Sublimated with Mineral Fury Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
ties’ of the ‘ascending pile’ of China today without even a whisper of theory or an ‘Ism’ – ‘post-colonialism’ or whatever? This is not to deny that ‘stripping art bare’ of all ideological constructs such as ‘post-colonialism’ is an invigorating exercise-especially in an age when
world-wide government functionality is increasingly taking creative activity under its wing. ‘ Strip ping bare’
resists the drive to codify art practice: it peculiarities, the unforeseeable vagaries of the art event–its singularity.
The bone some colleagues in China and beyond pick with the ‘multicultural’ is not so much with its spook Apartheid logic in which ‘some cultures are more equal than others’. Neither is it with its ‘managerial mentality’
based on reductive cultural-ethnic stereotypes. It is with the fact it falls short of the universal ideal – that
multicultural difference can only splinter into warring factions. But do multiplicity and heterogeneity intrinsi-cally spell breakdown and bedlam? We should not forget they are the force-field of singularity, individual quirk, variation teeming possibilities. Likewise, totality and oneness does not exclusively imply the totalitarian steamroller: it is also about co-operative association, unity of purpose, constructing the ‘commons’? Vital distinctions for the conceptual light-rope we walk in mulling over the multicultural today.
There are nevertheless some everyday examples of its skewed spin off that stick in the gullet. Two recent cases: a downtrodden caste in India, at the bottom of the social ladder, protests against being pushed too high up by new, fairer laws because they lose the benefits that go with their previous special ‘lowly status’. In a court case a few months ago, descendants of later waves of Chinese, mainly Taiwanese immigrants to South Africa, who were previously classed semi-honor-ary Whites and were beneficiaries of Apartheid, won the legal right to be re-classified Black. This means they now qualify for empowerment schemes under law of the post-Apartheid Rainbow.
Post-colonial Pharmakon or Panacea?
To speak of ‘post-colonialism’ as if it were a monstrous conceptual monolith overlooks the quarrelling view-points under its umbrella. What is up for scrutiny is a concoction extracted from them–a cod ‘post-colonial’ of well-thumbed slogans and shorthand: representation, self-voicing, identity, belonging, ‘other modernities’, Orientalist optics, migration, citizen/refugee, diaspora, authority/subordination, epistemic block and the like. It is not so much these terms in their original skin in the realm of pure theory that are in the hot seat. Rather, no means escaping ridicule as self-parody as
‘PC gone mad’.
Johnson Chang’s charge of ‘PC at large’, floated in the Triennial’s early propositions, has to be similarly unpacked according to both China’s historical experi-ence and actualities on the ground. ‘PC at large’ rings alarm bells about kowtowing to the status quo, toeing the party line, herd mentality that stifles acting on one’s own steam. It concerns political machination, control and being ‘corrected’ to fit in. In this light, we cannot but be wary of post-colonialism as one in a string of readymade ideological imports. However, for Ai Wei Wei, ‘Ideology’ is about having guiding principles for a meaningful life – a ‘design for living’. The lack of it, in contrast to past idealism, is reason for the present malaise, for empty, self-centres living. (Ai Weiwei).
For the radical stance beyond his view, the world is a better place without ideological movements. “Without Isms is neither nihilism nor eclecticism; nor egotism or solipsism. It opposes totalitarian dictatorship but also opposes the inflation of the self to god or Superman.
Without Isms opposes the foisting of a particular brand of politics on the individual by means of abstract collective names such as ‘the people’, ‘the race’. or ‘the nation’. The idea behind Without Isms is that we need to bid goodbye to the 20th century and put a big
question mark over those ‘Isms that dominated it”. (Gao Xinjiang. The Case for Literature.2008) We might pause to ponder whether ‘anti-ideology’ is not itself a bit of a doctrine, an ‘Ims’ of sorts. At any rate, from this viewpoint, ‘post-colonialism’ is little more than a manipulative agenda-another ‘Ism’ – that overrides individual, unfettered expression. Here ‘Farewell’ is no less than good riddance.
