6: Illiberal Arts / 36 Hours in Berlin (Capital indeed has its good tricks!)
I encountered the catalogue first at the old masters edition of Frieze and I asked what turned out to be Franz Konig if he had seen the exhibition. He replied he had not, but that this was likely the most interesting book on the shelf. I asked him what else he was reading and he replied that he doesn’t even like reading and when he does he reads mysteries. I couldn’t tell if he was joking. Because of its size I decided not to buy it and carry it around. Since moving to London, I mostly pick up pocket editions. I made a note to myself to try to make it to Berlin to see the show and left with a slim volume from Francois J. Bonnet called The Music to Come.
I emailed Anselm Franke to see if he would meet me. He graciously accepted and we set a time. After arriving in Germany and deplaning the immigration guard took my documents and phone and began scrolling through the pictures on it. This invasiveness continued for way too long while he questioned me coldly. I arrived at HKW a few hours early and was informed I could not enter without a QR code verifying my vaccinations. Berlin had implemented a law that without a digital vaccination certificate I could not enter most establishments. The next several hours involved rushing all over town on an electric scooter trying to solicit an authorization for a recognized vaccination status. A kind doctor in army fatigues at a nearby military hospital offered that if I could procure a World Health Organization booklet, she would fill it out for me. With my phone dead and access to app-based electric scooter rentals suspended, I literally ran through the streets like a 20th century pre-cyborg, in search of papers I could parlay into digital legitimacy. I made it to at the museum a little before our meeting, walked the show, called up to Anselm and got a text 5 minutes later saying he was feeling ill and went home. I spent the evening there, and returned the following day for a tour by the co-curator Kerstin Stakemeier.
The Haus der Kulturen der Welt is a strange folly of post-war soft power; a gift from the US to Germany to function as a ‘beacon’ of liberal expression and western cosmopolitanism, erected on the former hunting grounds of 17th century Brandenburg Electors. It collapsed under its poor architectural planning in 1980 (does anyone know what event was happening at the time?) and since being rebuilt, is referred to as the ‘pregnant oyster’ by Berliners. From behind it is supposed to evoke a bird in flight and looks a little bit like the furrowed brow of a scowling owl.
I’ve been following Anselm's curatorial work for some time and would show up for most things he’s involved with. The Animism project was particularly interesting and I appreciate the theoretical framing of his distinctive and politically oriented exhibitions. Illiberal Arts departs from the position that a failed liberalism has exposed its illiberal core and works in the show are examples of artists and practices that produce fractures in a liberal conception of art. Or,
‘The liberal-capitalist world order that appeared to have cemented itself after 1989 is now in a stage of advanced disintegration. The breakdown of this order reveals the illiberal core of its capitalizing freedoms and forms of property: the violent unfreedom of the propertyless and the readiness of the propertied to use violence. Art, too, turns out to be a site for the negotiations between these violent forces, their limitations and connections. What’s more, the ruin of liberality places the modern institution of “institutionalized art” (veranstaltlichte Kunst, Arnold Hauser) in a deeply questionable light. Taking up the thread of the interventions initiated 100 years ago by Berlin writer Lu Märten, in Illiberal Arts we view art as the result of colonizing enclosures, as a continuation of processes of primary valorization, appropriation, and expropriation of artistic “life-works” that reach far beyond art. At present, forms of life that have been truncated, degraded, and devalued by this curtailment are clearly erupting into art’s constricting horizons. And where they are not immobilised again as mere critical supplements, they lead to the perceptibility, in practice, of an increasing loss of modern art’s form, and extrapolate from it liminal forms of artistic labor and mediation. In this way, the familiar rituals of “institutionalized art,” which are increasingly losing their social legitimacy, turn into expanded sites for the negotiation of (no longer simply) artistic issues in this illiberal present. Illiberal Arts is an attempt at practicing forms of artistic life-work in the midst of this illiberal present.’
