1

*

LUCY BEYNON

THOM DONOVAN

BIRTE ENDREJAT

LISA JESCHKE

LUKE MCMULLAN

YATES NORTON

SOPHIE SEITA

JONAS L. TINIUS

STEVE TOMPKINS

EBEN WOOD

*

JONAS L. TINIUS

*

LISA JESCHKE &

LUCY BEYNON

EBEN WOOD

THOM DONOVAN

LUKE MCMULLAN

YATES NORTON

* & BIRTE ENDREJAT

SOPHIE SEITA

Synaesthetic Appeal

Un-Manifesto

Abstract / Argument

What My Smartphone Taught Me

About Johan Grimonprez's Inflight

Back Figure

Negative Knowledge; or, A History

of the I, Done in Language

Failure to Vertical: Upadhyay's 8 feet

x 12 feet

Interview: ‘Instructions for a Setting’

The Third Interview

3

6

8

12

17

18

21

23

27

CONTENTS

PLATES

STEVE TOMPKINS

YATES NORTON

Mobile Auditorium

Impressions

Cambridge, UK

February 2012

All material is the copyright of its respective authors.

Insert

22

JONAS L. TINIUS

Synaesthetic Appeal

SYNAESTHESIA — the (very) fact of ‘the production of a sense impression relating to one

sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body’

i

— is a

flaw in a cognitive imperative of differentiation, is the body whose cells grow anew a new body every

seven years, is the stretched and recreating tissue of quotation without inverted commas.

ii

Ne-

cessarily points SYNAESTHESIA a finger, shivering in awe, at the contingency of ‘a kind’, genre,

inter=penetration of in=formation, imagination, experience.

[I hasten to complete my list before I am interrupted. In the green group there are

alder-leaf f, the unripe apple of p, and pistachio t. … Dull green, combined somehow

with violet, is the best I can do for a w. I casually remarked to her that their colours

were all wrong. …We discovered then that some of her letters had the same tint as

mine and that, besides, she was optically affected by musical notes. … My mother did

everything to encourage the general sensitiveness I had to visual stimulation. … How

many aquarelles she painted for me.]

iii

WE don’t want to stop at the frame’s end, but lean our bodies over the threshold abyss between

earth and firmament like a traveller in the Flammarion engraving. Ill-contained, memories that you

anticipate, anticipated retrospectives, taking photos only to archive them, remembering the forth-

calling and before-taking that is provocation and anticipation. You wake up dreaming. And of colours

that stain wake night wanderings. Wander off, wander through, wander with, wonder about, oh won-

der! Vot zapomni [now remember]!

iv

LET US be Nabokov’s mother and the painting of encour-

agement, encouraging paint, flowing in all directions, veins, nerves, pores, saliva, LUST in your

fingertips. I am your fingertiptiptiptoed.

[Skin on skin becomes conscious. …Without this folding, without the contact of the

self on itself, there would truly be no internal sense, no body properly speaking, coen-

esthesia even less so, no real image of the body; we would live without consciousness;

slippery smooth and on the point of fading away. … Those who do not know where

their soul is to be found touch their mouths, and they do not find it there. The mouth

touching itself creates its soul and contrives to pass it on to the hand which, clenching

itself involuntarily, forms its own faint soul and then can pass it on.]

v

Let us be regressing from consciousness to unconscious, but pass on consciousness from mouth to

hand, to … Do you agree? Let me be your fingertip then, a lip touching lip, skins peaking on skin

speaking. Hit still watery surface with flat hand, just enough to delve into the responding mould, and

then then then, you ascend majestically with new wave form under your shocked palm. Or in the

post-coital clasp, skin involuntarily forms its own faint soul, crusted salty soul. Let me be meeting-

point then, cut surface in shapes of leaves covering the cut-surface(d) leaves. Surfaced forms ex-

pressed impression expressed impression in itself leaving, flowing, streaming, tidal. Tidal. Full stop.

[He explained that the Earth — the Deterritorialised, the Glacial, the giant Molecule

— is a body without organs. This body without organs is permeated by unformed, un-

stable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities,

by mad or transitory particles. … There simultaneously occurs upon the earth a very

important, inevitable phenomenon that is beneficial in many respects and unfortu-

nate in many others: stratification. Strata are Layers, Belts. They consist of giving form

to matter, of imprisoning intensities. … Strata are acts of capture. … They operate by

coding and territorialisation upon the earth. … But the earth, or the body without or-

gans, constantly eludes that judgement, flees and becomes destratified, decoded, de-

territorialised.]

vi

Let me listen to you, tell me, show me. Let us pick flora and see fauna, let us forget names, typolo-

gies, and relearn, recreate, reclassify to declassify. Free association. Like a jail door closing, like

a male whore dozing. And so on.

vii

I awe. I reverberate. I become. Many. Let us be and come,

let us become. Many.

[The proliferation of concepts, as in the case of technical languages, goes with more

constant attention to properties of the world, with an interest that is more alert to

possible distinctions, which can be introduced between them.]

viii

If you quarrel, amongst your selves, spanning tin can telephone threads between playfully longing

ears, let one be poetry and another philosophy, let them twist and knit strands until denser curls pull

nodes closer together until the net works for itself. On the other side of the planet, someone does

the same and doesn’t like it. Allow a thrown dice to determine paths untrodden. One fine afternoon,

somebody will say that nothing of the memorable crisis will have taken place. Let’s be quick, even

when standing still.

ix

Let’s be mothers, azure spreading coloured letters.

