ Paulo, the artefacts are wrapped in plastic bags and kept in temperature-controlled environments for conservation purposes.

Conservation seems to be a human necessity – a need to preserve a culture or a memory, verbally or through objects. Although conservation as a practice within museums began during the nineteenth century, humans have been conserving art since prehistory.4

1 'Whether a child collects model dinosaurs or dolls, sooner or later she or he will be encouraged to keep the possessions on a shelf or in a special box or to set up a doll house. Personal treasures will be made public.' James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Harvard University Press, 1988), 219.2 'Who We Are,' National Garden Scheme, accessed March 17, 2018, https://www.ngs.org.uk/who-we-are/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/. In the 1980s the Natural History Museum, London (NHM) created a space visible to the public referred to as ‘the goldfish bowl’ where scientists were conserving large fossil marine reptiles. In 2016 the museum opened a similar space when restoring the blue whale skeleton which now lives in Hintze Hall. The space was created for public outreach and the museum consequently was awarded the Keck. 3 Award for Public Understanding of Science. The space was also created because of overcrowding in the conservation lab. In both occasions the public encounters the scientists work through a glass wall, similar to vitrines which keep the exhibited taxidermy, creating a spectacle of labour. Lorraine Cornish (Head of Conservation at NHM), email correspondence with author, 29 January, 2018.4 Traditional story-teller of the Nugal-warra clan, Willie Gordon, when talking about the preservation of Indigenous rock art said: ‘If you go to different parts of Australia they've [tribes] already recoated or repainted art. They've painted it because it's in our culture to keep it alive and well.’ Sam Davis, “Preserving Indigenous Rock Art,” last modified 27 October, 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2009/10/27/2725103.htm.


Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia archive, 2017.


When I was a child, Analia took me to the Zoológico de Buenos Aires. The zoo was conceived in 1875 by Argentine president, Domingo Sarmiento. The first director of the zoo, Eduardo Holmberg structured the environment so that the animals would be housed in buildings that reflected their countries of origin. For example, a replica of a Hindu temple was built for Asian elephants, housing the first one ever to be born in a zoo. These replicas were built as an attempt to conserve the imagined original home of the elephants. The idea of a lived human architecture being built for an elephant so that she can feel more at home is beautifully absurd. They are a scenography that allows the public to imagine a fiction of animals living in human built environments from their home countries, but paradoxically the real power of these replicas is that they highlight the fact that the animals were plucked from varying countries for exhibition.5

5 In 2014, a Buenos Aires Court ruled that Sandra, a 29-year-old Sumatran orangutan living in the Zoológico de Buenos Aires, had enough cognitive functions that she should not be treated as an object. She was granted non-human animal rights allowing her to be liberated from the enclosure. In 2016, the zoo was shut down with the promise that the animals would be transferred to alternative sanctuaries and reserves. After three years, in November 2019 Sandra was transferred to a sanctuary, Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Florida. 'La orangutana “Sandra,” una vez más sujeto de derecho no humano' iJudicial, last modified 28 December 2016, http://www.ijudicial.gob.ar/2016/la-orangutana-sandra-una-vez-mas-sujeto-de-derecho-no-humano/.


Family Photograph at Zoológico de Buenos Aires, 1997.


Tom works as a technician building displays at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London. In the staff canteen, he had overheard a colleague of his, Nigel Bamforth, discussing a cabinet filled with ivory in the furniture conservation lab. Nigel had previously worked in the fashion industry, with a subsequent twenty-two years and four months heading the furniture conservation department at the V&A. I visited Nigel in April of 2016 when he showed me the cabinet filled with ivory, which he explained was used for furniture and artefact conservation, primarily to replace broken parts. He said that the material had been donated by customs.

I was curious whether the use of confiscated ivory in artefact conservation and restoration occurred in other national museums. I contacted Anna Bülow, then Head of Conservation at the British Museum. Her response was that ‘no Western trained conservator would use plant or animal material [unprocessed organic material such as ivory] for object conservation, as it is neither ethical nor useful to do.’6

I visited Nigel again in March 2017 with Bülow’s ethical standards in mind. I asked him why alternative materials were not used instead. He answered ‘we have the material [ivory] available to us so it would be rather pointless.’ Alternatives that exist for ivory include celluloid, and the Jarina seed (also known as ‘vegetable ivory’), a dried endosperm of the seed of Phytelephas from the Amazon.7

6 Anna Bülow, email to author, 8 March, 2017.7 Yinghao Chu, Marc A. Mayers, et al, 'A Sustainable Substitute for Ivory: The Jarina Seed from the Amazon,' Scientific Reports 5, Article number: 14387 (24 September 2015).


Jarina Seed donated to NHM from author. Photograph by Thierry Bal, 2019.