Full curator statement here: https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2021/illiberal_arts/kuratorisches_statement_illiberal_arts/text.php
An exhibition at this scale with all of its parergonal programming invites a multiplicity of approaches to it. One, might be on its own terms and through the works it exhibits. Another, as a long discursive event that brings together artists and commentators (if we even still need a distinction) and occasions the collaborative production of knowledge, publications and events. I’ve spent quite a bit more time with the catalogue, exhibition guide and exploring the cited texts and works than I did in the mostly inhospitable show. I found the tenor of the exhibition cold, imposing, horrific even; opaque, ironic, alienating, didactic, tragic and overwrought. A kind of mad house of anxieties and frustrations. An open sound video installation by Jordan Shafer bled a looped and crazy-making earworm into the hall, with a voice interrogating us, ‘are you a little girl?...are you a little girl?…’ over and over. Anne Imhof designed the exhibition space with a group called sub to be a falling horizon that oppresses—or at least inconveniences—both the viewers and the art.
By the first approach, I wasn’t able to connect the lofty curatorial statement with a discernible sense of any of the artist's somewhat ill-defined notion of life-work (Märten). It looked like the usual gallery fodder from people who call themselves artists—or at least turn up where liberal art happens to denounce its vulgar machinations and colonial history. I suppose the idea of exhibiting life-work in the HKW is a futile exercise to begin with, and perhaps the foregrounding of that failure was part of the larger conceptual level the exhibition was endeavoring to work on; performing the themes and limitations outlined in its theoretical framing. What seemed absent from an exhibition largely intent on foregrounding its critiques, limitations and paradoxes—and may also perhaps fit into a contemporary idea of life-work—would be the obscured networks of institutional affiliation, power, and professional reciprocity that likely contribute to how these kinds of (il)liberal artworks are produced and presented.
As a discursive event it worked for me, in that it provided a lot of ideas to think with, contest, depart from, and so on. Though the form of the book, like the installation, felt somewhat disrespectful to the contributors. The curators voice and command seemed to be asserted in every possible way. In the catalogue the contributors words were literally shrunk, made different colors and pushed around the margins of the curators larger printed black and white statements. Most contributions were interrupted, arbitrarily, by other contributions, making it difficult to follow any line of thought.
The catalogue opens with the intersplicing of Ho Rui An’s speculative forensics of a 1985 Chinese media-focused research delegation to Singapore with Juliana Spahrs ars poetica; forcing us into a hard to maintain position of simultaneously evaluating the implications of state-controlled media infrastructure with a romantic subjectivity grappling with the limitations of legacy forms of protest and poetry in the west. This kind of dizzying interscalar shift between inherited forms of subjectivity with their cultural articulations and the performance of theoretical positions concerning scales commensurate with massively distributed and complex networks of relations in divergent and reconfiguring contexts is the register Illiberal Arts operates in.
In between the fragments of Rui An’s historiographical forensics and Spahr’s ars poetica irrupts Bill Dietz’s polemic against art, that’s presented as a draft, marked up with edits and revisions. It borrows quotes from Saidiya Hartman and CLR James towards an abolitionist position of an art that is constitutively defined as ‘white, heterosexist, [and] genocidal…’ The piece veers in many directions through Soviet constructivist design, Henry Flynt, mukbang videos, CLR James on cricket, Shakespeare, Eisenstein, and so on towards a fuzzy sentiment of ‘solidarity’. It came across to me as feeling excessively digressive and libidinal. There’s a questionable grandiosity and sensationalism in this kind of polemic that opens with art as a genocidal machine of undifferentiated whiteness and proceeds through a libidinal mess of lazily related concepts, and ends with hallow signaling of ‘solidarity’. It makes me want to take a shower.