We all know that genres used to exist.

x

Notes

i

‘Synaesthesia’ in The New Oxford American Dictionary, 2

nd

ed., ed. by E. McKean (London/Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2005).

ii

Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 160.

iii

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York/London: Everyman's Library, 1947), p. 21f.

iv

ibid, p. 25.

v

Michel Serres, The Five Senses. A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (I), trans. by M. Sankey and P. Cowley.

(London/New York: Continuum, 2008 [1985]), p. 20.

vi

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘10,000 BC.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth

Think It Is?)’, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London/New York: Continuum,

1988 [1980]), p. 45.

vii

Tom Waits, ‘I look like hell but I’m going to see where it gets me.’, Interview by Tim Adams, The

Guardian, October 23, 2011.

viii

Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Science of the Concrete’, in The Savage Mind, trans. by G. Weidenfeld

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966 [1962]), pp. 2-3.

ix

Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, p. 45.

x

Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Origin of Genres’, in Modern Genre Theory, ed. by David Duff (Harlow:

Pearson Education, 1999 [1976.]), p. 194.

THE MAGAZINE IS DEAD!

LONG LIVE THE MAGAZINE!

LISA JESCHKE & LUCY BEYNON

Abstract

i

This rests on restraint.

This is for a limited period of time.

Austerity measures.

ii

I would hereby like to address you.

I think I can say I am speaking for all of us when I – speak.

iii

Black.

Argument

iv

Again! In parts, division into parts. Nothing? Nothing. Noth-

ing? Nothing. This is entirely linear. It would be one thing to

say: x is x, another thing to say: William Shakespeare is not

William Shakespeare, and an entirely different thing to say:

Adolf Hitler was Adolf Hitler, but really all of these amount

to the same old thing, namely what? What. What? What. Even

refusal of speech must be uttered. Again? Still? Still? Still.

Still. Again! Even refusal of speech must be uttered if it is to

lay claim to territory. This is entirely linear. It would be one

thing to say: I refuse to speak, another thing to say: Nothing,

another thing again to say: nothing, another thing again to

say: –. Again! All of these are just examples of what could be

said if one imagined oneself as someone who spoke. Further

examples must follow, if they must.

v

Black.

vi

Again. I would hereby like to address you. I think I can say I

am speaking for all of us when I – speak. Speech. Examples,

examples of speech: whenever there is a choice, the choice it-

self is limited. Words: there are those that could be imagined,

but these (here!, hear) are real, that is, here, here. Is this what

could be expected? Now, not this: is it possible to write about

concentration camps in anything but black and/on white?

This is getting worse. Is it possible to write about anything in

anything but black and/on white? What? What exactly is this?

Nothing, nothing, –,

EBEN WOOD

What My Smartphone Taught Me About Johan

Grimonprez's Inflight

I.

The user’s manual for my BlackBerry® Torch™ 9850 smartphone is titled “Master

Your Device.” I love the masculine clarity of that injunction, the desire concealed in its

performative command, but I haven’t read the instructions that follow.

Check your Hegel: it’s precisely by mastering your device that the device actu-

ally masters you, because in that process the dependency of the master is revealed. Or

rather, by mastering the device we mean taking its place as the subservient Other that

authorizes our mastery, identifying the coordinates of desire, an identity that’s always

elsewhere (“I want! I want!” wrote Blake in a 1793 engraving, and the stars become

holes). This particular device, my Torch, embodies communication and information-

processing, exemplifying the paradox of digital identity, the binary of yes/no,

either/or, one/zero. In this case it’s not the device itself that we must master in order

to come home to ourselves, but what it contains or represents: the binding of objects

and systems (carriers, functions, “third-party services and applications”) of which the

device is merely instrument and symbol.

According to the OED, the word magazine comes into English from the Spanish

almagacen, derived from the definite article and original Arabic word, makhzan, or store-

house. Its original use in English, now rare, was for “[a] place where goods are laid up;

a storehouse or repository for goods or merchandise; a warehouse, depot.” The word

subsequently took on a still-current meaning, for a “building in which is stored a supply

of arms, ammunition and provisions for an army for use in time of war”; Edmund

Spenser first uses the word this way in his infamous A View of the Present State of Ireland

(1596), arguing that the British military presence in that troublesome colony must dig

in for the long haul of occupation (I’m thinking about those murals on the wall

between East and West Belfast, depicting the Israelis and the Palestinians as a corollary

binary to Protestant and Catholic). By the early 17th century the term was being used

in the titles of books to denote a “storehouse of information on a specified subject or

for a particular class of persons.” Finally, by the 1730s, magazine had come to signify a

“periodical publication containing articles by various writers; chiefly a periodical public-

ation intended for general rather than learned or professional readers […].”

This is, I think, a telling derivation, echoing—avant la lettre—the closely inter-

twined development of film and military technology throughout the 20th century, bell-

wether of a more general militarization of culture. In a similar migration across

borders of experience and knowledge, a strategic move congruent with the prolifera-

tion of artistic practices after the 1960s, the work of Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez is

difficult to categorize. It’s not that Grimonprez’s work seems initially puzzling or off-

putting, but rather that it’s so immediately reminiscent of something deeply familiar:

not so much a specific thing but a whole world. That work is reassuringly like

something one has seen before, yet the closer one gets to it, the longer one spends with

it, the more alienated—and alienating—it becomes. Simply put, as I approach, it re-

treats. From his earliest films, in the artist’s transition from his student period at New

York’s School for Visual Arts in the early 1990s, to his breakthrough “documentary,” dial

H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. (1997), with its supplemental objects and installations, to his most recent

film Double Take (2009), Grimonprez situates his work within the objects and systems of

a post-Cold-War, globalized media culture. This is, I think, media as the Alpha and

Omega of history, its beginning and its end.