In 1997, European Commission Council Regulation 338/97 was passed, making it illegal to trade any ‘worked’8 ivory acquired later than 3 March 1947. After much criticism and significant appeals aimed to create a total ban, the United Kingdom government published the Ivory Bill in May 2018, indicating a total ban on ivory sales, with some exceptions including ‘allowing the continued sale of ivory to museums, and between museums.’9 There is no specific reference in this bill or in any previous regulation about the donation or sale of confiscated ivory from HM Customs and Excise to museums.

Nigel mentioned the bureaucracy of loaning objects or artefacts overseas which include materials of endangered species. The process includes completing a Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) form – having to name the species, where the animal came from, the previous owner of the piece, and when it was made. In theory, any addition of contemporary ivory would be documented by the conservator in the museum’s treatment records.

We spoke briefly about the burning of ivory as a symbol of the material’s non-value, which was in the news at the time – the fact that it takes seven days at a thousand degrees Celsius to burn ivory.10 He showed me the process of sawing the ivory and mentioned the terrible smell, likening it to the smell of getting a filling at the dentist.

I am dubious about whether burning is the solution to the ivory trade, especially since the process produces an incredible amount of carbon dioxide and harmful toxins.11 I am also sceptical that this recycling of the material by Western museums reinforces the deathly cycle. What I do argue is that the acquisition or donation of confiscated materials from African and Asian countries is a continuation of the historical role that museums play in colonization.

8 ‘Worked specimens’ specifies those that are significantly altered from their natural raw state, for example jewellery, adornment, art, utility or musical instruments. 9 ‘In line with EU guidance, the UK’s policy is not to issue documents authorising the sale of, or other commercial trade in, raw African elephant ivory of any age. Although the Ivory Bill does not expressly prohibit commercial activities in respect of raw African ivory, the Bill will have the effect of putting this policy on a legislative footing.’ Elena Ares and Alison Pratt “The Ivory Bill,” House of Commons Library, (28 June 2018): Briefing Paper Number 7875.10 Damien Zane, “Kenya’s ivory inferno: Does burning elephant tusks destroy them?,” last modified 29 April 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-34313745.11 Ben Panko, “Wondering what a bonfire does to your lungs?,” last modified 16 December 2016, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/wondering-what-bonfire-does-your-lungs-we-answer-your-burning-ques tions-180961493/.


Nigel Bamforth and cabinet in the Furniture Conservation department at V&A. Film still, 2019.


Ivory is only a fragment of what is available for Nigel to use in conserving furniture at the V&A. The cabinet also includes bones, turtle shell, rhino horn, ebony, mother of pearl, as well as the ivory – from elephants, narwhal, and mammoth. The ivory pieces exist in their raw, uncut form but also ‘worked’ into ‘tourist art’12 with images of elephants and faces with diverse African features. Nigel’s consciousness towards elephant endangerment comes to the forefront when interacting with these carved works, saying ‘how horrible it is that they slaughter the poor sods for something so diabolical, these rubbish, hideous carvings – not even 18th century beautiful carvings like before.’

The furniture which Nigel is conserving, as well as other objects in museum collections across the world, are imbued with a certain privilege. Not only is the object ‘saved’, but its history – the culture it emulates or represents – is conserved, even if it was not its makers’ intent.13

12 ‘Tourist art’ being carvings made by locals or natives for selling to tourists. ‘Other collectable – mass-produced commo dities, 'tourist art', curios, and so on – have been less systematically valued; at best they find a place in exhibits of “technology” or “folklore”.’ Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 222.13 When interviewed about the disintegrating Tacoma Totem Pole and whether it should be preserved or not, artist and member of the Puyallup Tribe, Shaun Peterson, or Qwalsius, said ‘In those territories, it’s sort of understood that poles have a life span. They’re left to return to the earth and the idea is to replace them.’ ‘Historic Tacoma Totem Pole in Danger of Falling,’ Seattle Times, last modified May 2, 2013, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/historic-tacoma-totem-pole-in-danger-of-falling/.


Nigel Bamforth holding tortoise shells, 2018.


While in Belem, State of Pará, Brazil at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, I came across the practice of replicas as a form of conservation.

An hour north of Belem, in the district of Icoaraci, most inhabitants have worked as ceramicists for centuries. In the 1990’s there was an upsurge of ceramic making after they had come across photographs of ceramics from both the local Marajó Island and European pottery.14 The photographs usually only showed one side of the object and did not include measurements; therefore, the ceramic copies were representative of one angle, but not the whole. In May 2017, archaeologists Helena Lima and Cristiana Barreto started a program at the museum that invited ceramicists from Icoaraci into the archive to select works to replicate. They produced two reproductions, one was for the museum for educational purposes and the other was kept by the ceramicists so they could sell them as accurate, more costly replicas.