I found Rosalind Morris’, text message conversation and related essay cogent and well written. I had been recently struggling with a film project of hers that involved editing the GoPro footage of South African miners in a way that fits within a quote she borrows in her essay from the editors of commune who offer ‘today, with increasing clarity, modern art can be recognized as a form of appropriating artistic labor.’ In the same essay Morris expresses some misgivings about Marten’s (unfortunately yet to be translated to English) notion of life-work that they offer as a ‘question whether the designation or valorization of Lebensarbeit [life-work] as an aesthetic practice does not smuggle back into the sphere of artful but art-less anti-modernism, the dream of a final judgment—even as it relinquishes the task and the possibility of a criticality liberated from possessive individualism.’ I was intuiting a similar concern about the juridcical implications of this notion with my inference of the concept from the Illiberal Arts catalogue, if not quite possessing a clear idea of what ‘artful but art-less antimodernism’ might be—a pleasantly ambiguous formulation that could suggest a number of valances towards how art could be interpellated that still appear beholden to a juridical sovereign. The essay goes on to caution against the universalizing tendencies of liberal historicization from which much of the work surveyed in illiberal arts departs from. In a shift of tone, an unnamed voice, described as an ‘aging woman,’ offers ‘let us not forget how often and predictably the sign of the new, rather than, for example, the otherwise, shelters the fetish of virile youth. Nor lose track of the frequency with which it is accompanied by the masculinist celebration of passionate intensities masquerading as anti-bourgeois radicalism.’
I would like to add a small addendum to the 12th section of Steve Reinke’s delightful monologues for an arrow pointing to a hole. If it’s not too late, Steve, when you go to south side of Chicago as part of the artist in a classroom program and offer to children that every crayon in the box was once a human spirit and so whatever they are drawing—a dog or a pond—they are really drawing that spirit, I might add something about the labor conditions of the people that produced the crayons.
Not unlike Deitz, Aristilde Paz Justine Kirby weaves a cosmology from disparate sources, among them; a triad of characters in an Ingres painting, a scene with Liv Ullmann in Carlmar’s The Wayward Girl, a Drake lyric, some Gayle Rubin quotes, the ‘bottoming out of the cut flower business’ as articulated in the Ecuadorian highlands, a Dutch flower facility the size of 75 soccer fields and the COVID postponed wedding plans of a young MoMA employee. This kind of writing, from deterritorialized forms of loosened subjectivities, is enjoyable—and even more so when it cedes its authoritative voice. As in, I prefer the tone of ‘if you ask me, bridewealth is the Lacanian sinthome for this topologic network of nested societies we call the world: the key to its dissolution.’ more than ‘the abuse of the bridewealth is a catalyst of capitalism & makes eunuchs of us all.’ But these are minor preferences and I’m rehearsed in running an internal program that transforms declarative statements into open questions, e.g is the catalyzing abuse of the bridewealth that is constitutive of capitalism making eunuchs of us all?
If this volume suggests a contemporary vogue for the cobbling together of disparate seeming epistemes, Övül Durmusoglu offers a longer tradition, with a bizarre history of Turkish speculative nation-building, instantiated by characters like Helena Blavatsky whose writings drew ‘from Neoplatonism, renaissance magic, Kabbalah, and Freemasonry, along with ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman mythology and religion, and eastern doctrines taken from Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta to present the idea of ancient wisdom handed down from the prehistoric times’ in service of furthering Mu’ist diffusionism.
Are you too, reader, getting the sense that there is a penchant here for the exotic blends of cultural connoisseurship that would become the discerning cosmopolitan audiences of the Haus of world cultures?
Following Dominik Intelmann’s anatomy of nazi resurgence in Chemnitz, Ana Teixeira Pinto’s unpacking of enlightenment sublime sheds light on just what a nasty bill of goods that ongoing project is. Right? Well, maybe there are some interesting, useful or redeeming features produced under that ‘regime of aesthetics’. I found myself the other day on the London overground thinking of Kant; that reclusive, aesthetic homebody, as a kind of proto Silicon Valley incel, building virtual worlds to protect himself from the horrors of the embodied sensuous world. Pinto cites Meg Armstrong’s The Effects of Blackness when she offers ‘just like Burke’s sublime, Hegel’s is marred by a parasitic relation to alterity, which burrows into the ‘’flesh it marks as other.’’ A formulation that can likely be applied well before Kant and Hegel and certainly in manifold relations of the contemporary. While reading passages like ‘Sublimity is a negative relationship: nature is an alienation in which spirit does not find itself. Nature is the negative because it negates the idea. The spirit must negate this negation…’ I feel like I’m back in GLUT, Johanna Hedva’s small black box installation at the outset of the exhibition that spins out a cacophonous bourgeois subjective interiority when you step inside until it becomes unbearable and you open the door, abruptly stopping the noise and returning you to social space. It occurs to me by the end of this lucid indictment, the enlightenment was not so much a negation or abolition of religion but rather an internalized version adopted by empire and articulated through the media of its day. Which by extension puts the metaverse in this long history of religion—or as Hito Steyerl asks, ‘how many AI’s can dance on the head of a pin?’ If you reread the above passage and replace ‘Spirit’ with ‘Meta’, its not hard to imagine an animated Mark Zuckerberg try to onboard you to Facebooks new platform.