This is particularly true of one of the most static or contained works in the

artist’s oeuvre, an apparent pastiche of airline in-flight magazines reflecting the mirage-

like archive of texts and images that appears to lie behind dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. but that is

equally anarchival, a projection of the film’s de-centering or ex-centric desire. For the

launch of Inflight at the Deitch Projects in October 2000, and invoking the necessary ab-

sence or lack of an actual airline but invoking its intended passenger, the system for

which the in-flight magazine is device, Grimonprez also created a retro-kitsch lounge

that recalled a “golden age” of aircraft travel, the 1960s, whose futuristic iconography

already looked ahead to the time in which jets would be replaced by spacecraft, when

the global networks established by the modern airline industry would become putat-

ively universal.

As summarized by the Deitch Projects’ publicity material, while hilariously syn-

thesizing the aesthetics of those glossy magazines found in the seatback pocket of a com-

mercial aircraft with the supermarket tabloid, the magazine

broke a basic convention of sky reading by focusing our attention on the his-

tory of airline hijacking. An obsessively researched collection of articles took

us on an exciting detour from the seamlessly peaceful world of showbiz chats

and international recipes usually provided to relax air passengers. By

sourcing 30 years of news archives on the subject, Grimonprez also subtly

scrutinizes the media’s influence in shaping our understanding of polemic

world events. It reports that today the hijacker character has virtually van-

ished from our screens. With a growing fear of the political unknown, atten-

tion on aliens is up! We were Skyjacked in planes, now spacenapped in UFOs

and cyberjacked over the net.

1

In this incarnation, the artist transformed the domestic video-viewing room, in which

dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. appeared originally at Documenta X, into a slick, commercial airline

departure lounge, containing copies of the magazine, “hijack-o-rama” timelines and

wall maps covering the histories of air piracy, sabotage, and cyberjacking as well as spe-

cific geographies of political conflicts in which hijacking played a constitutive role (re-

produced within the magazine), and the user-activated video library entitled (quoting

Bart Simpson) “Maybe the sky is green and we’re just colorblind.” The glossy Inflight

mirrors the appearance of its conventional or commercial Other, but the pixelated cov-

er photo of an airliner exploding on Jordan’s so-called “Revolution Airstrip” in 1970 as

well as a quick glance at the table of contents shows how askew that mirror is: “No

Man’s Land”; “The Skyjacker’s Profile”; “Supermarket History”; “No Place Like Home”;

“<hacktivism>”; “The Revolution of Everyday Pies”; and “Passenger Information.” The

closer one gets actually to reading the contents of these sections, to examining further

supplemental items contained in the magazine (an aircraft evacuation chart and motion-

sickness bag), the further alienated Grimonprez’s magazine becomes, burrowing into

the cultural ideas or representations (memes) for which dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. functions as

ambiguous index.

The uneasy fact of doubling, the uncanny likeness that partakes of the larger

“culture of the copy” at the same time that it poses as that culture’s immanent critique,

marks Grimonprez’s larger project, but also the ambiguities of its operations. The

longer history of Western “print culture” is familiar enough, the twin rise of periodic-

als and other printed matter alongside—and contributing to—the revolutionary

European bourgeoisie but also of the concepts of democracy and civil society on

which that bourgeoisie’s subsequent claim to political legitimacy rests. That fairly

straightforward history is complicated by the recognition, emblematized by the so-

called Habermas debate and neoliberalism’s privatization of the public sphere, that

comparison on the basis of likeness or resemblance is really a colonial extension of

the particular into the general, of the individual into the collective, the latter func-

tioning as the former’s Other even while posing as its alibi.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election

Commission, affirming the concept of corporate personhood (in which a corporation

is held to possess the same civil rights as a human being), directly expresses this mi-

metic problem. “Master your device,” I’m told, and like Goebbels I reach for my

smartphone.

II.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, the absorptive, universalizing experience of the mass media

too easily bleeds into a universalizing rhetoric of its critique, so that while “we” al-

ways and everywhere seem to share the same experience, “we” also can apparently be

assured of the same critical capacity to transcend and reflect upon that reproductive

logic.

2

Even in Grimonprez’s dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y., participation is a key concept, as

viewers experience simultaneously their roles within and outside the media of which

they’re both product and consumer, winding through mirror-like binaries: personal

and public, domestic and global, memory and history. Through the interstices of his

archival sources, tracing the intertwined histories of television and aircraft hijacking,

Grimonprez works his own artistic hand, a disjunctive series of non-archival images

that, accompanied by doctored excerpts from Don DeLillo’s novels White Noise and

Mao II, constitutes a banal narrative thread: a disembodied visual perspective (its au-

thenticity guaranteed by its poor resolution, its shaky, handheld quality) descends

from the bedroom of a middle-class, suburban home, arrives in a taxi at a large urban

airport, checks luggage, passes through a terminal with the blurred voices of official

announcements hovering overhead, views docked aircraft through the windows of a

departure lounge, takes off on what appears to be an overnight, presumably

transoceanic flight, crammed into an economy seat and fed a skimpy meal and a Hol-

lywood action film. This is the hand that would pull Inflight from the seatback pocket

and flip through it, distracted by the arrival of the Duty Free cart, free snacks and

soft drinks, and pay-as-you-go alcohol.

