14: Research Portfolio: a r t
Part 1
a r t
My feeling regarding art, is that when most people talk about how to define it, it’s offered as a small contribution to an unbounded polyphony of more-than-human relations. Even if their contribution to this chorus sounds like these are the boundaries of what I think art is, or a Modigliani nude sold for $186.1 million at Christie’s these refrains simply add texture to the magpies mimicry and the look how deep and long aunties laugh lines are. Even if there’s a seeming dissonance between a farmer cultivating perennial chicories from Castelfranco in California and a blog post from the Ports Francs et Entrepôts de Genève about a Monet with a biometric passport registered on the blockchain, they’re are actually counterpoints or small flourishes in an unfolding composition that simply could never be apprehended from our position within it. This is actually quite nice, as we can accept the mysterious expansiveness of it and enjoy the process of speculating together. I’ve heard some similar themes from Ben Lerner (Lerner, 2016) and François J. Bonnet (Bonnet, 2020) and I’ve been humming a melody that goes: a r t is provisionally codetermined, by objects, subjects and times.
It’s from this condition or understanding of art that I approach relations on a shared planet. At the front of my mind everyday is the question of how to collectively resist the oppressive and ecocideal structures operating in transnational configurations, while not creating a monolithic and totalizing sovereign that homogenizes the plurality of world cultures. A widely-shared, collectivized form of politics seems essential to regulate the extrastate actors that are most responsible for the climate disaster, mass extinction event and social misery that characterize this period we contentiously call the Anthropocene. As Charbonnier suggests, it seems a bit late in the day to continue dividing the social and ecological into separate sites of struggle. (Charbonnier, 2021)
The internet has forced an ecological awareness and reckoning with planetary relations. A smartphone, the becoming-requisite for modern planetary citizenship, is composed of 2/3’s of the periodic table with elements formed by deep time and sourced, assembled and distributed in a production chain that implicates arguably everyone, if unevenly. The resulting device can conjure the sum of recorded human knowledge instantly in the supported media forms of this unstable and accelerative period. The arbitrary practices and provincial interests of Westphalian states, with their policed borders and other oppressive structures, have created deep inequalities at the regional and local scales. Regional governance has been entirely unequipped to meaningfully address the ecosocial implications of transnational capital, which flows easily through and around the ineffective regulatory measures posed by mutable zonal power formations.
A few weeks ago an abrasive German in a quiet Georgian restaurant was berating, somewhat affectionately, a skillful artist from Tbilisi who was waiting on him. A few weeks later I returned and sat at a table too large for one. The abrasive German came in and joined the skilled artist from Tbilisi and I at the table. I was surprised to learn that the abrasive German had always felt like an outsider. First in the provinces of Germany where he moved around as a child and later as an adult in London. He had volunteered with a group in the Pyrenees to learn the Dharma and became somewhat disillusioned with the lofty spiritual ambitions of his peers and teachers. In a rehearsed dismissal of naive and detached idealism he pointed to a faraway horizon and said ‘if we just move that mountain and that cloud…’ He’s an architect, or rather a developer of architecture software that automates architectural renderings so that a change in one rendering, changes all of the corresponding renderings. The night progressed with food and laughter and we resolved to start a roving ecological film club. Towards the end of the night we had opened up and confided intimacies and dimensions of ourselves that make it feel callous and wrong to use labels like the skilled artist from Tbilisi, the abrasive German, or the lofty American.
If we just move that mountain and that cloud could be a shorthand for the advent of an age of planetary geoengineering and terraforming projects that will be undertaken in the name of climate emergency. The massive fortifications of coastlines and the chilling effects of solar radiation management that follow the ecological excesses of millennia of agriculture, industrial petrocapitalism, automobilism and nuclear power. The bid for planetary sovereignty will likely be couched within a language of data science and assume an unimpeachable authority. This makes critical science studies one of the most important fields of inquiry and sites of resistance today. It will be an indispensable tool in dealing with the burgeoning movement of entrepreneurial think tanks bolstered by scientists, philosophers and artists orienting themselves towards the massive markets of planetary ‘sensing’ and geoengineering (Strelka, Berggruen).
