Research Blurb V1

In a state of liminality, however brief, the past is momentarily suspended and the future has not yet begun. Dislocation of established structures, reversal of hierarchies and uncertainty regarding continuity of tradition and future outcomes, the liminal can also become permanent. When are things or matter suspended? What forms of governance appear between two desired end states? What is the mode of suspension? Grounding itself in three instances, this research explores how can one make a positive act of inbetween - a mode for suspension.

 

CASE 3: Bridging the GAP

The Southeastern Anatolian Project (GAP), Turkey's ambitious, 12-phase hydropower initiative, has been in the works since the late 1960s. Its completion will, its planners hope, provide Turkey with necessary energy and water resources. Stressing how political and economic policies are interrelated, Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan said on July 15, 2008 that economic goals were as important as political objectives. According to an official in Iraq's Water Resources Ministry, when Ilisu Dam, a critical component of GAP, is completed, it will reduce the Tigris River waters by 47 per cent a year. Up to 78,000 people, mainly Kurds, but also members of other ethnic origin (Armenian, Arab) and Turks, will be directly affected by the project in Turkey. Thousands more will be affected in the downstream neighbouring countries.

Disassembly-reassembly

Inspired by Fareed Armaly's ongoing project Shar(e)d Domains

“Archaeology begins with the shards. This is the most evident type of remain you will find excavated on an archeological site, because pottery was everywhere and broken everywhere.”

Archaeology begins with the shard and history obliges with an endless amount. As a museum science, archeology’s analysis of history operates with agreed-upon classifications. “Diagnostic shards” are collected as the more telltale rims, handles, bases, and parts with special features that identify the vessel. “Body shards” that seem featureless are deemed without meaning, unnecessary to archive.

[…]

My artwork begins through an archeological beginning: the shard. It matches the exhibition’s emphasis on history as a collection of fragments by operating through one - the Gaza amphora. Thus I commissioned a new ‘excavation’ of this amphora. A computer-assisted imaging process relieved the physical artifact of its surface appearance. Because nothing is “featureless” anymore in this resulting new shell of precise, depthless vectors of information coordinates, the distinction between body and diagnostic shards is suspended. This new artifact’s information from depthless vectors points to the exhibition’s unfinished center: the Gaza Archeological Museum.

[…]

The archeologists reassembling the Gaza-Geneva Amphora required montaging diagnostic and body shards, thus introducing one further element: the seam. This is the space between the original artifact as a construction and the event of its destruction. The seam functions as a chronicle of correspondences produced by the archeologist’s labor as they attempt to reconstitute the historical artifact in a present state.

In museological discourse the artifact serves as an expression of the contemporary routed through a historical condition. The vessel here is inversed, outlined, and suspended in a tenuos state of equilbrium that no longer contains but exposes. It reminds us that it is impossible to reconstruct history but only our current relation to the past as active discourse.

A Real Monument?

In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, monuments all over the country were being toppled and carted off. A very old technique - either worship or destroy. Each time it is history, the past that is being conveniently obliterated. Usually by the same people! In most cases not by the passionate crowds, but cool hand officials. Is there a third way, beyond the tendency to either worship or destroy? Can the monuments be saved through transformation?

Pragmatically each monument is made to be admired, contemplated, worshipped. In reality, however, monuments rarely become objects of genuine cult or admiration. In the urban landscape, the monuments virtually disappear from the field of vision by the obligatory placement of the object - slightly above the eye level, keeping at a distance and inaccessible. But one must keep in mind that monuments are usually constructed on the locations of the old, demolished monuments. Destruction affirms the power of the victor in the same way as the erection of the new monument. In some sense it becomes a memorial to external destruction. The monument is paradoxical - it creates the illusion of continuity, introduces consciousness; but then again it demands a forerunner. Could the time when the monument is detached from a pedestal in fact be historically more valuable than the monument itself? And even more. Isn't the pedestal also a monument, even if there is no figure on top? Doesn't the pedestal designate continuity and stability? It becomes a monument in itself as the statue is just a subject to the influence of time.