As I advance through the catalogue it begins to feel extremely heavy with citations. I wonder if it’s a near total disconnect from meaningful politics that produces such a vigorous production of art and letters about politics. Without an ability to meaningfully participate in determining those issues of most consequence (war, welfare, borders, infrastructure, etc) something like a fragmented, aesthetically-oriented left is left to the realm of signs which feel about as effective as the hand-painted ones that flash for an instant outside the actual structures of power. To clarify, I’m unconvinced the reactionary flare ups of street protest and the reshuffling of politically themed works of art and literature constitute a materially significant form of politics. It has also glutted the possibility space of an already impoverished notion of art with works that articulate the inability of this provincial, retrograde conception of art to meaningfully address the sociopolitical and ecological crises of the world. It’s a bizarre and sad turn that art should be organized largely by its viability in the market and/or the claims it makes towards socioecological efficacy.
The texts in the catalogue are put into startling juxtaposition. It feels impossible to apprehend and synthesize the scope of concerns. White’s afropessimist Warring precedes Engster’s Secondary Original Accumulation and Complimentary Valorization in Illiberal Politics and Art, a familiar intersectional impasse of race and class. It’s quite a sight to behold Engster shoehorn western dualism into a due terminological update of ‘primitive accumulation.’ We’re given something like a cosmology with an ‘original accumulation’ creation story for the economic determinists. In a later text by Engster he suggests an unusual theory of the ‘intersectionality’ of capital, which useful or not, is a good example of how these connotative struggles play out—and how easy it is to get lost in the shifting terminological woods. It becomes almost like a Marxian Talmud, with endless troubling of categories; reframing, negating, expanding, and conditioning the argot. Listening to this high marxist intercourse is impressive to behold and I doubt it’s winning many friends and supporters.
In a recent talk with Anselm Franke on an interesting interview project and public lecture series called the Hope Recycling Station Franke was asked to a comment on some of Latour’s work. He replied that Latour and french thinkers generally were going to ‘pay dearly’ for their refusal of Marxism. The language made me laugh at first, maybe because it felt so dramatic, but I found myself thinking about it later. In my reading of recent Latour there seems to be an almost singular focus on challenging his audience to honestly inventory the land and labor they live off and from, and as the basis of determining the scope of their responsibilities and entanglements. This might not be a bad way into a lot of the things Marx was concerned with and it might be a more effective rhetorical strategy to communicate with people who recoil from the interminable use of the word ‘alienation’ as it accumulates in exceedingly Byzantine structures of irresolvable dialectics. And I say this as someone prone to using that kind of language.
While reading the exhibition catalogue, I found myself mostly nodding along to the text and making notes of things to explore from the contributors and their generous citational practices. By the time I got to the end though I felt a kind of yawning chasm between the dazzling theory and—not just the work being shown, but the relations between artists in the show. That is to say, I wonder how much illiberal arts succeeded in realizing ‘…an aesthetic objectification of shared intimacies, as materialist resistances, communal forms of mind and living horizons of possibility.’