I’m interested in the forums concerned with apprehending and addressing the urgent issues commensurate with our entanglements and modes of production on an interdependent planet. An engaged form of political participation has felt out of my ability to meaningfully partake in. I’ve found myself in the softer cultural realms where a contemporary art sector is producing disseminable epistemes and heuristics, increasingly international in scope with the proliferation of biennials and other global-oriented discursive forums. While it’s easy to cynically dismiss the vulgar machinations of power and capital that underpin many of these cultural events, I’m interested in the potential of this kind of world dialogue or mondialité (Glissant).
Part 2
The horizon of art and ecology seems almost infinitely expansive, and the methods of research just as broad. There isn’t really something that I can think of that doesn’t fit somewhere into my understandings of art, ecology and research. Outside of the rigorous seminars and readings developed by Dr. Ros Gray, which has been reinforcing my foundational understanding of the ecological discourse, my research has been largely preoccupied with learning the customs and histories of my new context, which is doubly unfamiliar as a newcomer to London and latecomer to academia. There is a mental thrill to learning new places, especially one as diverse and dynamic as London; a steep and stimulating learning curve. Within this milieu there hasn’t been a day that wasn’t filled with research, filtering the world through these evolving epistemes. In particular I’ve been drawn to long aimless walks through the city, frequenting art spaces, book stores and charity shops. In these contexts I’ve been having many lively discussions and making new acquaintances and even friends. These relations seem to be the most significant form of research for me. Dinners with artists and educators after openings–like the one I saw you at last night Dr. Gerard–have been wonderful. The visiting tutor conversation with Ellie Ga was stimulating and affirming. Finding others with shared interests and discussing the things closest to our hearts and minds. And the unexpected affinities and resonances in the day-to-day. The woman who artfully arranges the charity shop windows shared a version of animism that left me speechless. The man who fixed my bicycle illuminated the socioecological devastation of capital relations with a plainspoken clarity that stopped my heart, while he generously gave a tool to a customer to fix a broken bike themselves.
I’m increasingly convinced that there’s a staggering amount of truly wonderful art that goes unnoticed, under-appreciated and inadequately responded to. This poses some problems for someone in my context, particularly regarding the question of what is one to contribute to this affluence? In some ways, I feel like the first step is to universally reclaim time, so that that in addition to people sharing their precious lives with their loved ones and partaking in the projects that are most calling to their highest selves, there would be adequate time to appreciate, consider and respond to the flourishing of art before us, as part of culture that values the sacredness of our coexistence and seeks to make hospitality most broadly shared.
My research and practice has been aspiring towards an almost metabolic function in my immediate ecology; like lactobacillus or white blood cells. I’ve been working with cast off objects and kind social relations. Also taking quite literally the art world is a joke along with a close reading of Byung-Chul Han’s deconstruction of the western passion narrative (Han, 2019). Perhaps I’m coming to believe art is an alibi. My work has been taking the form of parasociality, or open letters, with artists I admire. Like the following solicitation for an interview with Bruno Latour for a friend’s magazine. Sometimes the parasocial epistolary form brings about new kinds of clarity and its public performance opens a field of more-than-parasocial possibilities. What might fail in its timing or telos, can open up horizons of sociality as long as its articulation reverberates.
Questions and prompts for Bruno
For this Gaia themed issue of Autre, it felt important to reach out to you. Since Lovelock, the term has taken on its own life with new age valances. I understand your usage to be more pragmatic and rooted in science. Has your relationship to this concept developed or changed with its drift in the cultural imaginary?
I'm taken with your recent work that I understand to be concerned with inventorying what one lives off and from, or ‘that on which a terrestrial depends for its survival, while asking what other terrestrials depend on it?' (Down to Earth, Latour, 2018) which kind of forces an ecological awareness or reckoning; a sense of entanglement and responsibility. A smartphone, the becoming-requisite for modern planetary citizenship, is composed of 2/3’s of the periodic table with elements formed by deep time and sourced, assembled and distributed in a production chain that implicates arguably everyone, if unevenly. An object par excellence for inventorying the scale of what a terrestrial depends on for survival. It makes me think of Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler's Anatomy of an AI (Crawford & Joler, 2018) which could be understood as one approach for answering your question. Are you familiar with this collaborative work?
