Framework



Framework

The Finnish Art Review

4/Dec 05: Permanent Transience



Framework 4/Dec 05: Permanent Transience

Cover and pages 1-2: Otto Karvonen, Security Flip Shifty, performance in the centre of Helsinki in September 2005 and video shown in an exhibition First we take museums at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary in Helsinki, 10 September - 20 November 2005. Photo by Petri Summanen.

In the work Security Flip Shifty a group of local skateboarders is dressed in security guard uniforms instead of their normal attire. They go around the city centre and skate in places where people are used to seeing them. Only the appearance of the skateboarders differs from the usual scenario. The performance took place in Helsinki centre in summer 2005. The video documenting the performance was shot by Timi Valo.

Otto Karvonen (born 1975) lives and works in Helsinki. His work consists mainly of performances and sculptural installations in the public space. In his art, there is always a direct link between the artwork and the site and its users. His aim is to engage the audience in interaction with the work of art. Operating in the public space is fraught with great challenges and ex-

posure to surprises. As the work of art becomes a subject of public discourse, its inherent political connotations emerge. The political aspects in Karvonen’s art are often embodied in the small nuances of everyday reality and in the encounter between art and the public. They are embedded in the actions, reactions and interaction that the work stimulates in

The Finnish Art Review

Colophon

its surroundings. Using humour, irony and surprise, Karvonen seeks to create temporary spaces for encounter and dialogue, where he invites the audience to react. Currently, Karvonen manages the new artist-run, non-profit Gallery Alkovi in the heart of the culturally and ethnically diverse Kallio district in the centre of Helsinki. The space,

an 8 m long and 1.5 m deep shop window display, is actually an extension of the public space and therefore open to the public around the clock, showing site-specific projects by Finnish and foreign artists. Here Will Open: was the first public project at Gallery Alkovi initiated by Otto Karvonen in March 2005 (see page x, jos tulee kuva johonkin).



Framework 4/Dec 05: Permanent Transience

The Finnish Art Review

Contents

framework contents 4/Dec 2005: Locating: Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Jonardon Ganeri, Chuck Dyke, Jouni Häkli, Yrjö Haila. Focus: Structure of Change: Akseli Virtanen and Jussi Vähämäki, Steffen Böhm and Carlos Rodriques, Imre Szeman, Leena Aholainen, Steffen Böhm, Bracha L. Ettinger and Akseli Virtanen in Conversation, Stevphen Shukaitis & Sophea Lerner & Adam Hyde, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, Natilee Harren, Elly 56 Clarke, Brian Holmes. Features: Pessi Rautio on Jaakko Niemelä, Harri Laakso on Sanna Kannisto, Angela Rosenberg and Anders Schlaegel on ROR Revolutions on Request, John Gayer on Gun Holmström. 90 Visitor’s Voice: Jordan Crandall. Opinions, Analyses 98 & Letters: Mark Kremer, Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Serena Giordano and Anna Daneri, J.O. Mallander. 109 News/ Global Watch: Denise Robinson, Mika Hannula, Heie Treier; Picks: ARS 2006, Kassel???, Salla Tykkä ???, Breaking the Ice, White Box???, Istanbul???; In Brief; Biennials and Residencies; Calendar 200506. 6 28



Otto Karvonen, Please Act Like…, installation at the Facade of Gallery De Branderij, Antwerp, 2002–. Photo by Otto Karvonen.

Framework 4/Dec 05: Permanent Transience

Seppälä

Editorial



Something – an event – takes place in Iraq. We don’t know for sure if this event is a war or not. Furthermore, we’re unsure of whether we’re even involved in it or not. The most disquieting thing about it is that nobody knows what the consequences will be. In fact, we have no way of knowing where ‘Iraq’ ends and some other obscure source of anxiety begins. We live in an era characterized by a sort of permanent transience, a state in which exception and insecurity take the upper hand. What remain to be seen are the kinds of consequences that the dissolution of previously fixed boundaries will have on the dynamics of the creation of meaning and worth. Various cultural settings that can be thought of as reflections of human diversity are at present viewed in relation to polarized ‘extremes’ – those of liberal democracy and fundamentalism. Where can a platform for questioning contemporary discourse on globalisation, post-colonialism and trans-nationalism be found? Even if human environments and ways of life vary a great deal in different parts of the world, the basic elements that characterize the human condition – dreams, beliefs, fears and threats – can be viewed as commensurable everywhere. This perspective opens up both analytic and normative questions: for instance, what kinds of criteria can be used for comparing and evaluating the implications and justifications of different cultural ethical codes? On the whole, are there any true a priori grounds for such comparisons to begin with? In our western cultural heritage, two main a priori argumentative ty-

Framework 4/Dec 05: Permanent Transience

pologies hover in the background. One is a belief in a transcendent, rational world order that is divine in origin and which we humans are able to grasp. A second, more modern basis for argument is a belief in the universal laws of nature, which determine the character of single points and events, both in nature and human society; we humans are capable of discovering those laws with the help of science. However, both of these systems of belief have lately become suspect. Conceptions of a universal order are human projections, and we have no access to an external vantage point, an “Archimedean” point, from which to compare our conceptions of the order with the order itself. Some recent events have given further strength to suspicions directed towards a priori justifications. It is often repeated that the world has not been ‘the same’ since September 11, 2001. Unlike any previous news event, global mediation of the news coverage of the attacks on the WTC was practically simultaneous to the events themselves. Whereas coverage of previous catastrophes or events of violence was individualized and more or less ‘local,’ terrorism has now created a worldwide collective feeling that similar attacks could happen on any of our own doorsteps. Since this realization took effect, demands for security and governmental attention to risks have increased. Meanwhile, intolerance has continued to grow, creating in turn an increasing tendency towards violence and, furthermore, towards the emergence of a greater number of automated and networked apparatuses for engagement that are used as con-

Seppälä

Editorial

Marketta Seppälä

What Will Come Next?

trol systems. The full spectrum of possible effects on both military technology and global commerce is now ready to spring into action. It is striking that today the definition of war, especially, has been extended to include any struggle between individuals, societies or culturally-bound value structures. Culturally ingrown demands for continued economic growth have given rise to an information society where even creativity, opinion, and personal values are in constant competition with an ongoing hegemony. Today, a situation that was thought to be marginal and temporary just a short while ago has undeniably become a “norm” of permanent transience. The recent natural catastrophes have only underlined the sudden unexpectedness of the situation further and promoted a general feeling of inability to predict what can or will occur. In an effort to understand the ongoing processes that are taking place around us in the spheres of contemporary culture, this issue of Framework sketches the conditions for creating concepts of meaning and worth, especially when this creation must take place within an increasingly complex set of interactions between contingencies – contingencies that, in turn, are driven by deep relationships between cultural and socio-economic processes, as well as by the processes of identity formation in the realm of psychosocial dynamics. Some of the material in this volume was inspired by an experimental international conference, Capturing the Moving Mind: Management and Movement in the Age of Permanently Temporary War, that

took place on the Trans-Siberian train and in the cities that it connects – Helsinki, Moscow, Novosibirsk and Beijing – from the 7th to 20th of September, 2005.* Capturing the Moving Mind brought together an exceptional interdisciplinary and international group of researchers, intellectuals, and artists interested in the shifting and turbulent terrain of changes in current organization, economy, politics and culture. Utilizing various thematic prisms through which both positive and negative factors shaping possible future perspectives of human culture could be envisaged, the conference was a tremendous experiment in production, work, and research in its actual moving space through seven time zones. In its unrestricted and borderless form, the conference aimed at articulating the crucial issues of a moment when the locus of our experience of the world is shifting from the stable corporeality of the body to the interpenetrating movement and fluidity of technological space. This whole problematique offers a unique perspective from which to ask how adept various practices of art have been or could be in reacting to changes in the world at large and more specifically within the so-called art world, which has undergone a substantial shift towards market orientation with the huge proliferation of art institutions, fairs and biennials over the last decades. Ultimately, we can also wonder why there has been so little, if any, discussion or activity by critics so far on the role of the dominating global visual scheme and its impact on contemporary culture. +



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Introduction

nize the extent to which our consciousness is formed, manipulated and maintained by a range of technologies of image production and networks. They call upon philosophy, social sciences, semiotics, media theory and psychoanalysis to expose the insidious cultural, political and economic forces that structure and control the confluence of production and creation today. MS

Locating The general dissolution of the borders between various spheres of life has had deep consequences on the traditional understanding of knowledge creation. In the midst of constant movements, migrations, displacements and transformations, local traditions both on material and social levels are directly connected to global communication networks and subjugated to their images and procedures. Those transforma-

tions have tangible consequences. New global tensions arise and are reflected in local scenes, often in violent forms. The contemporary moment is especially dominated by a global visual scheme. News and television, documentary, film and advertising practices spread around the world instantaneously through the media and worldwide communication networks. Along with the Internet and mass me-

dia, a new setup for intensified global cultural domination is born. This development has happened in the past twenty years on an unprecedented global scale. On the other hand, we are well advised to keep in mind that novelties often have deep historical roots. To cope with the new, we must know the past. In this issue, a number of scholars and art professionals compel us to recog-

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Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Jonardon Ganeri

The Metaphor of Life

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Chuck Dyke

Uniform and Standard: The Epistemology of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

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Jouni Häkli

The Global Civil War

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Yrjö Haila

War and the Environment

Juha Nenonen (born 1967) lives and works in Helsinki. In the series States of Mind (1999-2001) Nenonen plays with the conventions of (photographic) portraiture. The ideal painted portrait has often been defined as a picture of an autonomous and unique individual that takes in their social status and roles. The main question that arises from Nenonen’s work is whether a photographic portrait can be a portrait in the same sense as a painted one.

The photographs in States of Mind are portraits, but they are portraits in a highly untraditional manner. Looking at them, we are surprised by the contradiction that Nenonen contrives to create with regard to portraiture conventions. Nenonen’s large-scale and sensual photographs seduce the viewer into identifying with the people in his pictures and their emotional states. This identification is further increased by the captions that tell us the

first name of the person in the picture. But then something starts to happen. When Nenonen informs us that this is “Pekka pretending to be happy”, it is impossible to identify with Pekka, since Pekka, in pretending, is acting something that he is not (alternatively he is both happy and pretending to be happy at the same time) and thus Pekka’s ‘true’ emotional state and self are left undisclosed. (Shortened from a text by Jan Kaila)

Next page: Juha Nenonen, Maria Pretending To Be In Love, 2001, from the series States of Mind, chromogenic colour print, 170 x 128cm, edition of 3, 112 x 85 cm, edition of 5.



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Nenonen

MARIA PRETENDING TO BE IN LOVE

States of Mind



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Vassilopoulou & Ganeri

The Metaphor of Life

Panayiota Vassilopoulou, PhD, and Jonardon Ganeri, PhD, both lecture in Philosophy at the Univeristy of Liverpool, UK.

Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Jonardon Ganeri

Instability and Tranquillity Lives, like rivers, are states of permanent flux. We are always on the run. Only rarely have philosophers seen this, our constant habit, as something good in itself; for the most part, it is looked upon as deriving whatever goodness it may have from something else, that from which we are running away, or that towards which our journey in life is taking us. Surely, though, if it is true, as the Buddhists say, that people are runs of thought and deed, then running and living are inseparable, and whatever is good about the one must follow from its being the other. What could it be, this ‘good-initself ’ inherent in instability? Our response in this paper is that instability leads to tranquillity and to creativity. And to persuade you of this, we will run with a living metaphor, the metaphor that life is metaphor. Idly turning the pages of some old trashy travelogue, we come across the following fragment of narrative: I am driving a large hire truck on the motorway. I have been driving for hours, and still have hours to go. It feels to me as if I have been forever ‘on the move’. Fields go by, houses, trees, towns and cities - each one unique to be sure, but in their very fleetingness familiar and even repetitive. All this movement, which I witness from my trucker’s vantage point, all these changing vistas, seem to have one and only one salient dimension, a quality which they also all share with each other - their very fleetingness. For the first few hours of my journey I crave for something more solid, crave in particular to be ‘there’, at my journey’s end. But as time passes, as the fleeting trans-

The Metaphor of Life

forms itself into the familiar, a strange contentment begins to fall upon me, no longer worrying about ‘reaching’ anywhere, happy with the stability afforded by the relative permanence of the transitory itself. I begin to find it curiously reassuring that each of these trees, these fields, these cities, will not clog my horizon for very long, that each one will, in its own good time, recede to a vanishing point in my rear view mirror; and I find it reassuring too that there will be an endless supply of new trees and fields and cities to come as these have gone.

tal, / and in unstable things here do not seek the stable. (Katha Upanisad 4.2)

It’s hard to know from where our author drew inspiration for this singular idea. As a metaphor, it speaks directly to us, and it seems to tell us to give up on all the anxiety that follows from being separated from one’s end, the uncertainty about whether one will ever ‘make it’. The flow of life itself fulfils our basic function. For us, it is of course the movement of thought that is most basic, our thoughts forever reaching out in new but fleeting comprehensions. We’re attempting, Nietzsche-like, a revaluation of values. We’re trying to invert the all too habitual association of the stable with the good and the unstable with the bad, or at best the only derivatively good. In this transitional moment when both evaluations are still in play, we might say, almost paradoxically, that the unstable is stable, that the temporary is permanent. That was an impossibility for the ancient Vedic seer:

Let’s reflect a little more on the semantic range of this curious word “stable”, or, in Sanskrit, dhruva. The entry in Apte’s Sanskrit Dictionary reads like one of those crazy taxonomies we find in Jorges Luis Borges:

noun, m.: 1. The polar star; 2. the pole of any great circle; 3. the polar longitude; 4. the Indian fig-tree; 5. a post, stake; 6. the stem or trunk; 7. the introductory stanza of a song; 8. time, epoch, era; 9. an epithet of Brahma; 10. Of Vishnu; 11. Of Siva; 12. a constant arc; 13. the tip of the nose; 14. a sacrificial vessel; 15. name of the son of Uttanapada and Suniti. 16. Peg Nm.; 17. name of an astrological yoga.

Fools pursue outward desires, / and enter the trap of death spread wide. / But the wise know what constitutes the immor-

noun, n.: 1. the sky, atmosphere; 2. heaven; 3. the fixed point (of departure); 4. a certain Yoga.

On the other hand, it is precisely what the Confucian sage desires:

noun, f.: 1. a sacrificial ladel; 2. a virtuous woman; 3. a bow-string; 4. clapping the hands to measure time in music; 5. the upper quarter. ind.: certainly, surely, verily.

Rather than isolating the various aspects of the real, the stages of becoming, and setting them against one another, the Sage understands that the existence of extremes expresses something else, something more fundamental: that everything exists only in process, in its passing from one state to another.(1)

adjective: 1. Fixed, firm, immovable, stable, permanent, constant, unchangeable; Perpetual, everlasting, eternal; 2. Fixed (astrology); 3. Certain, sure, inevitable; 4. Retentive, tenacious; 5. Strong, settled.

The jumping around of meanings, each leap being but the shadow of a metaphor, is never-ending. The word “stable” is semantically unstable. It fails, as much as we do, to find any fixed point on which to anchor itself; in its semantic range, there is more than a hint of desperation. How forlornly do we long for there to be in life something stable; how desperately do we jump from one rock to another, when it begins to tremble under our weight. In short, all we find, in the very heart of this notion of stability, is flux. Metaphors on the Move Like our wandering trucky, we are on a journey, not indeed in the space that the network of motorways, like a spider’s web, defines, but in the space of reasons: the journey is the one our minds make in their troubled attempts to comprehend their common world. This journey too is apt to feel forlorn, and this journey too becomes bearable - we might even say liveable - when the craving to ‘be there’ fades away to be replaced by a willingness to ‘become here’, to allow the fleeting movements of the journey itself to supply enough of a stability for one to feel at home. We learn, in short, to ‘be metaphoric’, to dwell in the movements of name and concept that constitute the metaphorical process, and to find tranquillity in the thought that those movements will never and can never end,



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The Metaphor of Life

for to cease to try to reach the world afresh from new directions is to give up on the very attempt to reach the world at all. We learn to find reassuring rather than frightening the certain knowledge that any metaphor, however well crafted, will vanish behind us no sooner than it is formulated in thought, for we are also reassured in the knowledge that new metaphors will always follow in the train of the old. But why is it that we appeal to metaphor when we wish to live our life creatively? Why is metaphor, the act in language and thought to grasp “the similarities in dissimilars” – as Aristotle was first to put it – “a sign of a genius”? Metaphor narrowly conceived is, after all, a linguistic device employed primarily in poetry or rhetoric. As such is to be distinguished from analogy, simile, synecdoche, and other figures of speech, which largely identify an existent and recognised comparison between two terms. Instead, metaphor aims at creating the comparison itself, through a leap of the imagination, a shift of attention from what is ordinarily or obviously evident to that which properly belongs to a different sphere and may only be intuited rather than witnessed. In this sense, metaphor is not confined merely to designate a particular syntactic formulation but the genus as well: in the words of Ricouer, the “figure itself ”.(2) Thus understood, metaphor’s prominent position in the history of culture is wellestablished: without it, it seems, no other figure of speech or even speech itself would be possible. As Ernst Cassirer remarks: “even the most primitive verbal utterance requires a transmutation of a certain cognitive or emotive

experience into sound, i.e., into a medium that is foreign to the experience, and even quite disparate”.(3) If however we admit that in the heart of all verbal expression lies metaphor (including even, as we have seen, the verbal expression of stability), then, surely, this claim may be extended to cover cases of non-verbal expressions. In this sense, non-verbal metaphors, such as those found in paintings or pieces of music, are transformations of experiences into other mediums: as we move from words into images and back again, whole new worlds are created, the members of which are neither concepts fixed in eternity, nor things captured irreversibly into a specific here and now. Carl Hausman has chosen to describe “a world that includes the outcomes of metaphors” as “a totality of identities”.(4) And by this, Hausman invites us to understand identities primarily not as singularities but in a much wider sense as “whatever is or could be”. What ‘identity’ aims at correcting in our ordinary perception of the world as comprising events, facts, or things, is the tendency to overlook the possibility inherent in the world to present itself differently to its many different viewers. The views that we may enjoy of the world are neither mere recordings of our surroundings, nor just discoveries of its concealed aspects. Identities need our interpretation in order to perform their function, in order for the world not only to breathe its life but also to grow in meaning. It is in this way that the metaphoric process creates passages through which meaning flows and forms into new patterns of varied intensity. Through the view-

er’s creative intervention – in the space of his or her attention and participation – the world may be created anew. This entails further that if “new instances of intelligibility” are “integral to the intelligibility of the world”, and if metaphors indeed offer such instances by “introducing new rules for finding the world intelligible”, then “metaphors function in fundamental ways in the constitution of the world”.(5) Let’s take an example: ‘God is a spider, the world his web.’ This venerable metaphor has a long history (it has, we might say, been on the move). Cropping up first in, again, the Upanisads, it would re-surface a long time later in that “arsenal of the Enlightenment”, Pierre Bayle’s Dictionaire Historique et Critique, and thence in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion of David Hume. Hume said that he could not understand how anybody could compare the Divine with a creature as contemptible as a spider; but that was a failure of ‘creative intervention’. For Svetasvatara Upanisad 6.10-11 had explained the matter clearly:

der are transposed, and help to re-configure our appreciation of the world. It works, of course, only if we can think of a spider as something more than a nuisance that needs to be brushed out from the corners of the ceiling. In fact, the spider and its web is itself almost a metaphor for what we wish to say about the relationship between metaphor and creation: we spin out in metaphor a world that is within our grasp. The creative character of such constructive experience of the world and of ourselves assumes a world where concepts, words, works of art, and selves, are constantly being formed and transformed, weaved through and by consciousness alert to every movement. To recall Nietzsche:

The one God who covers himself with things issuing from the primal source, from his own inherent nature, as a spider, with the threads – may he procure us dissolution in brahman. The one God hidden in all beings, pervading the universe, the inner self of all beings, the overseer of the work, dwelling in all beings, the witness, the avenger, alone, devoid of qualities. Thinking of the cosmos this way does certainly introduce a “new rule for finding the world intelligible.” Various significances of the idea of a spi-

Hence one may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in pilling up an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders’ webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind.(6) Metaphor and Movement: Circles, Centres and Margins We must now bring together our two themes so far, that temporariness is an intrinsic good, and that metaphorical identification is an act of creation. As a noun, one of the meanings of dhruva ‘the stable’ is “the pole of any great circle.” Stability stands for centredness, the instable for a movement to and from the margins. Indeed, there is a double movement: out from the cen-

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Next page: Juha Nenonen, Tiina Pretending To Feel Sick, 2001, from the series States of Mind, chromogenic colour print, 105 x 84 cm, edition of 5, 161 x 128cm, edition of 3.

tre towards the margins, and inwards from the margins to the centre. For Plotinus, the 3rd century Greek philosopher, the sun and its light provide an example for this: “as a circle does to the centre from which all radii come”, so too “the sun is like a centre in relation to the light which comes form it and depends on it”.(7) The sunlight presents itself through multiple rays, each of which brings its own individuality to it: “it is like a line which seems to go on unlimitedly, but depends on a point, and as it runs round it the point is in the picture everywhere the line runs to”, and the picture is thus such as to include the viewer.(8) An alternative way of expressing the same idea is to reflect upon an experience that most of us share. When we walk at night, we often feel as though the moon were watching us, and following us in every step of the way. The realisation that the moon is not following us may initially make us seem less significant and our human affairs meaningless, but it also makes us all the more important. That the moon is following us is not to be dismissed as a the kind of illusion that science or an objective truth can rectify: it is in the nature of the moon, as it is of every centre, to exist in different ways for each one of us, and without our view of it, something of its truth and beauty, as well as our beauty, would have been lost. We should not turn our back to the world and stand still gazing at the moon; rather, if we wish to add to the beauty of the world we should continue tracing in its shadow our own paths. But is the movement we want another one still, the movement that takes us beyond the ideas of permanence and temporariness, as every good paradox should? In her moving truck, our old friend the trucky remains always at the centre of the sky, and the sky is, recall, another of the meanings of dhruva “the stable”. The centre and the circumference are both

candidates for the permanent, but we have been arguing that in both cases the appearance of stability is an illusion. Even the sky itself, so often a metaphor for the fixed and immovable, can come to be seen, in the poetic mind, as fleeting. This is already to be found beautifully expressed in the seventeenth century English mystic, Thomas Traherne: Suppose it millions of miles from the earth to the heavens, and millions of millions above the stars, both here and over the heads of our antipodes: it is surrounded with infinite and eternal space; and like a gentleman’s house to one that is travelling, it is a long time before you come unto it, you pass it in an instant, and leave it forever. Your understanding comprehends the world like the dust of a balance, measures Heaven with a span, and esteems a thousand years but as one day.(9) The fundamental way, then, in which the use of metaphor is constitutive of understanding a ‘world’ is that, in identifying the stable with the unstable, the permanent with the transitory, the fleeting with the eternal, it permits us to transcend that bifurcation altogether. No longer thinking that one of the two poles is the source of the good, the other a privation, we see both as bestowing their goodness in equal measure. In the following verse, T. S. Eliot sees the co-presence of stillness and movement: The stillness, as a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in its stillness. / Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, / Not that only, but the co-existence, / Or say that the end precedes the beginning, / And the end and the beginning are always there / Before the beginning and after the end. / And all is always now.(10) Self-constitution and Metaphor The same creative process is also involved in acts of self-creation or selfconstitution. Instead of seeing the self

either as an enduring substance or as a mere bundle or flux, we are led to regard it as fashioning itself in the movement between, and hence beyond, these two self-conceptions. Here again, the Upanisads are our guide: It is like this. As a mass of salt has no distinctive core and surface; the whole thing is a single mass of flavour – so indeed, my dear, this self has no distinctive core and surface; the whole thing is a single mass of cognition. It arises out of and together with these things and disappears after them – so I say, after death there is no awareness. (Brihadaranyaka Upanisad 4.5.13). Plotinus would disagree: he holds that awareness is possible after death as is also before birth, with the transition from bodilessness to embodiment being none other than the travels of any one soul-centre along an imaginary distance in the soul-depths of an embodied universe. But as much as these views or these traditions – the Indian and the Greek – seem to oppose each other, they still converge on this: for Plotinus, the individual self is double, and as the reflected is to its reflection, they too form a unit only in so far as they are bound to one another without collapsing into one another. In this metaphor, to talk about myself, rather than a self, is what holds the key. “This after that”, says Plotinus, “is in the [material] things which cannot exist all at once”; but for the noble soul its self-constitution is “like a circle fitting itself round its centre, the first expansion after the centre, an unextended extension”.(11) How is this double self to appropriate the world? We may search for a clue in Hierocles, who earlier, in the 2nd century, and in a philosophically much different context, proposed the following: Each one of us is as it were entirely encompassed by many circles, some small-

er, others larger, the latter enclosing the former on the basis of their different and unequal dispositions relative to each other. The first and closest circle is one which a person has drawn as though around a centre, his own mind. This centre encloses the body and anything taken for the sake of the body. For it is virtually the smallest circle, and almost touches the centre itself. Next, the second one further removed from the centre but enclosing the first circle; this contains parents, siblings, wife, children. As the circles move further away from the centre, they expand so as to include more and more relatives, friends, and fellow citizens, in order to reach “the outermost and larger circle which encompasses all the rest” and which embraces the whole of humanity. The task is then “to draw the circles together somehow towards the centre, and to keep zealously transferring those from the enclosing circles into the enclosed ones”.(12) And so we are led into our concluding theme, that the metaphorical reconciliation of stasis and movement, of the eternal and the transient, of the immanent and the divine, is distinctive of soul-making. Plotinus again: Let there be, then, in the soul a shining imagination of a sphere, having everything within it either moving or standing still, or some things moving and others standing still. Keep this and apprehend in your mind another, taking away the mass: take away also the places, and the mental picture of matter in yourself. (V.8.9.1­14). This is a ‘spiritual exercise’, a metaphorical intervention, that results in the emergence of a new sense of self. Art and Life in Metaphor Being at a certain place, trying to settle down and think that this is indeed where we belong, may entail, and it often does, the risk of losing the vivid

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(1)  F. Jullien, In Praise of Blandness, P. M. Varsano (trans.), Zone Books, New York 2004, p. 52 (2)  P. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, London, 1997, p. 17. (3)  E. Cassirer, Language and Myth, Dover Publications, New York 1953, p. 87. (4)  C. R. Hausman, Metaphor and Art, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1989, p.191. (5)  Ibid, p.198–200. (6)  F. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”, in Levy, O. (ed.), The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche Vol II: Early Greek

Philosophy and Other Essays, p.85 (our italics). (7)  Plotinus, I.7.1.24. (8)  Plotinus, VI.5.11 and V.1.11. (9)  Thomas Traherne, Selected Poems and Prose. Penguin Books, London. (10)  T. S. Eliot, ‘Four Quartets’, in Collected Poems 1909-1962, Faber and Faber, London, 1963. (11)  Plotinus Enneads IV.4.16, A. H. Armstrong (trans.) 7 vols., Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusets, 1964-82. All references to Plotinus are to this edition. (12)  Hierocles, Stobaeus 4.671.7-673,11, in A.A.