When the replica artist or conservator is in close proximity, interacting with the object they are copying, they enter a process of embodiment – becoming, for that moment, a manifestation of the original artist. In the case of book binding conservators, not only do they have to be trained as conservators but also as book binders themselves.

Plaster is the standard material used for producing museum replicas with the technique of casting that allows the replicas to be economical and easily reproducible. By using the original, higher quality, more costly material of (in this case) clay, and by making each object individually, by eye, these replicas are closer to the original, both in the process of making and in their materiality.

14 Pereira, Edithe, 'The Geoldi Museum and Archaeological Research: An Overview of the Past Seventeen Years (1991-2008),' Bol. Mus. Para. Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas, Belém, v.4, n. 1, p.171-190, (Jan.- Abr. 2009).


Anisio Artesanato Ceramicists sculpting replicas at Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Film still, 2019.

Luís at Anisio Artesanato, Paracuri, Icoaraci. Film still, 2019.


Another example of the conservator embodying the artist is through the writing of technical papers. At Harvard Art Museum's Straus Centre for Conservation and Technical Studies, conservators scrutinize an object by both looking with different technologies and physically mimicking the material process to understand how the artist created the work. From this they write highly detailed reports outlining their research and their conclusions on how to best conserve the object. For instance, the conservator describes what part of the finger was used by the artist to build the clay away or towards them.15

Nineteenth-century French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-Le-Duc, who had radical views on conservation, believed that restoration was imitation. He saw restoration as a practice that would ‘reestablish it [an edifice] in a finished state, which may in fact never have actually existed at any given time.’ When undergoing the process of restoration, he believed that ‘the best thing to do is to try and put oneself in the place of the original architect and try to imagine what he would do if he returned to earth and was handed the same kind of programs as have been given to us. Now, that sort of proceeding requires that the restorer be in possession of all the same resources as the original master – and that he proceeds as the original master did.’16

This point of view today is mostly seen as outdated. Although conservators do not take on such invasive approaches – any changes they make to an object should be reversible – there is still an embodiment process that takes place: in the case of Viollet-Le-Duc, the conservator entered an imagined space and re-created it. Today, conservators are in an existing space where they embody the artist through what is in front of them, both materially and historically.

15 Anthony B. Sigel, 'The Clay Modelling Techniques of Gian Lorenzo Bernini,' Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin - VOL. VI, NO. 3, (Spring 1999).16 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-Le-Duc, “Restoration” in Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage ed Nicholas Stanley Price, M. Kirby Tally Jr., Alessandra Melucco Vaccaro, (The Getty Conservation Institute Los Angeles, 1996), 314.


Anisio Artesanato Ceramicists sculpting replicas at Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Film still, 2019.

Erêndira Oliveira wrapping urn in cling film at MAE. Film still, 2019.


At the Museo de Archeologia e Ethnogrpahia (MAE) in São Paulo archaeologist Erêndira Oliveira studies diverse patterns of Amazonian funerary urns by physically tracing the markings. Wearing latex gloves to protect the ceramic from her fingertips, she carefully wraps several layers of cling film around an urn to delicately trace the details. She then lays out the cling film and, together with precise measurements she has taken from the urn, she draws them out. She has chosen to use her hands, cling film, and measuring tape as tools to learn, rather than more advanced technologies. From conversations with her, it is clear that it is integral for her to feel a spiritual closeness to the artist or maker when she is working with such a powerful object, which once held human remains. Here, again, Erêndira is embodying the artist. Although she is not a conservator, the work of an archaeologist undergoing these practices could be seen as forming part of the highly collaborative and interdisciplinary process of conservation.


Erêndira Oliveira’s diagrams at MAE, 2017.


Non-human agents also play an important collaborative role in conserving archaeological artefacts, including the worm. Charles Darwin notes that ‘archaeologists are probably not aware how much they owe to worms for the preservation of many ancient objects. Archaeology is still a subject that is actually carried out in the realm of earthworms. Their burrows and galleries form and reform the matrix surrounding the harder materials from which we deduce whole cultures.’17

Usually, conversations and collaborations between conservator, art historian, and scientist are the first stage in deciding what, if anything, should be done to the object. If relevant, archaeologists and curators are also involved. Recently, there has been an introduction of non-human agents, such as bacteria, as participants in the collaborative process of conserving.

Typically understood as ‘playing a role in the biodeterioration process’ of natural-history specimens, conservator Lorraine Cornish and her team at the Natural History Museum, London carefully and rigorously cleaned away the dust from a blue whale skeleton that had accumulated while being housed in the mammal section since the 1930s, before being moved into a new exhibition space in the main museum entrance, Hinzey Hall. Whale bones accumulate dust more than other specimens due to the fact that they continue emitting oil in their exhibited state. Samples of the structure and composition of the dust were taken, as well as DNA extraction and sequencing to ‘help identify which microbial species had been living on the specimen, and their relative abundance.’18 Although the final decision was taken to rid the skeleton entirely of dust, there was some hesitation at the beginning as there may have been some positive aspects to it being there: the dust particles may have been holding cracked parts of the bone together.