I appreciate how you offer concepts and schematics that help us move away from familiar discursive impasses [add attractor diagram]. It's also quite fascinating to see how a concept can drift through culture—have you seen the Zac Efron miniseries Down to Earth on Netflix? I recently watched Don't Look Up, which seemed like liberal Hollywood's rally for climate change awareness. It occurred to me though, that characters like Trump and Musk are beyond satirization and this self-congratulatory and likely quite profitable piece of advanced nihilism wasn't really useful, humorous or cathartic. I also noticed the name of the production company Hyperobject Industries is taken from Timothy Morton's influential text (Morton, 2013). Timothy has taken what one could describe as an eco-messianic turn, describing themselves as the eco prophet of the Anthropocene. Greta Thunberg seems to also fit into this kind of eco messianist celebrity paradigm. What do you make of these events and figures in the cultural landscape?
At the front of my mind every day is the question of how to collectively resist the oppressive and ecocidal structures operating in transnational configurations, while not creating a monolithic and totalizing sovereign that homogenizes the plurality of world cultures. A widely-shared, collectivized form of politics seems essential to regulate the extrastate actors most responsible for the climate disaster, mass extinction event and social misery that characterize this period we contentiously call the Anthropocene. And as Charbonnier suggests, after you and many others, it seems a bit late in the day to continue dividing the social and ecological into separate sites of struggle (Charbonnier, 2021). What kind of political formations do you envision for collectivized forms of planetary care and remediation?
And as a follow up, the bid for planetary sovereignty will likely be couched within a language of data science and assume an unimpeachable authority. This makes critical science studies, of which you are a foundational source, one of the most important fields of inquiry and sites of resistance today. It will be an indispensable tool in dealing with the burgeoning movement of entrepreneur-led think tanks bolstered by scientists, philosophers and artists orienting themselves towards the massive markets of planetary ‘sensing’ and geoengineering. What kind of orientation and practices should be cultivated in response to instrumentalized and ideological science?
I’m interested in the forums concerned with apprehending and addressing the urgent issues commensurate with our entanglements and modes of production on an interdependent planet. Exhibition-making and the proliferation of biennials are promising sites of discourse at the best of times. As an exhibition-maker, what is it about this form that excites you? Are there particular projects you would like to realize and share at the moment?
Lastly, would you share with the readers of this publication any recommendations for texts, films, artworks, websites, persons or projects you feel are interesting and useful for this present moment?
Part 3
In the small research portfolio breakaway groups that formed to discuss the progress of this process, one of the members in my group, Finlay Forbes Gower, was citing her sources that mostly fit the academic parameters of specialists in their fields and their affiliated institutions. One in particular stood out, made me laugh out loud, and then stayed in my thoughts for weeks to come; Joe from the zoo. The openness of this, the speculative possibilities and allowance of epistemological plurality latent in Joe from the zoo, is thrilling to me. Joe from the zoo could be any number of modes of study or speculative relational learning. Is Joe an animal scientist? or a koala? perhaps another visitor? Was it Apichatpong Weerasethakul? Apichatpong is surely one of my favorite Joe’s. I went to see Memoria twice in the cinema, and I would be remiss if I did not mention his work as part of this research portfolio. The easy way spirits and memory shape the presence of his films feels sane to me, and hospitable. All the major themes of interest feel present in Joe’s work. His adoption of Joe reminds me of Frank’s adoption of Ocean. Tributaries, irreducible in their specificity and of the same body of water.
The scene in Uncle Boonmee where the spirits of a deceased sister / aunt / wife / and other relations and a disappeared son / nephew / animal / and other relations join the living at night around a table hospitably, is the way I feel at home in the world, with the presence of the unempirical spirits that guide me. In the clearest of times, a great shimmering and shivering passes through me like the wind, and an overturned rear view mirror on the concrete catches the full moon in its fox eye convex and I feel the world watching through me.
This feels like a good stopping place, but life and the requirements for this assignment propel me along. Today my research will be going to Camden to see an artist talk. The last time I went to the Camden Art Centre, I saw 3 satisfyingly scaled installations from 3 local artists. The Camden generously produced 3 short accompanying films, in the style of public broadcasting, that showed the artists describing their work and sharing some biographical information. I think this is a good practice for institutions, to enliven and personalize the works they exhibit. Camden Art Centre is a nice model, with a broad program, lots of events, a garden, bookstore, cafe and friendly disposition. I wish every neighborhood had something like this. On the way up I’ll listen to ambient music on the train, perhaps reading from a pocket volume. If there is lively conversation happening on the train I’ll turn off the music. And if I’m on the overground in the outside stretches I’ll watch the city pass or close my eyes and feel the warm sun on my face.