Long and D.N.Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, Vol.1, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1987, p. 57-58. (13)  Plotinus, IV.3.10.35. (14)  Herakleitos Fr 84a. (15)  T.S.Eliot, op.cit., note 10. (16)  Ibid. (17)  M. Miles, Art Space and the City, p.165. (18)  J. Dewey, “The Aesthetic in Experience”, in Aesthetics, S. Feagin and P. Maynard (eds.), p. 49. (19)  T.S. Eliot, op.cit., note 10.

Next page: Juha Nenonen, Martin Pretending To Be Bored, 2001, from the series States of Mind, chromogenic colour print, 112 x 85 cm, edition of 5, 170 x 128cm, edition of 3.

awareness of one’s surroundings and gradually of one’s self, the risk, in other words, of no longer being metaphoric. It is characteristic that when we visit a new part of the world and are taken aback by its marvel, we immediately feel anxious with its novelty: we wish we could have a home there – we wish we could make the world ’our own’ and cast away its enchanting spells. It is, as Plotinus reminds us, ”common to all that exists to bring things to likenesses with themselves”,(13) but in so doing, only those who live a creative life and are brave enough to embrace the transitory character of human existence, manage not to let go of the freedom of a wall-less home for the comfort of a house. Another Place, is the title of Antony Gormley’s latest work. It is set on a beach not far from the centre of our town, but it has become the reason that many of us, intending to see the art, in fact visited and enjoyed for the first time the seaside itself. It took us sometime to realise what we were looking at, and then we saw on the long, extended beach, where the tide had persuaded the water to reveal and to retreat, the first of 100 men, who stretched over 3Km of sand. In the move of the tide we could see the parallels with that other dual movement of ‘leaving the world’ and entering the world’. It was a breathtaking sight indeed: the men, made of iron moulded on the artist’s own body, stood there peacefully but strong. As the sea was coming in, they were gradually entering the waters deeper and deeper, resisting, submerging, only to emerge again, undefeated, the same yet different, moving in their stillness: “while changing it rests”.(14) All sorts of shells and other sea creatures had become the garment of the otherwise naked men, while the wind and sea-salt were making some of the details on their faces to fade away. They were all numbered: number twenty-six had no lip-line and

barely any nose, while in number ten one could see all the details. We could even see, in some others, that the statues were in fact standing on pedestals, which, we found out later, were rooted in the sand by a 3-metre pole. We were surrounded by all these statues, that were numbers, that had become part of the landscape, without making any claim on it. The sun was shinning, in the way the sun shines in the afternoons in late autumn in the North. Not the blinding sun of the Aegean or of the East, but that other shy sun, which appears just so that the wind will not freeze our minds and bodies. It is this sun that turns the water into a silver mirror, the moon-like sun... “The river is within us, the sea is all about us;/ The sea is the land’s edge also”.(15) In this diverse landscape there was no here or there but it was as if the one and same person could rest on a multitude of places at any one time. But that time, that moment is: “Not the intense moment/Isolated, with no before and after/But a lifetime burning in every moment/ And not the lifetime of one man only/But of old stones that cannot be deciphered”.(16) We saw in Gormley, in fact, not a procession of 100 distinct men, but rather the sequentially arranged several momentary selves of a single man, each frozen in space and time yet part of a tangible flow, each looking into the back of his future self and being observed by his past. Those relationships of gaze, and not any elusive soulsubstance, constitute the self, which is at the same time, more than a mere disconnected sequence. And this gaze that creates self is an aesthetic gaze. While modernity articulated an interconnected ‘experience’ of creativity and its perception, relying on the universality of reason to which each individual has free and unmediated access, post-modernism comes to shake this foundation. The age of ‘Enlightenment’, a term

often used interchangeably with Modernity, was animated by the overwhelming optimism of Sapere aude, pervasive to all spheres of human life: to identify the universal elements of reason within and outside ourselves, to see the world from the one and only true perspective would lead human beings and their society to perfection. Modern life was gradually being unfolded in and conditioned by the urban, and then more specifically industrial, bureaucratic environment, which eventually introduced a new modern vocabulary of space that would address and accommodate ‘anonymous’ individuals. The dynamism and complexity of the life in the city were expressed in the artists’ refusal to paint figuratively: they were aiming at depicting that which is most significant, that which is most meaningful, ‘representing’ rather than copying the appearance of something, be it an object or a human being. Hence, gradually from Manet onwards, there was a lack of interest in creating the ‘illusion’ that a painting was indeed part of the natural three dimensional world, and an interest in displaying the limitations, and hence the particularities of art as well as of the artists themselves as subjects. This attitude towards artistic creation, and the philosophical views that encouraged it, pointed towards the understanding of the aesthetic value of the work of art as consisting in the autonomous qualities of the work itself. These qualities are to be found on the conceptual fabric weaved by what is being represented and the way this is being done. We may again imagine a gigantic spider (such as the one by Louise Bourgeois which was installed in order to welcome the first visitors of Tate Modern) weaving the threshold of modernity, the other side of the mirror, which leads to post-modernism. On that other side of the ‘web’, modern art and life is viewed and interpreted in a differ-

ent way, in a multiple space and time which is not constructed along utopian dimensions, but deconstructed, stripped naked of all recognisable ‘truths and lies’. From the modernist Utopia, the ideal-place-that is-not, we set our foot to the temporary transient, a space and time that is no-place, and from ‘anonymous’ viewer of Modernity we turn into the ‘authors of our own narratives’ in a post-modern world. Again, there are two movements here, one towards the centre, the other in the direction of the margins: In the ruins of modernism and the failure of the modern project for an evenbetter world, are two possibilities: the deconstructive, in which meaning and value are seen as aspects of an outmoded approach to a world in response to which only irony and cynicism are now possible, however much this might inhibit action; and the reconstructive, in which, accepting the need to relinquish the privileging of patriarchy which determined the framework for the modern (and Enlightenment project), new approaches to meaning and value are still sought, however difficult this may be.(17) We have been arguing that there is a metaphorical, aesthetic, element in all of human thought. John Dewey likewise says that: …no intellectual activity is an integral event (is an experience) unless it is rounded out with this [aesthetic] quality. Without it, thinking is inconclusive. In short, aesthetic cannot be sharply marked off from intellectual experience since the latter must bear an aesthetic stamp to be itself complete.(18) “Love is most nearly itself ”, writes Eliot, “when here and now cease to matter”, where as “explorers” we “must be still and still moving/Into another intensity”.(19) The same is true of the metaphor that is life. +

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Nenonen

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States of Mind

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Dyke

Uniform and Standard

The writer is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University, Philadelphia.

Chuck Dyke

Uniform and Standard: The Epistemology of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

There are lots of military museums in the world. In most of them are dummies wearing uniforms: objets d’art. Uniforms are full of emotional ambivalence for those who wear them. On the one hand, they can be a source of pride. On the other hand, it can never be forgotten that the basic reason for the uniform is so the enemy knows to shoot at you and not at his buddies. Of course, these days, we’ve progressed in the development of protective and armored textiles, so another function of the uniform is to make sure that most of you stays inside your clothes when you step on a land mine. In the good old days, another function of the uniform was to distinguish the military from the civilians, the “non-combatants.” That function is now thoroughly obsolete, but its obsolescence acutely raises the question of how anyone is supposed to know whom to shoot at. International peace-keeping forces seem to have a lot of trouble with that. But that trouble pales in comparison to the trouble they have keeping the peace, so it really doesn’t matter much. Furthermore, bombs and missiles and land mines are intrinsically ecumenical anyway, and make the whole issue of uniforms moot: a nostalgic historical anomaly. But even with all these advances, the epistemic imperative of war remains: If you’re going to have a war, you’re going to have to be able to tell the good guys from the bad guys. While not forgetting Sergio Leone’s earlier contribution to our understanding of these issues, I would say that a text we certainly have to look at is Michel Foucault’s 1976 lectures, Society Must Be Defended.(1) Against whom must it be defended? How will

we know them when we see them? Currently, simply enormous amounts of money are being spent on epistemology. The marks of Al Qaeda are obscure. They have no truck with uniforms. Indeed, they have no truck with insignia of any kind. The epistemology of good guys and bad guys involves an examination of edges: hard edges where binary decisions are easy, and fractal edges where binary decisions are all but impossible. There are no harder, firmly drawn, edges between or within social systems than battle lines. All other edges are softer and more permeable. They allow interchange and interaction; the interpenetration of human lives across all sorts of boundaries: geographic, social, and emotional. It takes work to convert them to the hard line of war. We have an enormous fund of metaphors and images, some remembered from the mini-warfare of childhood, for talking about the hardening of edges – “drawing a line in the sand” probably being the most used (and clichéd). But when we get past the clichés, we have to recognize the multidimensionality of the spaces within which such lines (now surfaces) are drawn. The metaphor of the hard edge is spelled out in a system of prohibitions, interdictions, and threats. The various relationships that may have linked people “across the border” are severed. Hard edges are simplifications, and the task of simplifying a formerly interactive system so that all that remains is the relation enemy may be a very difficult one. Of course, if you can put uniforms on the border dwellers, you can reduce the difficulty of the task, so long as the uniforms mean to the wearers what the providers of the

uniforms want them to mean. A similar simplification of the task of simplifying can sometimes be done with flags: standards, in this case, rather than uniforms. “Standard” and “uniform” are very transparent words, and all the more useful for the wide range of punning meanings each has. Standards to bear and uniforms to wear take all the plurality and complexity of fractal edges and reduce them to one symbolic dimension – very conveniently for those who want to wage war. The trouble is, the reduction of differences to single symbols merely masks plurality and complexity. It doesn’t make them go away. Nation, Jihad, Crusade suspend differences, but very seldom eradicate them, especially differences of long standing. Once again, the dissolution of the Soviet Union is a convenient example. It seems to be the rule rather than the exception for the managers of war to have trouble managing the standard and the uniform. It’s those management problems we’ll look at: with special attention to the management of race. Foucault suggests that we begin our study of good guys and bad guys with four “concepts:” nation, race, the savage, and the barbarian. Race is superficially the easiest so we can start there. The world is currently split (though not evenly) between people who understand why no categorical distinction between historical or biological races can be maintained, and people who don’t know or don’t care about that, and make racial distinctions anyway. War tends to be in the hands of the latter. They can’t simply be dismissed from the lofty vantage point of superior knowledge. They have control of the vast bulk of

the global dynamics of race. If they think that black skins, for example, are the uniform of the enemy, then black skins will be targets no matter what learned judgment says. This isn’t unique to uniformly black skins. Other uniforms of race, as we’ll see in a bit, can be utilized as well. No one doubts that we live in an era dominated by “nations.” The major world organization is the United Nations; The European Community is a federation of nations; similar federations exist in Africa and Asia. The World Court is a court of international law. You’d suppose, then, that wars would take place between nations. Sometimes that’s true, but not always. In fact, the way the phrase “war against” floats through our public discourse shows a lot about wars. There are wars against poverty, diseases, pollution, and on and on. Now if you try to say that these are only metaphorically wars, you’re going to commit yourself to some criteria of the literal war. Civil wars and holy wars are bound to give you trouble.(2) But, as usual, wars of definition aren’t worth pursuing very long. In a world dominated by nations, there may be a point to stopping the lexical buck. Nations issue uniforms, and wave standards. So if wars have to be between nations then terrorism has to be invented, and Sadaam Hussein had to be Iraq, no matter what the realities of state may have been. In all fairness, it has to be said that both Hussein and the Bushes were equally in the same simplification business. We can enhance our feeling for complexity by following Foucault further, and introducing savages and barbarians. Savages are inferiors – by his-

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(1)  Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College De France 19751976, New York, Picador 2003. Foucault really offers no more than a sketch, but a potentially fruitful one. At the moment, the state of the art on race, especially with emphasis on contemporary Afro-American perspectives is Paul C. Taylor’s Race: A Philosophical Introduction, Oxford, Polity Press/Blackwell 2004. I’ll have occasion to cite it as well. (2)  You might still insist that a war has to have people on both sides, killing each other. Then

American cities are literally battlefields. (3)  Even as I write: as the European Community expands, the test of its capacity to assimilate new nations is Turkey. Vide Terry Gilliam’s film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Columbia Pictures 1989). There’s a couple of million Turks in Germany at the moment awaiting their fate as immigration policy is being reformulated. For the Turks, in turn, there are always the Kurds. (4)  Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species. The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York, Norton, 1997.

tory, by birth, by bad luck. Their inferiority, having many sources, can have many consequences. Savages are also one of the main mythical beasts of colonial mentality. Humble or noble they had (and have) the central role in the missionary politics of world domination. They’re the human raw material of progress in the Western mode. Their emergence from savagery is a central image of the civilizing power of the civil state. They have traditionally served as the tissue with which charity and foreign policy are linked. Barbarians are a different story: the story of the enemy at the walls. One man’s Mede is another man’s Persian. The Golden Horde is transformed into the Yellow Peril. The Turk is always available.(3) The chief threat to the world order, we now say, is terrorism. The last of these will be looked at carefully in what follows, for, in a totalized world economy, the barbarian is always already inside the gates, only a mouse click away. We trade with him, outsource our labor needs to him, and cultivate him as a market. Oh yes, and we need his crude, while it lasts. There are a few strange features of the existence of savages and barbarians. They’re real enough, of course: real enough to kill and be killed, for example. But they have a complex way of coming into being. Let’s take savages. Their being savages isn’t a fact about their lives, it’s a fact about other people’s lives: “civilized” people whose judgments and evaluations of them are strong determinants of their future possibilities. Of course, at some stage the savages may come to think of themselves as savages: “internalize” the relational property bestowed on them by the civilized, but that’s a sec-

ondary matter. In this, savages are like money: only money as long as people think it is. The same is true of race. As Paul Taylor puts it: “If this radical constructionist approach is right, then races are aspects of real systems of social interactions and forces – systems that I’ll denote by the single word “race” – just as physical objects are aspects of real systems of physical interaction and forces. This may just mean that metaphysics is cheap, that all sorts of things can count as real if we’re willing or determined to interact with them in certain ways.” The only thing I’d begin to disagree with in that is the preamble. Nothing radical is needed for things to be the way they are. As Terrence Deacon puts it, we’re the symbolic species, and a good part of what that means is that we live and interact in a world we make, organize, remake and reorganize.(4) We make friends and we make enemies; but we also make the possibility of making friends and enemies by making the systems Taylor talks about. It’s perfectly ordinary – for humans. Social systems both enable and constrain. They make some things possible (like football) and other things impossible (like peace and quiet in New York City). Some of the things they make possible are pretty ugly: racism, war, and domestic violence come to mind. We create the structural conditions, the systems, that make them possible, just as we create the possibility for the arts and the beauty of fine design. Some of the things that social systems make impossible we’re better off without; some would be nice to have back. As environmentally aware people know, nothing in the world can escape our symbolic spaces. As we make

Dyke

Uniform and Standard

friends, enemies, and so on, we make edges. We simultaneously create the need for demarcational epistemology. Foucault arrives at his brief discussion of race within a study of types (or styles) of histories that have appeared over the course of time: suddenly race appears as an historical category ready to do some explanatory work, then subsequently becomes available for other work as it wobbles through symbolic space. Race is a part of what Foucault calls “biopower,” a loose heterogeneous family of strategies for managing modern lives in the modern state. In Discipline and Punish, he introduced the micro-physics of power as a welcome alternative to the traditional conspiracy theories of discipline and control. The surveillance and sanctions that keep us in line, keep us respectable, and keep our noses to the grindstone are mutual interactions among us, not imposed by external authority. So, as subject to the gaze, normalization and so on, we aren’t (and weren’t) the innocent victims of a conspiracy, but the active partners in the evolutionary emergence of a way of life. There are no villains in the micro-physics of power; nor are there heroes and martyrs. This co-operation in our own discipline tends to be obscured by the use of Foucault’s theories in the service of conspicuously liberationist projects. Cooperative participation turns out to be even more conspicuous when we come to the “biopower” within which Foucault embeds race. The system of biopower has its major genesis in the liberationist and humanist projects themselves. It involves the management of our health (both physical and mental), our sexuality,

our longevity, and our strivings to be beautiful rather than ugly, among other things. Biopower is the main instrumentality of the welfare state. It locks us into dependence on a society pledged to the task of rooting out imperfections threatening to our wellbeing. This is the society that “must be defended” against, among others, savages and barbarians. We look to medicine, psychiatry, and, in general, biotechnologies to save us from these threats. Race figures within this context; and eugenics is one of the recommended therapies. Foucault’s speculations about the trajectory of race have a European focus, and end, as one would expect, with Nazism and Fascism. I’ll stay with what I know better and focus on the USA, ending, as one would expect, with Iraq. I hope the sketch that follows is clear enough to do the job. The story of the USA and race is a long one, especially in proportion to the length of its history. For one of the things most important to keep in mind about the US is that it has no history prior to modern colonialism, and very little prior to industrial capitalism. Our national identity had to be formulated in modern terms; our savages and barbarians defined solely against the background of Western incursions into the rest of the world.(5) We started out as a colony, and very quickly became a colonial power. I don’t think we’ve ever completely assimilated that transition. For example, slavery was needed by colonies; immigration of Europeans was needed by colonizers. In fact – and this is an important condition for what follows – internally the United States has always been both colony and colonizer.(6) Notice that this threatens to

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Uniform and Standard

(5)  We aren’t unique in this. All the African nations are modern artifacts as well; and, as Simon Schama showed in The Embarrassment of Riches, The Netherlands have a parallel history. They also have a parallel tradition of Puritanism, that characteristically substitutes a Biblical reading of history for longevity. That turns out to be really important. (6)  Many southern Italians, especially Sicilians,

have claimed that the same holds for Italy since unification. This may or may not be an exaggeration. (7)  Early on, the competition between the European colonial powers affected the place of the indigenous Americans – e.g. in the period of the Seven Years/ French and Indian War, then again in the Mexican War, but with only local significance. (8)  Of course, if we were film buffs we could take advantage of the depictions of black/white

race relations from the early D.W. Griffith days to the present – and there are many many very powerful ones. Perhaps more modestly we could be specific and ask how we’ve gotten from Mantan Moreland and Sidney Toler (in the old Charlie Chan flicks from Monarch) to Denzel Washington and Spike Lee. (9)  In Life in a Horse Opera which can be found on my web page at Temple.edu.