In recent studies, microbiologist Giancarlo Caligaris, argues that particular kinds of microbes can be used to repair objects of cultural heritage in a process called ‘biorestoration.’19 In the case of Lina Arpesani’s 1921 funerary monument Neera, microbiologists used bacteria to remove a sulphate-based black crust caused by pollution to reveal the original marble. They applied the bacterium Desulfovibrio that has the ability to discriminate between materials.20

This multispecies collaboration could be an interesting method to introduce to ethnographic museums. For Indigenous communities who chose to allow their ancestral subjects to live within museums, this multispecies collaboration could be a progressive move towards museums working with subjects21 that have been made with the intent of interacting with living organisms.22

Both humans and non-humans conserve, either through unconscious, subconscious, or conscious necessity. Time is integral to this process – embodying the past and collaborating to secure a future.

17 Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould: Through the Action of Worms with Obervation on their Habitats Mould (John Murray, 1904), Chapter IV.18 Arianna Lea Bernucci, Lorraine Cornish, Chery Lynn, “A modern approach to dismantling and redisplaying a historic blue whale skeleton” ICOM-CC 18th Triennial Conference, Natural History Collections, (2017).19 Grace Kim, “Putting Microbes to Work: Using Biotechnology to Restore Architecture & Art in Italy” Thresholds, 44 (March 8 2016): 171 - 181.20 Kim, 171 - 181.21 ‘Should we even be referring to them as “objects” – many Indigenous people reject this term as itself enacting an unlimited Western dualism. Instead referring to treasured items as “subjects”, “beings”, “belongings”, “medicine”, “ancestors” or forgoing European language.’ Aaron Glass at Symposium “Conserving Active Matter” at Bard Graduate Centre, https://www.bgc.bard.edu/events/755/27-nov-2017-symposium-conserving.22 “Historic Tacoma Totem Pole In Danger of Falling”, Seattle Times, last modified May 2, 2013, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/historic-tacoma-totem-pole-in-danger-of-falling/.


Conservator instructing public on how to clean a bottlenose whale skeleton, Grant Museum. Film still, 2019


Argentine-British artist filmmaker, Jessica Sarah Rinland’s work has been screened and exhibited internationally at galleries, film festivals and museums, winning awards such as Special Mention at Locarno Film Festival and Best Film at DocumentaMadrid (Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another, 2019), Primer Premio at Bienale de Imagen en Movimiento (Black Pond, 2018), Arts + Science Award at Ann Arbor Film Festival, and M.I.T’s Schnitzer prize for excellence in the arts (2017). Residencies include Film Studies Center at Harvard University, Somerset House Studios, Flaherty Seminar Fellow, MacDowell and Ikusmira Berriak. She holds a BA (Honors) in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London and a MSc in Arts, Culture and Technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. www.jessicarinland.com

OAR Issue 4 / MAY 2021 Immobilisation 111

Immobilisation

Johann Arens

To cite this contribution: Arens, Johann. ‘Immobilisation.’ OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform Issue 4 (2021): 111–112, http://www.oarplatform.com/immobilisation/.

Adopting the format of a durational unboxing video this work is filmed with the shipping specialists of Pack&Send featuring their packaging method Foam-In-Place. These foam moulds, used to create customised cradles for fragile objects in transit, are made bespoke for a series of new sculptures. The same method is applied in a medical context for patient immobilisation during a CT scan. Accordingly, the packed objects are sculptures derived from anthropomorphic training phantoms; medical dummies used to prepare for radiography and CT scanning.

CREDITSGeorgi Markov and Daniele Savi from Pack & Send Elephant & Castle, Yasser Elmoussa from Bay Root and Johann Arens

WITH SUPPORT OFCharlie Mills, Diana Córdoba Barrios, Hannah Barry, Tom Kelly, Bold Tendencies, Graeme Rhodes, Ruby Hoette, Nina Wakeford, Oxford Artistic & Practice Based Research and the Mondriaan Fund.

Johann Arens, video still from Immobilisation, 10’35 min, 2018. Available at: http://www.oarplatform.com/immobilisation/.

OAR Issue 4 / MAY 2021 Immobilisation 112

Johann Arens uses installation and video to survey the documentary properties of public interiors and their inherent social textures. These site-related interventions are enquiries into the multiple ways novel technologies impact our communal life and shape civil behaviour. He has been resident at Fondazione Antonio Ratti, British School at Rome, Space London, Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and realised a number of public art commissions assigned by Arnolfini Bristol, Bold Tendencies London, Jerwood Space London and Kettle’s Yard Cambridge. Recent work has been shown at Manifesta13 Marseille (2020); Pump House Gallery London (2019); IMMA Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin; P/////AKT Amsterdam, IFFR Rotterdam (2018) and Neuer Aachener Kunstverein (2016).