It’s hard to reconcile the call for ‘sociogenic’ morphology with what by all accounts presents as a typical European contemporary art exhibition of videos, paintings, drawings, sculptures and installation. If the idea was to choose artists based on their life-works or life practices, then despite the antagonistic treatment of their display and the rhetorical claims made on their behalf, the exhibition displays their art-works and almost invisiblizes their lives, providing very little context or intimacy with them. I don’t doubt that each of the artists has a fascinating relationship to the present and their lives are irreducible to the artifacts that hang in Illiberal Art, I just wish the show was oriented towards sharing the facets of their life-practices that get occluded by the Art. I felt a self-defeating (but also somehow self-serving) wounded romanticism saturating the show. At one point, I thought I saw a curator cameo in a five part soap opera about an apathetic left.
MYSTI offers;
Art is the donut
You sit on after hemorrhoid surgery
Jenny Nachtigall’s essay opens up—through Lu Märten— a Spinozan monism that proceeds through Marx and art, constellating historical resonances and mystic affinities.
The preamble to the conversation with Fumi Okiji illuminates a feeling I’ve been struggling to articulate thru my engagement with Illiberal Arts. It opens with a thought lineage about the nonway, traced back through Rei Terada on Derrida, that ‘excludes no possibilities except the dividing line of the route. Every other possibility is still there—maybe an infinite number, maybe a condition unassailable to choice.’ To which Okiji would like to ‘distend Terada’s intention ever so slightly, to help situate a group of seemingly disparate sites of liminal communitas, sites of unactualizable practice amidst the modality of fantastic possibility.’ And goes on to offer Benjamin’s experiments with hashish and thought as narcotic ways into the nonway. This abundance of quantum possibility and intoxicatingly spun language feels reminiscent of the California countercultural context I’ve become entangled with and suggestive of the easy affinities between psychoactive substances and poetics.
To circle back to the idea of illiberal arts, I think this is an interesting concept and would like to explore it further. Illiberal arts could be used to elaborate what we might call the relational aesthetics of neoliberalism. A way to understand the unrelenting aesthetic production of contemporary virtual subjectivity—with all its various media, performativity and relationality—towards the the allo- and auto- exploitations of precarious work and platform capitalism. The aestheticized performance of Self distributed through media and platforms is increasingly necessary for work, socializing, and education and is both of and in advance of the aesthetic ‘content’ or illiberal art that is produced—the value of which is largely expropriated by a vectoralist class (Wark). When a media artifact or a confluence of socioecological relations gets shared, it’s the subsequent expropriation of value and instrumentalization against its social context that makes the character of this art illiberal. These parasitic forces should not be confused with the qualities of interest in the works they predate on, while their hegemony overdetermines the forms of their circulation. Perhaps a fracture in illiberal art looks more like collective projects taken in service of social goals that are not reducible to any form of individual accumulation. Wikipedia, Memoryoftheworld, public parks and a range of mutual aid initiatives come to mind—also, as their seems to be an aesthetic dimension to everything, any kind of social or ecological confluence in resistance to illiberal suffering provides more than enough of the constituent elements to determine artfulness.
Does the notion of illiberal arts pertain to overcoming restrictive borders? The arts of sacrifice and remittances? The counter illiberal arts of organization and mutual aid?
The artworks here are intriguing and contain insights, humor, beauty, skill, charisma, curiosity, etc, though still remain largely opaque and seem to signal, through the familiar tropes of installation art, an embrace or proximity of these institutional norms. I get the sense what’s most interesting about them is left out of the pamphlet that accompanies the exhibition and theory-dense catalogue. It’s a bit like looking at pinned butterflies in a science museum and reading some dispassionate information about their provenance along with a general critique of the fraught history of Science. It was mostly during the guided tours with Kerstin that the works began to open up a little; when I felt little glimpses of the ‘life-work’ from which these things were extracted. The circulations of anecdote, gossip and intimacies seem to be what has replaced the aura in contemporary art. Perhaps it could be observed that the institutional performance of this suite of ambivalences through the social, performative, visual, relational, and ultimately acquiescent aesthetics that determines one’s realizable sociocultural capital comprise the art-life-work that convenes in Illiberal Arts; all the diffuse meanings and their half-lives.