Next page: Juha Nenonen, Pekka Pretending To Be Happy, 2000, from the series States of Mind, chromogenic colour print, 105 x 84 cm, edition of 5, 161 x 128cm, edition of 3.

produce paradox and confusion about edges. What, at any given moment are (and were) the boundaries of the US. This can’t be thought about on a flat map. It’s a question about a multidimensional space. Then, in these many dimensions, who is or was in; and who is or was outside. Wave after wave of immigrants and imports have found the epistemology of complex boundaries very difficult. As we see in each day’s news, the experience of the US is becoming awkwardly relevant to the current experience. It’s probably fair to say that the nest of issues behind the rejection of the new European constitution by both The Netherlands and France concerns the new (and in many ways surprising) system of edges that are beginning to emerge into view with the expansion and elaboration of the European system. French farmers apparently sense the barbarians at the gates as their carefully constructed system of economic privileges is threatened. There are many signs that the equally carefully constructed system of internal colonialism, a system that was managed successfully for centuries, has broken down. Similarly, in Germany there’s a crisis of unemployment while German business and finance thrive. The DAX rises; the government falls. Evidently German labor is largely decoupled from the German economy. Labor policy that seemed to work well while Germany had hard boundaries is a failure when the boundaries soften. Furthermore, re-unification radically changed the boundary conditions of the German economy, and, evidently, this was supposed to occur without any non-linear consequences (even in an era of outsourcing and globalization). Partly because it succeeded in a politics favorable to its traditional aims, and, Foucault would say, its commitment to biopower, understood in terms of the conditions of wellbeing and secure superannuation, the German labor force has created the conditions of its own redundancy. The economists wistfully worry about the weakness of domestic consumer spending. The point here is not to embark on a discussion of policy, economic or political, but to point out that present day Europe is Americanizing in ways that it may not have come to general atten-

tion. That is, race and plurality are becoming a part of the European scene in very like the way they have always been part of the American scene. So there’s a point to using the US as a more general model than it may formerly have been. Native Americans understood about uniforms. Distinctive dress and decoration were an important part of their ritual and their war. It was no problem for the European invaders to construct them as the barbarian at the gates. Of course, the situation was perfectly symmetrical. (The Europeans, with their distinctive dress, could be equally well constructed.) Furthermore, the “racial” differences were conspicuous as well. So the imagery necessary for a hard edge was ready to be invoked as soon as the initial period of relative peace decayed in the face of European expansion. Whatever subtleties of history and circumstance there may have been in the emergence of European national racism were irrelevant to its development in the US.(7) The indigenous Americans were all but exterminated by the end of the 19th Century, so their cultural participation in evolving American society was mooted. They’re citizens of the country, but not members of society. As Indians, they occupy the roles of the exotic and the mythical, especially, of course, in the movies. For most people, they wear the uniform they were given in the legends of the wild west. In two centuries of literature then film, the redskins and the palefaces confronted one another. Revisionist attempts to appreciate the redskins more deeply never accomplish any more than transforming them from barbarians to less threatening alterities of dubious relevance. Nonetheless, as we know from the rhetoric of the wars of the Near East, they’re still readily available in war paint to provide a metaphor for conquest when one is needed. Thus the edge between native Americans and the rest of American society remains pretty hard, especially with respect to the current dominant conservatism. They can still be cast in the uniform of the enemy. The situation with Afro-Americans is very different. The edge between them and the rest of American society is very complex: a geography of hard edges and soft edges in terms of which almost every important feature of American cul-

ture, nation, and society can be read. If what follows seems Baroquely complex, keep two things in mind. First, that’s a good image to keep in mind in any case, for the contrapuntal interplay of several related themes is what we’ll be up to. Second, intellectual simplification is the exact equivalent of the uniform, and has many of the same effects. Just as richly different people are reduced to soldiers by the uniform, richly complex social phenomena are reduced to flat, uninformative, surface by simplification.(8) The vast majority of American blacks emerged from slavery as citizens at the end of the war between the states. This juridical simplification both hides the complexities of racism and provides important structural conditions for its management. On the one hand is the persisting belief in white superiority found in the South; on the other hand is the Northern commitment to freedom and equality for blacks: a commitment tied to the rhetoric of justification for the war itself. Another dynamically important legacy of the war was what you might call the failure of uniform removal. The Blue and the Gray continue to be worn in the symbolic space of American society to this day, producing distrust and division. However, we’re a nation of immigrants as it is. Nobody really belongs to or with anybody else. The image of the melting pot has long since been discredited. I’ve argued elsewhere(9) that bigotry is ubiquitous and entrenched in the U.S. One after another, groups, of all origins, have been made to feel emotional and social exclusion in a shifting web of disdained differences. Not tolerance, but intolerant toleration characterizes American society, with the toleration sustained only so long as the promise of wealth is more or less fulfilled. So the slaves walked off the plantation into a fully fissured society with strong traditions and practices of exclusion in place. When they moved to the northern cities in search of a new life, they found that a multidimensional tangle of edges already existed in systems riddled with ethnic and class dimensions. As farmers with no or few educational opportunities behind them they would have had a hard go of things in any case, but in addition, the dermal uniform and long traditions of demonization were

superimposed on a social infrastructure built on division. Meanwhile, blacks were suspended between the project of purification and the Enlightenment Liberalism of the Bill of Rights. In fact, everyone is suspended thus, not only inside the US, but also inside the grip of American foreign policy. But blacks were inevitably stretched thinner between the two than others. At the purification pole, powerful social groups actively cast them as savages (or sub-savages, in a project of biometric necromancy), and as barbarians (e.g. in the biopolitics of misogyny). The asymmetry between the treatment and reception of black males and black females in this regard is legendary. >From the founding days (with Jefferson the famous example), black females were thought of by the white culture as available sex objects; black males (even to the present day) as dangerous sexual rivals.(10) The black woman is confronted with a white male leer, and a white female sniff of disapproval. The black man confronts looks of fear and hostility. That’s what it is to grow up black in America. But the other suspension point is “civil rights:” the tradition of the first ten amendments to the Constitution. We have to recall yet again that the Bill of Rights was written in the Virginia House of Burgesses, the legislative body charged with the state’s ratification of the Constitution. It was put forward as the condition for ratification, aimed largely at what the Virginians saw as the theocratic bent of the Massachusetts Puritans. It’s informed through and through by Madison’s warnings about the tyranny of majorities, and its main thrust is to remove a number of basic rights from the scope of electoral politics. We’ve never stopped fighting that battle, and are fighting it now with respect to issues like abortion rights and same-sex marriages. The rhetoric of the religious right has recently become very democratic as it’s begun to smell electoral majority. Jockeying for replacement justices of the Supreme Court has become ever more heated, since the ideological configuration of the court has so much to do about the poles of suspension. It’s obvious that American blacks have benefited greatly from the tradition of civil rights, although not with-

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(10)  Nowadays this is played out in the entertainment and athletic fields: often in very bizarre ways, as we know. (11)  Lily Kay, The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993.

(12)  Charles Dyke, Principal Author, Through the Genetic Maze, The Pennsylvania State University, 1982. (13)  Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked, New York, etc. Plume, The Penguin Group, 2002, 2003. P. 59.

out a struggle. The most important moment of all occurred when they were brought under the protection of the Constitution, for it wasn’t a forgone conclusion that they would be. The later fights against differential enforcement of rights are dramatic, but depend on being allowed into the arena to fight in the first place. This too is a perennial issue, with women, resident aliens, and, for that matter, the environment as some of the later contenders for Constitutional recognition and protection. It’s important never to forget that in terms of who belongs and who doesn’t, constitutionality is all the US has ever had, once the redskins were out of the way. The short history precludes any historical foundation narratives laid in the past. The French can recruit Aeneas to their genealogy, as Foucault reminds us, but the sheer contingency of the Pilgrims and other early colonists precludes their mythologization. Not that attempts aren’t made: Anglo elites certainly have tried; but the assimilation of successive waves of immigrants has prevented any real success. So blacks have always been able to fight for their place on constitutional grounds. In that context, the perennial issue has been the extension of constitutionality to the right to reasonable access to a good, or even decent, life. Ideological pressures against the extension of constitutionality into the economic sphere have been fierce. In addition, the confinement of issues of belonging to the juridical realm may also have contributed to the pursuit of the project of purification in the sphere of biopower. There were two efforts. The first, pushed to the point of insanity, in hindsight, was the attempt to demonstrate biometrically that blacks were not humans, hence not subject to constitutional protection. The second was attempted eugenic purification by managed breeding, very often sterilization. Blacks were not the only victims of these projects. Class and gender became involved as well, as the bad seed was winnowed from the gene pool. Both attempts ultimately failed globally (at least so far), but they had extraordinary and surprising local successes. For example, Lily Kay showed how the rise of molecular biology was tied to deep eugenics programs in a joint project between Caltech and

the Rockefeller Foundation.(11) In about 1980, I myself was recruited to a project in the “biomedical ethics” of genetic technology that had obvious and articulated eugenic motivations. More or less by luck we managed to sterilize the sterilizers in the final product.(12) Eugenic dreams continue within the sciences of reproductive technology. Indeed, it’s hard to see how they could be excluded as we strive to eliminate genetic “defects” from the human race. It may seem that the Christianization of American blacks ought to have mitigated attempts to exclude them, but this turned out to be unreliable. A good analysis bearing on the issue can be found in Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In general, the conversion of blacks could prevent them from becoming barbarians, but was only a necessary but insufficient first step in their emergence from savagery. So their fate was to be distinguished from that of, say, the Japanese Americans treated so cruelly and insensitively during WWII. At the moment, there’s a common perception that the American armed forces are predominantly black (at least in the lowest ranks), and that, for the usual combination of class and racial reasons, blacks are the current cannon fodder. The body counts don’t bear out this perception at all. In fact, this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer (August 11, 2005) has four pages of photos of military people “killed in the line of duty” in Iraq since April 2005. Out of 289, 28 are black (three photos not available). This follows the overall trend. In contrast, there have been eight or nine times more blacks than that killed on the streets of Philadelphia so far this year (August). Inevitably, the creation of barbarians has been far more successful with the people of the Nation of Islam. Guantánamo Bay is full of them; FBI files even fuller. The clumsiness and brutality with which this is being carried out are tributes to the epistemological difficulties. In the presentday world, guilt by association is nearly inevitable. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi reminds us of the little experiment in network linkage carried out a few years ago by three students. “The genius, if it can be called that, of these three students was their observation that every actor in Hollywood could be connect-

Dyke

Uniform and Standard

Next page: Juha Nenonen, Riina Pretending To Be Nervous, 2001, from the series States of Mind, chromogenic colour print, 112 x 85 cm, edition of 5, 170 x 128cm, edition of 3.

ed to Kevin Bacon with typically two to three links.”(13) I suspect that anyone reading this (and, of course, me as well) can be linked to Al Quaeda in about the same number of steps. Every Muslim in the world, no matter how pacific, has relatives and/or acquaintances in an Islamic country: an epistemic piece of cake. In fact, at some level of paranoia it’s a dead certainty that every Muslim in the world is implicated. The epistemology of edges certainly does produce its absurdities. The fractal edge of Islam stretches from Mauritania to the Philippines, most of the way floating on oil (for the moment). But percolation fingers extend almost everywhere. It’s become apparent, belatedly for a lot of folks, that the Islamic world is internally very fragmented, with some of the fissures more than a millennium deep. Israel is a conveniently erected lightening rod to draw away some of the hostility, but its absence from the Middle East certainly wouldn’t end the strife there. So Muslims have their epistemological task cut out for them as well, and under such circumstances it often seems easier to concentrate on the identification of the infidel. As some people have begun to hypothesize, the deepest problem may be that of fundamentalists mirrored in each others eyes. Well. As Britain begins to grapple with the epistemology of home-grown terror, and Germany along with Italy and the rest of Europe continue to grapple with their immigration problems, are they going to be able to learn from the experience of the USA? My knee jerk (Groucho) Marxian response is “I soitainly hope not.” But that may be premature. Without condoning or minimizing the ugliness we Americans have been capable of, we can say that in the midst of borderline pathological plurality we’ve managed to get along fairly well for a couple of centuries. Things work best when everybody is a little unhappy, and nobody is extremely unhappy. Everybody has to be moderately frustrated that things aren’t going exactly as they’d like them to go. Nobody succeeds in their closet purification aspirations. We’re worst when those aspirations begin to be satisfied. Consequently, as many have discussed, our politics is stablest when it oscillates most. (Even Armstrong’s bike wobbles when he goes up the

mountain.) When our politics stick in place, we get into trouble. I think this may be true even for the fractal fortunes of blacks. The signs of sticking in place are evident everywhere in Europe. The failure to pass the proposed constitution is diagnostic in this regard. Yet the fact of pluralism grows. I think that the combination is really dangerous, on the basis of the American experience. Everybody ought to volunteer to be a little bit unhappy: forego some of the subsidy perks, or some of the sovereignty, and so on. Keep the system fluidly multidimensional; don’t try to simplify it in your own terms. That’s where the hard edges come from. But watch out for that advice. There’s another side to the pluralism coin. As I keep saying, here in the Megabuck Balkans we may have gotten by this long simply by buying our way out of our troubles. For the last century we’ve been buying pacification with cheap energy; and those days may be coming to an end. I’m not the only one who suspects this. Bush, Cheyney and Rumsfeld suspect it as well. That’s why they do what they do; and it’s why the electorate supports them. With deep respect for the arts, I end with a discussion of two ugly images. First is the creation of Bolsheviks in washrooms. This image has circulated widely over the last ¾ of a century in the United States, and been discussed over and over again. The real creativity is in the creation of the Bolshevik. The ad appeared, obviously, at the height of the Red Menace. What, pray, is the epistemology of Bolshevism? We’re given a guide to its recognition. All the nightmares must be packaged together: the menacing scowl; the Hitlerian mustache; and, alas, the unmistakably wooly Negroid hair. I won’t add to previous analysis, given what I’ve said already. The picture really does tell the story, and it’s a story about multiple xenophobia. But it’s so easy. The creation of savages, barbarians, and races is child’s play. Try it yourself. The second image is me. I don’t think I look Jewish, but take a stab at it. Get out your crayons and get to work. I’ve given you a good start: that nose; that Saul of Tarsus hairline; that right eye, an evil eye if I ever saw one; that Brandeis University education. If you prick me do I not bleed? +

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Nenonen

RIINA PRETENDING TO BE NERVOUS

States of Mind

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Häkli

The Global Civil War

The writer is Professor of Regional Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. Copy edited by Anneli Chambliss.

Jouni Häkli

The Global Civil War

War within limits The standard definition of modern war has pointed to a state of open, hostile, armed conflict between states or nations. Typically, such wars have involved the violation of an established geopolitical order represented by state boundaries. Modern Fordist wars have been state-territorial in nature from outset to outcome; the rules governing war in international law have recognized territorial violations as one of the most legitimate causes for war. Wars have hence been about the conquest and defense of territory, often justified by the perceived or invented incongruousness between national or ethnic homelands and the territories in question. This narrow politico-rationalist view of war may still seem plausible in view of recent international conflicts; yet it totally fails to recognize contemporary wars that occur through transgressions of other kinds of boundaries. These wars, which are permanently transient, are everywhere just as borders and boundaries are everywhere. Individuals and human communities define and structure the social world by making distinctions between groups, spaces, times, objects and meanings. We encounter these borders constantly in our everyday lives and are aware of how to respect or disregard them by intuition, experience, or reasoning. Some symbolic boundaries are deeply internalized by individuals and collectives, making them especially conflict prone. Boundaries related to individual and collective identification and identity can be transgressed in acts that Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘symbolic vi-

olence’. The definition of war can then be extended to mean any struggle between individuals or groups over any identity or meaning, including conflicts between definitions or principles of understanding. War by other means For Karl von Clausewitz, one of the best-known philosophers of war, war is the continuation of politics by other means. This definition captures the modern condition of war very well as a reflection on the nation-state holding a legitimate monopoly on violence. We need not ask who the agents of this violence are because we already know. We have an idea of how the line of command works, who signs the declaration of war, who trains the soldiers, who takes the risks with civilian casualties, who takes care of public relations, who pays the bill, and so on and so forth. That said, the operation of military force is certainly the result of Foucaultian capillary power formation: power arising from the orchestrated action of numerous human minds and bodies, aided by the technologies of war-making and held together by the governmental discipline pushing stupid questions aside. Military power takes a very dispersed form, but nevertheless, we know, or think we know, where to locate the centre of this power and the extent of its regime. In the contemporary geopolitical world, this structured understanding of war simply misses the mark. Of course it still applies to those armed conflicts that are more or less reminiscent of modern territorial wars. But it drastically fails to grasp the nature of

war to the degree that it is waged in the realm of symbolism – the realm of categorization, language and knowledge. Even armed conflicts that have looked traditional on the surface, such as the Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003, have curiously been turned into public entertainment, beginning with their catchy nicknames ‘Operation Desert-Storm’ and ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’. Media coverage of these conflicts was more extensive than perhaps ever before, but the coverage’s contents were carefully controlled and manipulated. While it certainly holds true that territorial control over Kuwait and Iraq was achieved by means of physical coercion, in both wars battles that proved to be equally significant were fought without a single gunshot. These battles did not take place in the deserts of Kuwait or Iraq but in the boundless space of the international media and the internet. While armies were in the process of doing their business as usual in the field, other machineries quite far away – those of symbolic production – were sharpening their pencils. At stake in this symbolic battle was the definition of what the war was about, who was waging it, and why. The creation of fitting identities for the warring parties helped set the scene for the whos, whats, wheres, and whys of the conflict, bringing forth such grand narratives as ‘the axis of evil’ – a storyline that supposedly tells us all there is to know about the war. The reward of such a symbolic conquest is no less than a justification for the use of physical violence: those who manage to impose their views on the other side hold an upper hand in the symbolic battle.

Contemporary war has increasingly drifted from the territorial realm into the realm of symbolism. Not only are we faced with de-territorialized forms of war such as terrorism and its countermeasures, but in the knowledge economy, war has also taken more subtle forms in which the violent agency is much more difficult to recognize than in its military counterpart. In Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, we can transgress the boundaries of former concepts of war by stating that symbolic violence is the ‘continuation of war by other means’. Bending the boundaries of traditional warfare Let us now leave guns and battlefields for a while. Not to ignore the horror and devastation of contemporary warfare, but rather to look into a violence no less atrocious but much more difficult to grasp. This symbolic violence is found wherever a certain hierarchy is present, one in which one actor has the capacity to impose upon another actor categories that the latter fails to recognize as legitimate or relevant. Often, such a hierarchy is based on the actors’ unequal positions in terms of category and knowledge production. Those who occupy an institutionally based position with its respective legal, economic and social powers are in a position to present classification and information in rigid, inflexible form. Those who are subject to this categorization must yield to its meanings. Pierre Bourdieu writes that “knowledge of the social world and, more precisely, the categories that make it possible, are the stakes, par excellence, of political struggle, the inextricably the-

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can see how different methods of warfare, physical and symbolic, actually merge into one other. In cases such as Operation Desert Storm it becomes difficult to say where one actually ends and the other begins. Certainly the operation’s success depended on military might, but it depended to an equal degree on the media’s control and consequent ability to ‘script’ events in such a way as to allow military action to seem legitimate in the first place. In the latter instance, physical aggression is overshadowed by symbolic violence altogether. The dominant representation of Iraqis as the unpredictable and savage ‘other’ portrays the society of Iraq and Islamic culture as a whole in ways that are likely to violate the individual and collective identities of Iraqi people. This is accomplished as the party in power imposes its own categorizations and visions on the colonized subjects, thereby continuing war by the means of symbolic violence.

tal anguish and a feeling of total oppression caused by being forced to accept and behave in accordance with an imposed identity that feels totally alien, encountered, moreover, when one is in a position from which it is impossible to escape. It is the latter experience that comes close to being what one can refer to as violence. It seems that identities play a key role in the constitution and experience of symbolic violence. But what are identities? Since the 1970’s, identity has become a major concern in social and cultural studies. However, identity has also shown itself to be an extremely complicated set of phenomena. How, then, should we approach this complicated and contested term? In psychological analysis, identity is usually understood as a view of the self that people develop as acting agents while being objects of their own and others’ observations and interpretations. In this view, identity is connected to the experience of individual particularity and to the key question of ‘who am I’. However, identity cannot be reduced analytically to just individual experience. The logical flip side of dissimilarity is similarity, which points to collective, or shared, aspects of life. Locality, ethnicity, gender, work, or sports, for instance, may provide frameworks for the rise of collective identities. Even though the existence of frameworks is dependent on real human beings who produce and reproduce these identities, their construction also requires a set of social practices in addition to shared discourses or narratives that join people together. Therefore, in the final instance, individual identities are also always social identities.

Theories of social identity have often looked into ways in which identities emerge as the dialectic of internalization and externalization of social categories. However, to avoid essentialism in understanding identities, these have been seen as fragmented and fractured, never singular, but rather multiply constructed across diverging intersecting and antagonistic practices, positions, and discourses. However, social processes of identification do not necessarily flow freely. Mary Douglas has pointed out that institutions, and institutions only, can define sameness by imposing a category upon the mixed bundle of items. The identity, then, is fixed by institutions. This is an important realization and aptly points to the connection between identity and symbolic violence. The major function of institutions is to establish stable structures for human interaction and thus to reduce uncertainty. Institutions order social life through formal rules in society, as well as in informal constraints embedded in customs, traditions and codes of conduct. Both varieties of institution have something in common: language, discourse, is the pre-eminent vehicle of the institutional order in the form of performative communication, rules and laws, written records, narratives, and categorizations. Institutions create classifications and thereby confer identity to individuals and groups. In classifying, institutions use a form of power that Michel Foucault has addressed in his studies on the ‘constitution of subjects’. As such, power effectively ‘produces’ individual subjects, both in the sense of be-

(1)  Bourdieu, Pierre (1985). The social space and the genesis of groups. Theory and Society, 14(6), 725-744. (2)  Cicourel, Aaron (1968). The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice. New York: Wiley.

oretical and practical struggle for the power to conserve or transform the social world by conserving or transforming the categories through which it is perceived”.(1) Objectivity in the sense of singular truth is a social construction, and therefore there is a space for political agency in the symbolic production of knowledge. However, the categories and truths produced by society are not always based on ‘paradiplomatic’ negotiation between equally capable agents. In fact, as Aaron Cicourel has aptly pointed out, what he calls official discourses typically seek to establish singular objective truths about events, individuals and collectives so that these can be fitted into pre-existing categorizations and thus become more easily governable.(2) This matter of fact carries within it the seeds of symbolic violence, especially when the officially fabricated categories feel grotesque and alien to the subjects that they are brought to bear on. Such institutionally produced categories and meanings violate the subject’s identity and understanding of self. Production of knowledge that has the capacity to impose itself upon and replace the subject’s own ways of thinking about and knowing the world is no less an act of aggression than a physical transgression of boundaries in war. Both acts violate an existing order, an identity or territory, safeguarded by material or symbolic boundaries. In keeping with the understanding of contemporary military action as increasingly symbolized in the media, together with the understanding of all institutional symbolic production as containing an aspect of violence, we

Symbolic violence in everyday life Everyday life is crowded with instances where symbolic violence can occur. These are typically related to experiences of ‘otherness’, of being seen as different, ‘outside of ’ or ‘not belonging to’ a given group or category. We all have such experiences, encounters with the irresistible power of a person, group of people, or set of concepts to define who or what we are. Yet, as in all hostility, there are varying degrees of symbolic violence. On one end of the spectrum there is perhaps a slight annoyance caused by a situation where we feel uncomfortably outside but in which we are voluntarily present. On the other extreme there is severe men-

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(3)  Foucault, Michel (1983). The subject and power (afterword). In H. Dreyfus & Rabinow, P. (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Second Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 208-226. (4)  Douglas, Mary (1986). How Institutions Think. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

(5)  Hirschman, Albert O. (1970). Exit, voice and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations and states. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (6)  Bourdieu, Pierre & Wacquant, Loïc (1992). An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

(7)  Agamben, Giorgio (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. (8)  Minca, Claudio (2005). The return of the Camp. Progress in Human Geography, 29(4), 405-412.