OAR Issue 4 / MAY 2021 Collaborating with a stick – Algernon Schtick Meets Nina Bambina 113

Collaborating with a stick – Algernon Schtick Meets Nina Bambina

Mihai Florea

To cite this contribution:Florea, Mihai. ‘Collaborating with a stick – Algernon Schtick Meets Nina Bambina.’ OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform Issue 4 (2021): 113–120, http://www.oarplatform.com/ collaborating-stick-algernon-schtick-meets-nina-bambina/.

Always a loner, shy ever since childhood and downright catatonic when it came to making friends – that is me! A non-British postgraduate researcher, I am now very close to finishing a part-time PhD in Theatre Studies at the Theatre Department, University of Bristol. Throughout a period of six years, the idea of collaboration – whether in the form of offering my written work to a fellow researcher for review or engaging in more in-depth academic cooperation – proved a daunting task. Sharing the office space offered to postgraduates by the Department, exchanging ideas, going through the usual conversations about teaching or conferences, meeting academics in the Department, allowing intersections of thought in the usual empathetic and cooperative way – all these have been difficult for me, even if they are expected to naturally occur in any academic setting.

How then can a researcher with my socio-psychological profile resolve collaboration? Can my capricious inclination to solitude and isolation add any value to the concept of collaboration in an academic context?

My answer, explored in this paper, is the rather silly idea of a collaboration with a stick. The broader context for this peculiar idea is a project titled Algernon Schtick Meets Nina Bambina, a video work based on Konstantin Treplieff and Nina Zarechnaya – two of the main characters in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. The video work also draws inspiration from The Man Whom the Trees Loved, a story written by British author Algernon Blackwood, first published in 1912. Within my video project, I have constructed the character Algernon Schtick as an alter ego in which to divest personal feelings of anxiety, awkwardness, stubbornness (frustration even) but also the rather bewildering sense of relief when realizing that I am unable to engender collaborations with my fellow postgraduate researchers. I grafted a character from Chekhov’s famous play onto a character from a less-known British story, in order to obtain a fictional vehicle with which I set out to search for an elusive, ideal human collaborator called Nina Bambina. I should note that the reluctance and difficulty in collaborating with others was never due to the fact that I felt unwelcomed in the Theatre Department: the choice of collaborating with a stick was a purely personal matter.


WHO IS ALGERNON SCHTICK?

Who are Chekhov’s Konstantin and Nina and why Algernon? I was keen to construct a suitable alter ego for the loner-researcher that I was, and therefore imagined a triangulation between one of Chekhov’s protagonists, Blackwood’s first name and my longstanding passion for sticks. Konstantin is an apparently childish and self-defeating writer-in-the-making, rather late in the search for his true artistic voice. His self-deprecating, semi-hysterical and odd interventions – during tense scenes with his mother, a famous actress, and with the mother’s lover, a popular writer – bring a special, odd note of cynical estrangement and torment to Chekhov’s play. In Act Four of The Seagull, Konstantin, now a disappointed, unfulfilled writer and twice betrayed lover pathetically confesses to his former muse Nina Zarechnaya (just before taking his own life):

You’ve found your way and you know where you’re going, but I’m still drifting through a maze of dreams and images, with no idea what use it might be. I have no faith and I don’t know what my vocation is.1

In constructing Algernon Schtick, I felt that I resonated with Konstantin’s painful sense of drifting, made so markedly evident in the second (and final) failed amorous encounter with the elusive Nina, in the last act of the play. To underline Algernon Schtick’s difficulty in finding a suitable human collaborator, I have invented the name Nina Bambina: a sarcastic, bitter reference to Nina Zarechnaya’s own elusiveness and fleeting presence (in the play, she often declares that she feels homeless, like a seagull).

Algernon Schtick – the ironic, capricious yet sad look of the lonely researcher.


I borrowed Chekhov’s unforgivingly ironic, cold eyes (a theatre critic famously noted that Chekhov was colder than the devil himself) and used them to look back at myself, to make sense of my own difficulties in establishing connections. Intoxicated (another side effect of my anxiety towards humans perhaps?) by the possibility of actually being a complete failure at collaboration (just like Konstantin), I chose to push the self-irony further and state: ‘I will never be able to collaborate with a fellow human.’ Thus, instantaneously, I pictured myself as a child, holding a stick, talking to it, talking through it, moving with it, allowing myself to be led by it. Ever since I can remember, the stick has been my most faithful companion and collaborator.