Peculiarities of the English
The view that post-colonialism harbours a dead-end preoccupation with colonial power in not unlike Toni Negri’s on the limits of the post-colonial paradigm with globalization (Empire.2000) But the complaint that it is inapplicable to China’s historical experience, that as a theoretical model it rides rough shod over the ‘peculiari-ties of the Chinese’ need closer attention. It parallels E P Thompson’s dogged defence of the ‘peculiarities’ of the English’–a feel for the grain of the concrete, the
empirical and doable that shies away from overweening theorizing. One of the ‘grand systems’ he had in mind was Louis Althusser’s formidably abstract, Marxist categories of analysis. (The Poverty of Theory. 1975) The quandary is whether we can grasp the ‘dense
peculiari-Sublimated with Mineral Fury Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
frank turn to the ‘row empirical’. I mean a plunge into quotidian experience–into sounding the everyday rub-up of ‘mainstream/marginal, of self/other in their rounds of communicative endeavour beyond the uncrossables of language.
Out of the prison-house of concepts, immersion in the dense peculiarities of the ‘ascending pile’. With this dunking in discursive-non-discursive random encoun-ter, pre-given lingo or grammar of self/other cracks and crumbles. From the smithereens, from ‘ground zero’, fumbling contact, scrapings of sound, ur-utterances well up – a tunnelling under the partitions of language. To illustrate this we might look at an extreme example the 07/07/05 murderous terror bombs in London. From within the incident, maimed mangled strangers sometimes managed to attend to one another, to eke out a lingo for the nonce – communicative gear emerging from scratch on the spot. This is not to eke out some consolation from in the terrible events. It is sound an elemental flare-up in extreme situations–the capacity to patch together ways of see-feel-think that leap over the self/other hurdle. Not least, this confounds what both fundamentalists and some theorists
assume-‘epistemic blockage’ that does not budge.
Up for ‘Farewell’, is the celebrated spat over ‘PC at large’
between Star Theorist and Renowned Artist-the Star Curator was the missing link. The primal scene of the showdown was the making of the exhibition “One or Two Things I Know About Them” (Whitechapel, 1994).
They fell out over whose rendering of the East End immigrant Bangladeshi community was more telling, more correct. The quarrel reaches back to Said’s quote from Marx in his epilogue to Orientalism: “ They could not represent themselves: they had to be represented”.
He was flagging up possibilities of self-voicing and self-fashioning-cornerstone of both PP and PP2 – that would lie at the heart of the dispute.
The Theorist’s expose of contradictions within the immigrant community was unsparing: women’s subordination, sweatshops, grubby money, ‘backward’
notions of honour and shame. The Artist was less inclined towards an unrelenting sociologizing optic, more into sounding their plight with half an eye on local racist attitudes. His photo-film emanated from an immersive meander through other lives and terrains leasing out representations from the ‘dense peculiarities’
of the community. It clashed with the ‘transcendental tackle’ the Theorist had tooled ‘outside the community’
to hammer home her critique. Was she a specimen of their mash up in the art-culture criticism-curatorial
spheres-in the ‘spectacle of discourse’– that are candidates for fond ‘Farewell’.
The Post-colonial pharmakon (PP1) is a deconstructive probe in which critique is an oscillating positive-nega-tive charge-in Derrida’s figure, both ‘poison and cure’. It is a 3600 swivel eye that relentlessly divide. Stopping short of simply valourizing the latter term over the former it highlights the latter term over the former it highlights their complicities and blind sports. PP1 is at odds with the Post-colonial Panacea (PP2), which is a strategy of inversion. It turns the tables on the West/
Non-West, Europe/Asia power divide in a ‘utopian’
privileging of the subordinate, underdog term. Toppling the ‘heavenly’ dominant, it becomes its ‘nether empire’.
An issue ripe for ‘Farewell’ that PP1 embodies derives from Gayatri Spivak’s potent post-colonial purge. She had brewed this from a mix of East/West texts and ideas in her pharmacy lab, ‘Critique of Post-colonial Reason’ (1999), to show how, in the Kantian critique, the
‘transcendental turn’ produces in one go both the
‘Enlightenment space’ and the ‘subaltem’. The former hinges on the ‘foreclosure’ of the latter. Her remedial reading includes a homeopathic smidgen of Kantian poison-the brute empirical. It is not unlike Duchamp’s prescription for the retinal malady–a stringent dose of the retinal itself: ‘To Be Looked At (From The Other Side Of The Glass) With One Eye, Close To, For Almost An Hour’ (1918. Buenos Aires).
Is there an escape hatch from the wiles of ‘foreclosure’?
With each historical step a new avatar of the ‘foreclosed’
pops up; from aboriginal through native information to colonial subject and subaltern, from women of the South to those beneath the radar, the wretched of the earth below the NGO line through the metropolitan migrant and refugee to the ‘non-Western other’ – another incarnation springs to place in apparently endless succession. Is this wallowing in the ‘underdog’
slot for which we have already taken PP2 to task? Here the ‘transcendental no-exit’ seems little than a concep-tual conceit–an epistemic cul-de-sac where analytical thinking perfects an apriori system only to find itself locked up in it.