To say that “we” are all familiar with this same narrative in the same way, out-

side of its mediated image, is simply incorrect, as the smooth transitions from bour-

geois domestic space to departure lounge to a seat in Economy Class of a modern

jetliner mark a very specific—if global—geography of cultural, social, and economic

privilege. The coordinates of this geography construct a subjectivity in their inter-

stices, a subjectivity that defines itself first by mirror-like opposition or negation, and

finally by identification, in which opposition is mediated by symbolic difference. For

Lacan, this is a gradual differentiation of the subject from originary Ego (“undifferen-

tiated ‘a-subjective’ being”) to Imaginary (in which the subject has learned to say “I”

but really means the “he” or “she” established in binary opposition to the “real Other”

of the mother and to the “symbolic Other” identified at this stage—falsely—with the

father) and finally to the Symbolic (in which the subjective “I” has “passed from the

subject-object, object-object relationships of the Imaginary into a thoroughly system

atic and symbolic intersubjectivity”).

3

In Anthony Wilden’s fascinating early account of Lacan and cybernetics, this final

stage constitutes the subject of digital knowledge, in which objects—and the subject that

(mis)perceives them as “Other” through the paradox of identity and autonomy—have

been replaced by a system of signifiers. “Because of the overvaluation of the digital in

modern industrial society—a valuation which is intimately connected with individual-

ism, atomism, competition, and the historical development of capitalism and techno-

logy—modern man is constitutionally divided from himself.”

4

In my view, Johan

Grimonprez situates his work, at least from dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y., in precisely this symbol-

ic stratum, in which he articulates terror not as what is outside the system but its sup-

plement, that which continually confirms a constitutive lack, a continual—and

systematic—deferral. Inflight is a specific example of this supplement, lying outside of

the film to which it clearly refers but in doing so actually confirms or projects the ab-

sence of the corporate/corporeal entity that the film’s allusive archive seems to reflect.

This machine-like entity, constructed across the different films, objects, and environ-

ments of Grimonprez’s rhizomatic practice, asserts that “society is the true reality and

the individual the abstraction,” a concept common to Saint-Simon, Comte, and Marx,

but also to the films of Vertov, Godard, and others; that practice does so against “the

projection of models derived from technology—mediated by ‘science’—into the social

dimension” (Wilden 129).

The material politics of Inflight is not what it “fills in” from dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. but

its refusal to foreclose on the film’s supplemental production of its mediating logics. In-

deed, Grimonprez’s object is to make those logics visible. Interviewed five weeks after

9/11, Jacques Derrida described terrorism and anarchy as the constitutive supplements

of Western democracy and the media that subtends it in all their cultural and historical

embeddedness, easy words that obscure the vascular functioning of a global post-binary.

The word “anarchy” risks making us abandon too quickly the analysis and inter-

pretation of what indeed looks like pure chaos. We must do all that we can to ac-

count for this appearance. We must do everything possible to make this new

"disorder" as intelligible as possible […]: an end of the "Cold War" that leaves

just one camp, a coalition, actually, of states claiming sovereignty, faced with

anonymous and nonstate organizations, armed and virtually nuclear powers.

And these powers can also, without arms and without explosions, without any

attacks in person, avail themselves of incredibly destructive computer techno-

logies, technologies capable of operations that in fact have no name (neither

war nor terrorism) and that are no longer carried out in the name of a nation-

state, and whose "cause," in all senses of this word, is difficult to define […].

5

As if commenting on this atmospheric causality, the End of History as a thorough digit-

alization not just of culture but the subjects that reproduce it, Inflight’s supplemental

materiality deepens but also de-centers the archival references of which dial

H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. is an airborne storehouse (you see the loop, the end and beginning of the

circuit, approaching). Of a lengthy interview with Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled,

reprinted in Inflight under the title “What do you do with a Boeing once you’ve stolen

it?”, Grimonprez has said, “I wanted to republish an interview Leila Khaled did with

Der Spiegel in Germany, and I had to call her and get permission. And I also wanted to

talk with Ricardo Dominguez of the group Digital Zapatismo, and he said, ‘If you call

me and email me, you’re gonna be on the blacklist.’ I gave the book to a gallerist, he

wanted to take it back to Europe, and it was confiscated by Homeland Security.”

6

This

Notes

1

http://www.deitch.com/projects/sub.php?projld=126

2

See E. Wood, “Grimonprez’s Remix,” in Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction:

Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo, ed. P. Schneck and P. Schweighauser

(London/New York: Continuum, 2010), 110-29; revised and reprinted in “It’s a poor

sort of memory that only works backwards”: On the work of Johan Grimonprez, ed. B. Detalle

(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), 247-265.

3

Anthony Wilden, System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange (London:

Tavistock, 1972), 21.

4

Ibid. 75.

5

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/derrida/derrida911.html. For the

complete interview, see Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues

with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2003).

6

http://dailyserving.com/2011/03/history-and-ownership-interview-with-johan-

grimonprez/

is media device as afterlife, index of a closed circuit from system to subject to sys-

tem.