At this point, it is necessary to detail the connection between my video project and Algernon Blackwood’s story The Man Whom the Trees Loved. In Blackwood’s story, Mr Bittacy – the main character – festers a true obsession for the trees growing at the back of his house. Gradually, and to his wife’s complete horror, Mr Bittancy becomes the victim of the ‘pull of a forest [which] can be tremendous and utterly overwhelming.’2 By the end of the story, Mr. Bittacy’s soul will have been totally absorbed ‘into the immersive whirlpool of [the] vast dreaming life’3 of the forest, unable to withstand the trees’ call. Mr. Bittacy muses that the trees display:

‘awareness’ of your personality and presence involves the idea of winning you - across the border - into themselves - into their world of living. [...] taking you over.4

Behind Mr. Bittacy’s rather dubious mysticism towards the world of trees, I have identified the convincing, albeit strange instinct (or nostalgia?) to extinguish oneself, to allow oneself to be swallowed by the mass of trees, to drift into another regnum, to disappear. The element that attracted my attention in the story was the main character’s gradual and irremediable slide towards a non-human world. His semi-conscious surrender to the power of the trees rhymed – in a different key – with Konstantin’s drift through his own maze of dreams and

Nina Bambina: the human collaborator that never was — herself lost amongst branches, trees, sticks, forests.


images, that pre-empted his final slip into non-being. I considered that Mr. Bittacy’s peculiar shift towards the multi-faceted, non-human spirit of the forest could cohabit fruitfully with Konstantin’s failed attempts to establish successful connections/love with other humans. By creating a link between Chekhov and Blackwood’s characters, I sought to somehow sweeten Chekhov’s implacable irony with respect to Konstantin. Mr Bittancy’s absorption into the vegetal world appears somehow more benign and rather comical, and I thought that such a lighter tone would be suitable to reflect on my own drifting away from humans.

Inevitably, there is an immediate association that can be made between the stick and the trees/the forest that feature in Algernon Blackwood’s story. I will analyse this association later on. At this point, it is important to note that the image of the tree/the forest mainly interested me not in its possible association with the stick but as the final destination of a drift which is always anchored in a will to leave one’s species and regnum behind. The association should not be read ontologically, where the stick is ‘dead’ and the forest (seen as a producer of sticks) is alive. Rather, the forest is just a destination (the destination could have very well been an industrial park, for instance, had Mr Bittancy been sucked in by concrete walls and machines) and the stick is a pointer and a carrier of the human towards that destination. The stick as the collaborator of a human is not expected to ‘act alive’ at any point; it does not become human-like. The stick serves Algernon Schtick simply as an activator of drift and as a kind of guiding accessory in a drifting movement.

DRIFTING A-BRANCH

The stick teases a leap into infancy and childhood, when many of us used to play or improvise with sticks, teddy bears and other such objects. As infants, many of us were able to rehearse with such inanimate objects various types of affective investments: fending off anxiety or fear, exercising love and protection, etc. The phenomenon is very well theorized in child psychology, where teddy bears, sticks, pillows, heavy blankets, etc. are known as transitional objects. The concept was coined by British psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott and designates a material object which attains a particular value for an infant, allowing him/her a shift from the relationship with the mother to relationships with real objects:

The transitional object and transitional phenomena may be conceived in three ways: as typifying a phase in the child’s normal emotional development; as a defense against separation anxiety; and, lastly, as a neutral sphere in which experience is not challenged – an area of play and illusion.5

I shall refer to all these ‘three ways’ but dwell more on the last quality of the transitional object: that of allowing the creation of a neutral sphere for play and illusion, in my case, for drifting. In this context, it is important to note that the practice of investing affection into a transitional object stretches beyond the realm of human infancy. Biologists Sonya Kahlenberg and Richard Wrangham, who have spent fourteen years observing wild chimpanzees in Uganda, noticed that the primates were often playing with sticks. The researchers generically called such activities ‘stick-carrying’:

The juveniles carried pieces of bark, small logs or woody vine, with their hand or mouth, underarm or, most commonly, tucked between the abdomen and thigh.


Individuals carried sticks for periods of one minute to more than four hours during which they rested, walked, climbed, slept and fed as usual.6

It would be reasonable therefore to assume that Algernon Schtick’s collaboration with a stick indicates an intention to drift towards an idyllic (maternal) beginning in which he used to feel supremely sheltered and happy: an anxiety-free time. In this context, the similitudes with the animal regnum (the chimpanzees) is poignant: it enforces the idea of a drift in reverse from the human towards the vegetal, through the animal towards an elusive (ideal?) realm of an idyllic, safe beginning. In a somewhat similar key, Friederich Nietzsche talks about the urge to attain the un-philosophical, de-specialized perspective of the happy cow. When Algernon Schtick holds his stick, he too searches for a careless, inattentive, silent, detached (and perhaps equally aimless) vocabulary of mythical happiness and comfort:

Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see; for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying their happiness – what they have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yet he cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal…7

Collaborating with a stick is not entirely different from contemplating the ‘happy cow’ in this context: there is something similar in walking with a stick and the endless chewing of the cow - perhaps that sense of rumination without direction, an abandonment to the forces of idle drift. Perhaps it would have been interesting to experiment with collaborating with a cow but that would have been, as anyone can imagine, rather difficult to organise. The stick, on the other hand, enables and conducts a sharper drift, by skipping the animal/living stage: lifeless, the stick allows the energy of the carrier to flow through it.