With scant mileage to the ‘transcendental turn’, what alternatives, what possibilities for break out, for going beyond the card it dishes out? At the risk of ridicule from Kant, who scoffs at the botchers who mix up their transcendental with their empirical, we might venture a
Sublimated with Mineral Fury Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
breaking through the representational crust is possible with the erupting force of an aesthetics that both harnesses and releases energies. This is the capacity for unhampered expression that emanates from its own occurrence and takes shape with reference only to it – a self-organizing event or autopoesis. A little like the flow, the ‘spontaneity’ (chi) in same Chinese aesthetics or the primal outburst (Sphota) of creativity in Sanskrit metaphysics?
The sense of an explosive, non-mimetic force resonates with the self-processing event of the marathon in Haruki Murukami’s ‘What I talk about, when I talk about Running’ (2006-2008). His grueling long-distance runs ‘sweat out’ body-mind states in random order. The highs and lows do not ‘represent’ anything. His down-to-earth obsessions are with pulse rates, knee-joints, ligaments, oxygen. They undercut the impulse to ‘read’
his long-haul symbolically-as if it ‘incarnated’ myths of arduous test, sacrifice, sublime transcendence. The run is passage through peculiar body-mind circadian cycles, filling to brim, emptying to the lees. Each threshold crossed, is a build up of sensation, affect, emotion but, as with the gamelan’s sonic flat-line, there is crescendo but no climax. Here ‘hitting the wall’ is ordeal, pain, a morale dipper, flagging stamina and both heightened and blank consciousness. During the endurance course, there are flickers of body-mind illumination. Nothing as grand as Enlightenment only the ‘opaque’ brain-brawn torrent pushing the run to its edge.
The peculiarities of Runner and Writer seldom cross paths in Murakami’s circuits. The run of writing hugs the inside lane of the grammar track: it is organized, static even when in motion. The marathon, on the other hand, presses on through wordless syntax-the body without organs. The contrast touches on Jun
Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s proposed marathon cum drawing event: Breathing is Free: A Running-Drawing Project 12,756.3 km –Jack and the Guangzhou Bodhi Leaf, 193km. The route of the run through Guangzhou is in the shape of a giant Bodhi leaf. Perhaps nothing as grant as the Tree of Enlightenment for it is also Jack’s
Beanstalk of fairytale fame that shoots up unstoppably to the Giant’s heaven. It leaves us in two minds. Jun is at pains that this not a performance: it is always more than a representation and less than it. It is less ‘acting’
than perhaps ‘simply an act’ or the ‘enactive’. Here the running body-mind self-propels on the spume of the scriptless event.
PC gone mad? Or was the Artist-livered, overprotective?
The Theorist suspected the Artist of succumbing to a blinkered, ‘nativist’ stance. The Artist felt the Theorist was blinded by an uncompromising analytic that rendered the community more vulnerable.
Huang Xiaopeng’s ‘Over-translation’
Versions of the spat reverberate across the art-culture world. In the Chinese setting, it takes the form of concern over whether the artist’s work and thinking is shown in its own terms. How to escape the ‘curatorial turn’ that scripts them in advance-framing them as
‘Dissident Artist’, Post-Pop Pop Artist, ‘Merchant Conceptualist’ and the like? A reaction is the search for
‘correct representation’–for keeping translation to an act of pure, literal transfer between the artist’s identity and how it is rendered without anything else creeping in. This tends to underestimate the extent to which all translation intrinsically involves ‘distortion’ – a dose of something more than what is being translated and less than it. The gap between original and translation highlights the sense of its ‘impossibility’, its stickier, no-go areas.
Huang Xiaopeng’s ‘over-translation’ pointedly captures the sense of a troubling surplus or a shortfall vis a vis the original. His video soundtrack features pop songs translated from English to Chinese and back again through machine translation in random permutation.
The process shows up not only distorted representation, slipshod translation, flat mistranslation but also
‘creative mistranslation’ – ‘out of sync’ rendition that spawns new insight, fresh semantic stuff. The clamour of diverging representations and translations add up to a liberating ‘anything goes’ situation, to use Feyerabend’s phrase. In the jostle of disparate versions we are free to size up representations one against one another constantly-as opposed to judging and prescribing the
‘correct’ one.