Monuments/ Defacement

"I am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require the expenditure of so much strength." (Franz Kafka, diary entry, 1914)

In Lenin in Ruins Mark Lewis quotes Robert Musil to the effect that we never pay much attention to monuments in our city as we pass them by. Quite possibly we don't notice them at all. Why then, we must as all the fuss that suddenly arises concerning monuments during and after the toppling of the regime? Toppling of course gives the game away as if the regime itself is a monument and, what is more, as if there exists a sort of death wish deep within the monument, something in the monumentality of the monument that cries out to be stopped, besmirched, desecrated - in a word, defaced. This is the law of the base at the heart of religion and things sacred. Like Flaubert's concept of the act of writing, to erect a statue is to take revenge on reality. And reality in turn exacts its due. Mark Lewis suggests that the lies, or repressed history, of the regime are installed in the statue as a hidden flaw, an invisible fault line awaiting the resurgence of the truth of the past; and it is this, he suggests, that accounts for the fury of defacement and the effervescent magical effect thereof that yields more. But this hopeful suggestion itself suffers, so it seems to me, from the same monumental faith in truth and history, not to mention in memory, that sustains the self-portrayal of the regime. It lacks the defacement quality necessary to any worthwhile theory of defacement. It fails to see the law of the base, the attraction no less than the repulsion of ruins, and the ecstasy therein. How charming, therefore, the contributions to the defacing art provided to the New Yorker by several artists asked in 1993 what to do with the monuments of the recently toppled USSR. One inverts the statues, burying the tops of the figures in the ground, leaving the base in the air, on which vegetables arch as cabbages and carrots are planted. Another artist suggests simply to take the base away, or at least that part of it on which the Worker and Peasant are about to place their feet, leaving them both magically suspended in the air, unsure of what the next step shall bring. One step forward… Of course these stirring examples of defacement are somewhat weakened by the fact that they only occur after the regime has, as we say, fallen, emerging from the vantage point of the security provided by another strong state. (from Michael Taussig, Defacement)

CASE 1: In a parallel world, in a parallel time-scale

In 2008 Slavoj Zizek wrote an article for Die Zeit, where he argued that during contemporary tests of international politics, instead of the superpowers (e.g. USA and Russia), only small nations (e.g. Georgia and Iraq) get wounded, as they are treated like mice in a laboratory. The same argument applies in much smaller scale and in minority groups. In that sense, the Estonian government’s decision to remove an two-meter-long sculpture from the city center in Tallinn in 2007 can be seen as a sort of declaration to the world that Estonia has left its Soviet past completely behind. As if the object’s mere physical presence in the city center could threaten the country’s independence. Yet it is never just about things, in this instance the public statue; it is about the collective memory they embody.

Recent years have witnessed intensified action on the memory front in the Russian-Baltic relations, be they debates over ‘occupation’ or ‘liberation’ in the context of border treaties; or controversies over WWII monuments in Estonia. Both the Baltic and Russia attempt to seek pan-European recognition of ‘Europeanness’ and their ‘self’, whilst denying of the other. Relative geographically peripheral position has created a case where both sides use the other as a negative reference point in order to veil its own sense of inferiority. The attempts to fix certain meanings of the past show that in fact these are substantially struggles over power. The control over the narratives of the past enables one to gain control over the construction of further narratives for an imagined future. In recent years Russia has expressed the view that some of its neighboring countries are trying to ‘re-write history’. But is it re-writing history or perhaps writing your own parallel histories?

To govern is to govern things?

“Government is the right disposition of things arranged so as to lead to a suitable end.” 

Guilaumme de la Perriere

If we look at what characterizes the objects on which power bears in Macchiavelli’s The Prince, we see that objects, the target of power is, on the one hand, a territory, on the other, its inhabitants. From the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century, sovereignty is not exercised on things, but first of all on a territory, and consequently on the subjects who inhabit it. In La Perrier’s text the definition of government does not refer to the territory in any way: one governs things. It is not a matter of an opposition of between things and men, but rather showing that government is not related to the territory, but to a sort of complex of men and things. The things government must be concerned about men in their relationships, bonds and complex involvements with things like wealth, resources, means of subsistence, and, of course, the territory with its borders, qualities, climate, dryness, fertility, and so on. “Things” are men in their relationships with things like customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking. Finally, they are men in their relationship with things like accidents, misfortunes, famine, epidemics, and death. So, to govern means to govern things. Government therefore has a purpose; it arranges things (for an end).  Government is defined as a right way of arranging things in order to lead them, not to the ‘common good’, but to a ‘suitable end. This implies, first of all, a plurality of ends. It is not a matter of imposing law on men, but the of the disposition of things, that is to say that, of employing laws as tactics; arranging things so that this or that end may be achieved through a certain number of means.

Zero degrees

"Zero degrees is the reference point where everything begins…
... and everything ends" (Akram Khan)

What is at play is ambivalence. Numeric quantities seem determinate but the infinite is brought into play because zero is simultaneously a benchmark and a transition in a series where opposites (beginnings/ endings) can meet. It signifies absence (or the arithmetical value of nothing which is not the same as a lack) but marks this with a presence, the 0 symbol itself. Does 0 designate a third space? Is it surrounded by emptiness? Flows? The piece is a formal and narrative exploration of the politics of border spaces as a metaphor for the transient nature of diasporic identity. In the programme notes, Khan explains that 'zero degrees' symbolises the rite of passage between life and death, belonging and non-belonging and most importantly identity and the lack of.