From another perspective, it could be inferred that Algernon’s relationship with the stick functions in a similar manner to that of a computer programmer who ‘speaks’ to a rubber duck, searching for mistakes in the programming codes that he/she has created (it appears that explaining a programming code out loud, ‘line by line,’ to a rubber duck is very helpful in identifying potential flaws in that code).8 In such a case, the inanimate object helps to focus the mind, replacing the human interlocutor. The programmer, aided by the rubber duck, is filtering through his/her thought in search for mistakes, enabling some controlled and muted projection outward, of a kind that loops back in.

For Algernon Schtick, however, holding and walking with the stick or touching its tip to the walls and floors of the Theatre Department signifies something more than just seeking comfort, re-arranging the line of thought or rehearsing anxiety-free neutral spheres. Gaston Bachelard – in his theory of shells – makes a very interesting remark: ‘Motionless, mute things never forget: melancholy and despised as they are, we confide in them that which is humblest and least suspected in the depths of ourselves.’9 For Algernon, the stick points towards that distant depth within oneself, a region that is as inaccessible and unintelligible as the forest that Mr Bittancy gets sucked into and as mysterious as the maze of loveless images and dreams in which Konstantin gets definitively lost. The stick is the implement with which Algernon Schtick circumvents potential human collaborations: a tool which points away from his fellow humans


and towards a forest that we all (as there is a Mr Bittancy in all of us) feel drawn by. We must all become the ‘sensitive inhabitants of the forests of ourselves’10 the stick seems to remind us. The stick is therefore a providential prosthetic: an absolutely indispensable intermediary acting as a material bridge to our personal depths, auguring for a withdrawal from one’s regnum. Returning to the aforementioned association between a dead stick and living tree/forest, it now becomes much clearer how the inanimate ‘dead’ stick does not need to act alive (not even metaphorically, seen as the former part of a living tree), but points or draws towards the tree, towards the forest in ourselves, which is evidently not an actual tree/forest but the metaphor of one’s departure from one’s humanness. There is an expression in Romanian – ‘a umbla creanga’ – which in a literal translation would read: ‘to drift (like) a branch’. The expression means wandering apparently aimlessly, following an itinerary in which you allow yourself no deliberate input and which is dictated by a mysterious draw towards something that is not (yet) known to you. The Romanian expression also denotes a sort of doing nothing, an idle, unprofitable sort of wandering.

In this spirit, the stick is also more than a mutable, stand-in object: it becomes an instrument that leads and points to unexpected directions, tempting/carrying its carrier adrift or a-branch. Algernon Schtick walks through the Theatre Department, touches and scrutinizes it with the tip of the stick, led by the latter and complying with the draw of the inner forest, as the symbol of a much sought-after a-worldly non-humanness. Here lies the truly important connection between the ‘dead’ stick and the living branch/tree/forest: the stick encapsulates (like a fossil, or a seed) the frozen movements belonging to what was once a living branch. Gaston Bachelard notes:

A Jesuit priest […] once asserted that on the coast of Sicily ‘’the shell-fish, after being ground to powder, come to life again and start reproducing, if this powder is sprinkled with salt water.’’ 11

In the same way, when used in drifting (a mechanical procedure similar to that of shell-fish being ground to powder), the (now fossilized) movements of the former branch find a new life, animated by the stick holder. The stick’s function – by comparison to that of the former branch – now moves onto a different plane. This former (dry) branch now has to rely on the energy of the human carrier – the human who in turn it ends up carrying. Moved by the human and moving the human, it touches across the corridors and rooms of the Theatre Department invoking the motionless, stubborn isolation and taciturn-ness of the non-human depths of the forest of ourselves. The stick does not become alive but acts as a facilitator/intermediary for the walking adrift towards a realm of muteness, stillness and non-humanness, following the fossilized patterns of random, convoluted movement of the former branch.