The idea, as Grimonprez has given it to us in Inflight, is that history is the

middle passage from indifferent event, already structured by real-time global polit-

ics, to the instrumental oppositions described by Derrida, to the indifferent wastes

of the symbolic. In flight, these words appear utterly proximal, utterly familiar in

their otherness, and in that sense reassuring, until the very moment we master them.

October–November 2011

Brooklyn, NY

THOM DONOVAN

Back Figure

Rückenfigur in reverse

Her hearse reviews

Give me the back

Spoken like a true muse

In starving time

Speaks to power

What names our name

Withdrew

Through embroidery

An effort to send

These names renewed

Into time say my name

Motherfucker be mine

Lapse from relic to

Wanting you

Earth is our studio

So you want to be said

Into history so you want

That gaze to be for you

All turned around

Capsized from the cross

All revolving things which

Devolve to an act of anthem

Like seeing you wasn't

Simply enough

Like hearing you blew

My ears off

I, you, and we,

We have become dis-

enfranchised equals this

Desire to see your actual-

statuary-backside

Of the face you are naming

Power with

Speaking truth to sunset

By seeking out shadows

Folds of your robe

If with a backward look

Took'd from that flatbed.

LUKE MCMULLAN

Negative Knowledge;

Or, A History of the I,

Done in Language

i

forgetting what is social

which is a social attitude

anyway this is not a discussion

of what is social

is an attitude of totality

attitude to what

out of totality?

something you have to forget

to be negative knowledge

towards totality from out

of what is not from out

of the imagination, finding

its bite marks in the social

but its teeth retracted

in the private jaw we crunch down

on our desire spit in the form

which is a package sold back

this is not metaphor this is

negative knowledge unpinpointed

not even found

in the freedom from lucid material space

that is the constitution of a line break

this is not metaphor this is

the constitution of a line break

constituted out of freedom towards negative knowledge

which is not an attitude to be found in

the brochures of capital

that is every brochure constituted by attitude

as i was forgetting

in the social space and telling you

a gesture discovered by others

these are the terms

you have found

ii

to be social and subject to sentence

we hand down

where language has a distinctive role

in a model of social process

to a central space assigned

in the end of a sentence

where ‘you’ circles ‘me’ in gentle insomniac neon

ghostly projections on the wall of patrolled day

corralled by the specific ‘I’

we hand down subject to sentence

distinguishing a model of social progress

in the encircled central space

the polynomial preclusion in situ

of unknown diameters we speak

‘you’ of-many-names

which is a central epithet

the history i express

(

the voluntary paradigm

has been inadequate

(

-

)

)

the perimeter of occupation

is well established

in dispute

the rightness of the wager

the wager’s end forgotten

in accordance with the state

meant yes what is social

we assent defeat

‘you’ your cry

the perimeter of the subject

the diameter maintained in the private jaw

iii

the individuum they made up

of your hypostasis

it will be said

you wanted it this way

by a dismissive gesture

the accidens

essential to the social space

we must return again unroot

the speechless obliteration of difference

they said was a blessing

of hypostasis beyond the calculations of cold form

the quiet snow shoes the

lost manoeuvre into unchartable regions

and move about more or

less as is wanted

in postlapsarian tones

the hereafter clad in hi-vis

and your knowledge is

replete with surfaces my loved ones

when you move in a line

it is what we call true

which holds to the map aforementioned

we move about return

this technocracy of the heart

our enneper love

YATES NORTON

Failure to Vertical:

Upadhyay's 8 feet x 12 feet

Here is a schizophrenic house that contains and disperses, uncannily playing with that fear of haptic

and optic proximity whilst signifying distance in broad fields of vision. Inviting delicate touch in the

handling of the model tower blocks and shacks, hysteria in the compulsive repetition of these stand-

ard urban morphologies, and optical trajectories as the eye follows the glinting surface and shadowy

substratum, Hema Upadhyay’s 8 feet x 12 feet estranges the viewer through the simultaneous experi-

ence of antithetical modes of seeing and exploring. If its uncanny nature dominates—a gleaming

inter-uterine space that invites as much as repulses the viewer in its disorientating spatial ex-

cess—then Upadhyay has staged that introjection of the urban realm in the increasingly pathologised

interior shelters of the sprawling metropolis that characterises contemporary urban experience. In-

terrogating the interaction between private and public space and the modalities of their representa-

tion and experience, Upadhyay’s piece plays with the spatial dynamics of urban living that elide

secure cognitive mapping or description. Is the experience of this space a jouissance in the simultan-

eity of antithetical states, of proximity and distance, agoraphobia and claustrophobia, macro- and mi-

croscopic views? Is this visual and imagined spatial excess a dissipation of policed borders, a labyrinth

with no centre and one that reflects itself en abyme? It is neither and both: there is a border, a confin-

ing cell and a vision of an endless city spreading chronically like mould, enclosure in a womb-like ‘do-

mestic’ space and far-reaching optical journeys across and through the city. Upadhyay’s city seems to

extend beyond the limits of the walls, even when it is so sutured to them.

A refracted signifier of a house that contains the paranoiac space of the city, weirdly beautiful

and meticulously covered with a mapped city inside its walls, Upadhyay’s 8 feet x 12 feet at once at-

tempts to map, locate, point to and signify an absent site (the city) and self-referentially enclose itself

within its three walls and ceiling. Where are we in this object-site? Within the city, literally beneath

and clasped by it? Within the shack enclosed by a city or within the shack that itself encloses the city?