Next page: Juha Nenonen, Maria Pretending To Be Absent, 2000/2001, from the series States of Mind, chromogenic colour print, 105 x 84 cm, edition of 5, 161 x 128cm, edition of 3.

ing “subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to (one’s) own identity by a conscience or self knowledge”.(3) Echoing Foucault, Mary Douglas argues that “institutions survive by harnessing all information processes to the task of establishing themselves…In marking its own boundaries [the institution] affects all lower level thinking, so that persons realize their own identities and classify each other through community affiliation”.(4) The processes of institutionalization, identification, and classification intertwine in a manner that may impose categorical identities upon personal self-image.

ing principles, even when these are not seen to be in compliance with the rights of the disempowered. All of the three basic political reactions to being challenged suggested by Albert O. Hirschman – ‘exit’, ‘voice’ and ‘loyalty’ – are available to the parties of the struggle.(5) Exit means simply an escape from the objectionable state of affairs and an attempt to find a more tolerant or conventional environment to support one’s life politics. Voice means any attempt to change the state of affairs lying at the root of the identity political struggle; these may include various types of individual or collective actions and protests, including the mobilization of public opinion. Loyalty, however, explains why exit is virtually ruled out in certain contexts such as the family, tribe, church and state. The degree of loyalty that one feels depends upon one’s identification with the object of loyalty. We tend to identify with something to the degree that it makes up a part of us and thus is tied to our personal history. The concept of loyalty reveals the double-edged nature of identification and identity: in becoming subject to identification, we also fall subject to structural constraints built into our individual and collective identities. When one or two of the three alternatives, typically ‘exit’ or ’voice’, are unavailable, the situation bears the characteristics of symbolic violence. In such a case a power asymmetry is present in which those dispossessed of ‘formal’ or ‘official’ language lack the means of legitimate expression: they do not speak but are spoken to. This power asymmetry between speakers is most often based on institutional delegation, whereby one speaker has an institutionally dominant position over the other, and this symbolic domination is both reflected in and constituted by the acts of communication between the two. Symbolic violence is practised in the internalized humiliations and legitimizations of inequality and hierarchy ranging from sexism and racism to intimate expressions of absolute power.(6) In this regard, symbolic violence may characterize any situation where power asymmetry and symbolic domination are present. However, it is war’s escape from its traditional confines that has creat-

ed new opportunities for symbolic violence in the form of arbitrary dishonor imposed upon various forms of ‘otherness’ ranging from ethnic and religious difference to subcultural behaviour. We have all been turned into potential suspects with our identities put to doubt by the coming of the global geopolitical emergency after the events of 9/11 in the US. As manifested by the slogan ‘war on terrorism’, war is now potentially everywhere and the institutional authority to wage (symbolic) war has extended well beyond the military. This has gradually turned exception into a norm: we can all be stopped on the street for interrogation on grounds that we do not necessarily know but are required to accept. In the words of Italian political philosopher Girogio Agamben, the war on terrorism is actually pushing the world towards a condition of ‘global civil war’.(7) This war does not respect boundaries of any kind. It is characterized by the increasing penetration of the ‘logic of emergency’ into the international as well as domestic politics of most western societies.(8) The logic of emergency works effectively to push norms aside, creating ‘spaces of exception’ where norms and the rule of law are suspended entirely. An archetypical space of exception can be found in the United States-governed detention camp of Guantánamo Bay in the Republic of Cuba. This facility is actually comprised of a series of linked camps prepared to receive up to 2,000 detainees suspected of having connections to the al-Qaida terrorist network or the Afghan Taliban regime. The use of Guantánamo is central to the US administration’s strategy in preventing judicial review of the legal status of prisoners. Located on Cuban territory, it is the legal equivalent of ‘outer space’, a space of exception where norms can be suspended. Unlike military bases on US territories, the prisoners of Guantánamo do not have the option of challenging their detention in front of the US Court of Appeals or any other judicial body. The detainees are thus kept in a legal limbo, denied basic safeguard against arbitrary detention, ‘disappearance,’ or other cruel and inhuman or degrading treatment. They are totally outside norms and laws that normally create a ‘buffer

zone’ between human beings and institutions. The detainees of Guantánamo are held under conditions that deny them their political rights either to ‘exit’ or to use their ‘voice’.. In such conditions, institutionally defined identities are imposed upon their bodies, and the prisoners can then be arbitrarily violated both symbolically and physically. But beyond our human rights concerns for the detainees of Guantánamo, why should we trouble ourselves about a detention camp somewhere beyond the last remnant of the former Iron Curtain? According to Agamben, the answer here is that in Guantánamo, as in all other spaces of exception, the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (of the camp, in this case) is blurred in several ways. The confinement of the war on terrorism to Guantánamo’s space of exception is only apparent. In reality, the suspension of the norm ‘within’ occurs in the name of the reproduction and protection of the very norm that exists ‘outside’. Our current geopolitical condition is turning the exception into the rule, thus extending the ambiguous dislocation of the norm and the lack of distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ into our everyday lives. In the name of war on terrorism, we can all be stopped in the street, be interrogated on our identities, and ultimately have them replaced by ones that fit in with the official language rooted in the functioning of global politics. In this sense we live in the midst of permanently transient or perpetually momentary war. On the battlefronts of identity politics, struggle, and symbolic violence, war has escaped all confines. Never before has this phenomenon been as evident as in the aftermath of the events that took place in the United States on 11 September 2001. The ensuing war on terrorism has gradually worked to normalize the blurring of norm and exception, inside and outside, life and death. It has pushed us into a geopolitical perplexity ordered and orchestrated by the self-pronounced guardians of the ‘free world’. The condition of Guantánamo Bay penetrates all of our lives, making us potential detainees within as well as outside of the detention camp. +

Permanently transient war For every person, there are numerous identities that may come under threat any given time. The rise of performative and expressive culture in Western societies has given rise to ‘politics of identity’ in various fields of individual and social life. These politics, as the term suggests, entail struggle over the meaning of individual and collective life. It is through this struggle that marginalized populations and groups have won or lost battles over acceptance within the society’s legitimate perimeter. First and foremost, these battles are an ongoing struggle for the right to unconditional existence under the norms and laws that constitute societies. A seemingly minor matter, such as the right of female couples to undergo artificial insemination, may, therefore, culminate into a decisive issue that actually reflects the degree to which homosexuality retains a status of societal normalcy. It is through such political identity struggles that society’s norms can be changed to turn otherness into sameness. For the marginalized, defeats in these struggles are every bit as bitter as victories are sweet. In the context of marginalized peoples, identity politics are typically about struggles to protect, shift, or even to transgress the boundaries of normalcy. At stake in these politics, then, is either the preservation or change of the respective society’s norms, ‘the society’ being above all the social setting in which the rules of law apply. Therefore, the society’s norms in these struggles are generally acknowledged and accepted as rul-

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MARIA PRETENDING TO BE ABSENT

States of Mind

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Haila

The writer is Professor of Environmental Policy at the University of Tampere, Finland. Language editing Mike Garner.

War and Environment

Mississippi, Hannibal, Missouri, July 1993. Photo by Yrjö Haila.

Yrjö Haila

War and the Environment

War and the environment are closely linked. Do we not still remember images of the US Air Force using herbicides to wage war on the rain forests of Vietnam in the 1970s? They had drawn the conclusion, albeit correctly, that the forest offered shelter to Vietnamese guerrillas. Against this background, we might venture a generalization: could there possibly be more efficient ways of defeating your enemy than by destroying the environment on which he depends for his subsistence? However, in a longer historical perspective, this principle is not as self-evidently true as it seems today. The conqueror and the conquered have often been dependent on the same environmental circumstances, for instance, agricultural products. When this is the case, it is difficult to destroy the enemy’s environment without destroying one’s own livelihood with the same blow. As recently as in the late autumn of 1812, Napoleon’s troops faced this truth when they withdrew from Moscow through areas that they had destroyed a few weeks earlier. But there are deeper connections between war and the environment. In what follows, I will pursue the question: To what extent can we say that human societies have waged war against their environment? Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collége de France 1975-1976, “Society Must Be Defended”, help make sense of this apparently outrageous proposition.

War, control, destruction In the early part of the lectures, Foucault addressed the question “What is power?” and made the following remark(1): “Power is war, the continuation of war by other means. At this point, we can invert Clausewitz’s proposition and say that politics is the continuation of war by other means.” Foucault dedicated the bulk of the lectures to exploring this remark and its implications. He found substantial support for it in the writings of late 16th and early-17th-century historians, from both France and England. These historians attacked the juridico-political discourse that was used to defend the legitimacy of the sovereign monarchy of the day. For this purpose, the historians introduced the theme of conquest into history writing. They wanted to show that the dawn and consolidation of every major European state was, in actual fact, preceded by conquest. This is true, of course, up to the present day: simply note that one of the major unsolved problems in relations between the European Union and Russia is how to arrange traffic between Russia and Kaliningrad (Königsberg). We can start off from Foucault’s remark. Foucault points out that the main achievement of the anti-monarchy historians was to bring a new “grid of intelligibility” into understanding the relationships between politics and history. Chuck Dyke, in his es-

say in this issue of Framework, starts from these lectures and moves on to the epistemology of the good guys and the bad guys; this epistemology is always actualized when we have to specify who defends society against whom. This setting also offers an entry point for the environment: whenever any element outside of society, whether human or non-human, can be depicted as a nuisance to be held in check, it becomes irreparably intertwined with the power play within society. But before proceeding, we have to make a few clarifications. First, the appropriate unit of analysis, the object of concern, is not “society”, but socio-ecological formation.(2) Humans lead their lives within networks of ecological interactions with the rest of the world. There never was, and never will be, a society that was not dependent on its ecological circumstances. Second, the environment perceived as a totality is a recent and potentially misleading invention. The interrelationships between societies and their surroundings do not take place “in general”, as if following a model of frontal combat. Quite the contrary, these relationships are specific: sympathetic elements are used and drawn up within the society, and unsympathetic elements are suppressed and pushed to the outside, as far as is possible. The border between a society and its environment is permeable and shifting. Furthermore, as we will see, some hos-

tile elements always remain within society, no matter what. We should not get soft-hearted in the wrong way at this point. All living beings must create a favourable environment in which to lead their lives. This is what J. Scott Turner calls the extended organism.(3) It is a biological necessity for every organism to extend its influence in a systematic fashion into its surroundings and to try to harness some of the elements and sources of energy and bring them under its control, and to keep some other elements at bay. We humans do the same, exert control over our environment, only vastly more extensively, efficiently and ruthlessly than any of our co-creatures. A further clarification is needed at this point: control and destruction are two fundamentally different matters, but they go together. Control, to be feasible at all, requires some sort of respect for the entity that is being controlled. If the effort to control leads to overly harsh violations of what is controlled, it flips over into destruction. The actual control that humans have been able to exert over their environments is quite limited, and what little there has been has been achieved as a result of a long process of mutual accommodation. Fernand Braudel characterizes the long-term history of Mediterranean agriculture as follows:(4) “Everywhere can be found the same eternal trinity: wheat, olives and vines, born of the climate and histo-

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War and Environment

ry; in other words, an identical agricultural civilization, identical ways of dominating the environment.” In this setting, “domination” does not mean that the objects of domination were completely at the mercy of humans. Nothing of the kind. The socio-ecology of Mediterranean agriculture came about as a result of a long history of coexistence and mutual adaptation. Braudel, for one, understood this very well. But so did the Ancients: Hesiod’s Works and Days, often cited as the oldest formulation of a written ethical code in the Western tradition, builds upon the peasant’s duties in working the land.(5)

Historically, a sine qua non for the existence of a city has been its ability to defend itself against intruders. To succeed, a city has to recruit the natural environment as an ally. Let’s take a look at Venice.(7) What eventually grew to be the city of Venice was established on a group of muddy islets in the middle of the Venetian lagoon in the early fifth century, by inhabitants of the coastal communities who escaped the raids made by Alaric’s Goths. A few decades later, Attila the Hun came, followed by others, wave after wave. Thanks to its favourable location, Venice avoided the continuous, recurring destruction that every other Italian city was subjected to over the centuries. New attacks by invaders from the north brought new waves of immigrants to the muddy islets in the lagoon. A city was born in this disease-ravaged, utterly hostile location, and over the course of centuries grew to be the major power in the Mediterranean basin, and was to maintain this position for the better part of a millennium. Factors other than defence against northern barbarians proved to be important later on, but these, too, were contingent upon the location of the city. The shallowness of the lagoon sheltered the city against attacks from the direction of the sea; Venetians were the only ones who could steer their ships through the treacherous labyrinths of the lagoon. Also, the seemingly ridiculous position of the city

at the very end of the Adriatic proved to be an asset rather than a weakness. The Adriatic offered a direct sea route to the Levant, and in any case seafaring routes followed coastlines well into early modern times. On the other hand, as it happened, Venice also had excellent access to trade routes overland to the north, to the growing European cities. Materials needed for construction work, both timber and stone, were available close at hand on the Istrian Peninsula, and further south on the Dalmatian coast. The city developed into a trading centre, since nothing else was possible: it became the cradle of commercial capitalism, in terms of both institutions and mentality. Ships had to be defended against pirates and “competitors”, and, as a consequence, trade and war were organically joined together, from the very beginning, in the mentality of Venetian institutions. The city established the earliest largescale shipyards in the Mediterranean, in the Arsenal in the early 12th century. Agricultural produce, however, became a problem quite early on. The available soil on the islets was soon all tilled, if not covered with stone and tiles. Furthermore, the city was vulnerable to floods that could destroy the entire harvest. To regulate the floods, Venetians started to construct waterways along the rivers flowing into the lagoon. The defence of these regulatory channels was important enough to

motivate a war, like the one with the Paduans in the mid-12th century. Ultimately, the ever-present threat of food scarcity led to expansion. Venice conquered colonies and established plantation-type cultivation of staple wares such as grain, but also export products such as sugar, on Cyprus and Crete. The plantations continued the Roman model from the Po Valley; in this respect, Venetians were direct descendants of Imperial Rome. Venice is an extreme case, but precisely because of its extremity, Venice is a good one to investigate when we want to identify general principles. Venice owes its existence to its environment. But what, precisely, has been the environment of Venice? This question does not have any single answer. The city has had innumerable different environments, which it has tried to “dominate” and “control”. Over the centuries, increasing control demanded increased control, and on and on; the continuous rivalry and warfare with other aspiring Mediterranean powers, such as Pisa and Genoa, did not make this spiral of control any less forceful.

Expansion in space: the case of Venice But agriculture is not all there is to human socio-ecology. Cities have formed an essential part of it for something like ten millennia. A city is a far more complex socio-ecological formation than any agricultural community, and the growth and maintenance of a city requires firm aspirations toward controlling and dominating elements in the surroundings. Let’s cite Braudel on Mediterranean cities: “Like any other towns, they owed their existence to the control over physical space they exercised through the networks of communications emanating from them, the meeting of different transport routes, their continual adaptation to new conditions and the ways in which they developed slowly or rapidly.”(6)

Expansion in time: the case of Mississippi flood control, the Aswan dam, and other modern miracles We can extract from this story an important principle: increasing control begets increasing control. If we want to clarify this principle, a particularly good social practice to look at is water

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(1)  Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended.” Lectures at the Collége de France 1975-1976, Picador 2003; p. 15. (2)  ‘Formation’ is a good term from a socio-historical perspective, but we could also speak of socio-ecological systems; see Y. Haila & C. Dyke, eds. How Nature Speaks. The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition (Duke University

Press, 2006). (3)  J. Scott Turner, The Extended Organism. The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures. Harvard UP, 2000. (4)  Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Fontana, 1975; p. 236. (5)  Laura M. Slatkin, “Measuring Authori-

ty, Authoritative Measures: Hesiod’s Works and Days.” In: Lorrainen Daston and Fernando Vidal (eds), The Moral Authority of Nature, 25-49. The University of Chicago Press, 2004. (6)  Braudel, p. 312. (7)  The following draws upon John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice, Penguin, 1983. (8)  Historical details in what follows are from T.

K. Derry and Trevor I. Williams, A Short History of Technology. From the Earliest Times to A.D. 1900, Oxford UP, 1960. (9)  John McPhee, The Control of Nature, The Noonday Press, 1989. (10)  Mikko Saikku, in his This Delta, This Land. An Environmental History of the Yazoo-Mississippi Floodplain (The University of Georgia Press,

regulation.(8) Human aspirations to control the water have had three goals, by and large: conservation of water in situ; directing extra water to where it is needed; and getting water away from where it is a nuisance. The realization of these goals has demanded ever more comprehensive technological arrangements. Large-scale constructions erected to regulate water flow date back to the second millennium B.C., and the earliest aqueducts were built in Babylon in the first half of the first millennium B.C. The art of aqueduct construction reached its zenith in Imperial Rome. In more recent times, successful land reclamation has been particularly important for the shaping of modern societies, the Netherlands, of course, being a paradigmatic example. The technological and social skills needed to “conquer” dry land from the sea reached their highest point in the Netherlands in the 17th century, and were exported from there to France and England. In Italy, eradicating malaria was a particularly important motivation for developing skills in what was later called “hydraulic architecture”. In large river systems such as the Mississippi, flood control constituted yet another motivation for regulating the water. Gradually, with increasing control leading to increasing control, we end up with the vocabulary of war. As

John McPhee notes in his chronicle of the efforts to control the Mississippi, the governmental body in charge, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, writes in one of its official histories: “By 1860, it had become increasingly obvious that a successful war over such an immense battleground could be waged only by a consolidated army under one authority.”(9) War requires arms. The arms deployed in the war against the Mississippi have included the construction of levees and the closing of small distributaries, which in the old times served as outlets when there was too much water in the main channel. As a consequence, floods have become ever more disastrous: the most destructive flood of the 19th century occurred in 1882 and, in the 20th century, particularly disastrous floods occurred in 1927 and 1993.(10) Then, August 2005 brought Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans.(11) The success of the war against the river has turned out to be questionable. In fact, it is quite unclear where control ends and destruction begins. Improvement of the human lot is a commonly invoked motivation for all sorts of environmental modifications, small or large. But improvement is a symbolic notion, and we have to ask what counts as improvement, and for whom? The most disastrous environmental modification projects are those

that are evaluated primarily by their symbolic value. The paradigmatic case in this class is the Aswan Dam. The regular flooding of the Nile maintained the fertility of the soils of the river valley for millennia, all by themselves, without human intervention. However, in the early 19th century, an obsession with modernizing agriculture in the Nile valley by irrigation took hold. One of the original schemes, conceived under British colonial rule, was to construct reservoirs at high elevations upstream in Ethiopia and Uganda, where the climate is cold and water evaporation moderate. A dam was, however, constructed at Aswan, which is in Egypt and only 101 metres above sea level. After Egypt became independent, the enlargement of the Aswan Dam became a high-priority project for the new leader, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser: “Nasser saw in a high dam at Aswan a symbol that would contribute to the heroic, vigorous image he sought for himself, his revolutionary regime, and for Arab nationalism.”(12) The Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970, revolutionized Egyptian agriculture. In the short term, production of food and export products such as cotton became more efficient, but negative effects of the dam were not long in the waiting. Increasing evaporation from the reservoir, located in as hot and dry an environment as you

can get, increased the loss of precious water; silting is a notorious problem in reservoirs, and the Aswan, with fastflowing mountain rivers bringing water in and a tranquil, regulated channel leading water out, offers a textbook example of these problems; and as the floods stopped in the Nile Valley below the dam, 98 per cent of the fertilizing silt that was previously carried by the water to the fields was lost: Egypt had dramatically to increase its use of artificial fertilizers. Ultimately, toward the end of the millennium, water shortages that had vanished for a while returned, but now in much more severe guise than before. The promoters of the Aswan project: “traded the only large, ecologically sustainable irrigation system in world history – one which sustained the lives of millions for five millennia and made Egypt the richest country in the Mediterranean from the Pharaohs to the Industrial Revolution – for this postponement.”(13) Control, destruction,war: a re-take The boundary between control and destruction is hard to pin down. One of the reasons that this is the case is the difficulty in identifying the critical scales. A measure that works well on a small scale often brings about a disaster when the scale is expanded. Land reclamation demonstrates this princi-

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Anssi Kasitonni, The Gliders, 2005, 8 mm film, digital editing, 15’00. –  Son! Today is the day when you become a real flying squirrel! –  I might as well become a platypus. –  Being a smartass won´t save our home from the bulldozers! –  Don´t underestimate your own abilities. –  Th at´s rule number one. Rule number two: mind your roots. –  If your ancestors were flying squirrels, why couldn´t you become one too? –  Being a flying squirrel is nothing more than hard work and getting spotted.

The flying squirrel (Pteromys volans), a relative of the common squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris), is a denizen of old spruce forests which have a good mixture of deciduous trees. It is distributed across Siberia to Finland in the west. It is active at night, gliding from tree to tree with the help of loose skin that opens up as a kind of “kite” when the animal stretches its legs. The population has been on the decline since the 1930s, as a consequence of intensifying forestry, and has been included in the Red Data List. When Finland joined the European Union in 1995, the flying squirrel was included in the EU conservation legislation (the Habitats Directive) as a strictly protected species; “all forms of dete-

rioration or destruction of breeding sites or resting places” are strictly prohibited. As a consequence, local controversies have sprang up in quarrying, forestry, urban land use planning, and traffic projects and reached wide national-level publicity. For instance, in Forssa (southern Finland), rocky forest area called Konikallio was planned to be used for extracting mineral aggregate, but flying squirrels were found in the area. National conservation organizations appealed to the court and also to the European Commission. The case ended up in the Finnish Supreme Administrative Court which made its decision (KHO:2003:38) in favour of protecting the squirrel.

2005), tells the story of the floods from the point of the local people. (11)  Levee construction started around New Orleans in the early 18th century; in its origin, the city is a distant cousin of Venice: a trading centre where heavy cargo is shifted from river barges to ocean-going ships, and vice versa. (12)  John McNeill, Something New under the

Sun. An Environmental History of the TwentiethCentury World. W.W Norton, 2000; p. 168. (13)  McNeill, p.172. (14)  Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore. Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century, University of California Press, 1967. Cartesian optimism gives expression to a gener-

al cultural mood that came to dominate Western thinking after the Enlightenment. (15)  Braudel, p. 85. (16)  In fact, the example is not entirely imaginary in this context: we have all probably heard it claimed that if we humans succeed in damaging the biosphere beyond recovery, we can always shoot ourselves into space. This weird notion is

presented as proof of the human ability to control conditions on Earth. (17)  Slatkin, p. 25; translation by H. G. Evelyn-White. The Western tradition of “ethics” has not been able to come to grips with the idea that such mundane activities as growing wheat and breeding sheep might offer advice regarding human conduct. This, of course, is exactly what we have to rethink.

ple, too: local success promotes global optimism. Clarence Glacken suggests that the example of the Netherlands was a major inspiration for Descartes to draw optimistic conclusions about the human ability to control nature in general.(14) The prestige conferred by successful land reclamation on those in power has provided strong positive feedback in support of this optimism. It has been far too easy to forget about the enormous amount of work that is needed to maintain the new sociotechnical systems, to defend the new dominions, while enjoying the glory of the day. Fernand Braudel has something to say on this, too: “Any plain that is claimed for agriculture becomes an economic and human power, a force. But it is obliged to live and produce for the outside world, not for its own sake. This is both a condition of its importance and a cause of its subordination and troubles.”(15) In line with these considerations, we can formulate a direct analogy between controlling the environment and war: the more intensely you get involved, the more intensely you have to get involved. Efforts to control the environment lead to an unending, expanding spiral: the more you control, the more you have to control. Furthermore, the larger and more intense the system of control, the more serious are the consequences when some-

thing unexpected happens in the “environment” so that the system breaks down. The geometry of the setting can be envisaged as fractal, in the sense that the “environment” that can threaten the system of control is both inside and outside. To demonstrate this principle, we can take as an imaginary example a platform erected to launch spacecraft.(16) The “environment” is contained within the system in the shape of minor coincidences, such as the exceptionally cold weather that made the famous O-ring in the fuel system of the space shuttle Challenger become less pliable during the night before the launch: the shuttle blew up a few seconds after take-off. On the other hand, the “environment” is on the outside, for instance in the shape of Hurricane Katrina’s cousin approaching the launching site hours before the spacecraft is supposed to take off... We can conclude that there is a real sense in which environmental politics is the continuation of war against the environment by other means.

ing. The levee system that increases the threat of disastrous flooding of the Mississippi cannot be removed overnight. In principle, though, something else might be possible. Mark Twain was working on his book Life on the Mississippi at the time the US Congress established the Mississippi River Commission in 1879 (still chaired by the US Army Corps of Engineers). He had one of his characters remark that: “Four years at West Point, and plenty of books and schooling, will learn a man a good deal, I reckon, but it won’t learn him the river.” To learn the river, you have to live with the river. Given enough time, we might learn to live together with the critical elements and processes in our surroundings. This is, after all, what most people have done throughout history. We might call this ideal harmony, for instance, or if we want to hark back to Hesiod and the other Ancients, we could use the term measure, and keep in mind what Hesiod had to say about measure: “Observe due measure: and best in all things is the right time and right amount.”(17) But whatever we call the ideal, it will take a lot of work and effort to get our dealings with our surroundings to distantly resemble it. The arts might help in this respect. The arts establish, at their best, new symbolic meanings that make peo-

ple change their accustomed modes of self-understanding and action. However, let us not be overly optimistic about the arts. Historically, they have sided firmly with war, both in human affairs and in relations between humans and the rest of the world. Classical landscape painting has mainly produced representations of human fantasies, with the rare exception of an Altdorfer, for instance. Contemporary environmental and landscape art are subject to the danger of turning environments into art objects. But to stop waging this war, we have to use all means imaginable. Some potentiality is offered by the fact that this is not, after all, frontal combat. We would be wise to shake up and disturb as much as we can the assumed rigidity of the mutually opposed fronts. Our co-creatures, for instance, the flying squirrel, might give us a hand. Whether we have enough time for this is fundamentally uncertain. But what else is there to do? +

What is to be done? Could we not just stop this folly and break out of the spiral of control? Unfortunately, it is not quite that easy. In the short term, there is not much we can do. Once you are in a war for which you have prepared for long enough, you have to carry on fight-

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Introduction

Focus:

Capturing the Moving Mind Edited by Akseli Virtanen and Steffen Böhm Focus is based on Capturing the Moving Mind: Management and Movement in the Age of Permanently Temporary War, a conference on the Trans-Siberian train (Moscow–Novosibirsk–Beijing) September 11-20, 2005. A preconference was held in Helsinki on September 7, 2005.(1) www.ephemeraweb.org/conference/ The purpose of the conference was a “cosmological” one. It gathered together a group of 40 people from 20 countries: researchers, philosophers, activists, artists and others interested in the changes going on in society and engaged in changing society as their own moving image, an image of time. We explicitly did not want to create a community. Rather we wanted to ex-

periment with those who neither have nor need one. But what happened on the train? What was actually the difference between our experiment and so-called reality TV shows like Big Brother? Or were we just imitating the model of PostFordist production where mixing different roles and competences, arts and sciences, is the basic method for putting to work not this or that particular ability, but the faculty of being human as such? Or were we engaged in a spectacle, a pseudo-event, a false event marketing movement and crossing borders without, or separated from, a real capacity to experience and engage with it? Our problem was really this: how to find the courage to look right in

the eye of our ability to do anything; how to seize back our potentiality and make of it a beginning for something else, another sense or another form of life, whereby the seed of potentiality would grow into something else; how to travel through this space of experimentation, where there are no visible landmarks or set cardinal points? And our answer is this: it is done by hand. It is done by touching, by groping one’s way, as in the “Crane Dance” that coils and uncoils the labyrinth of the Minotaur.(2) In this labyrinth every entrance seems to lead to an aporia, a knot, which is impossible to undo using visible, formal principles. We have to find our own way in a “place” or rather a “space” or a “time” with-

out boundaries or ceilings, where we come back close to the place where we started, where near and far commingle, and which is fundamentally without a centre. Like a measuring worm, with hands and feet sticking out everywhere, we have to grope and ramble our way through the empty desert. This is so as to sense the burning problem of what it is to live today. It is a question of sensing and not of understanding, of moving from the level of meaningful words and communication to the materiality of language, where thinking turns to flesh and starts directly changing the world.