POSSIBLE EFFECTS

My initial question was: Can my capricious inclination to solitude and isolation add any value to the concept of collaboration in an academic context? Algernon Schtick is a Nietzschean human contemplating escapes into non-human vocabularies of collaboration: he walks around the Theatre Department with a stick in hand as a gesture


of active absence, reversal and forgetting. Does this walking with a stick along corridors trouble the human co-habitation/collaboration arrangements of those working in the Theatre Department? Does that ‘mad’ researcher carrying a stick spoil the collaborative arrangements as they are provided by the Theatre Department? The stick that points to the forest of oneself may – in an eccentric manner – reveal the sometimes constricting nature of human-with-human collaboration, may unveil entrapments of thought, limitations of possibilities for new, less routine approaches to research. Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk advances a daring indictment of universities as ‘institutions [that] are strongly self-referential, fully critique resistant, and barely reformable.’12 As Algernon Schtick, I find – I think – a milder, more humorous way of commenting on possible blockages in the ecologies of collaboration as they are engendered in academia. Watching Algernon wandering through the Theatre Department led by a stick, some may ask themselves: why don’t we grab our supervisors’ hands and lead them into the forests of ourselves, for some unusual supervisory meetings? Wouldn’t new ideas, new vocabularies and new ecologies of knowledge and collaboration emerge as such? Wouldn’t blockages of the kind that Sloterdijk mentions wane?

These effects should all be taken into consideration but from my point of view, they are only secondary. When Algernon Schtick points towards the forest of oneself, towards another (non-human, a-worldly, vegetal even) side of oneself, it allows what is human in the researcher to recede, to become more and more absent. The stick teaches me the value of wanting to disappear, to push myself – as much as possible – to ‘become imperceptible’, in philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s words, to:

enter into a state of movement that eludes any perception (whether actual, photographic or cinematic), such that perception is no longer centred around subjects, but the duration and passages between them.13

Algernon’s stick pointing towards the Theatre Department.


The stick points towards a sarcastic absence-through-presence, an ironic turning of the back, a fumbling and idle drifting, like a branch which abandons itself to the whims of the wind, laughing.

Having a stick as collaborator teaches me – researcher turned Algernon Schtick – to look at my research (and the confines of my existence as a researcher) in boundlessness. Algernon Schtick travels out of the postgraduate office, the Department and the University and out of the customs of collaboration that define them: he travels towards an inner forest, to encounter forgetting and mindlessness, guided by his inanimate stick, who offers transition from one world to the other, from one regnum to the other, from perceptibility to imperceptibility. In its strange, gnarled form, the stick signifies this boundlessness, giving its human collaborator some temporary (or perhaps even permanent, who can tell?) access to forms of accidental, drifting thought and absence in presence.

The final reward of collaborating with a stick is therefore a totally new fantasy: to drift (or grow, or disappear) unrestricted, free, with a voice unbound. To maintain the absolute privilege and right of being an outsider. Is this achievable? For people who are determined to disappear (like Mr Bittancy and Konstantin) or become imperceptible (like me, in my search for Nina Bambina) it should indeed be possible! Is this valuable? I argue that any kind of inclination to escape from a/the current state of affairs is inherently valuable.

1 Anton Chekhov, The Seagull, Christopher Hampton (trans.) (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 80.2 Algernon Blackwood, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved,' in Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural (London: Spring Books, 1964), 93.3 Blackwood, ‘The Man Whom,’ 92.4 Blackwood, ‘The Man Whom,’ 102.5 ‘Transitional object,’ Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures- and-press-releases/transitional-object 6 Sonya Kahlenberg and Richard Wrangham, ‘Sex Differences in Chimpanzees’ Use of Sticks as play objects resembles those of Children’ Current Biology 20/24 (2010): R 10687 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, R. J. Hollingdale (trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 60.8 Joe Mayberry, ‘How a Rubber Duck Taught Me to Be a Better Programmer,’ WSOLBlog (blog), September 15, 2014, https://blog.wsol.com/how-a-rubber-duck-taught-me-to-be-a-better-programmer9 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Maria Jolas (trans.) (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1994), 143.10 Jules Supervielle, La Fable du Monde suivi de Oublieuse mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 54.11 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Maria Jolas (trans.) (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1994), 115.12 Peter Sloterdijk and Hans- Jürgen Heinrichs, Neither Sun nor Death, Steve Corcoran (trans.) (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), 63. 13 Eugene B. Young, Gary Genosko, Janell Watson and Gregg Lambert, The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary (London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 40.

Mihai Florea is a professional actor and a part-time teacher and researcher in Theatre Studies at the University of Bristol. He is recipient of a Duignan bursary for a PhD thesis titled ‘Actor in a Second Language’. He has presented academic papers at a number of universities in the UK, Finland and Lithuania. He is an Associate Member of the Brokering Intercultural Exchange group, a global network of academics and cultural managers, and a co-founder of Nu Nu, a theatre company that supports professional actors who use English as a second (non-native) language. He also established and coordinates CASL (Centre for Actors in a Second Language), an online research tool dedicated to the theme of second language acting.

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Cover – Tennant Creek Brio 'Artist Studio' (2020)

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