Talk Run
With PP1 and PP2 above, the anxiety over ‘correct’
translation and depiction-always at stake in identify politics-drifts towards ‘representationalism’. This is, in Nietzsche’s terms, a ‘reactive stance’, where art and thinking are so embroiled with what they retaliate against that they are almost solely defined by it. Though the ‘deconstructive mode’ (PP1) tries that to shake free of this oppositional stance-typical of PP2-it remains within the ambit of the reactive syndrome. Modes of detoumement, inversion or transgression too are caught up in varying degrees by what they knock. For Deleuze,
Sublimated with Mineral Fury Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
Why Pandemonium? In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Lucifer/
Satan and his rebellious Band, kicked out of Heaven, fall precipitously through dementing zones of Disorder and Chaos, the hell holes of Din and Hiss. Milton sound the cacophonous ‘other’ of the old ‘harmonious order’ – his epic reverberates with the topsy-turvy of new possibili-ties the English civil war had ushered in. The Band pass over sulphuric lakes, scurfy deposits, toxic fumes-not unlike the cratered, damaged environment of contem-porary ‘Asia in development’. Nevertheless, the blasted landscape is also one of inventive construction where the architectural spectacle of Pandemonium goes up-the ‘ascending pile’ of giant columns, palatial halls, massive architraves. Satan’s labouring cohorts give us a snapshot of today’s towering engineering feats in Asia.
The continent is a plane of transmutation: furious input of raw materials and minerals through a ‘sublimation’
filter: output of futuristic buildings, cities, crystalline commodities.
At the Pandemonium think-tank, the fallen Band scheme to regain their lost power by erecting a ‘nether empire’ to match and beat Imperial Heaven. To get at God, they plumb for the more devious plot of corrupting his new creation-the primal duo in Paradise. Pandemo-nium seethes with energies, a lab for alternative projects, uncreated worlds. The wild atmosphere of things on the boil visualizes a continent bristling with transformative, unknown potentials–Pandemonium Asia.
Memories of Underdevelopment
I am taking the title of Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s renowned film by that name (Cuba, 1968) as an initial component of the proto-probe. The film had looked back on Cuba after the revolution to note traces of underdevelopment that had not been ‘superseded’. ‘Backwardness,
rottenness, lack of culture’ linger on in a society with pretensions to modernity and advanced socialist ideals.
I am using this as a backdrop to evoke Seydou Boro’s (Paris/Burkina Faso) ‘dance-non-dance–that kicks off with the question: ‘How to get to Brazzaville?’ A woman fingers a nightmare route on a map: head far south to Johannesburg, then a maze-like backtrack to Central Africa, Perhaps onto Paris just to get to the country next door.
For Seydou, the regulation of movement in colonial travel networks mirrors how ‘dance’ regulates body-mind movement. The way colonial categories organize space-motion parallels how art genres parcel out creativity. They are structures of authority that define Zeitdiagnose & Abhijnanasakuntalam
In the wake of the ‘Farewell’, we have a prelim probe for
‘Asia in the world’ – quasiclinical notes on the current conjuncture:
There are two pointers to the above: Max Weber’s Zeitdiagnose or diagnostic of the present, taking the sound of modernity and the global forces of ‘Asia in the world, –a non-totalizing score. The second is ancient India, Kaidas’s Sanskrit play: Abhijnana-sakuntalam (Sakuntala Recognized by a token). King Dushyanta, who fell in love with Sakuntala when they met in the sacred forest grove, fails to recognize her later because she had fatefully lost the ring, the token that was to
‘awaken’ their reunion. In the erotic mode or Rasa the play engulfs us with body-mind states of love, languor, desire, the flood and ebb of rapture and enlightenment.
The text had circulated in Enlightenment salons: its prologue and the vidhUSka figure so enchanted Goethe that he crafted a similar device for Faust.
Weber’s Zeitdiagnose is about cognitive signs, social facts, statistical data that have to be configured to take a reading of the current state of play, of incipient developments and new bearings in modernity. Kalidas’s play, on the other hand, ‘embodies’ body-mind fill up and damp down – non-cognitive charges, feel-know indexical markers, affect traces, clouds smudges. The token by which Sakuntala is to be recognized is not an
Weber’s Zeitdiagnose is about cognitive signs, social facts, statistical data that have to be configured to take a reading of the current state of play, of incipient developments and new bearings in modernity. Kalidas’s play, on the other hand, ‘embodies’ body-mind fill up and damp down – non-cognitive charges, feel-know indexical markers, affect traces, clouds smudges. The token by which Sakuntala is to be recognized is not an