2: Induction

I sometimes get the sense many of the great artists included in the western canon, were basically lecherous men that cultivated skills, both material and social, that expedited the satisfaction of their desires. These western canons drip with libidinal residue (aura?). The cultivation of these excesses are not without their forensic pleasures. I went to The Making of Rodin show as an afterthought, and to use the right to special exhibitions that comes with my Tate membership. As its name suggests, the exhibition demonstrated a mutability in how an artists work might be presented and received. This occasion favored a behind-the-scenes, post-modern feeling survey of de-monumentalizing works that seemed to multiply in variation and relation, forming an almost quantum field of recombinable positions. Well known works and themes, split into constituent pieces, reconfigure in chimeric assemblages. Sculptures grafted onto vessels drawn from the artists giant collection of antiquities and wall texts on appropriation and fragmentation.

I was talking with R over breakfast about the tendency to allegorize and naturalize a historical moment according its technological metaphors. He offered that when Darwin said ‘fittest’ it was more about an ability to fit in; as in compromise and flexibility and less about competition and strength. R, a retired animator and member of the academy has alert eyes and a gentle disposition. He inspires me to develop a finer capacity for subtlety. He tells stories like an animator, embodied and performed and eventuating in deep laugh lines blooming from his eyes. He offers one story about his mothers sister who was a widowed lace maker that would come to visit from time to time. She assumed an air of superiority towards his mother who was a house cleaner and would sit, head cocked and smoking affectedly at the table while his mother would rush around trying to make her feel welcome. He described how she had dark stains on her fingers and bandages on her legs that the children would gawk at from under the table. The humor erupted from the tension between her affectations and the children’s naked staring. As is often the case, it was a humor born of difficulties and a complicated laughter. Both the story and its telling remind me of Jacques Tati and I say something about how much I love his films, and to which R replies how much his father loved Tati as well. Our conversation moves into an intimate register—more intimate than convention and our short friendship would recommend and brings to a communicable form the common well of suffering we take turns holding, in uneven measure.

He recalls a scene in Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot where Hulot, in the middle of a string of questionable decisions, is attempting to paint a boat that’s not his with a can of paint that keeps drifting away with the tide. He ends up doing more damage than good and when he gets in the boat it breaks completely, appearing to transform into a terrible monster and scaring everyone on the beach. This is more or less how I feel about most of my art and writing.

Chisenhale Notes for Abbas Akhaven

The Perry index was unknown to me until this morning. An index of ‘Aesopica’ or a collection of fables attributed loosely to Aesop. I also learned, in a likely unrelated turn, that perry-dot-nearly any top level domain has been squatted. And so apparently has Spinoza.biz. This particular Perry index has an extension, from an unknown temporal provenance of 3 additional fables: 

585. Sick Lion, Fox and Bear. cf. 258
586. Calf and Stork
587. Flea and Gout

The cat’s paw, written on the roof of the Chisenhale and in the texts of Abbas Akhaven’s curtain call, variations on a folly is a reference to the fable where a monkey dupes a cat into burning his paw to retrieve chestnuts from a fire, which the monkey proceeds to eat until a maid comes in, disturbing the scene, and causing them to scatter. I imagine a Rashomon telling of the story from its constituents, but with reality TV style floating head interviews and lots of quick cuts and dramatic monologue. The cat might have suggested that it was the interruption that foreclosed on a more equitable distribution of chestnuts. Like those announcements on airplanes instructing you to put on your mask in the event of an emergency before helping your companions. Perhaps the threat of the maid is a state of exception that calls for singeingly draconian measures. The cat, like myself and nearly everyone I know, tells the perennial tale of exploitation, a capitulation to fleeting power assumed and transacted. The cat, perhaps like all those instrumental, realizes themselves interpellatively. And the maid is the arm, the final point of contact, of an absent but intuited power structure. She likely unthinkingly recites the internalized imperatives of a power she represents, and in turn enjoys an alleged privilege. This interrupted monkey cat dynamic gives a lot to consider. Are we to link the cat’s paw to the artists role for the institution? Or does the artist invite us to consider which roles we perform? 

The former question becomes somewhat calcified and I take it with me through the forthcoming Frieze week and beyond holding it up to my eye like a piece of amber or a snapchat filter and seeing monkey hands and cat paws everywhere I look.

Is there some positional, aspirational balance between too explicative as a poetics and a fitting poetics for an age of explication that continues to elude me?

I clumsily wonder out-loud, to whoever is sitting next to me on those wondrous double decker buses with the big screen street scenes, if conceptual art doesn’t use rumor as the market-oriented mechanism for producing scarcity. A currency of gossip and elucidation.