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Akseli Virtanen and Jussi Vähämäki

The Structure of Change. An Introduction

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Steffen Böhm and Carlos Rodríguez

‘Velkom tu Hell’: Precariat Moscow

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Imre Szeman

Irreversibility, or The Global Factory

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Leena Aholainen

Resisting Death or What Made Luca Guzzetti Jump into the Ashtray?

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Steffen Böhm

Origins of Art, or, the Un-timely Jump

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Bracha L. Ettinger and Akseli Virtanen

Art, Memory, Resistance

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Stevphen Shukaitis, Sophea Lerner and Adam Hyde

Mobicasting: Let 1,000 Machines Bloom

Web Contents: Links are to be found on www.framework.fi for the contributions by Bracha L. Ettinger, Luca Guzzetti, Wonsuk Han, Klaus Harju, Peter Petralia, Gwylene Gallimard & Jean-Marie Mauclet, Gillian Fuller, and Jussi Vähämäki. Materials included in the Web Contents were provided by the organizers of the conference and they did not go through the editorial process of Framework: The Finnish Art Magazine. Special Issues on selected themes of the conference will be published also by the journals Conflitti Globali (Italy) and ephemera: theory and politics in organization (UK).

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Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter

Action without Reaction: A Mongolian Border Intervention

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Natilee Harren

The Trans-Siberian Radio Project: Enacting Polymorphous Radio

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Elly Clarke

The Trans-Siberian Photo Project

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Brian Holmes

Continental Drift – Activist Research from Geopolitics to Geopoetics

Akseli Virtanen and Jussi Vähämäki

(1)  The conference was organized and supported by ephemera: theory and politics in organization, Conflitti Globali, Megafoni, Tutkijaliitto, The Wihuri Foundation, the Foundation of Economic Education in Finland, Helsinki School of Economics, Chydenius Institute, University of Essex, m-cult centre for new media culture, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Novosibirsk State University and Tsinghua University. Next Page: Otto Karvonen, Nothing to See, installation at Cable Factory Cultural Centre in Helsinki in 2003, metal fence, barrier tape, plastic sign. Photos by Otto Karvonen.

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Nothing to See

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The Structure of Change

The writers are one of the co-organizers of the Capturing the Moving Mind conference. Esittelyyn tulee myös, mitä ovat varsinaisesti.

Akseli Virtanen and Jussi Vähämäki

Permanently temporary war We live in a global state of war. We don’t live in sequential spaces of local wars and conflicts. War and conflict are no longer local. They are no longer states of exception. Rather, their state is indeterminate and hard to piece together. War is everywhere and nowhere. It does not confine or try to isolate itself. Rather it wants to obliterate all borders and fences. It wants to see human bodies spread out on the same plane, for them to be at its direct disposal, sometimes cutting down their possibilities of movement, sometimes opening them up. In the end, its aim is to give direction to movement, to find for it a function and to identify its origin. It aims to give coordinates to movement. In this permanent state of war, a new kind of system of control is spreading around the globe. War is the permanent and principal mode of being of this system, even if its explicit military, political, social, legal operations vary. In this war, we may distinguish two frontlines or lines of force through which we may begin to understand it. These lines are interlaced together; they are weaving a new form of power. The first of these lines is external. In the external war we may still see the formal (nation) states, even if the condition of the independent states and their ability to guarantee the safety of their citizens is continuously weakening. The loss of this capability to maintain the safety of their citizens means the beginning of war, a constitutive war, a war which is shaping the coming forms of life. Therefore, if we wish to create a new safety, a new justice, we

cannot start from the existing institutions of the state, not from human dignity, respect for others and other such categories, but we must start from the state of lawlessness, the state of statelessness, the state of anomy, from the state of those who don’t have a state and who may thus create something new. This external war is being waged to control the movements of human masses and populations. At its root it is a biopolitical conflict in which the brutal practices of World War II (camps, genocides, torture) are being re-enacted solely as humanitarian tragedies without any moral or political rage. This war is not external because it would then be directed outside the so-called western world. It equally penetrates human bodies in the west, by organizing and disciplining their powers and powerlessness. It is external because it is directed at the human body, which in this war is absolutely without any protection from the law, because it is the mere powerless object of manoeuvres, as the desperate actions of suicide bombers tell us. The second front line is internal. It is the line of development of the new system of control and the corresponding form of power, which departs radically from the state model. This war does not aim to control human bodies in space. It is being waged to control the possibilities of human action, to control the human intellect and communication, to control the movement of minds. It operates with what we can do, say and think. This new power over the life of the mind, that is, power over the use of brains, language and communication is not only “western”, even

The Structure of Change. An Introduction

if it is characterized by transformations in social and political relations in western countries. These changes may be characterized as a transformation towards societies of control. The emerging societies of control are being legitimated by a particular fundamentalist and extreme rightwing ethos. This fundamentalism does not express itself as open racism, even if it talks about the clash of civilizations. It does not express itself as open racism, as the priority of the “Aryan race” or as apartheid. It does not focus on people’s external features and properties, but on what they think, on what they believe, and on what they might do. It expresses itself in the spread of suspicion and distrust, and in the organization of strict, tacit models of behaviour and thinking. In such fundamentalism, for example, a “terrorist” differs by definition from a “Jew”. Whoever behaves “abnormally”, rebels or simply acts suspiciously in relation to the behaviour required for “state safety” – for example, in defending elementary civil rights – can be perceived as at least a potential terrorist, and he or she must therefore be eliminated and disarmed, even before he or she has done anything. In other words, his or her possibilities for action must be controlled. This control of possibilities above all means control of thought and movement. We are on our way to the religious state where the difference between thought and action has disappeared. The separation between thinking (belief; religion) and action (the state) formed the two supporting pillars of the modern democracies, which have collapsed in the age of the war against

terrorism, as control focuses not so much on actual actions in space, but on the possibilities for thinking and acting in time. The ease with which the so-called western states are moving back to the principle of cuius regio eius religio (“whose the region is, his religion”) that dates back 400 years, is astounding. As Prime Minister Blair said after the attacks in London: “Our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people.” And President Bush added: “The attack in London was an attack on the civilized world. And the civilized world is united in its resolve: We will not yield. We will defend our freedom.” The destruction of the state governed by law takes place as a kind a mass psychosis, in which it is thought that punishment for thinking only concerns others, and that there are two different laws, one for “us” and one for “others”. But when the central principles of constitutional states collapse, they collapse for everybody and not just for Muslims, for immigrants, and for “others” in general. This displacement within modern societies – and the transformation towards a “fundamentalist” religious state – is not as much as it seems a reaction to an external state of affairs. Rather, it is a reaction to the internal development of societies, especially to the birth of the new social subject (the “brain worker”), but with the methods and models of the old (industrial) society. This is so at least insofar as we consider the changes in the world of economics and production. The ayatollahs are much closer than Iran. Movement without cause is the or-

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igin of restlessness and unrest. It compels power to move, outside of its castles. When movement has many directions and possible meanings, when we don’t know where we are and where we are going, we have to start to grope about, to touch, to experiment. Now, we are fleeing in every direction, escaping far from equilibrium and harmony. People are set in motion, flow and spread without the limitations of direction, origin and meaning. Only such setting in motion, flowing and spreading unleashes movement and desire. Or, thinking can advance, move and touch only when it takes meaning to the point of collapse, far beyond society and its requirements. As Heraclitus said, war makes some slaves, and others free. In the war against intellect, we have no positive chance of freedom through rebuilding the independent castles of thinking and politics. Only a desire to create our own problems opens up the possibility of an experiment that would define anew the relations between thinking and acting, art and science, and through that the new forms of political and social action. Society and history are never experimental, they are just a set of more or less negative preconditions, which make it possible to experiment with something beyond history. Beyond history, that is where Capturing the moving mind is aiming. It was held not so much to interpret the present war, its reasons and objectives, but to experiment and experience something that goes beyond the regime of war, to experiment and experience possible new forms of action, production and politics.

Capturing Gilles Deleuze writes in his great article “Postscript on control societies” about the transformation that takes place from the temporal and spatial succession that characterizes (industrial) disciplinary societies to control societies, which instead of enclosing in a space and organizing temporal successions, operate through continuous modulation of time and space. The institutional models of enclosure found in disciplinary societies, with the discipline being exercised on the human body and spirit, and the particular knowledges (e.g. psychiatric knowledge) that arose in them, may be understood as the invention of the factory. In a factory immaterial labour and manual labour, planning and execution, communication and production were separate and had their own spaces. What does a factory actually do? Above all, it constitutes a stage that gives spatial unity and coherence to time, place and action. What characterized a factory was a unity of space. In certain places certain actions were carried out, and different places were connected in a coordinated way. Specialization penetrated not only into factories, but also into schools, homes, hospitals. The workplace was a kind of mould which made the worker interiorize the norms of the economy as movements of his body. Each particular place, each link in the chain had beside it a watching space, which checked that in each place what was supposed to be performed was performed, and that time was not wasted on anything irrelevant. This spatial unity also gave rise to its own forms

of resistance: booze hidden in the machine; extended coffee breaks; “illegal” communication among workers; gravitation to the blind spots of control; etc. What ruled in the factory was temporal unity. The workers were present at the same time. What was important were timetables; externally determined tasks were to be carried out at externally determined times: task one, task two, lunch break, rest etc. Timetables were means of discipline, by which tasks were divided up and time was divided off and gradually sold. The productivity of bodies and their movements was scheduled, like being enclosed in a kind of time mould. What governed the factory was the consistency and unity of action. Particular actions were dependent on each other and managed one by one. An organization chart coordinated it all. The model based on the unity of time, space and action has been in crisis since the 1970’s. This crisis is about the general crisis of the disciplinary society and its institutions (factory, prison, hospital, school, family). The breakdown of the traditional nuclear family, along with the emotions, norms and models of behaviour that were Taylorized in it, has perhaps been the most convincing expression of this crisis. The breakdown of the nuclear family also forces changes in upbringing, education and the labour market. The collapse of the model of the disciplinary society has meant a passage from command to communication, from receiving orders to participation and interaction by those ordered about, from the prison to controlled movement on the highways (of

knowledge), from the execution of set tasks to surfing the net, from an assertive handshake to noncommittal cuddling. The walls of the closed institutions fall and indeterminacy, confusion and disorder penetrate into the spaces of factory and family where continually different “workstations” begin to form. We move from a closed, immobile and concrete factory to an open, moving, abstract enterprise. The enterprise is in continuous transformation and redefinition without stability, just as the work at the enterprise is changing and precarious. It is not so much a matter of flexibility or adaptation, but of modulation and variation. As Deleuze understood, we are moving from the rigid mould (“dress code”) to self-decomposing compositions, to projects that are put together out of heterogeneous materials.(1) Modulation now concerns space, time and action. The limits of space disappear, they are continuously redefined, spaces vary and even exist inside each other, because of the new means of communication. Working time varies, the time spent on the actual paid work becomes indeterminate and flexible in its limits, while working history too becomes piecemeal. In the sphere of action, the personal and the public (or what belongs to the company) start to commingle, intensities of work and levels of commitment vary continuously, and the worker’s commitments make the work schizophrenic, when the abundance of promises and the possibility of keeping them irreversibly part company. And we could add to the list the modulation of the employment system itself and the increase in “flexible components” in sal-

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aries. In short, modulation no longer operates through the unity of space, but rather is spatially boundless; it no longer operates through temporal unity, but rather is temporally endless; no longer through organizing visible and particular actions, but through action that has become invisible and discontinuous. Behind these forms of modulation there is an essential factor, which might be called the conflict or the change in subjective, personal participation and commitment: we need to be interested in everything without caring for anything. This is a subjective attempt to control modulation so that we will not be left totally at its mercy. It is no surprise that the modulation of this subjective commitment has become the central site of operation for the new control systems, where they try to have an effect on enthusiasm, indifference, motivation, difference, resignations, leaving, beginning anew, and other aspects of the sense of commitment through various means, ranging from therapy and medicalization to crude enforcement. On this site – where everyone is interested in everything, but nobody cares about anything – we are fighting for our freedom, for our “own time” and for our right to move. According to Foucault’s thesis on the primacy of resistance, if power relations penetrate the whole social field, it is because there is freedom everywhere. That is, in Fordist industrial capitalism and its disciplinary mechanisms (and modern democracies) what remained an area of freedom and resistance was brains, thinking and communication. These are now being penetrated by the new mechanisms of power, which are minimizing the freedom of brains and killing their resistance. That is why we can say: what is going on is a war against intellect. Mind Today, we are increasingly working with our brains and feelings. We live in a situation in which the determined spatial and temporal coordinates of work and production are disappearing. Intellect and thinking are central to production. They are also determining the nature of our organizations – we even talk about intellectual organizations, learning organizations – and

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Virtanen & Vähämäki

The Structure of Change

are crucial to the renewal of our societies: only the intellect seems capable of creating something new by being able to extend beyond what is existent and visible. As such, the process of thinking has no specific or particular place: you don’t see it except through its possible outcomes. It does not have a spatial existence, and therefore it is impossible to restrict it to a certain space. Thinking may take place anywhere, there is no privileged space for it. It is a movement that does not show outwardly. Thinking has no temporal succession. Its time is not chronological, rather it is jumpy and meandering. Thinking can take place any time, there is no specific privileged time for it. Thinking is also messy: thoughts don’t add up consistently, they don’t proceed in a clear, clean order or logic. Rather, they are ruled by a quite different principle, as in the famous library of Aby Warburg, where while looking for a particular piece of work one finds another, which then opens up an entirely different perspective on what was thought before. In this sense, thinking is characterized by a kind of dyslexia rather than a taxonomy. It means that thinking is a talent of sense and not one of communication. It is a simultaneous use of many senses and not some sort of supremacy of one sense over others. What is important is understanding moving and changing entities. What is central in the “knowledge economy” or “knowledge society” is brain work, intelligence and its use. This is something that could be described, following Gabriel Tarde, as cooperation between minds, or as cooperation, action and movement in brains. This cooperation has no spatial existence, it is not guided by temporal succession and it does not proceed consistently. What is important for cooperation between minds is not an individual genius, a definite subject that has to be located, but the general intellect, the collective intellect. The pinpointing of the subject in a particular body always threatens brain movement. Brain workers do not form a compact social class with a spatial existence. Because of their indeterminacy, mobility and spatial invisibility they are a continuous threat to authorities and pre-existing borders, norms and limitations. Brainwork cannot be reduced to pre-existing knowledge, al-

ready codified knowledges, to what we already know and have already said. It takes place before any visible or audible performance in space. The cooperation between brains is not only the target of control and organization, not just a focus of political operations. Rather, it has become the actual (and invisible) stage of politics, a form of political relationship and the only origin of productivity, the “place” for creating something new. In this invisible force field, the political struggle and production mix, as when the value of companies is no longer in the fixed capital, in the machines and equipment, patents or software, but in the cooperation between brain workers, in the surrounding society where intellectual action is spread everywhere. In this “place” the new (needs) are created, the old is recycled into new contexts. It is here that new forms of life are invented. That is why the central issue in politics in this “place” is the use of life, brains and the entire society: free use of brains, freedom of cooperation between minds and the ability to pose our own problems; or, the use of brains for solving already existing, and already posed problems. It is on this field of political conflict, where the fight for the free use of human minds is being fought out, that the new forms and practices of power emerge. These new practices have very little to do with the methods that were based on the unity of space, time and action. They might be best described as power over the life of the mind or arbitrary power. Indeed, from the perspective of the traditional methods of organizing and controlling work, such as wages and fixed capital, cooperation between minds is problematic, because of its spatial, temporal and operational indeterminacy: separating work and non-work, and thinking and the material results of thinking, is difficult, and moreover, this separation in fact tends to prevent the occurrence of thought (by forcing thinking to achieve a preset result or by preventing the movement and combination of thoughts). What is controlled is no longer tasks defined for particular spaces, tasks carried out at certain times, or the consistency of the actions performed. The new controls operate in phases and are based on the relation-

ship between objectives and the results. Their simple aim is self-evaluation, self-control and accountability: have I achieved my objectives, have I reached my own level? Or have I once again failed? This continuous accounting and self-evaluation is flexible and pliable. Now the objectives and actions vary. This continuous modulation replaces the inflexibility and direct control in wage work. Self-evaluation returns, thinks back and organizes memory into facts, it turns it into history by giving past events their place and meaning. This remembering is not always a pleasure, as when it is done under the threat of unemployment. The freedom of flexible, pliable work is controlled freedom. The worker needs to control herself and her commitment to work. Now the fallow times, the coffee breaks and other breaks from work, which previously formed times of resistance and freedom, are monitored by bad conscience and the feeling of “not doing enough”, of not having gone into work enough. What were previously moments of joy and freedom, the joy of not having to work, have suddenly and surprisingly turned into moments of sorrow and deprivation. There is no longer a boss, there are no longer the constraints of physical and spatial hierarchies: the worker must learn to work by herself. But this is also to say that modulation is never simple, one-way control. It also concretizes the possibility of freedom, the need to get rid of the closed spaces in which all the action and movement (whether physical, intellectual or emotional) is partitioned and suspended. The disciplinary society was characterized by limitation of the movement of bodies, partitioning and concentration of thinking, the contraction of the expression of feeling and of the emotional world. Through modulation and variation people are trying to take over their own lives and create new experiences, to expand their relationships, and thereby their power and ability to manage in the world. The question is one of the relations of force between freedom (the extent, autonomy and movement of relations) and submission. It is also necessary to understand that control over the life of the mind does not outright destroy the model of

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enclosure (even if it reveals its inefficiency). Rather, the two operate side by side, shoulder to shoulder, or within one another. The decisive point, however, is that today these mixtures of controls (as in China, where we find the most feudal organization and the most advanced cyber police in operation simultaneously) avoid committing or attaching themselves to any particular institution and its function, which would set limits and tie and slow things down. Today control has no permanent external reason or foundation, like the law, the norm or a particular task, within which it would function. Rather, it operates without institutional legitimation, or then its logic and foundations seem to change from day to day: it is baseless power, that is, arbitrary power or pure power, power without any permanent relation to law, to a norm, or to any particular task. Its relation to any particular reason, task or meaning is arbitrary.(2) The arbitrary nature of control means that, whereas modern power always received its legitimation as a means to a particular end (the factory produces, the hospital treats illness, the state protects the labour force, the army wages war, research is done in a university…), today, power is never simply a means to an end. In other words, the arbitrariness of power cannot be understood by approaching it in relation to the ends that it, as a means, attempts to achieve, but rather its arbitrary nature entails power as pure power, power as power without reasons or ends. The analysis of arbitrary power cannot therefore be about identifying a power that is only a justified or non-justified means towards this or that end, but which is in no relation to ends at all, and operates in some other way (than as a means to an end). The arbitrariness of arbitrary power is therefore not a result of some intrinsic character that would distinguish it, for example, from modern power, that is, from means that always have an end, or some institutional context or some particular legitimation (from means that acquire their “reason” or legitimation from a particular institution and its task), but from its arbitrary relation to these. This is how the concept of arbitrary power opens up the nexus between the floating currency (the floating signifier, the

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Virtanen & Vähämäki

The Structure of Change

(1)  Modulation is boudless moulding or moulding in a continuously variable way. Modulator is a mould which continuously changes its form, function and settings. If modulation is moulding in a varibale and endless way (in indeterminite time-space), moulding is modulation in a fixed and finite way (in determined space-time). See Gilles Deleuze Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle in Pourparlers (Minuit 1990) and Anti Oepide et Mille plateaux, Cours Vincennes 27.02.1979. (2)  Or we can put it also like this: “International legality” (Kuwait 1991), “humanity” and “hu-

man rights” (Somalia 1993, Bosnia 1995, Kosovo 1999), “enduring freedom” (Afganistan 2001), “war against terrorism” (Iraq 2003). (3)  This means that it must differ, not from something else, but from itself, or in other words, that it is change. The question is no longer of change as a change of something, but of change itself taking on a substantial nature without any need to presuppose something else (like a changing object). To say that multitudo is change, is to say that it differs with itself internally: the change itself becomes a unity of substance and

subject, a causa sui, that is, a substance that is the cause of itself. That is why the multitude does not need anything outside itself, a reason, a cause, a meaning, or any kind of mediation to support and guarantee its existence. This makes it absolute. This is important because, insofar as a cause is external to its effect, it cannot function as a basis of its being, it can only guarantee a possibility of existence, but not its necessity or substantiality. An effect can never have more reality than its cause.

arbitrary sign) and the generic human capacities (intellect, perception, linguistic-relational abilities) as means of production, that is, the nexus between the era when the faith in the sign is lost (our experience of the triviality of all reasons and meanings) and the production of wealth in modalities that cannot be thought or understood via the concepts of modern economics, and always restricted to capital’s selfexpansion. The “knowledge economy” is the continuation of capitalism without a foundation, and arbitrary power is its logical form of organization.

is not a leap, a transition or a difference in their nature. When we come across something that is right for us, we link to it, combine with it and devour it. What we were before fuses with what we have encountered and becomes part of a bigger, more extensive person. To answer these questions, it is important to understand a few things about our experimental organization. First of all, this organization did not drop from the heavens, but had to be made. It was not made for fun, but out of necessity. The necessity to resist the new war and arbitrary power. The necessity to create our own problems and forms of life, and not only to respond to the questions and “weekly assignments” already posed by the Teacher-Capital. The necessity not to submit at the moment when the fragility on which the new controls are built (the naked belief and fear) reveals itself; when we should reject panic and fear they try to spread; when we should take control of our lives, and not just react to the demands and requirements placed on us. Secondly, movement is not born out of nothing. The organizational experiment was made up of around 40 independent projects, 40 body-mind or time-space constellations, a series of 40 pieces whose connections were not pre-destined in any way. Anything could have happened. This was the potentiality in our hands, a potentiality for anything, a potentiality to do anything (also to fail or to give in), a potentiality from which anything can be expected. On the train, it was as if we could look directly into the eye of our existence as potential beings who do not have any particular surrounding, any particular task or function, that is, as beings who can do anything and from whom anything may be expected. Ontology revealed itself phenomenologically: we experienced what it means to be a “human being”. This is the second meaning of the concept multitudo: we experience, at the same time, the abundance of our possibilities and the trivialness and vanity (arbitrariness, fundamental groundlessness) of all reasons. In such a condition, we have no other ground, no other resources to turn to except ourselves, that is, this very ability to do anything that characterizes us. This experience

of the naked “I can” does not refer to any particular ability or faculty, but to our nature as such. It may be the most severe and cruel experience possible: the experience of potentiality. Yet this potentiality is always entangled in its expression, as is our journey to its organization, and is in no way separable from it. The journey could also have turned into a chaos or a catastrophe, and remain so. We are animals that are able to change our fate, but are also able not to do so. We can do or can not do, we can succeed or fail, lose ourselves or find ourselves, become slaves or become free. No excuses, our behaviour is not prescribed by a biological vocation, assigned by a necessity, but always retains the character of possibility. Through this potentiality we may face chance events, others, either lose or gain connections, branch off into change. None of this happens by itself, but rather it creates its own “problem”. To create our own problems is to have the courage to look directly in the eye of our ability to do anything, to climb our way back to it, to touch, not a chaos in which we would disappear, but a movement that gives us consistency. Finally, then, if it is true that arbitrary power operates using the possibilities of our thinking and acting, which it tries to subordinate to the already structured tasks and aims of a particular historical period (as in economic valorization), then the question of movement and the good life – a life in which our ways and our acts of living are always about creating our own problems – interferes directly with the core of this struggle. What is at stake is not just this or that historical fact, or this or that injustice, but the ability and structure of change as such. +

Movement, or the Structure of Change In the organizational experiment Capturing the Moving Mind everybody was “alone together”, each one taking care of her/himself at the same time participating in the band, sometimes in the centre, again finding her/himself at its edge, like a pack of wolves around a fire with neighbours to the left and to the right, holding on by just a hand or a foot, but with nobody behind them, their backs naked and exposed to the Gobi desert. For the logic of the one and the many did not fit our plans, nor did organizing many different (people) around a common cause, for each different one to be able to express themself in the best way possible without impeding the others. As we saw it, a common goal, a common ground or common language is not needed as the condition of cooperation. This is the first meaning of the concept multitudo: it is not conditioned by a common cause or by determinate meanings. It is not a ‘one’ constructed out of the ‘many’, it is not composed of individuals or of a diversity of parts that are glued together. It is absolutely devoid of any external or transcendent common denominator. It does not amount to pluralism. It has nothing to do with tolerance. It finds its community, its unity, in change. It finds its substance in movement.(3) In movement relations of cooperation combine, not in terms of a common cause, but in terms of attraction and rejection, in movement good relations are those that add power, extend and combine, and bad ones are those that take apart, isolate and suffocate. The difference between increase in powers and their reduction

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Böhm & Rodríguez

‘Velkom tu Hell’

Steffen Böhm, based in London, teaches organisation studies at the University of Essex and is editor-in-chief of ephemera: theory & politics in organization. Carlos Jesús Fernández Rodríguez has a PhD in Sociology, Department of Sociology, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain. Language editing Mike Garner.