In the moment of our exploration of Upadhyay’s piece, we find ourselves trapped in an endless web

of urban space that seems to disseminate the body amongst it, dissolving our integrity even though

when approaching the work, the receding perspectival lines of the box-structure seem to privilege

our occupying the centre.

Yet once inside, we find that there is no such thing as a centre, no privileged point of view

from which the whole can be grasped and totally comprehended. Inscribing the walls and ceiling

with a view of an endless city, Upadhyay establishes this urban space at once cartographically and met-

onymically by the 8 x 12 foot structure - the average dimension of a typical shanty hut in Mumbai.

We confront the city above, to the left, the right, in front. Uncannily reconfiguring scale and dis-

tance, the aerial view and its encompassing and macroscopic mode of vision is brought within the re-

mit of intensely close optical inspection. The hegemonic, organising and Archimedean eye of the

cartographer—the Miltonic God of modernity who himself uncircumscribed retires—is dissolved

and re-assimilated into the endless web of space from which it tried to disassociate itself. Usually al-

lied with the imperialist gaze, Upadhyay’s recoding of the mapping convention as bringing order and

accountability to heterogeneity, displaces this mode of vision to a fragmented and uncertain position

of viewing. Ironically, the very symbol of the removed eye/I—the tower block—is now subsumed in-

to the grasp of the shanty city around it. These towers hang upside down or horizontally—all wrong

positions that deny the possibility of their ever achieving the presupposed stability of the vertical axis.

If we think the visitor gains superiority above these ludic subversions and inversions of the

city’s fabric, then we find ourselves uncomfortably aware of our body by its enclosure in the disori

entating field of vision. The visitor—now no longer voyeur—cannot attain the purity of the disem-

bodied point of view, for now our ability to map and measure the space is destabilised by our ‘somat-

ic’ spatial experience. Our body gets in the way. The disjunction between what is conceptually

comprehensible and exact—the precise measurement of 96 square feet—and what is bewildering

when physically explored and experienced, is precipitated by this bodily intrusion: exactitude and nu-

merical precision are rendered unstable and imprecise at the moment of their embodied interaction.

No more the uncircumscribed and detached axis of organisation, the cartographer’s view is fragmen-

ted within the excess of the visual field that is above, around and in front of it. At once a sort of optic-

al flaneur tracing the streets of the miniature city, and a body incarcerated in the small dimensions of

the room, the viewer is confronted with the superimposition of an almost frenetic motility of the eye

and the claustrophobic enclosure of the body.

The tectonic simplicity of the shack does not help to orient ourselves either. A sort of parody

of that fetishised symbol of ur-architecture—the primitive hut with its structural clarity and architec-

tonic integrity—Upadhyay’s shack actually renders a space that seems to exceed and deconstruct the

basic forms of the room in the overlay of claustrophobic and agoraphobic space. The spaces of these

standard urban neuroses are inverted—the agoraphobic view of the entire urban fabric is situated

with the claustrophobic space of the shack, renegotiating the spatial relationship between the interior,

private and domestic space with that of a broader urban fabric. The private is constructed according

to the actual dimensions of a shanty structure, whilst the public is rescaled to minute proportions.

Here the public is seen intimately, and the intimacy of the shack is literally redressed as the site of

broader urban and public views.

Yet Upadhyay does not attempt to sublate the dialectic between public and private. She simply

concentrates them in their interaction, overlay and subversion. To perceive the vast public space of

the city we have to enter a private space: the home is no longer a site of escape from the precipitous

confusion of the public realm, but is itself the very point at which the psycho-spatial thematics of the

urban realm are crystallised. It is the room which circumscribes and contains the city, not the city

which contains the room. In this inversion, the urban life world is inscribed onto that of the domestic

one, making fungible their differences and boundaries.

Like the schizophrenic, the hut is nowhere and everywhere, an object and a site. The visitors

find themselves homeless, impossibly occupying several spaces at once and faltering in an attempt to

find a secure and static point of view from which the endless space of city and home can be con-

sidered. If this space is an uncanny hut or inter-uterine space to which we may long to return, it of-

fers no protective enclosure from the spatial orders of the world from which we have come. For if it

is our desire to rise above the web of urban space with a proud and vertical I, then we find ourselves

helplessly spread into its space and the prospect of extending out of it becomes an impossibility. Like

the delicate tower blocks which fail to rise vertically, the visitor finds the tyranny of a single, direc-

tional gaze futile in the psychic and spatial excess which surrounds them. And even if we imagine oc-

cupying the privileged vertical axis which the tower blocks fail to do—after all is it not the visitor

who stands tall and straight compared to the horizontal and upside-down buildings that surround

it?—we are only confronted with the fragility of this position as ready as the buildings to be subver-

ted, inverted and caught within the city’s clasp.

Yates Norton. Impression of 8 feet x 12 feet.

Interview with Birte Endrejat

It seems that in your work—and I am thinking here in particular of ‘Instructions for a Set-

ting’—specificity is very important, seems almost to operate as a confirmation of the acts the

work instructs. Could you talk a little bit about that part of your work?

This is correct, specificity is an important aspect. I would say even at several levels. First with

the maps I ask a place questions about its uniqueness with regard to the happenings that take

or took place only once at a precise moment. In addition, by focusing on the unity of action

(that can be translated as performance) I try to give the place its own face to underline its

own reality. This can be compared to experiences that each of us has already had in these pub-

lic places. I try to release the place (a place that exists in different forms and variations almost

everywhere in the world) from its ‘icon’, to make the place specific again, and to sharpen the

onlooker’s vision, and to lead this vision back onto the one place/object. That means that by

reading the instructions for the various settings, new as well as familiar images are provoked

in the beholder which can be confirmed or overruled. Exact and specific description is how

this oscillation is made possible.