Some cats I’ve known, including Dougie in the flat that I’m letting, lead a life of rest and abundance—with not an exploitative monkey in sight. There are fox that come for scraps in the garden, where Dougie spends most of their time, and everyone seems to get along. There doesn’t even seem to be a great deal of emotional labor involved. Sporadic and mutual seeming affections are exchanged. Is a relaxed cat in abundance a state to collectively aspire towards? And how many forms of life can we include in relaxed cat?

Inside the Chisenhale, a reconstruction of the colonnade that led to the destroyed Palmyra arch has been constructed on a giant green screen. This is the part of the exhibition we experience directly. There’s an unpleasant drone coming from a pair of speakers hung from the ceiling at the entrance of the gallery from where you first encounter the installation.

One of the lecturers at Goldsmiths in the Art and Ecology program, is telling me about the Aerocene society. They offer it’s a ‘lure for thought’—a formulation I like, if not distrust a little. It’s been a long asocial lockdown and this dinner with our nascent group feels deeply satisfying. Fatima, or Fatty as I’ve quickly taken to affectionately calling her, puts on George Michael and in short order we’re dancing to Rihanna and feeling as though we may be the only girl in the world.

This feeling like the only girl in the world occupies an interesting relation to the interrupted monkey-cat-maid triad, or rather the observed and elaborated interrupted monkey-cat-maid ecology. Does the feeling like the only girl in the world, in the thrall of its affective devices, come to stand in for the neoliberal insistence of the individual subject? And is the illuminated corpse of the (autotuned) Only Girl (In the World), somewhat recuperated by the sociality of its illumination?—In the sociality of the being more-than-vectors-of-disease together, illumination of the corpse of the (autotuned) Only Girl (In the World)?

Only Girl (In the World) itself performs the ultimate bracketing of the constructed individual from the world.

La-la-la la
La-la-la la
La-la-la la (uh, yeah)
La-la-la-la
I want you to love me
Like I'm a hot ride (uh, yeah)
Be thinkin' of me (uh)
Doin' what you like
So, boy, forget about the world
'Cause it's gon' be me and you tonight (yeah)
I wanna make you beg for it
Then I'ma make you swallow your pride, oh (uh, uh)
Want you to make me feel like I'm the only girl in the world
Like I'm the only one that you'll ever love
Like I'm the only one who knows your heart
Only girl in the world
Like I'm the only one that's in command
'Cause I'm the only one who understands
How to make you feel like a man, yeah

[cont…]

The lyrics are hard to meaningfully apprehend through the emotionally charged vehicle through which they are delivered. The beat is faster than my heart and puts me in a quantized state of bittersweet ecstasy. The poles marked by a nearly completely eroded sociality in saturating arenas of competition, and the quantized ecstasy of socially illuminating corpses in the key of power, opens up a un suturable rupture.  

A local poet, Laila Sumpton and Chisenhale convene a workshop in response to Abbas’ installation. She provided several prompts, in her gentle and focused facilitation, to a group that feels like they come from a range of different socioeconomic backgrounds. The prompts I responded to were: ‘write about memorials’, ‘write a letter to Palmyra’ and ‘address the monkey starting with reach into the fire’.

1.

Isn’t it usually a memorial of the present?
A cold mechanic hum at the viewers frontal gaze
I think of the grid as a tool to organize space,
and when the space has been measured,
objectified forms can be (re)placed accordingly 
At this stage of this unrelenting process
we’re mapping the constituent objects
of what is technologically measurable 
This crumbling colonnade…
leading towards the impoverished mutability
the fast approaching primacy of virtual space 

2.

Dear Palmyra, 

This affectation shows how saturating 
these colonial histories can be

I don’t feel entitled to that kind of endearment 
for an object I’m so far removed from
though undoubtably implicated in

This applies to most objects though, 
a large sonorous bowl 
thriftstore cashmere 
dissolving pictures 

I wish we lived in a world 
were people could move 
with the ease of currency  

A canon of everyone and everything 
to be shared as widely as desirable 

Not their flattened likeness 
the cold mechanic hum 
at the point of encounter 
an inoculating drone

3.

Reach into the fire
I’m to ventriloquize the monkey 
Who dupes the cat into harm  
This comes as not even a footnote
In the long history of humans projecting 
All manner of atrocities onto animals 
Without giving them the dignity 
Of simply rehearsing their own

I have ambivalent feelings towards these constraints and their results. It was a surprise to see what came to the surface when responding to them. I don’t really know what to do now with these texts. They belonged to a room of people responding to an artists work, and now they are here. The colonnade smelled like sweet earth and now it is here.

The following weekend Federico Campagna gave a response on the theme of ruins to Abbas’ variation. In anticipation of the event I started making my way through the highly listenable podcast Federico has been producing. He has a wonderful voice and an endearingly retrograde style of pedagogy that feels somehow balming. As though putting your worried mind to sleep with nicely shaped images of thought. He addressed an audience that seemed mostly absorbed and afterwards gracefully aikido'd my indignation about a recent title published by Verso, where he also works. The conversation moved to Berardi and La Malinche.