Photos by Steffen Böhm.

Steffen Böhm and Carlos Jesús Fernándes Rodríguez

‘Velkom tu Hell’: Precariat Moscow

It is said that we live in an age of precariousness, the signs of which we can find everywhere: in the labour market, in immigration, in the wars against terrorism, in our daily lives. Many borders that used to hold us in place have become fluid: old borders have vanished and new ones are in the process of being erected – de- and re-territorialization. When this new age of precariousness is announced, we are usually referred to developments in the labour market, which, since the early 1990s, has seen an immense expansion of the discourse of flexibility: temporary work, subcontracted jobs, outsourcing, downsizing, seasonal and parttime jobs, project and research work, illegal employment, self-employment, entrepreneurship, McJobs, etc. This discourse of labour flexibility, which goes hand-in-hand with a flexibilization of global markets, is seen to re-territorialize the social along new lines. In this space of flexibility a new category appears: the precariat. The precarization of work means that most social and labour rights achieved in the 20th century vanish or are reconfigured, and uncertainty spreads everywhere. Precariousness cuts off and divides. Those who still have a fulltime job and a pension can consider themselves lucky – they are the affluent workers. But more and more work is of a precarious nature: the precariat becomes the symbol of today’s socalled post-modern or post-Fordist capitalism, in which the mad volatil-

enjoy the privilege of travelling from Helsinki to Beijing as part of a co-ordinated group experience, on the one hand, and the precariousness experienced by illegal immigrants in, say, the outskirts of Moscow, on the other. An analysis of the political economy of precariousness has to travel via a critique of today’s multiple phenomenon of migration. There are literally millions of migrants on the move globally at any one time: fleeing from war, terror, corruption, poverty, economic meltdown, ecological disasters and other crises of global capitalism. These migrants travel to the ‘first world’ searching for relative economic and political security. They become the precariat underclass, washing old ladies’ bottoms, cleaning bankers’ offices, minding the children of precariat academics and producing cheap toys for Western supermarkets. The privileged precariat of the ‘first world’ depends on the work of these ‘third world’ migrants. One precariat labour force exploits the other. ‘First world’ and ‘third world’ come together in a precarious space of exchange. Moscow, the former capital of the ‘second world’ has become one of these urban conglomerates where the ‘first world’ meets its dirty underbelly. This vast city has one of the highest concentrations of luxury hotels and cars anywhere in the world. The extremely rich, who have built their wealth on the debris of the melt-down of real-existing socialism and the rise of real-existing neo-liberal capitalism, come together with migrants from within Rus-

ity of markets dominates all aspects of social life. But how new is this so-called age of precariousness? What does the ‘post’ in post-modern or post-Fordist mean in relation to the historical development of capitalism? Has capital not always de- and re-territorialized social relations in such a way that maximum exploitation of the social is possible? Has Marx’s Capital not shown in quite considerable detail the parasitic nature of capital and its absolutist aim of turning the social into ‘total social capital’? There is a lot of talk about precarity today. What is sometimes missing is a genealogy of precarious labour relations, which would trace the precariat back to the infancy of capitalism. In the days of ‘Manchester-capitalism’, did people not worry about losing their jobs, about losing their houses, about being able to feed their families? Did markets not fragment and transform on a continuous basis back then? Have capitalist markets – industrial or financial – not been mad ever since their genesis? Is there not a certain mad precariousness at the heart of capital? That is, should not the very nature of capital be associated with the concept of precariousness? Another aspect that is often missing in today’s thought on precariousness is the fact that we are not simply talking about the precariat as such, as if all precarious labour relations are the same. Surely, there is a difference between the precariousness of Western artists, academics and activists who

sia as well as many ex-Soviet republics in one place. Of course, this ‘meeting’ is often no more than a virtual one, as the migrants – who are mostly illegal – work and live in parts of the city that will never be seen by the rich. The precariat migrants come to Moscow looking for a stake in the new riches of Russian oligarchy capitalism. Just as Roman Abramovich started as a street dealer, some hope to make it big. But most simply need to make a living and cope with the rising prices created on the back of neo-liberal reforms. So they work as illegal employees in factories that produce cheap goods for the GUS and European markets. The Moscow authorities know that they are there illegally and they know under what kind of ‘third world’ conditions the workers exist. The authorities are kept at arm’s length with bribes. The workers go home once a year, if they can afford the journey, which normally costs several months’ pay. Their families are thousands of kilometres away waiting for the occasional money transfer so they can pay the rising bills. It is not just fathers who never see their children. It is often mothers who are the breadwinners – they leave in search of work in far-away places, and only come home once in a while. Precariousness is not simply a labour relation – it’s a relation of life itself. Yes, precariousness is everywhere, but not all precarity is the same. PostFordist labour relations are articulated in various ways. There are explicit and hidden hierarchies. The trans-nation-

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Böhm & Rodríguez

‘Velkom tu Hell’

al classes of privileged professionals include precarious labour. Yet, their situation is very different from the precariousness that millions experience in the hellish gulags of the ‘third world’ districts of urban monsters like Moscow. One of the most urgent tasks is for these different types of precariat not just to meet virtually in one city –

where one precariat exploits the other – but to come together in a real meeting. What is needed is a class consciousness among all precarious labour that lets all the precariat see their mutuality and inter-dependence. What has to end is the ruinous, exploitative relationship between the affluent precariat of the ‘first world’ and the ‘third

world’ underclass that is everywhere. The ‘third world’ does not just exist on television; it is not just in Africa or in parts of Asia and Latin America. The ‘third world’ cannot only be found in the South. The South is everywhere. It is a Global South; the ‘third world’ is right here amongst us. We just have to look at who serves the

food in restaurants, works in hospitals, and cleans the street. The affluent precariat of the Global North meets the precariat of the Global South on a daily basis, yet there is very little interaction between them. One of the most urgent political tasks is for such a real meeting between the precariats to take place. +

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Szeman

Irreversibility

The writer is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies and Director of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Institute for American Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Maria Whiteman is an artist and educator based in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Her current work explores the zones at which industrial and natural environments come into contact.

Next page: Maria Whiteman, compilation of the series Irreversibility and Ephemera: Past and Future, 2005, digital photographs.

Imre Szeman

Irreversibility, or the Global Factory

The ever-present danger of epochal analysis is that, as it runs ahead with emergent phenomena, the modes and forms of life that are still dominant are too quickly left behind in the theoretical rust. The proletariat emerged onto the stage of world history in the middle of the nineteenth century, at a time when most of the population was still engaged in subsistence farming. Agriculture remained dominant when the factories of Fordism made their appearance at the turn of the last century. And the forms of post-Fordist, postmodern, affective and creative labour said to characterize our present era are propped up by a global mass of factory workers, miners and oil rig workers, migrant farm labourers and others still engaged in work of the “body” rather than “mind”. Satellite technologies, the Internet and cell phones may have reshaped social experience, but it is at our theoretical and political peril that we forget that people using the technologies of mobility still have their basic experience of the world mediated by the alienation of the time-clock. Rustbelts and silicon economies in North America, seeming to embody the end of old processes and the ascendancy of new ones, obscure the fact that the global economy remains fuelled by older, more basic processes. Indeed, the most basic processes of all: the transformation of the wealth of the natural world through industrial systems that remain essential for the creation of those emblematic objects

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of globalization: post-modern office towers, computer screens, satellites and cell phones. The dynamics of global politics today are essentially nothing but an endgame struggle over the last ecological reserves of raw materials for economies that function only through the fantasy-dream of perpetual growth: oil, coal, natural gas, iron ore, water. The passage across Siberia, Mongolia and China on the Trans-Siberian lays these processes bare. A journey that fits the genre of adventure travel (however mild it may now be) for all those who are not locals, the train traverses spaces of great natural beauty across two continents. Fields, lakes and forests, unimaginably large, seemingly able to resist by sheer virtue of their colossal size the intrusions of humanity, stretch away to the Polar Regions. The more instrumental origins of the railway are, however, apparent everywhere. Despite its immense length, this is a train journey through a zone of intense factory production – the Ruhr Valley stretched over six time zones, complete with huge cities rendered invisible to the global imaginary by virtue of the fact that they are situated in that great fantasy of emptiness called Siberia. These are not the factories typically associated with globalization – the export-processing zones and tax havens of Guangzhou or the maquiladoras. Instead: coal-fired generating plants, tractor and railcar factories, coal mines, steel factories, aluminum-smelting plants, and a hundred

other things besides, each mile another stretch of what only appears to be abandoned buildings, now put back to work in new economic circumstances for ever-greater modes of extraction and exploitation. Zones of intensified production offer clues to the often invisible forces reshaping the human and natural landscape on a global level: the rail line between Omsk and Novosibirsk has the greatest freight traffic density on earth. The view from the train window is of a blighted landscape, of human processes intruding and desecrating the hills and plains that spill away northward to the Arctic Circle. As different as they may have been politically, the economic forces of communism and capitalism share this in common. Still, in a world of six and a half billion people, production and extraction are a necessity, an inevitability, a source of wealth, a way of life. The wealth disappears into the markets; the cities, factories and human dreams that produce it remain fixed in place. Smokestacks and mazes of pipes, which seem to have been accreted almost accidentally onto the roof tops and surfaces of factory buildings (the legacy of multiple and conflicting logics plus time), strive to eliminate poisonous gases from the place of work, only to deposit them into the living spaces of the communities of workers. These spaces of work and production form some of the basic spaces of human experience in the global epoch.

They constitute a vernacular architecture. However much they are meant to be hidden away or expelled from the “civilized” world, a catalogue of human spaces and experience would have to include these boxes sprouting a maze of steel appendages, where two basic activities occur: the life of humanity – production – and that first extraction of value that begins the drama of what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the nightmare of every social formation: capital. The German architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, visiting Manchester in 1825, wrote: “Here are buildings seven to eight storeys, as high and as big as the Royal Palace in Berlin.” The moment when the factory grows taller than palaces is for Schinkel a melancholy one: the passing of history from the era of ornamentation and aesthetics into the plainer, more utilitarian world that would follow. But this moment marks another passage. When the factory exceeds the palace, we enter a space of social contestation: politics emerges from the world of powdered wigs and enters the streets. It is then hardly surprisingly that the mirror-shade aesthetic of globalization seeks to banish smokestacks and factories to the hinterland, in the process trying vainly to drag politics back out of the streets and sequester it in the lifeless hermeticism of the glass-andsteel boardroom. Luckily as fate would have it, the politics of the street are as irreversible as the still glowing embers of the industrial age. +

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Szeman

Irreversibility

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The writer is a researcher on cinema and political science at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III, France. When she is not travelling she is mobile in Paris. Language editing Mike Garner.

Aholainen

Resisting Death

Although a lot of good art is, of course, driven by different sentiments and experiences, such as despair, loneliness, depression, trauma etc., I think that joy, fun, laughter, and especially enthusiasm, in its etymological sense of being possessed by a God, are crucial elements in art. Although the question “What is art?” is fundamental to the contemporary conception of art, in my opinion, neither

artists nor public need necessarily answer such a question. I think that, in the end, art has to be practised, loved, lived and enjoyed, not just talked about. “It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and Aesthetics are one and the same)… What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus). – Luca Guzzetti

Pages 39-41: Luca Guzzetti, Jump (2005), an event carried out with Steffen Böhm, Bracha L. Ettinger, and Akseli Virtanen, Beijing, September 20, 2005. Photos by Bracha L. Ettinger.

Leena Aholainen Resisting Death or What Made Luca Guzzetti Jump into the Ashtray? On coming to the train I was troubled by a sentence, Deleuze’s statement that art is an act of resistance. I didn’t dare to hope that taking the journey would throw some light on that statement. It was a Jump that made me understand a facet of resistance, of what has the power to resist, and how. When our journey had come to its end in Beijing, Luca Guzzetti jumped into the Korean artist Wonsuck Han’s artwork Rubbishmuseum (2005), a huge tray full of maggots in the backroom of a gallery space at Factory 798. The jump was then reproduced twice and the last jump was filmed. The event created a flood of reactions on behalf of conference participants assisting at the scene; anger, shame and mixed negative emotions: “How dare he enter into the work of an artist who did not give his consent?”; “Who gave him permission to do it?”; “Why did we enter the private room and not remain in the gallery?” When Luca Guzzetti first entered Factory 798 and jumped into the ashtray, it was not an act. It was a reaction to something he saw, felt, and maybe, being an ex-heavy smoker, smelled. It was his private reaction to a work of art which as such (a reaction) created

the tangible condition for the emergence of a space for co-acting, a sphere of the possible. We do not know why Luca jumped in the first place, and I bet he himself does not know any better. He jumped, something pulled him into the pile of maggots, and this jump triggered another set of “jumps”: a few people in the gallery space started transforming the event into a performance. In the backwash from these jumps there was also a certain significant moment when a group of conference participants were watching this videoed moment on a computer screen in a hotel lobby in Beijing, and which then led into a “problematic discussion” in hotel room 901. To throw some light on the notion of performance we could refer to Austin’s famous speech acts, acts that are in accordance with the act performed, of the type “I baptise this child Luca”. These acts are generated from a language that “makes acts”. These doings by saying in Austin’s terminology are performative acts. If we then think of art, this performativity seems to be ambiguous. An artwork has stopped saying “this is not a pipe”, everybody already knows that it isn’t, we’ve got it and we do not need to be more in-

formed on the matter of language not being in accordance with the world of phenomena. The statement about a “pipe not being a pipe” does not make the pipe not be a pipe. The performative power of a contemporary artwork goes beyond its material form or its visibility; it works in another, more material, sensible diagrammatic sphere, beyond the level of meaning; it is a relating element, a dynamic principle of agglutination, like a dot on a line. Its power is to generate spaces where transgressing the private borders of personalities becomes possible: spaces for relating . “I baptise this child Luca” is a performative act in the weak sense of the word. It is part of a repetitive structure that replaces the collective act of performance. Our contemporary societies are full of these kinds of replacements, empty performative acts constructing our practical lives. They are created for a collectivity, but require no subjective effort of relating oneself to a collectivity. As Foucault remarks, we are moving away from disciplinary societies that define themselves by the milieu of enclosure towards societies driven by new forms of mechanisms of control, we might think of these empty performative acts, and we might think of them on a very subjective level. Our inner selves, or “second natures” as Aristotle calls them, are structured by different kinds of laws, judgements, morals etc. that direct our movements. It is good not to kill or not to destroy every piece of art that crosses your path, but the point is that when this happens on the mere level of “visibility”, of empty performativity, and not in the sphere that requires a sensitive subjectivity, these acts are “gratuits”,

so to say. They are mechanical, made by no-one, and there is no human resistance involved. They simply happen because the structure exists, and therefore there couldn’t be anything political or creative about them. Guy Debord claims that spectacle is the common language of separation. Spectacle is the principle that separates us from our own power for compassionate co-acting. Morals, judgements, laws, most rules maintaining social cohesion etc. are spectacular in this sense, and they make the process of separation work on two levels that complement each other. Separating us from our own sensitive being, which is the point of departure for any subjective valuation, and which is the only real basis that enables us to connect with the collective sphere of relating to other(s), spectacle separates us from reality. We are talking about “machines” in the Deleuzian-Guattarian sense as social assemblages, but this constellation also has its form on the individual level; we are reproducing the social machine with our own individual bodies by carrying out empty performatives and repeating a form of selfexploitation through obedience to the spectacular social forms. The negative reactions to the jump scene were spectacular in this sense. They arose from the fear of transgression and of shareable border spaces. The event was about to become a repetition of the group’s original trauma of transgression and exclusion experienced in the train(1), and this is exactly the principle of the functioning of the spectacular machine: a form of mechanical repetition. The separation, the experience of the individual being cut off from the world creates a field of neg-

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ative emotions that in their turn maintain the machine that creates spectacular realities. Getting connected to the movement of life requires a conscious effort of letting go of the private notion of the self, recognising that we are a duality, and that there is a powerful part of us that does not “belong” to us. Our power to act is not “ours”, but is generated out of our power to be affected, and therefore out of something that is not our property, but which is given to us. In our individualistically driven realities this is a principle that is difficult to accept. We are powerful through something that is not ours; our power is not a fixed quality of Me, but a possibility given to us that appears in us by action taken in co-emergence with other subjectivities, other vectors of life.(2) It is this that Capturing the Moving Mind was trying to capture, and it is this that entered into our immediate experience at Factory 798. And it also revealed all the difficulties the group had in letting borderlines be crossed and border spaces shared. So, let’s get back to the train, because there are strings to be pulled between the train, art, action, exclusion, performance, Moscow railway station, the gallery space at Factory 798 and the hotel lobby in Beijing, where Guzzetti’s jump started creating another set of backwash. In this movement of the train one of the conference participants was excluded from the group because of his atypical, transgressive behaviour, (drinking, losing his papers, being absent-minded and rather full of himself) and finally had to stop his journey in Russia. One person being condemned to detachment from the group left a mark on the collective skin of

the group. This “act” of exclusion was a mechanical – and as such a repetitive – reaction based on a simulation of a judgement, and as such called for a counter-act. The context for carrying this traumatic event on into a healing process was offered at Factory 798 when Luca Guzzetti jumped into the artworld. His first jump and the reactions prompted by it generated a crossroads situation, a moment of choice, when there was the friction required for transforming and activating the collective sphere. A few people in the gallery space sensed the possible in the situation, and started transforming Luca’s jump into a performance. On the video we see these people setting up the scene, encouraging Luca to jump, joyfully playing with each other, with a certain scent of danger in the air. In the moment, they must have known that they were transgressing the apparent border lines, but they anyhow felt the need to experiment, to actualise the potential reconciling power that they must have sensed in the moment, of which, however, they could not have foreseen the result. There was a collective instinct, or intuition, expressing itself in action. There is a counter-force that works against the general alienating processes that we all go through in different degrees. Wrapping our sensible selves in plastic and slowly detaching ourselves from our natural point of departure, our sensible sharing of the world, we invent for ourselves personalities that coincide with the outer (imaginary) conditions, and act in our place. By nature we are powerful, but employing this power requires an act of relating. We could talk about power in

the world and power over the world. Power in the world implies a certain support from a structure (an empty or mechanical performative act), and this generates acts that look like generic acts. Power in the world does not necessitate singularity or subjectivity, and therefore it does not necessitate action, which alone can empower us. Luca’s jump did necessitate an act to prevent it from having a determined repressive outcome. It created the condition where relating in action became possible, when people setting up the second and the third jump were transforming the first jump into a performative event, taking the jump beyond its original private framework, and bringing it to the level of, and making it for, the group; like a gift it was brought into the public sphere where it could be processed and shared, and where it could affect individuals. But giving a gift requires certain conditions. If we have nothing, we do not give gifts. On the level of empty performatives we have nothing, we are being exposed and used by the outer conditions that think us, feel us and decide upon our actions. When Luca started the jump, standing still, he was already in there, in the movement. As was everybody else in the room. The movement exists whether we are disposed to perceive it or not, and the only way to have power over it is by relating to the power of the other(s), by becoming able to be affected. In the train the main mode was the movement, the ever-ongoing outer cinema that penetrated into the travellers. We were “consciously” (it was so obvious) in the movement, talking about it, about how our thoughts were constructed differently because of the

movement and in the movement, trying to go to sleep, but finding ourselves in an insomnia with a head full of thoughts that wouldn’t stop. I started noticing a peculiar thing(3): the movement of the train created another level, a simulation of the movement, like a parallel reality. Perceiving all the moving forms created a certain feeling of uncertainty regarding the environment, and at the same time a peculiar feeling of action, as if we had become part of an action, actors, just by gazing out at the scenery through the screen of the window. It was as if we were interiorizing the image of the outer movement, as if our moving minds were being captured and fixed by it, painted on a canvas. An image can be an object. I see a lady walking her dog on a street, and what I see, the perception of this happening, can be an object. If I am affected by this perception and sensible to it, it can be something else, a related element, and if not, it is an object for me in the sense that it does not, literally, touch me. The fact that the image on the level of visual perception is moving, does not mean that it is not still on the level of my inner perception, whether I am aware of this or not. The most intense moments of anxiety and “mal-à-l’aise” were lived through when the train was standing on the border zones, and we in the train were prevented from watching the outer cinema. “How long do we still have to sit here?” seems an absurd question after having sat in the train for four or five days already. Anyhow, the question arose, and it is an important one because it reveals our problematic relation to the movement surrounding us, and to ourselves in action. If our actions are based on inner, still images

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(1)  Ettinger, Bracha L. Email message Tue 27/09/2005 8:11 PM (2)  This is what Bracha L. Ettinger calls the matrixial copoiesis whereby a joint trans-subjectivity seizes a potentiality and allows the growth of a gesture into something else, the transformation of a gesture into an artistic counter-event. See her

essay Copoiesis at: www.framework.fi. MORE SPECIFIC ADDRESS TO BE ADDED (3)  Thanks to a comment made by Bert de Muynck I started elaborating this train of thought. (4)  Deleuze, Gilles. Avoir une idée en cinéma. A propos du cinéma des Straub-Huillet. p. 74.