"We are functioning in a world fundamentally characterised by objects in motion. These…include ideas and ideologies, peoples and goods, images and messages, technologies and techniques. This is a world of flows." (Appadurai, 2001)

Know-how and No-How

Notes from: Know-how and No-How: stopgap notes on “method” in visual art as knowledge production by Sarat Maharaj (published in Art and Research, spring 2009)

“Visual Art as Knowledge Production” involves sundry epistemic engines and contraptions that we might broadly refer to as “Thinking Through the Visual”. What do such modes of knowing entail? Perhaps method is less about given, handed-down procedures than about approaches that have to be thrashed out, forged again and again on the spot, impromptu in the course of the art practice-research effort. Perhaps method is not so much readymade and received as “knocked together for the nonce” - something that has to be invented each time with each research endeavour.

Deleuze came to explore the sense of an unfolding flux between the “poles” in all its phases and variability through the notion of “any space whatever” - drawing on a series of examples from film. In his critique, “any space whatever” takes on the force of method: it embodies the concept of “singularity” that cuts across the poles of the universal and particular dissolving them. This notion seems to lie with Ferdinand Gonseth who had tussled with the “any space whatever” in mathematics, with rules that undergo change, with process and contingency. In the framework of a non-Aristotelian logic, Bachelard uses the term for an alternative tack to the Kantian principle of the “universal” - to bridge the gap between thinking.

It is not only about thinking by means of the visual, via its sticky thick as it were. It is about unpacking it, taking apart its components, scouring its operations. What I am trying to finger eventuates not so much in the well-trodden terrain of the academic disciplines or in the so-called gaps, chinks and cracks between them or in any designated “interdisciplinary/ transdisciplinary” belt. Rather it is a force in its own right, always incipient in “whatever” spaces where intimations of unknown elements, thinking probes, spasms of non-knowledge emerge and come into play. It is distinct from the circuits of know-how. It is the rather unpredictable surge and ebb of potentialities and propensities - the flux of no-how. The term is Samuel Beckett’s. No-how embodies indeterminacy, an “any space whatever” that brews up, spreads, inspissates.

If the research project was... #1

If the research project was a play, it would look at the modes of suspension by questioning the notions of overlay, synchronicity and the time in-between. The play would be in three parts. In the first part, the action is set ahead of the screened subtitles; in the second part these would be in sync, while in the third part titles would reveal what was about to happen on the stage. Subtitles would be the exact wording of the play, building up tension towards the third part. The stage would be screened off from the audience by a lightly reflective translucent net. The screen is used for projecting the titles, but it also creates a border between the actors and viewers. During the play one can never directly engage with the other. In that sense, the act is double-removed - in space, and in time...

The content of the play until now remains a question...

Out-of-Sync (exhibitions)

Laurie Anderson: "I usually watch TV in a rocking chair, and I have noticed as the chair moves, the image bends at the edges. A good solution is to put the TV in another rocking chair that is in sync, so that the image stabilises." A video composed for 2 violins that go in and out of phase, 1970s

The Globe shrinks (2010). A multi-channel video installation by Barbara Kruger that incorporates written and spoken text in an exploration of how we express and communicate, but also confront ourselves. Composed of 4 screens, each on the facing wall, the installation places the viewer in the middle of the storyline. The installation space becomes disturbingly intimate as one never knows which screen is turned on next. Thus the visitor finds itself in the middle of the conversation trying to face the person speaking, but ends up turning itself from right to left to back to front, unable to grasp the setting, and losing any control over the event and space. The seating for the audience is placed in-between the screens. Even though one might try to walk to the corner of the room to get a better view, it turns out to be unachievable.

Recapitulation

... reading Deleuze Cinema II

Quasi-emotion theory

Quasi-emotions differ from their actual counterparts both in their source (they are generated by beliefs about what is fictionally rather than actually true), and, typically, in their behavioral consequences. Views in the second subgroup maintain that when we engage with fiction, our emotional responses are directed not towards the characters or events within the imaginary context, but rather towards appropriate real-world surrogates for or counterparts of those characters and events. So, for example, we don't feel sadness for Romeo and Juliet, but rather for people in the actual world who have led relevantly similar lives. (Charlton 1984)

A second family of response rejects the Belief Condition, denying that the situations and characters to which subjects have emotional responses are situations and characters that they believe to be fictional or merely imaginary. Advocates of such confusionist or illusionist or belief-suspension views maintain that when we engage emotionally with fictional characters and situations, we temporarily cease to represent them as imaginary, instead representing them (as the result of some confusion, or an illusion, or a ‘suspension of disbelief’) to be real and mind-independent. Such views have few adherents among contemporary philosophers and are generally discussed only to be subsequently dismissed.