Dear Fred,

There was a moment in the talk you gave at Stanford, after the talk you gave at the library in Oakland, where you said something like, first, we have to confront our own wretchedness.

I think about this often. I thought at first it might be an interpellative understanding. Then the we began to seem like a state or machine that can be entered and driven around menacingly like an SUV. And then perhaps like a self-driving car that we sit in anxiously by ourselves, being soothed with inoculating flows of simulation.

I tend to think we are fungible and that we can access similar sentiments beyond the limitations of faraway ideas like Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Ireland. Living next to the ocean for many years has estranged me from the beaches. When one doesn’t particularly want or trust power, the world feels inhospitable. One might look for small islands of non-inferno to make archipelagos of sociality and respite.

It’s a little embarrassing to share that I have a ‘google alert’ set for you. I get an email from time to time that you will be having a talk with some imposing institution and often, some overlooked or under-appreciated artist or scholar. I think you might have been the last person outside of my family that I hugged before Covid began. Following you around for that week of lectures was really one of the great learning experiences of my life. And more than the content, it was your disposition, or as you put it approach. Throughout this pandemic I've been thankful to drop in on your conflicted and consoling addresses. I remember your son coming into a zoom window on a talk called the porch with nia love's lilliputian dancing and deep breathing amplified through her microphone. There was a kind of sensorial reconfiguration. Offering new valences as solace for the creeping grid. Your son offered you a bite from his plate, but pulled away when you went for the golden stuff and you ended up with a laugh and a consolatory vegetable. It's funny the details we hold onto.

Since I saw you last, I moved to London for graduate school at Goldsmiths. It's my first time back in an institution since I left high school twenty years ago. It took me a little while to understand how situated the undercommons was in academia. From this too-early space of naive horizons, I feel a sense of relief. The unavoidable and unfairly distributed perennial suffering—and a sadness towards the austerity of time and space—and also a sense of relief. I heard you talking with Vijay Iyer about this music group you've been a part of for so many years and how it might have been the greatest educational experience of your life. This sounds like a dream to me. And I imagine the whole thing is worth it, even for just one friend.

I’m in an ecology program and interested in studying with Forensic Architecture. They represent, for me, this paragon of collectivized applied aesthetics towards political ends. At the same time, I hold the paradoxical and sacred love for an art that is unnamable and unbounded. I streamed a conference yesterday from the art history section of the Goldsmiths library that FA convened in Berlin with Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain (of Decolonize this Place) and Nan Goldin. It felt close to home and also made me wonder what’s more addictive; painkillers, art, or institutional power?

After the conversation I wrote a note to some of the FA people I’ve been corresponding with. I’ll include it here as I often feel like I'm writing openly:

Dear Eyal, Susan and Christina,

Thank you for the conference.

There was a little bit of trouble with the livestream but I caught most of the last two talks. In the second panel I appreciated the range of artist-activists who embody the tensions of that hyphenate and are producing works worth giving attention to and reproducing.

The feed cut for a while and then I heard the question of how to include more forms of life and intelligences into the juridical process. And its potential excesses (ooo, new materialism’s, etc)—which recalled a moment in Susan’s recent material witness talk, where she mentioned Arthur Jafa’s hesitancy to grant personhood to everything under the kitchen sink at this historical juncture where that privilege is still so unevenly distributed at the anthro-level.

There’s something unsettling about how extrahuman agencies get determined. I get the sense that there’s a certain kind of libertarian technocratic planetary ‘sensing’ and governance movement forming along the Bratton-Berggruen axis (for example) that mobilizes a data supremacist, anti-pluralist, greenwashed tech-geoengineering position towards its consolidation.

To the slowness of the courts and the use of alleged technological incompetency, I would add a general susceptibility to affective-rhetorical mediated evidentiary assemblages of which one could anticipate a kind of forensic visualization arms race. And that despite its sophistication can be superseded by the capricious and arbitrary juridical contingencies that Irit pointed out in that same material witness talk.

There's a Lordeian echo from the impasse lamented in the earlier panel on artists and institutional critique.

I would like to learn more about some of the current projects regarding arms dealing in Yemen, European instigation in Libya, and Namibian reparations. I'm also interested in forensic oceanography.

I really appreciated your closing statement, Christina, and I'd like to contribute more to the investigative commons. I'd like to think more together and offer my modest abilities and openness to learning towards the consequential projects you are collectively realizing.

Kindly,
Perry

I’ve been reading some books by Byung-Chul Han about rituals and entertainment. I've been sitting with this idea that rituals in time are like objects in space. That they help orient us and make our world habitable.