(5)  ibid. p. 74-75. (6)  Hardt, Michael. L’art de l’organisation: Agencements politiques chez Spinoza. Futur Antérieur 7:1991. p. 3. (7)  Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha. Art as the transport-station of trauma. In Artworking 19851999. Palais de Beaux Arts Brussels, p.1

(8)  Hardt, Michael. L’art de l’organisation: Agencements politiques chez Spinoza. Futur Antérieur.7:1991. p. 5. (9)  Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza. p. 262. (10)  Mondzain, Marie Jose (2002). L’ image peut-elle tuer?, Bayard Éditions, p. 63.

that are separated from the movement, we are not acting in the actual sense of the word, but reproducing images in the form of “act-simulations”. Let’s reflect a moment on the question of art, as we are reading and writing in the context of an art review. Gilles Deleuze said in one of his lectures at the Parisian film school Femis,(4) without really clearly explicating the further meaning of his words (and it is precisely here that the genius of his forms of expression lies), that art is an act of resistance connected to counter-information. An act of resistance. A window could be compared to an art object. It has a shape, we can see the elements that it has been constructed out of, our attention can be drawn to faults or scratches on it. We can see its physical dimensions: the frames, its depth and width. It is an object, but it opens up another world, serving as a passage into a vision. It frames our experience, locating the focal point of perception, with an everchanging scenery. And it challenges us to see through it, just like the movement behind it challenges us to capture it instead of being captured by it. For Deleuze art is not an object of communication. There are, however, affinities between an artwork and an act of resistance. Art is not counter-information, but counter-information becomes effective when it becomes (and it is so by nature) an act of resistance. Deleuze creates a liaison with Malraux’s definition of art: “Art is what resists death”.(5) Spinoza, when talking about adequate and in-

adequate ideas, considers that the passage from the latter to the former happens through the growth of our power to exist and to act, and that the power to exist and act corresponds to the power of being affected.(6) I would marry counter-information with the power to be affected, and note that the power to be affected necessitates relating to the power of other(s). So what is this counter-relating, or counter-organization, that could empower us to resist death? A friend of mine was looking, one early morning, at Lake Baikal out of the window of the Transsiberian train, and, touched by this early moment passing by, he spontaneously said: “That is just so amazingly beautiful”. A man standing next to him, seeing the same scenery responded in the same tone: “Listen, why stay there, why not go further, go beyond that?” “Perhaps we are trying to avoid (beauty) much more than aspiring to arrive at (it), because the beautiful, as Rilke says, is but the beginning of the horrible in which – in this dawning – we can hardly stand.”(7) Beauty is not a visible form, a “visibility”, but the vertigo of approaching the inevitable death, the death of the private self. Death in this context is like an action space resulting from transgressing the personality’s private space. And what Deleuze calls counter-information requires this transgression, because counter-information is not receivable without experiencing death; counter-information is already an act, an art of dying. When talking about the joyful passions, Spinoza claims that they are

always inadequate, because they are generate by an external cause.(8) This external cause could be anything: a human being, the weather, an emotion, an object. “Therefore we must, to increase the joyful passions, form an idea of what there is in common with the external body and the one that is ours. For only this idea of what is in common, is adequate.”(9) And, I might add, can resist death. These inadequate passions of Spinoza’s carry in themselves the seeds of the adequate, because they provide the friction that is needed for forming an adequate idea or the notion of what is in common, they offer the pre-condition for the perception of what we consider as the exterior. No friction, no fire, this people have known ever since the first spark was struck by a human hand. Resisting death does not mean overcoming it, but living it through in order to see what resists it and can be transformed by it, what has the power of not dying. We are all afraid of death because we rarely have the confidence to believe that there is something in us that survives death. This fear of death is a genuinely inadequate idea. So perhaps we are trying to avoid beauty much more than aspiring to arrive at it. Seeing the jump video in a hotel lobby with a group of people who had been involved in the moment when Luca Guzzetti jumped into art was peculiar. What I saw there, among these people, was a moment of suspension. It reminded me of all the “essentialities” of art, of why and for what we have this mode of expression. A moment

when you are given the possibility to halt on your own image, so that something can touch you. In the discussion that this moment generated in room 901 there was a second moment of negative reaction, which was worked through with the intention (conscious or not) of creating public meaning for the performance carried out. The arguments against the constellation of the jump revealed us to be at a common point of friction: between ourselves and the exterior forms that make us think, reflect, transform, suffer and enjoy, live. An artwork defines itself in every moment of history through the figure of freedom that it incarnates.(10) And in that moment, we were questioning the figure of freedom in ourselves. When I was flying back from Beijing to Finland, I saw Lake Baikal as a small, immobile spot on a huge canvas. And I didn’t have the sensation of being in motion, even though my body was flying through the air at a speed far faster than any train could ever reach. And I thought to myself that what I saw was the idea of a lake, since I had the knowledge that the spot/object /?/ was one. Otherwise, there was nothing that would have qualified as lake-like in its appearance, according to my experience. And I thought that the speed making the movement imperceptible to me, also made my place disappear. I was there, of course, but looking at the world beneath me as a beautiful far-away idea. And suddenly I had the urge to stop – or to jump. +

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What Is Art?

(1)  Fuglsang, M. and Böhm, S. ‘The Rest is Silence’ (2)  Ettinger, B. (3)  Benjamin, W. (4)  Derrida, J. The Gift of Death (5)  Ettinger, B. (6)  Dali, S. The Face of Death (7)  Weber, S. ‘Television’

The writer, based in London, teaches organisation studies at the University of Essex and is editor-in-chief of ephemera: theory & politics in organization.

Steffen Böhm Origins of Art, or, The Un-timely Jump One possible translation of ‘origin’ into German is Ursprung, which is literally the ‘primordial jump’. Ursprung: The pre-historic jump; the jump before history was recorded; the jump before ‘our’ time; the un-timely jump. Thus, in German, when one talks about the origin of art, or the original artwork, one gets a sense of un-timeliness. In such view, art is not something that exists within a linear history that knows an exact beginning and an end. An original artwork is an un-timely call for a jump into something. What is this ‘something’? Can we name it? Is this ‘something’ art? If we could name this ‘something’, it could not be art. Because ‘naming’ is based on a particular history of voice that renders the un-timely nameless: silent. There is thus a silence in the work of art.(1) This is its secret. This is the gift of art. The jump that took place at the end of the Trans-Siberian train project was an original artwork, not in the sense of a ‘thing’ to be gazed at, but in the sense of an un-timely performance that produced a space of undecidability. This ending to our conference

Guzzetti

was also its beginning: a jump into a matrixial(2) space of connections that could not be foreseen – nor can they be judged. Some were quick to decide; some were quick to judge. Others took their time to make sense of what took place. But it didn’t matter what actually took place. The jump itself was simply a physical act that engaged with an artwork. What took place was an event that went beyond the physical jump. Here the concrete work of art was merely a transitional stage.(3) It was something else in the course of its gestation and it became something else again by the way we interacted with it. Art here is not something to be gazed at; it is a transitional event. What took place was the event in which we begun to be something or someone else. We stopped being individuals, tourists, conference participants. With the jump we started to become: a group that emerged out of different components. For the first time we, as a group, had to take responsibility. We had to decide how to react, engage and go on. Emotions were overflowing. The struggle of and for art became visible and audible. But there

was no right and wrong. What matters is that we took responsibility: of responsibility.(4) Responsibility cannot be a moralistic concept that is simply and programmatically applied to a situation. Responsibility is first of all the event of being/feeling responsible for responsibility. And this is a communal event. Responsibility can only take place in a space where one meets the other. Responsibility is an event of co-emergence, in which egos are relegated to the background in order to let the silence of art speak for itself. Art is transformed from a narcissistic author to an event of co-poiesis.(5) Art is the jump into a unique moment, where we take responsibility for our selves: we take responsibility for our future, for who we are, and who we want to be: we take responsibility for life. This event of art as responsibility is not simply positive or creative. This event is also an event of death; an event of destruction: of madness, trauma. How can it not be? Great works of art are silent because they render us speechless. Even the chatter of today’s hypermodern busy-ness comes to a halt in the face of a great piece of art. The eternal return of history suddenly comes to a standstill – it shuts you up. We can see the face of death.(6) The primordial abyss of our existence becomes visible. In the face of the origins of art history is killed: morals become sense-less and un-timely. Art is an event of death. Art is the gift of death. Art is the event when we take responsibility for death. We don’t try to keep it at bay any longer. In the event of art we jump into the impos-

sibility of death. Committing suicide is no longer a moralism. The gift of death is when we take responsibility for ourselves. What is the jump into an artwork? Is this not the attempt to come to terms with death? Is this not the event of taking responsibility for death? Modern existence is all about keeping death at bay. We drop bombs from B52 bombers high in the sky; their impact is only visible on a TV screen. Today death only becomes visible as a TV event.(7) During the first world war soldiers still looked into the enemies eyes; they stood in the trenches and saw the face of death. It is perhaps for this reason that those few who returned home after the trauma of war said ‘never again’. Today we can often not take responsibility for death because it is kept at bay for us. We cannot stop it, because we don’t know what it is. War violence becomes the eternal return of a spectacle that we cannot recognise as death. A press of a button releases the trauma of death, the madness of violence in which time is out of joint – but we are far away from this experience, and so we continue with our ‘normal lives’ where we don’t get involved. But art is an event of involvement. It is a jump into a collective event of responsibility that hopes to involve the other. Yes, things get messy in such an event. Yes, often we don’t know how to go on. Yes, we might see the face of death. But for the first time we take responsibility of ourselves and life itself. +

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Ettinger & Virtanen

Art, Memory, Resistance

Bracha L. Ettinger, Ph.D. is artist, theorist, senior clinical psychologist and practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst based in Paris and Tel Aviv. Akseli Virtanen teaches political economy and philosophy of organization at the Helsinki School of Economics.

Bracha L. Ettinger and Akseli Virtanen

Art, Memory, Resistance

Akseli Virtanen: For Félix Guattari an a-signifying semiotic opens meaningful words up to unexpected material intensities. Perhaps we could understand these elements which express the materiality of language and its internal tensions a little better by recalling Deleuze’s analysis of a Francis Bacon painting. For modern painters the canvas is not a tabula rasa, but a space of visual preconceptions and accepted conventions of representation, which the artist brings to the canvas, and with which she struggles, and which she tries to defeat or escape. For Bacon the moment of transformation begins with a stroke of the brush, a drip of the paint or touching the canvas, which may be unexpected. For example a light touch on wet paint makes a mouth suddenly spread across the face. It creates a moment of chaos, a catastrophe on the visual probabilities, which Bacon calls a ‘diagram’. The diagram is really a chaos and a catastrophe, but it is also a seed of organization and rhythm, as Bacon starts to follow the created change, the form, colour or line of this diagram. As if the skin of a rhinoceros were suddenly tightened and it revealed new microscopic, repetitive patterns. Bacon uses this as a way to produce new intensive relations with the painting, which inevitably transform the character he had started to paint. The new form emerges out of this unformed figure. I think of Luca’s jump as an unexpected stroke of the brush in our organizational experiment. In fact, that is why his motives are not so relevant. What we then did was to follow the new intensive relations to transform our experimentation, to make it a performative, a work of art.

derspaces. The event of the first jump, within these parameters, was about to become a repetition of that original trauma of transgression and expulsion. What we then did, matrixially, in copoiesis, was to embrace and plant the new intensity within the web of our relations, to transform our experience into artistic experimentation, to turn Luca’s reactive acting-out toward the work of art of someone else (Wonsuk) into a sovereign act, to turn the event performative, to turn this event into a subjectivizing time-space of encounter: not transgression – but a performance of transgression, so that the potentially traumatic, unexpected stroke, a stroke that could simply become jouissance and trauma, both to Luca and to the group, like previous acts of real transgression of borderlines, would become a transformative matrixial encounter-event and a work of art that allows us to approach anew both aesthetical and ethical questions. In other words, we can pay attention to five points here. (1) Wonsuk’s pile of cigarettes. (2) The unexpected stroke. (3) The original traumatic event on the level of the group, and the pattern of repetition it was destined to entail, which for us exists from before. (4) The artistic event as a transportstation of trauma: where the potentiality for retraumatizing becomes transformative, while we are moving together to a zone between the aesthetical and the ethical. (5) The matrixial copoiesis whereby a joint trans-subjectivity allows, by compassionate hospitality and a duration of fascinance, the transformation of a gesture and a catastrophe into an artistic encounterevent. And of course the encounterevent went on from the first moment

Bracha L. Ettinger: I absolutely agree with you, and in terms of the copoietic moment there is more to say.(1) The first jump was a reaction to another work of art. Such reactions to a work of art are wonderful, crazy, the dream of every artist. It was not a work done for the gaze, but for the sense of touch, a ground-play for adults, a sandbox. It worked as such for Luca. His reaction was génial, strong. For you and me it was génial, yet it didn’t make it a work of art. The work of art was born in the repetition that was a sovereign transsubjective move: a new co-creation. So, the first jump, of which we have no record – this is mainly between Luca and you – is the enigmatic event in reality: this is the beauty of whatever has no first-hand visual record, like the first jump, it is only in our minds now. Then, with the repetition-in-jointness in our coemergence, a transformation is created, the jump embodies and displays sameness with-in difference. The first step of the Jump as art is at that point of repetition-in-difference; when the Jump becomes an artwork, we don’t have “the origin”, we don’t have one author, and this is symbolic of the fact that in any case there is no one origin to anything that is becoming art in copoiesis. Luca’s jump was an unexpected stroke of the brush in our organizational experiment, not only motivated by personal needs, but also by the group’s “original sin”: the trauma of the expulsion of a transgressive individual. Contrary to the conceptual declarations concerning the transgression of borderlines, which was the group’s conscious wish, the group couldn’t deal with transgressive behaviour within its mental shareable bor-

until the morning, because on the level of transformation it travelled to other venues through outbursts of anger, reflexion, discussion, and hopefully some transformation and rethinking and reframing of the whole experience within the larger experience. With this performance as a matrixial event, all the difficulties of the group to let borderlines be crossed and borderspaces be shared were revealed. It is important that you stress that, in the end, Luca’s private motivations as such are not the central point here, because on that level it would have remained an idiosyncratic act after which you feel fine, or you feel guilty, or ashamed, or proud, or stupid, etc., and so what? After all, there are many such gestures going on everywhere and all the time and leaving no artistic trace. It could have remained on the level of catastrophe or chaos or even “instinct”. The work of art “begins” when the artist – here the artist is the matrixial subjectivity composed of three of us, but surely also of others who were not there – seizures in the catastrophe, a potentiality, and for one reason or another, both ethical and aesthetical, must make of it the point of birth for another sense and another form, whereby the seeds of the catastrophic gesture, arriving from elsewhere, will grow into something else. There are rare moments when copoiesis emerges, and there are millions of moments, or jumps, that “fail” to make sense, and that do not make an art event. It is an important task to articulate all this as an artistic event on its own terms – not in terms of the original work to which Luca reacted, not in terms of the first stage which would still be considered a reactive acting-

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Art, Memory, Resistance

out, with some ancient reason that wouldn’t have an artistic intensity if it had been left on its own – but in terms of the project: Capturing the moving mind as a work of art. I think that we all agree that it is one. For this voyage as a work of art, this moment is a peak moment. The fact that the whole performance was not planned in anyway, but became a necessary, unexpected crescendo of a journey as an art event, is significant. It ties the beginning and the end, not in a repetitive cycle, but as a section of a spiral of transformation-within-repetition in a matrixial bordertime and borderspace. Luca allowed us to perceive and even materialize the difficulties in opening yourself and accepting the other, and in transgressing mental borders. He is therefore my hero.

our journey, is something that cannot be reached by spatial successions, historical facts or a succession of presents – first jump, second jump, third jump etc… this is what happened in Helsinki, this in Moscow, this on the train… – just like the arrow in Zeno’s paradox is motionless at every point of its trajectory and seems to annul the reality of motion and change. Movement, or copoiesis as you call it, is betrayed every time it is approached as the relation between mere actual elements or as a succession of presents or motionless cuts, or, in other words, when time (duration) is mistaken for space, or memory for states of consciousness that are separate and external to one another. So asking “Why the Jump?” is not a question of causal relations, of causes and effects, of pinpointing reasons. It is rather to acknowledge this “space of copoiesis” or “time of mutation” without which we cannot create and become actively, without which our journey also remains a little more than a reactive series of sequential sensations. Without a “matrixial” metaphysics or memory as the force that keeps whatis-no-longer in that-which-is, without memory as duration, the world would be forced to start over from scratch every instant. Without this fertile succession that contracts before and after all sensations, Luca’s sensitivity would have amounted to simple excitation. It is a question of explicating the ability of copoiesis or the structure of change.

art today, trauma more then phantasm determines the trajectory of what is, out of art, a forever no-time and noplace. Art links the time of too-early to the time of too-late and plants them in the world’s time.

also expressed a lot of fear and domineering emotions; the questions asked were: “How does Luca dare to enter the work of an artist who was not there to give his consent?”; “Who gave the permission to do it?”; “Why did Bracha encourage him?”; “Why did Akseli protect him?”; and “Why did we enter the private room and not remain in the public gallery?”; “Why did Luca mess with the work of art of others?”. Luca was aggressed, then you, then me. Later in the night, watching the video, I was the focus of the attack because it was easier for some people to see Luca as a drunk and therefore as the object and not as the subject of his acts, and me as a theatre-director and not as subjectivizing vector. I know that Luca was not an object, but the subject of his acts, but for a time-space to become a subjectivizing scene a compassionate hospitality is needed. And this was making us strong and very fragile. Through participating in a larger subjectivity and in allowing us to participate in a larger subjectivity, individual borderlines opened up and copoiesis was working-through. After the first jump, you became worried and asked me to close the door. You thought, and you were right, that some of the people around will not tolerate Luca’s jump, but we made the choice on the spot to transform together with Luca, and this second potentially traumatic event of transgression, into an artistic performance, within which even the aggressive reactions will acquire another dimension. It was quick, no time to think, it was thinking-and-knowing-as feelingand-affecting, it was affective transmission, reattunement and cooperation. I didn’t really foresee that the reactions would be so aggressive, because for me Luca’s first jump was a reaction of love, and my joining both of you instantly and the Jump were about love, not about crossing the private borders of another artist. For me a work of art, any work of art, is an act of generosity by definition. A work of art is a gift. Watching the video, I couldn’t believe that this flow of generosity that I was trusting so joyfully could turn into something that everyone is blaming. The decision to transform the performative moment into an artistic performance had

Akseli: So, three visible levels: we have the work by Wonsuk. We then have Luca’s first jump. Then we have the performance as our copoiesis: the second and third jump, documented by you and Steffen. Then we have an invisible level, the whole experience of Capturing the moving mind as a work of art, of which the performance as a work of art is a part, and into which even Wonsuk’s work was carried by the first jump and by the performance. As Leena says in her essay, the second would have a very different meaning in this context without the third level – and then there is also the moment of watching the video and what it generated: a kind of moment of a stroke on the canvas in which all the forces represented there regroup themselves and create a “line of flight” from the “chaotic” lines, as I said at the beginning.(2) And you are right, “its own terms” are of vital importance. Why? Because the Jump did not emerge out of nothing. It can’t be separated from the potentiality of our lives, through which we may encounter chances, others, and either lose or gain in combinations. None of this happens by itself, but rather creates its own “problem”. To create our own problems is to climb back to “the origin without an origin” to touch, not a chaos in which we would disappear, but a movement that gives us consistency. That is why what happened in Factory 798, and on

Bracha: As I said in Beijing, the artwork processes a matrixial time where a memory of oblivion that can’t be otherwise processed finds its space. Artworking is sensing a potential coemergence and co-fading and bringing into being objects or events, processes or encounters that sustain these metramorphoses and further transmit their effect. Art evokes further instances of trans-subjectivity that embrace and produce new partial subjects, and makes almost-impossible new borderlinking available, out of elements and links already partially available in bits. These are going to be transformed in ways that can’t be thought of prior to artworking itself, on the way to shifting with-in-to the screen of vision inside the tableau. In

Akseli: So, if copoiesis is the place of mutation or a potential transportstation, as you call it, then it must be that which differs, not from something else, but internally from itself, or which, in other words, changes. Change is here not change between two different states of affairs, but it itself takes on a substantial nature without any need to presuppose something else, like a changing object. To say that copoiesis is change, is to say that it differs with itself internally: the difference, the change itself becomes a unity of substance and subject, a causa sui, that is, a substance that is the cause of itself. That is why copoiesis does not need anything outside itself, a reason, a cause, a meaning, no kind of external mediation for the support and guarantee of its existence. This makes it absolute. And it does not mean any kind of confusion, chaos or indeterminacy, because the elements and relations are with one another in a completely determined whole, but this whole is just not actualized as such. So we need to avoid the temptation to give the elements of copoiesis an actuality that they don’t have, and deny them the reality that they have. Instead, that the Jump as a work of art emerged out of nothing, or was reactive, or that existence was merely added to a possibly existing thing, the actualization is the creative taking place of things. Bracha: A sense of danger, mixed up with immense joy, immediately started to build up, and with it, an intensive appeal to transform the moment and give it a new meaning, or a memory as you say, based on the unconscious of the voyage itself. It seems to me that Luca, you and I shared this urge for another meaning. Aesthetical and ethical knowledge could arise only through working it through and acting it up, or climbing up to “it” and giving some visage to the foreclosed and the virtual. Thus, what we see on the video was born. Now some people became extremely aggressive and

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Art, Memory, Resistance

ethical and aesthetical dimensions all along, and in it the ethical compassion towards the other and the arising borderlinking in trans-subjectivity and the emergence of matrixial responsibility were crucial. You and I turned our wit(h)nessing into sovereign subjective positions, and Luca turned his reaction into a sovereign acting, in jointness.

loss of the self and the public rejection, was the group’s first trauma, its unconscious primal sin. A transgressive behaviour, the crossing of private borderlines, in a group that is there to work on the issue of crossing borders, became a reason for exclusion and expulsion. I view this event as a traumatic founding event that transformed anonymous individuals into a group with an already traumatic history: an unconscious founding event of the group as a group, that followed the conscious establishing of the voyage of a group as a work of art. The first trauma of the group, its primal sin, was doomed to be repeated. There is an interesting photo in the set, where we are with Luca arriving at the hotel in Moscow, and if you look carefully K. is there with a mask on his face. The second transgressive event could also have become a simple repetition of a similar traumatic moment, with transgression plus fear, aggression and finally some kind or another of silencing and exclusion. This time, the crossing and transgression was of spaces. The group couldn’t tolerate the blurring of the borders between a private space and a public space, as formulated by some. A transgressive borderspace was forbidden. To transform the jump from an event that arouses fear, shame, guilt and aggression, and has a private intra-psychic meaning, into a transformative event with inter-subjective and trans-subjective meaning, the Jump, a matrixial unconscious, reattunement was needed, but also an ethical acting and aesthetical working-through: to turn the impulsive and compulsive reaction from a repetition and reaction into a subjectivizing event and a work of art with its own parameters with what looks at first sight like a stage, stage-directors, an act, a few acts, an actor, a few actors, a photographer, and also a videodocumentarist, all an event supposedly needs in order to be taken out from within the limits of the individuals involved and be turned into an oeuvre. But not even all these elements necessarily make a work work. When I started to take photos, asking Luca to jump again, to stay there longer, to jump again, etc., when you started to rearrange the place as a stage, this was almost an instant drive that fol-

lowed the instant drive of Luca. But it took the joint dancing of few bodypsyches, a copoiesis like that of a musical dance, connecting Luca, you, myself, and Steffen, who joined in suddenly at the end of the second jump, to transform what had already taken place inside someone’s (Luca’s) mind and was acted out, into an artistic working-through with the second and third repetitions as a joint event that needed the body-psyches of each participant to be in unconscious attunement with one another and to create a shared psychic camera obscura with poietic and healing potentialities. This is coemergence, copoiesis and cofading. It transformed Luca’s act into a matrixial encounter-event that became Jump. And it worked. From that moment on, even the fear and the aggression became a part of the artistic performance. And later on, with Leena and others, the long discussion into the night about the meaning of art, of ethics, what is ethical, what is a work of art, what is private and what is public, modernism, postmodernism, etc, based on the video shots taken by Steffen – and involving people who were not physically there, but who viewed the performance in the video – was already the reaction not to the Jump, but to the video which is a part of it. The work of art in question was not the basin of smoked cigarettes, and not the first jump that was still a personal reaction, but the copoietic videoed duration itself. What matters is the event, the repetition of the event as performance art, and the repetition of the performance as performance art, the video, and all that followed from that moment on – the discussion, the conversation. For me the fact that suddenly Steffen was there taking a video of the event was a part of the matrixial unconscious web that was woven slowly during the voyage itself and attracted us all to articulate this web as an artistic event, unknowingly. I didn’t know that he was there and filming the Jump itself until later in the hotel. He did, however, work hard, insist on interviews after the Jump and before the night-long discussion. Steffen played an important role in the first trauma and expulsion. It is therefore no wonder to me that unknowingly he

was drawn to this particular copoiesis and became a part of it as a wit(h)ness to it and the producer of the filmed traces of the whole performance. He was surely working-through and perhaps understanding for the first time the meaning of his active part in the production of the first trauma. He was perhaps working towards understanding and reparation, and was wit(h)nessing with us, something that the ethical side of this performance as a work of art was offering. The fact that you two could, immediately after the performance, discuss the expulsion of K, as seen on Video 2, points to this as one of the lines of flight.