You were involved in VIVA! Art Action 2009. What are the implications of an art that ‘reste

toutefois peu connu du grand public’?*

Difficult question. In my opinion there are different reasons why many works of art stay un-

discovered or unknown. I think that works that have a rather complex structure demand

more time, attention and interest and will therefore at first have more difficulties to find a

* ‘remains unknown to the general public’

*

*

B.E.

B.E.

wider public. I cannot say this, however, for all works of the festival. The impacts are finally as

different as the works themselves. Some allow new points of view on known/familiar situ-

ations, others repeat art-historical positions which already 40 years ago only reached a small

circle of spectators. I think that all this has its validity/justification, but can also be called into

question.

What was the context in which your specific work was presented, and how do you see that

context interacting with the work itself?

In this piece, like in (almost) all of my works, the frame with its conditions becomes part of

the work. In this case the frame was a ten-day performance festival for which different art in-

stitutions set up a programme.

The contribution of Skol

(Centre des arts actuels) expli-

citly sought perspectives that

connected actions in public

space with a reference to the

gallery space. Actions did not

have to be staged; they could

also happen unannounced.

The exhibition room was

opened daily for visitors and

could be used by us (the selec-

ted artists). From these set

conditions I developed the

structure for the work. The

idea with which I had applied

for the participation was an in-

tention to observe people in

public places and develop pro-

tocols from these observa-

tions. But I included further

conditions/constraints as fol-

lows: for every day that the

gallery was opened I de-

veloped a map (based on the

parameters—size, folding, typography, structure, coordinates—of the map of the public

transport company of Montreal). The observations and the developing of the instructions

were first of all motivated by the question about the notion of ‘performance’ and tied up with

the understanding of performance itself. It also questioned the very idea of a ‘performance

festival’ and to expose/document/show this reflective process. Mostly I wondered what dis-

tinguishes a performance from other actions. The final form of my piece refers to the time

structure of the gallery. I included the documentation as an essential (but not exclusive) part

of the art-work from the beginning. The documentation becomes the means of communica-

tion and the only ‘material’ product of the project. The maps were exhibited individually and

always one day after the observation, as if one had only just missed the event. Another thing I

was interested in was the edition. The print shop requested a general fee so that the costs of

11 came to the same as a single one. As I had to have each one printed on different days, I de-

cided on an edition of ten and offered it for $9.95 at the bar of the gallery (the normal price

of a Montreal city map). To collect the whole edition one had to come daily to the gallery.

*

B.E.

How do the contradictions within the idea of the ‘performance document’ (for example

transience/record) give it a special status?

The specialty about the places selected is that one can go there at any day and more or less

always find the same things happening. It is the place itself that requires certain behaviour.

Therefore it has a continuity. In pointing out a special situation it suggests that there might

be something ‘other’ or unique happening. Which is in the end the case, of course. But gen-

erally nothing particular happened at all. So I think the transience of the selected settings,

and probably of the design of our lives, is quite limited as it is so comparable and implies a

lot of continuity (if you regard it from an overview perspective). The document goes in

both directions (pointing out the one moment as well as the generality of the setting). Even-

tually I think in the same sense it contradicts the fact of performances being ephemeral and

unique but also capable of being re-staged. Even when being staged the individual percep-

tion of the same situation will be different. For me this is very much a way to articulate my

own struggle with documentation. Knowing from the beginning that any documentation

will eliminate possible approaches in perceiving a work, but is necessary for further commu-

nication of a project, I am happy to develop forms that express this impossibility. In offering

precise but sparse visual material I imagine the work being created in people’s minds and

not just being pre-made and consumed.

Your particular approach to the ‘performance document’ (as in ‘Instructions for a Setting’)

seems to be to make that document itself a performance. Can that performed document

then itself be documented in a more permanent form? (I have, for instance, the .pdfs on my

computer, which seem to suggest permanence at last.)

What is performance in the end? Is thinking about a performance a performance already?

Does anything have to happen at all? Does anything have to be set up for a performance?

Does a performance require anything other than ‘a space’? These are some of the questions

stressed by this work and I am satisfied to see you working around them. I don’t provide an-

swers here, but wonder about the meaning of the term ‘performance’. I find it highly impre-

cise and feel uncomfortable using it in the context of my work. The documents

offer/suggest a more permanent form. They might be anything but a performance. They are

made from concrete material (paper), they don’t change, can be read anywhere, can be car-

ried around, are not fixed to a moment or place which I guess is what performance is about.

The work is the document and reflects itself as such.

Do the .pdfs now on my computer have any bearing on the 2009 artwork entitled ‘Instruc-

tions for a Setting’ which is now being further documented in this interview?

To me this question reverts to a question about the end of an artwork. Seeing a work that

was developed by constructivists in 1920 in a museum today—is that still the same work

even if it didn’t change form? I would be satisfied to see that a work of mine is discussed

over time from different angles. That somehow renews the work and makes it live on. With

performances this question is particularly delicate. Makes me think of this piece by Silvia

Kolbowski (title: an inadequate history of conceptual art) where she asked witnesses of hap-

penings to recount them from memory. To my point of view this work questions very much

our sources of art history and eventually of history itself. What becomes the base for us to

create our history from? Which document would be acceptable to prove something has

really happened? Is an oral report nowadays as arguable or believable as a written text, a

photo or a video?