After the show I stopped into the Hienz Emigholz retrospective in an adjacent gallery. Around a theater playing an almost terminally boring, glacially uneventful architecture fetish film were vitrines filled with libidinally charged notebooks, almost overflowing with interior hyperactivity. The tension produced an almost uncontrollable laugher in me. There is something distinctly German at work here, a kind of severely disciplined architecture for the totally excessive and uncontainable. Like standing in an orderly line and confronting a super ego before going into Berghain and [insert most sensational and salacious Berghain experience or rumor here]. I made my way to the Shinkel Pavilion to see the 'the worlds of the late Swiss visionary HR Giger (1940-2014) and the South Korean artist Mire Lee (b. 1988), transforming into a site for an exploration of the darkest aisles of the human body and psyche,’ which mostly delivered on its promises. I wonder how instructive it is to look with clear eyes, under bright fluorescents at these hyper articulations of horrific unchecked libidinal fantasies? Looking at the Giger boardroom I started thinking of Ho Rui An’s video in Illiberal Arts. Watching a video Lee compiled of a fetish genre where footage is made of an unsuspecting victim moments before being sexually assaulted on public transportation I thought of Epstein, Berlusconi, Trump and the Marquis de Sade. Is this what this art is about? How important is it for us to look at these impulses and how much of our lives are determined by these libidinal drives and their attendant forms of power? I also wonder if this kind of institutional art looks quaint in comparison to what I imagine most adolescents first encounter of the libidinal economies on the internet must feel like. A friend came to meet us in the evening at Shinkel after he had been out clubbing all night and day. I tried to imagine what kind of psychological effect this kind of work would have after so many hours of partying.
In between I stopped at Gropius Bau, (a pretty libidinal sounding place with a fairly wholesome program and undoubtedly connected to and funded by a myriad of sordid historical forces) and bumped into my friend Ayumi, clothed in white singing some devotional sounding sounds to an atrium filled with an installation described by the museum as:
‘Under the title Ámà: The Gathering Place (2019/2021), Ogboh's intervention takes the form of a tree over 9 meters high and includes an accompanying 12-channel sound installation and textile elements. The starting point of the work is the “ámà” - “village square” in Igbo. These places are the physical and symbolic center of life in Igbo society; Places where ceremonies, entertainment, trade and everyday exchanges take place. Ámà: The Gathering Place takes inspiration from these places and transforms the atrium of Gropius Bau into a space of calm and social exchange, accompanied by recordings of a choir singing traditional Igbo folk songs. In addition to the sculptural and sonic elements, viewers are invited to sit on traditional Akwétè towels, which were designed by contemporary Nigerian graphic designers and weavers and which also cover the central sculpture of the work. The work shows how semi-public spaces, from village squares to institutional open spaces, can be reclaimed as places of conviviality, celebration, reflection and exchange.
As part of the installation, Emeka Ogboh is developing the conceptual craft beer Ámà together with the Berlin brewery BRLO , for which he works with spices and local ingredients. It will be available in the Beba restaurant and in the bookstore from autumn.’
It is kind of heartbreaking though perhaps generative that the highly stylized, sanitized and mostly lifeless rendering of the village square modeled on the Igbo ámà is put into a European museum and accompanied by a seasonal craft beer.
I did a quick walk through The Cool and the Cold a painting show from the collection of Peter and Irene Ludwig who ‘were among the first collectors in the world to collect US and Soviet art at the same time. The exhibition enables a critical juxtaposition of works from both camps of the East-West conflict and examines how artists during the Cold War reacted to political and aesthetic questions of their epoch and negotiated ideas of individual and social freedom,’ as well as demonstrate the easy compatibility with which markets and powers can capaciously and sympathetically hold all sorts of proclaimed and assumed ideological positions, despite their rhetorical disparities.