This evening I’ll meet a friend for dinner near the ICA where we’ll watch the Metamorphosis of Birds, a film by Catarina Vasconcelos. Meeting this friend for films and slow meals is a central form of both research and pleasure. I sent him a picture of Tarkovsky and Parajanov sitting at a table somberly, that hangs on the wall in a local Georgian restaurant. The person who took the image is a friend of the owner, as well as Iosseliani and Salomé Jashi. Diasporic cafes where artists have long lunches discussing art, is a mode of research I’m interested in including in this portfolio. It was also what Pirosmani wanted to do with the notoriety he received at the end of an overlooked life of art-making— at least in Shengelaia’s cinematic rendering. He wanted to simply open a tea house where people could gather thoughtfully and convivially. My friend responded that the image I sent him, which featured a ghostly visage in the background, reminded him of the dinner scene in Uncle Boonmee.
I invited another friend to the Georgian restaurant, who had come to do a residency in London from Ecuador. Our friendship started with a shared affinity for Apichatpong Weerasethakul. We might say, Apichatpong Weerasethakul introduced us. Isn’t this a wonderful notion of art’s gift? As a future occasion of friendship? We went to see a dance performance by two dancers named Brigel Gjoka and Rauf “RubberLegz” Yasit, who met working with William Forsythe and collaborated with a composer named Ruşan Filiztek on a hauntingly beautiful score constituted of saz, voice and electronics. Their work gave form to their experiences in Kuridish and Albanian contexts, and however you might describe the context of working with Forsythe. It was the first time I went to see a dance performance since the pandemic, and it filled me with an unnamable kind of beauty and deep respect for their embodied forms of wisdom and research. At dinner afterwards, this friend shared a project he did with an indigenous style dugout canoe that he outfitted with solar panels in collaboration with an organization interested in alternative transport for indigenous amazon communities. On this speculative craft, he fixed a gramophone reminiscent of the one Fitzcaraldo used to play classical music in Werner Herzog’s eponymous film. However, in Adrián Balseca’s work, the gramophone was a field recorder that collected sounds from the river.
Yesterday (two days after going to Camden) I went to a non-profit art film archive called LUX to see a screening of a film called Idrish (ইদ্রিস) by Adam Lewis Jacob and made plans to return to watch some other films in their collection. I also watched the magpies eat out of a trashcan for a while in the park and talked to people on the bus. I bought a book referencing Freud—and the concept of oceanic feeling more specifically—by Erika Balsom and watched a lecture she gave while I prepared a simple dinner of bitter greens and sour bread. I had visited the Freud museum the other day and got an idea for an installation. I stopped by Little Georgia to visit Beso and saw him outside the restaurant. He was recovering from COVID so instead of going inside, I got some adjika for the house and we talked outside about a magazine called Luncheon I saw at Dover Street Market—where I was doing some more research for a forthcoming essay. The magazine featured Pirosmani on the cover and had a selection of his paintings of women and animals that were chosen by Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, a Georgian artist that Beso knew and told me a little about. This morning I watched several of Patrick Goddard’s films, shared by his gallery and will likely fold them into a piece of writing I’m working on related to John Wilson, essay films, street photography, troubadours, ukiyo-e and some general themes around entertainment and art.
Some the research practices outlined in this portfolio are elaborated in ritualsintime.space
References
Balsom, E. (2018). An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea. Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.
Bonnet, F. J. (2020). The Music to Come. Shelter Press.
Charbonnier, P. (2021). Affluence and Freedom: An Environmental History of Political Ideas (A. Brown, Trans.). Wiley.
Crawford, K., & Joler, V. (2018). Anatomy of an AI System. Self. https://anatomyof.ai/
Han, B.-C. (2019). Good Entertainment: A Deconstruction of the Western Passion Narrative (A. N. West, Trans.). MIT Press.
Latour, B. (2018). Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (C. Porter, Trans.). Wiley.
Lerner, B. (2016). The Hatred of Poetry. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press.