Yesterday in the art history section of the Goldsmiths library I watched a stream of a show called Transmissions organized by Tosh Basco and it had that video you made dancing with Wu Tsang that I saw some years ago. I remember loving it. It's such a beautiful shimmer.

There are some things you almost want some distance from so they don’t get so pinned down with epistemes, gridded with information.

I went to an opening at David Zwirner for the paintings of Noah Davis. I have to confess I went to this like one goes to a theater to see a tragedy. Actually like a tragedy matryoshka. A simulated Underground Museum in the upper galleries. A choreography of power relations. The flashy power of celebrities with their hulking bodyguards, the discreet power of the collectors in their quiet ostentation. The aspirati. The whole thing produces an intoxicating mist that confuses the senses. The bright white light is disorienting even further. I saw an artist from a foundation Noah was a part of in New York and the conversation turned towards Gossip in the ways it so often does. Rituals as Stockholm syndrome. Was this the wretchedness you were talking about? What does it even mean to bring Donald Judd to West Adams?

I saw a show last week at the Chisenhale from the artist Abbas Akhaven. He made a version of the colonnade that led to the Palmyra arch out of earth and put it on a giant chroma key green screen. When you walked into the large hall you gazed on it beneath a pair of speakers playing an inhospitable and inoculating drone. I’m not sure I would have even noticed it, if it wasn’t for the invitation of a local poet to experience the work with all my senses. I also began to notice the sweetness of the hay clumped in the earth. On the roof in chalk was an excerpt from Jean de La Fontaine’s fable of the monkey and the cat. The group that convened for this poetry event reminded me of the group from the talk you gave at woodbine. It felt hospitable.

Kindly,
Perry

The floating aerobes have an almost Miyazaki charm, with incongruous proportions that somehow manage to submerge you. There’s a tree moss in California that shifts in the wind and has a similar effect on me. I’m charmed and a long time admirer of Yi’s work— though I was a bit disheartened in the artist talk with the constant recourse to a rhetoric of collaboration and interdependence that didn’t substantially offer any particular acknowledgment of those other people folded into Anicka Yi’s Studio. We learned Hyundai had given a lot of money to the project which made the disarmingly naturalized ‘pond’ where the aerobe drones went to recharge seem like it could have been a green-washed marketing campaign for electric vehicles—capitalisms profoundly inadequate solution to the crisis of automobilism.

It’s not hard to imagine less poetic drones occupying space. Say a fleet of millions delivering amazon packages and prescription pharmaceuticals. And I imagine if I lived somewhere like Yemen I would already have a very real and terrifying relationship to drones, that could make a work like this feel almost willfully disengaged. If we look at Yi’s work as an invitation to consider how we program machines, and perhaps conclude that we should make them more beautiful and less productive, are we then to apply that to humans, animals and the natural world as well? And do we need teams at MIT to help design expensive, plastic, battery-operated drones as a philosophical prompt to consider our unevenly distributed technological ambitions? I suppose they are actually quite productive, in that the exposure they bring the museum through their proliferation on social and traditional media will provide an enormous attentional and remunerative return for all involved. The project brings to mind Trevor Paglen’s launch of an orbiting satellite sculpture that make use of considerable resources to belabor a similar, quotidian idea of technological poetics, that comes across as both murky and ultimately affirmative.

While experiencing the crowds gathering and children cooing it’s easy to remember that mine is just one small and shifting vantage on this project. It made me pine for the open water swimming I left behind in California, where anthropogenic climate change has caused the jellyfish to swell in numbers, upsetting the ecological balance and making swimming more difficult and unpleasant. The jellies that bloom by the season don’t sting me but startle and upset me when I interact with them in the water.

After the artist talk I stayed behind in the theater listening to a group of stylish young women with Telfar bags discuss secret babies being had by professional women in the remote-working pandemic period. Anicka stopped over to say hi and said she would be in touch later on about outfit possibilities for that evening. The conversation focused in on female artists quietly having babies during the lock down. One woman offered a tutorial on how to gaslight your boss by slowly making casual mentions of your baby after the fact and then acting confused when they register surprise at the news. The conversation produced a feeling of abyssal sadness that no amount of gently fluttering poetic drones could balm.

The professional photographers looked like they were hunting. The amateur photogaphers looked like people admiring themselves in a mirror. Allegedly there were olfactory nebulizers emitting a mist of cholera, deforestation and horse sweat, though this wasn’t explicitly claimed on any wall texts and rather seemed to move like rumor through the Turbine Hall. The aerobe drones are attracted to heat and so they find themselves clustering around groups of human bodies. This began to make them feel a little menacing. They were initially programmed to drop lower towards people, but there were institutional concerns about children on adults shoulders. As they get closer, the machine hum grows distressing and the charm of the floating robots fades. I began to get the feeling their aquamorphical guise is a part of a generalized technique of making what will soon be ubiquitous more palatable to people who are not given the right to consent.