*

*

*

B.E.

B.E.

B.E.

*

*

This artwork is figured as a document of events that explicate themselves in space (happen-

ings). What is the meeting-point between the static, temporary document on the gallery wall,

and the imaginary events being documented on the maps?

Is the paper on the wall the source for your imagination or the documentation my perception

(thoughts)? Isn’t your body where everything comes together and where the memory mixes

with actuality? When leaving an exhibition don’t you always just take the memory with

you—not the work itself? So eventually artworks will be recalled from beholders' memories

rather then re-watched. That challenges me to create works that take form in someone’s

thoughts where they will stay, or be forgotten but perhaps leave a trace.

Where is the virtual, imaginary space of this e-mail in this scheme?

Which scheme?

Do you find these conditions artificial and strange?

Which conditions?

*

B.E.

B.E.

B.E.

The Third Interview

BIRTE Where am I?

TEXT Yes.

BIRTE What?

TEXT Hello.

[Awkward silence.]

BIRTE Mother?

TEXT –

BIRTE There’s something I cannot quite

TEXT Figure out?

BIRTE ?

TEXT That’s something.

[As if the before had not occurred.]

BIRTE How do I remember what I have learned?

TEXT How could you not?

BIRTE But does it all make sense?

TEXT Sense is a construction. Malleable. The one whole almond in the pudding.

[Titters.]

BIRTE Sorry? Sorry.

What if I

What if I miss an important

What if it is all

TEXT ‘If’ is only a grammatical aid to a possibility.

BIRTE Have I changed?

TEXT See p. 1.

BIRTE Why did you leave me, mother?

TEXT Ah, that one.

BIRTE [Impatient.] Why?

TEXT Did I?

BIRTE Why did you leave me?

TEXT Leaving is not leaving behind.

BIRTE Never a letter.

TEXT —

BIRTE Never an answer.

TEXT Never just ‘answer’.

BIRTE I need an answer.

TEXT A self-help book is, strictly speaking, not self-help.

BIRTE [Indignant.] I wouldn’t want that.

TEXT No. You wouldn’t want that.

BIRTE Will I be OK?

TEXT I think so.

BIRTE You think?

TEXT I think.

BIRTE THEN DO.

TEXT —

[Silence.]

TEXT [With a smirk.] ‘Investigative rigour’.

[Hold out your palm and I’ll tell you — ]

[Looks at BIRTE.] Nothing?

BIRTE I can read.

[Reads.]

But if you don’t speak to me

Never spoke to me.

TEXT Speaking doesn’t need a tongue.

BIRTE There are always more and more questions.

I don’t know where to begin. Where do I look first? Where next? Above here?

Beneath there? Open a cupboard, lift this —

Always more.

TEXT Good.

BIRTE ?

TEXT That’s something to be embraced, not feared.

BIRTE I don’t hear you.

TEXT Shall I say it again?

BIRTE No answer.

[Listens.]

I’m talking to myself.

Myself

Always

Alone.

TEXT BIRTE?

BIRTE I ask (politely) – no difference, I ask a little more clearly, no, I plead

(more insistently now), nothing.

I cry. Nothing.

[Impatient silence.]

Do I need to go back?

Please don’t tell me I need to go back

And

?

All over

Again?

[End of Interview.]

_______________________

* This is an extract from a novel.

Biographia

Birte Endrejat studied fine arts in Bremen and Montreal. Her work has appeared in Italy, Sweden, Thailand,

and elsewhere. She is part of the artist collective mark. In 2011 the artist book Before the Curtain | Avant le

rideau was published by Passenger Books. ‘I try to unfold situations to approximate their inner reality:

every fragment of an investigation can become material’.

www.birteendrejat.com.

Lisa Jeschke & Lucy Beynon have been working on performances, drawings and texts together since 2007.

Based in Berlin between 2008 and 2011, they've just returned to Cambridge and London. For upcoming

performances and more information, see crowinstigated.blogspot.com.

Luke McMullan is a poet who lives in Cambridge. He is currently writing and working on the Mobile

Auditorium Venture.

Yates Norton is an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge.

Sophie Seita is a poet and graduate student at the University of Cambridge.

initialseita.wordpress.com.

Jonas L. Tinius studies social anthropology at the University of Cambridge, U.K. He works on theatre,

environment, and space near his hometown in the Ruhr area of Germany. To his liking are beginnings,

pauses, photographs, and translations. Selected other rumblings can be sensed on

www.assemblingaffects.blogspot.com.

Steve Tompkins is a director of London architects Haworth Tompkins. His completed performance work

includes the Royal Court, the Almeida theatres at Kings Cross and Gainsborough Studios, the Young Vic,

Snape Maltings, the Bath Egg children's theatre, the Oxford North Wall, and the Bush theatre. He is

currently working on projects with the National Theatre, the Liverpool Everyman, Chichester Festival

Theatre, the Donmar theatre, Tara Arts, and Battersea Arts Centre.

www.howarthtompkins.com

Eben Wood is an Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York. A former Fellow in Non-

Fiction Literature at the New York Foundation for the Arts, his most recent publications include a study of

Johan Grimonprez’s dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y., a scholarly article on the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser and Robert

Hayden, and fiction in Black Warrior Review and Variations.

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