It was hard to decide what to fit into our short trip. We did a run through KW for the Renée Green and a show curated by Iman Issa called Understudies: I, Myself Will Exhibit Nothing and largely because of its proximity to Sofi and their sourdough focaccia. In the interest of time we passed on the show of video works at Julia Stoschek but did get to see the Anne de Vries show (thanks Jol!) at Fragile, a nonprofit space a few doors down that you could easily miss if it wasn’t for the small piece of mail packing tape warning ‘fragile.’ The director of the space informed me they hauled the 15 tons of sand up to the second story by hand and flew in a sand artist who had just finished a job in Dubai for Playstation. De Vries had conceived a Hollywood-set-level installation about the shifting sands of power and real estate development with a randy chimeric knight from the metaverse who crashed down into the material world, right into their soon-to-be-lost, below-market art space and into some strewn around banners for architectural renderings of impending condo development. We left for dinner as some friends were bringing in drinks and setting up a sound system for a party.
We went to a taberna in Neukölln (google asks me a couple times a day if I’m a robot for querying things like ‘taberna in Neukölln’, and which I’ve come to regard as mostly benign—if not mildly irritating, and maybe even flattering a sense of of worldliness or broad interests—though now am legitimately beginning to wonder if I might be one…), to meet the friends we were staying with, a particle physicist and an arts administrator at a German publishing house who was overseeing the translation of Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom. The warm campy island frescos, the neoclassical columned architecture and proximity to the house made it perfect for the cold, wet night. It was hard not to think about Giger’s table as we ate meze and gossiped about twitter beefs and supercolliders. Andrea Long Chu’s excoriating review of Maggie’s book and Ben Lerner’s masterful prose poetry. The effects of Boiler Room on dance culture and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets. When the conversation got too technical on particle research our host offered to show some videos back at the house to better explain their work. We watched videos from popular media explaining the search for neutrinos—those elusive, nearly massless, anti-social subatomic particles. Inapparently, some 100 billion of them cross each square centimeter of our bodies every second. It turns out they’re too small to detect so it’s only when they crash into something that they are inferred. It strikes me as a strange strain of atomist thinking, at the technical threshold of detectability, which actually undermines its logic and finds only relation all the way down. A stubborn monument or installation made in the name of individualism; the production of masses of anisotropic data and the incidental wisdom that attends. I suggest a Barad lecture and the evening diffuses in a rangy montage of particles, Parajanov and Ulrike Ottinger’s 89’ Trans-Siberian lesbian epic Joan of Arc of Mongolia. We settle on what we might call ambient media, live cameras mounted on the front of trains moving through the countryside and then Liziqi videos that unobtrusively project on a wall around our conversations.
The Liziqi videos, which have made her the most watched YouTuber in Chinese history, have an uncanny quality about them. They feature a young woman in rural Sichuan performing traditional domestic acts that seduce with a rustic charm but with aesthetic discontinuities that betray their constructedness and global influences. All of a sudden Li is posed like Vermeer’s milkmaid, wearing too much makeup and an impossibly clean outfit, pouring boiling water over flour in a segment called When the flipping pan meets sesamecake, you think there will be a story? before butchering a chicken and preparing a meal for her grandmother. Afterwards she stacks up some some old tires around a bonfire and tries to balance on them while finger picking a guitar and singing a folk song.
As rural China radically transforms itself through new technology enabled agribusiness (Wang, Block Chain Chicken Farm), and more people find themselves in urban areas, Li has found a massive audience for a highly stylized fantasy of Chinese traditionalism. Her personal story is quite mythological. After being orphaned at a young age, she dropped out of school in the country and moved to the city to find work as a DJ, singer and waitress. She returned to live with her ailing grandmother in the country and started selling agriculture on Taobao before focusing on vlogging. The confluence of pastoralism, traditional values, artisan food preparation, asmr soundscapes and perhaps too the heady cultural pleasures of deconstructing the delightfully incongruous semiotics and ideologies present in her videos have made her a global phenomenon. At the time of writing this she had ‘gone dark’ on social media, withholding all of her content and communication, while disputing with her business partners. She released one ambiguous communiqué directly to her fans that read, ‘Capital indeed has its good tricks!’
It also occurs to me there are archetypal resonances between Li and La Malinche. [forthcoming essay]