Giardini: A Fairytale

A visually sumptuous film of thirty minutes, Giardini comprises two projections set side-by-side, which steadily gather a series of evocative vignettes. Like McQueen’s past films, such as Caribs’ Leap / Western Deep (2002) and Gravesend (2007), Giardini denies clear links between representation and significance, between form and content – not to exclude reference but instead to allow the image’s potential meanings to crystallize, its facets reflecting numerous paths of fabulation.

Indeed, the film’s suspension of its images in a field of multiple possibilities defines its power: to release life from belonging to any certain code, clear narrative, or restrictive regimen, and to do so in the quintessential location of national order: the Giardini of the Venice Biennale. As its title indicates, the film is set in the famous exhibition grounds. These otherwise well-known monuments are shown here in an unexpected light, during the interim between biennales, in the down-time and during the nights, in the shadows of spectacle. The renowned gardens are thereby recast as a site where everything is suddenly up for grabs, seems unfamiliar and unpredictable, where life is shown to assume forms of creative survival that transcend the fanfare of the great exhibition. Giardini constructs a fictional world and does so with great care, although its stories are not necessarily impossible accounts of what might actually happen.

Multiverses

Parallel universes, also known as meta-universes or multiverses, are a group of theoretical twin universes that coexist at the same time as our own. Parallel universes are said to be simple variations of our reality, all running at the same time in different realities. Parallel universes are not uniquely confined to the science fiction realm anymore; philosophy, physics and even theology have theories about why multiverses exist and how they work. Parallel universes have often been used in fiction and TV programs as an explanation for strange phenomena. Quantum mechanics the science that looks for explanations to phenomena that cannot be explained by the regular laws of physics and science, has been studying parallel universes since 1956. American physicist Hugh Everett first formulated the idea of parallel universes to explain the theory that every possible outcome of every choice we have actually does happen. While in this universe you may choose path A, an alternate you will choose path B in a parallel universe. Where and how parallel universes exist is actually the most heated source of debate. Some say meta-universes exist close to us. So close, in fact, that ghosts may be nothing more than people from alternate universes somehow slipping into our reality. Others postulate that parallel universes are infinitely far, way beyond the farthest galaxies. A third theory is that parallel universes exist in different dimensions, either lower or higher than the four-dimension world we live in.

The liminal

Liminality, as developed by van Gennep (1960), refers to "in-between situations and conditions that are characterised by the dislocation of established structures, the reversal of hierarchies, and uncertainty regarding the continuity of tradition and future outcomes". The word liminal is derived from Latin "limen" (threshold), and simply means a situation in which, in order to facilitate a "passing through", ritually or temporarily, all limits are removed. As a consequence, the very structure of society is temporarily suspended. The primary meaning however is not simply a passage, but successful completion of a passage. It assumes particular ordering in which someone goes ahead, showing the way so that others could follow, "imitating" him.

Although the liminality concept was initially developed as a means to analyse the middle stage in ritual passage, it can be seen as events or situations that involve in dissolution of order but which are also formative of institutions and structures. But liminality is also a situation where almost anything can happen. This is why, in a rite, such openness is limited: any rite must follow a strictly prescribed sequence, where everybody knows what to do and how; and second, everything is done under the authority of a master of ceremonies. (Turner, 1967) Liminal is a moment, however brief, when the past is momentarily suspended and the future has not yet begun.

Liminal situations can be applied to whole societies going through crisis or a collapse of order. But a liminal state may also become fixed; referring to a situation in which the suspended character of social life takes on a more permanent character (Turner, 1967). Szakolczai defines three types of permanent liminality: monasticism (with monks endlessly preparing the separation), court society (with individuals continuously performing their roles in an endless ceremonial game), and Bolshevism (as exemplifying a society stuck in the final stage of ritual passage). He argues that not only the emergence but also the maintenance of the communist regime was only possible under such liminal conditions. The communism as a regime was based on the perpetuation of temporary liminal conditions into a permanent state, and it was only possible if the political system kept the society in a permanent state of liminality and transitions: of confusion, threat and uncertainty. The liminal is the temporary suspension of order. In that state there is no concreteness. Therefore objectivity becomes impossible; without concreteness, matter, resistance to set limits is absent and therefore necessary development of control and responsibility is missing.