Akseli:  “Wit(h)nessing” captures something important in the structure of change. Bracha: The whole event goes together, we all felt concerned and responsible, concerned for Luca and concerned for the event, and responsible for the other and for an event we didn’t initiate – that we wit(h)nessed – that’s in matrixial terminology. The artist becomes responsible for an event she didn’t produce, and by joining in and transforming it into an artistic working-through, the original event of the other or the cosmos, which can be traumatic for the other or for a world, becomes a source of meaning and knowledge within a joint psychic sphere and for whoever can join this sphere immediately or later on. This is, for example, the sense of my painting within traces of images of traumatic war events. This is also at the heart of my works of conversation and notebooks. The link between aesthetical workingthrough and ethical working-through (which is the psychoanalytical healing practice) is at work in the working of art. A strange responsibility it is: to take responsibility for the other in the other, for a world in the world, for the cosmos in the cosmos, based on a kind of illogical knowledge of the other in the other and the cosmos in the cosmos. Such was even our knowledge in the cigarette work, the knowledge that this work is assuming its own consequences, that it is there for this: for someone else to enter it. I somehow felt that I must take on board the responsibility for transforming Luca’s jump, as well as the fear and aggressivity that started to build all around Luca, so that this event would not end up in aggression and expulsion like the group’s first transgressive event: the drunkenness of K. The rejection of K., and following that his losing his papers, symbolic of the

Akseli: A Crane Dance, we refer to its necessity as a way out of the labyrinth in which there are no visible landmarks or set cardinal points also in the introduction to the project as a whole.(3) I also think that responsibility is essential here, not responsibility for the other, or for K.’s behaviour, but for intuition, joy and its expansion. Responsibility to escape destiny, to take our destiny into our own hands. I also think that the key to reaction and action is here, which is also to say that let’s be careful about the “cause” of what happened: I am sure that the Jump overstepped its own time, it was untimely, unzeitgemässe, in the sense that Nietzsche talks about it: it didn’t emerge out of history, the already-happened, which cannot be affected and is outside the human being. This untimeliness is necessary for creation. For to create we need to step outside of our own time, out of the demands and requirements of society, out of the necessity to communicate and respond to the demands of the age. This is also the way I understand the potential nature of copoiesis: it may produce outcomes or effects in the state of things, but it is never reducible to its outcomes, products or effects. It has no beginning or end, it is without a cause and a subject. The one who does and what is done, the active and the passive, cannot be distinguished at that level, it does not have any particular content, cause or task; it can’t be divided, partitioned or represented. It is there from where the Jump as a work of art originated. And it was with the Jump that a

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Ettinger & Virtanen

Art, Memory, Resistance

(1)  See Bracha L. Ettinger’s article Copoiesis in this issue of Framework http://www.framework. fi/4_2005/framew4.html (2)  See Leena Aholainen Resisting to Death, or What Made Luca Guzzetti Jump into the Ashtray? in this issue of Framework.

(3)  See the introduction to Focus in this issue of Framework. (4)  “The place of art is for me the transport-station of trauma. A transport-station that more than a place is rather a space that allows for certain occasions for occurrence and for encounter

that will become the realization of what I call borderlinking and borderspacing in a matrixial trans-subjective space by way of experiencing with an object or process of creation.” See Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (2000), Artworking 19851999. Ghent: Ludion, pp. 91-115, 2000.

(5)  See Akseli Virtanen and Jussi Vähämäki Structure of Chance. An Introduction in this issue of Framework.

sudden possibility to climb back there emerged, a possibility to jump beyond our limits. And here I would also like to refer what you said in Novosibirsk about the uncertainty of this “transport”.(4) That is why I don’t think we can do Jumps by listening to others, which is precisely how the preconditional, the preorganized “facts” and communicative requirements work on us. The feelings of sorrow and disappointment originate in our inability to use our powers, they express submission and powerlessness. Joy is the opposite of sorrow. If sorrow is the reduction of our activity and capacity, and originates from withholding powers, from eyeballing the “cause” or the “subject”, then joy is always the multiplication of our capacity and an extension of our powers by addition. Joy does not focus or contract powers, but expands them. There is no investment in joy, it does not proceed through “the other”. Luca’s jump was joyous directly, we were joyful directly. Joy does not reduce or weaken our power. When we encounter something that is right for us, we link to it, combine with it and devour it. What we were before fuses with what we have encountered and becomes part of a greater and more extensive subjectivity.

Here is what I wrote in my notebook on the 17 of September, before all this happened:

work of art, and his performing as a part of a work of art started after the first reaction. So, when one starts thinking about irrelevant questions like “authorship” one misses the point of coemergence, though the difference between individuals on other levels (like the self-identity level) is not denied. Co-emergence is not easy to admit, it means the giving up of all kinds of powers (of limits, boundaries, of self), and it therefore usually remains invisible. Or it is denied. What is so beautiful in the Jump is that the borders between any definition and who’s contributing what, and why, are entirely blurred. There was never one reason anyway, metramorphosis was working its borderlinking within and between webs – this is one of the points. The point of copoiesis as the emergence of “the jump as a performance” is getting more and more clear, no?

trols, or what we have called “power over life of the mind”, operate no longer so much with our actual actions in space, but with the possibilities of our thinking and acting, with the possibilities of our entire time of life.(5) Our potentiality, which is without any function and always open to change, is subject to pressures that try to subordinate it to the already structured tasks and aims of a particular historical period (like to economic valorization). Thus the question of copoiesis or good life – a life in which our ways and acts of living are never simply facts, but always and above all about creating our own problems, about the possibilities of life – interferes directly with the core of this enterprise. Either we submit to “creation” within already set questions and limits, and allow our lives to be “put to work”; or we create our own problems, our own forms of life. So what I am trying to say is that the Jump and how you understand art and this voyage as a work of art, and the critique of capitalism, must today be seen as the same thing. The ethical has become directly political, we have moved from being between aesthetics and ethics to being between aesthetics and politics. What is at stake is not just this or that historical fact, or this or that injustice, but the ability and structure of copoiesis as such.

Bracha: In the Video 9 I explain how one knows in the other, indeed something very different from communicating or proceeding through the other or through the self. Joy was there, I knew it in you and in Luca, even though you weren’t maybe able to feel it on the spot because other vectors, necessary for the event, were known in a stronger way by you. I would therefore say: responsibility for jouissance and for trauma as well. All these vectors were there, carried from one another and from elsewhere and nowhere, and creating the transformation into an art-event. Joy was there, but if it weren’t for that particular matrixial web it wouldn’t have appeared like that on the video. This is freedom, as Luca felt and expressed it, and it involved what I call co-response-ability. Subjects, objects, actors, etc., should be viewed, from this perspective, as the redispersion of trans-subjectivity.

“The machine of social communication eats it all. Compassion is the only resistance to the power-manipulation machines. Compassion is the ethical opening, and also the possible response. You can’t command it. You can’t falsify it. But you can work yourself through to become more and more compassionate in attitude as well as by the aesthetical practice of fascinance with others (toward the other). The psychological practice is a compassionate practice, and the painting process is a practice of compassionate fascinance with moments of horror and bewilderment of other sister human beings.” This is one of the points: in the matrixial sphere on the aesthetical and ethical level it is possible to take responsibility for the other in differentiation-in-jointness, by which the other is never total Other. I felt an appeal to take responsibility for the first “sin” and for what Luca is doing, and by this, in compassion towards the two transgressors, you are transported to a sphere where reasons and communication don’t matter, where the already transforming potentiality works to create-while-transforming an encounter-event. Or, like what you see in the video, you are starting to discuss with Steffen about K. which is a beautiful moment, entirely nuanced, mellow, delicate, unfinished, and of course very relevant somehow, with no particular reason, no beginning, no end. It somehow goes together with my assumption that the trauma was in the air or within the web. Or like you defended Luca, saying that he always liked cigarettes, and so on…, I mean you were there and really supporting Luca and explaining that he liked to smoke, and this enabled Luca to do many things, not because this was a “true reason”; this – and not the fact that somebody said “jump!”. Luca was also letting himself do it again because by the second and third takes he was already compassionately held by our affective fascinance, and he was therefore already a part of copoiesis and not anymore in the realms of reaction or repetition. This is why our

Akseli: Yes, I think so too. An organization without ends and subjects, that is one of the names we also gave to Capturing the moving minds. To tie again the beginning and the end, I was thinking about the “original sin”: it is maybe difficult, and not fair, to reduce it all to that and for everybody. Even if at the Moscow railway station I too easily believed that it was a consensus opinion of all. Maybe we could say that the original trauma also included our worry, insecurity, anxiety and fear of not understanding the experiment, being afraid of being just a tourist, not getting something concrete out of it, not being able to handle it, to give up one’s defences and to open oneself to creation. So even more, and especially in terms of Capturing the moving mind as a whole, as a work of art, or as an act of resistance, we can move beyond the level of individual body-psyches and that of our particular group. We have to understand that there is more at stake here than just personal inabilities (like the enormous distance between the intellectual desire to cross borders and the emotional incapacity to stand the crossing of borderlines) or private transgressions or self-developments (or their absence). I mean that today the new con-

Bracha: For me, art will always escapes organization, and the vibrating strings between ethics and aesthetics will always escape the political, while forming and informing it. The best photo as a still for me is Luca with a dirty face and his hands up. Especially in the context of “war” and “resistance”, as you said already at the beginning of the conference. Having your hands up, on the other hand, being dirty and ambiguous, is a very strong image and in a sense more enigmatic, more problematic, and for all of us it is perhaps an important ambiguous image. It takes us further away from the question of tobacco, which is not important, and it puts the emphasis on the journey, the trip, the peoples, the issues, and takes us to the question of the group journey as performance, what is art, what is surrendering – and what is courage. +

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Shukaitis, Lerner & Hyde

Mobicasting

Stevphen Shukaitis is a social researcher based in ????????, Sophea Lerner is an Australian born sonic media artist currently based in Helsinki, and Adam Hyde is a new media artist working at the convergence of broadcasting and Internet technologies. Language editing Tomi Snellman.

The mobicasting system is free software and is documented at http://www.streamingsuitcase. com. The system was realized in the context of the Transsiberia web documentation project produced in collaboration with m-cult and Kiasma. http://www.kiasma.fi/transsiberia/stream.php

Next page: Photographs from Capturing the Moving Mind, Helsinki-Moscow-NovosibirskBeijing, September 7 – September 20, 2005. Photos by Adam Hyde, Netta Norro and Sophea Lerner.

Stevphen Shukaitis, Sophea Lerner & Adam Hyde

Mobicasting: Let 1,000 Machines Bloom

Let us suppose that life is a dance, a chaotic unfolding of bodies in motion, repetitive but utterly unique gestures tracing lines of flight over the unfolding of the new earth these steps create: the resistance of fleshy bodies and their collisions embodying the limitless nature of human experience, from the antagonism of the unexpected blow to the warmth of the gentle caress. Each interaction always exceeding our capacity to enunciate its experience but paradoxically embodying the very basis from which we come to communicate, to relate, to describe in common. Stepping back from the metaphor consider: is the art of political communication all so different from this? Moments of creation, resistance, and expression, from the collaboration of gardeners growing a patch of vegetables in a community garden to mass actions in the streets, are constituent elements in an on-going process of creating new forms of sociality and community, new forms of life. But in the same way the experience of motion always exceeds our ability to express them, forms of political communication stumble on the gap between an ever-present sensation of movement and our attempts to describe it. The

Mobicasting is a new platform of media technology developed by Adam Hyde and Luka Princic for “Capturing the Moving Mind“ that provides opportunities to address these dynamics. It is at once two ideas. The first is technical: build a system to deliver ‘pseudo-live’ video from any device capable of delivering images by email. The second is tactical: build a system that enables the production of video reports positioning the mobile phone as a networked ‘outside broadcast’ studio. The first goal is an exercise in developing models of ‘broadcasting’ that employ the simplest technologies possible. Simple technologies are the ones we already know how to use. So simple is the idea: send a sms or an email with attached images, sound, text or video. In the subject line of the email put the name of a video program. This is your new ‘program.’ This material is then compiled into a video as either a ‘live’ stream or as a downloadable video file. That is the technology, but the pay-off is the tactical side, for which the tool was built. With this mechanism it is possible to make collaborative online video content from any device capable of sending email. This can be used for capturing moving minds, or it can

intricate weaves of affective bonds, experiences, and memory tatter and fray from their immediacy in the shaping of representation. And all too often attempts to describe become methods of capture, transforming vibrancy into pallid reflection. The tension between the inside and outside of experience, between the emic and the etic, has long frustrated attempts to communicate the immediacy of experience beyond itself. From the bodies in streets proclaiming their collective desires to busy hands of artists and philosophers shaping singularities with creative techniques, we find ourselves caught in a dynamic where the description of an experience or event forces one to step outside of it into the logic of removed narration. When asked “so what happened?“ one can attempt to piece together a sense of the event through collections of its bits and pieces or to grasp the whole through description, binding oneself away from the event through the separation of inscription. Such dynamics find themselves seeping into even the most earnest forms of independent media where all too often logics of professionalization and attempts to gain legitimacy lead to communication constrained by format and expectations.

be directly used as a device for reporting on events that are normally out of reach of wired or wireless Internet connections. Sitting in tension between the fragmentary ingestion of experience and the formation of a narrative flow, this represents an attempt to move beyond the logic of post-production. As a pragmatic solution to challenges around a limited bandwidth, instead of a smooth stream, which always represents an almost-recent-now over a fragile connection, fragments of media can be aggregated from numerous sources into a continuously flowing output subject to repetitions, sporadic updates and an ad hoc alphabetical editorial algorithm. It is both processed and raw at the same time. An open archive of media materials formed from the multiple experiences and perspectives embodies of a wealth of ingredients that can be creatively redeployed, mixed, interspersed, and scrambled proliferating into journals, art exhibitions, films, manifestos, and forms of media art. Not knowing what others will be contributing or what they are intended for, Mobicasting is a platform designed with a high degree of user hackability; it creates an interface for the flexible shap-

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Shukaitis, Lerner & Hyde

Mobicasting

ing, reshaping, and ordering of media materials for creative uses, many of which may not have been anticipated beforehand. Rather than shaping the description of an event afterwards into an accepted narrative framework, Mobicasting allows for the on-going modulation of an event representation as part of the production of relations and interactions that construct the event itself and networks of relations formed out of it. As a social technology of dispersal and transmission Mobicasting exists in their interstices between the technical apparatus of media production and corporeality and immediacy of experience. It creates a space and method where an emergent collectivity and the flesh of the event can construct and shape its representation in a process immanent to its own unfolding. The goal is not to construct a high tech other within the created social space, but rather to open up a space for the collective shaping of self-representation and narration as a part of the unfolding event whether a conference on a train making its way across Siberia or any other gathering at which Mobicasting could be useful. It is a platform for the enabling of emergent narra-

tives, an indeterminate media form in that the frameworks, structures, and memes generated are open to the situation in which they find themselves created and are shaped out of them. It allows for forms of media production that are enmeshed within the aesthetics and affective conditions of their creation. Things like Mobicasting in this sense could not just be one more trick up the sleeve of media activists but potentially offers a format for collective mediation shaped through the technological environments we find ourselves in. By enabling collective participation in the shaping of an event’s representation and the technology through which this is done it transforms the dynamics of attempting to capture experience into those of creation beyond and through the collectively created experience. This is not to say that tension between capture and representation, between experience and articulation, has been finally and successfully addressed through the promises of yet another piece of high tech gadgetry. Far from it. And perhaps the very dynamic that new forms of independent media attempt to address the ones that are the most important are the hardest to handle: why does one want

to capture a moving mind in the first place? What fuels this desire for mobile communications to transcend distance as if they could become transparent and now for the first time create an ideal speech situation and democratic public sphere? Emerging from today’s cybernetic salons to develop new privileged forms of mobility that desire constant connection with distributed forms of community created by their ownmovements; these traces and reflections, recorded through mobile media forms, often constitute its own self-referential and self-contained audience. The dividing line between reality TV style titillation and collective documentation, between the corporate media logic of rolling news coverage and grassroots media, increasingly blurs and breaks down. It may very well be in that trying to capture a moving mind we are captured by our very desire to form coherent forms of self-representation; have we formed a polyvalent and participatory media panopticon where the inmates all watch each other, recording every motion, utterance, and moment from multiple angles and modes of inscription? Mobicasting by building itself on an open platform suggests opportunities for reshaping its usage and

deployment in new forms that are open to the multiple and fluctuating forms of desire, motivation, and connections we bring to media communication. The multiplication and expansion of new forms of movement, experience and life must find ways to escape, to move through and beyond a logic of representation which confines them in updated versions of the same old story. It is a form of walking while asking questions, not only about the world and our shared experiences, but also about how we ask and represent these questions to ourselves. It may stumble awkwardly trying to find its footing, perhaps even tripping over its own immaturity at points, but is ultimately strengthened within the molecular proliferations from which it emerges. Rejecting both uncritical techno-utopianism and naïve Luddism, the task is to seize upon opportunities for political communication by working from the social dynamics of technology and the technical forms extended across the entire social field. Let then a thousand machines of life, dancing, celebration and movement bloom across the endless fields of human experience. +

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Neilson and Rossiter

Action without Reaction

Brett Neilson is senior lecturer in cultural and social analysis at the University of Western Sydney, where he is also a member of the Centre for Cultural Research. Ned Rossiter is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies (Digital Media) at the Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. Language editing Tomi Snellman.

Next page: Bernardo Giorgi and Helen Grace, still frame (with animation 3d) from the performance “border action-with(/out)-reaction”, on the night of 17th September 2005, Naushki (Russia).

Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter

Action without Reaction: A Mongolian Border Intervention

For academics, activists and artists with means – various as they are – to global mobility, an encounter with national border inspections is, in many senses, a routine experience in which passage to the next destination is rarely refused. It is all too easy for social networks immanent to digital communications media to hold a delirious sense of unconstrained possibility – a condition which needs to be carefully untangled from the notion of ’organisation without ends’. Within the upper echelons of the symbolic economy, individuals trade so often in ideas that amount to nothing beyond self-gratification and the possibility of career enhancement. Is this the same as organisation without ends? The staging of a border action is one instantiation of how limits might operate as an experiential resource for thinking the organisation of organisation without ends. A network without limits is a network of inaction. But what happens when the relationship between determinacy and indeterminacy occupies a space of indistinction? And to what extent can a border zone – defined precisely in its distinction from the freedom of movement – be understood in terms of indistinction? There can be little doubt about the coordinates of departure and termination on the fixed line of the Trans-Siberian Railway: Moscow arrives in Beijing. And within these constraints contingencies abound: sorties can be made from stops along the way, and a myriad disruptions, experiences and

stantly adjusts to the sway and speed of locomotion. Leaving Russia for Mongolia, the process goes like this: the train stops at Naushki, the Russian border guards enter and collect the passengers’ passports and other documents handed out earlier by the conductors, then the passengers alight to buy products from the locals near the platform (kebabs, dried noodles, vodka bottled from a flask concealed in a tent). At a certain point, the conductors give the signal to reboard. The Russian guards re-enter the train to return the passports, search cavities for human bodies, and harass the Mongolian traders transporting products like urine bags and dialysis tubes. And then the train makes its way into Mongolia, crossing the imagined line sometime during an indistinct half an hour. Then there is another delay. But this time there is no alighting. The Mongolian border guards enter, marked immediately by a different aesthetic order. In place of the dull uniforms and overalls of the Russian officials are patent leather boots, made-up faces, and stern expressions. The border crosser is told to stand while the face is surveyed. There can be little doubt here of the contiguity between the affective pull of colonialism’s tropes of servitude, the always sexualized dynamic of power, and the state’s governance of human mobility. Independently of whether, at the border, one is confined to the cabin or not, there is always a restriction of

Bernardo Giorgi is an artist based in Berlin. His widely exhibited work is focused on borders and identity, using journeys and the mapping of territories as instruments of investigation. Helen Grace is Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, and Visiting Fellow in the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.

encounters are more likely to happen than not. Indeed, it is even incorrect to speak of the Trans-Siberian Railway as a fixed line in this instance, since one must transfer to the trans-Mongolian line if the terminal is Beijing and not Vladivostok. The trans-Manchurian line would be yet another option. Thus while a network of lines composes the linearity of movement, an historical phantasm perhaps shaped the collective certainty of passage on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Naushki, the train station where the exit procedures for Russia are carried out is, in many respects, no different from any number of stations that precede it. But of course a border crossing is never without distinctions and possible consequences. Differences, in this context, are of a temporal, mythic and procedural order. Each time the train stops the body undergoes a rhythmic equivalence of a drug addict’s withdrawal process. Unlike the usual 10 or 15 minute train stop – a refrain at once irregular in terms of the uneven distances between stations, yet also regular insofar as the repetition of the stop marks the interruption of movement – both this last station in Russia and the first station in Mongolia take time. The equivalence between motion and a temporal present gives way to stasis marked by an extension of time in the transition between national territories; movement is subtracted from the body’s recently acquired kinaesthetic comportment as the body con-

movement. One is confined and beholden to a procedural system that conforms to the family of border controls. But this system varies in different sites and, in this case, on either side of the metaphysical line that constitutes the border. At Naushki, the passengers can get off the train. By this time, however, their passports have been collected for processing in the customs house adjacent to the platform. In these moments, the travellers are, in a certain sense, sans papiers. They are free, it is true, to get off the train and even to wander into the city or the territory at large. There is no visible policing of mobility from the station. But, in another sense, they are bound, physically attached to the border, by an imaginary line (a tether) that connects them to the place and to the documents not in their immediate possession. Who are the border crossers, in these moments? What is their juridical status? Free to move without documents, yet tethered, each along a different global vector (depending on the passport that has been removed), to an international state system, which supposedly grants them rights. In this time and space, the traveller is no longer him or herself. Free to move but unable to cross the border, he or she is actively detained and, in this detainment, made to encounter the ephemerality of those same rights. Still, in this time and space, actions are possible. Action, in these circumstances, is predicated on not knowing, of being uncertain about what is to follow. Organi-

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Neilson and Rossiter

Action without Reaction

sation becomes structurally unhinged from any causal temporality. Indeed, it is precisely this ‘not knowing’ that serves as the precondition of experiencing action as that which can only ever be temporally present. Here we get a suggestion that the time of the present has multiple registers and dimensions. It is within this temporal cartography that action is without reaction. Action then divorces itself from the mechanics of cause and effect. And the point of such action, which is importantly not yet and maybe never ‘activist’, is to execute a certain de-motivation of the border – both this border and all borders. There on the platform at Naushki, where traders and suspected Chechen sympathisers are regularly held back, duties collected, and tourists given a few moments to stoke the local economy, there emerged a series of bodies, which slowly and deliberately, sometimes with joy and sometimes with solemnity, traversed lines back and forth, some tracing an arc, before the customs house. To be sure, this action had no effect. Its only purpose? was to mark and remark the border through movement in multiple directions, independent bodies each ambulating on its own path. Together, they created a kind of pattern generator, fabricating curves and interruptions, relations of proximity, distance and touch, illegible to the techniques of the border but somehow enabled by its very being. At stake was a kind of encryption. But one that begs for no decoding, as if in retro-

spect it could be revealed and labelled as an act of transgression (or as breaking the rules that, in the very act of breaking, restores the grammar of the border and all the metaphysical subtleties it carries to human thought). This border action was an experiential experiment, a political and emotional making of lines as a preparation to cross (or not to cross) the line. Furthermore, it was a strike against the tendency to celebrate border crossing in concept alone, the kind of disposition that preaches resistance and then has a crippling encounter with the sublime right at the very edge. What came into being was a bending of lines, a menagerie of motions that exceeded any single path, and, in so doing, marked the very arbitrariness of borders – both their geographical locations and the powers that institute them. Here, there was a movement into the very space where rules are generated, an intervention into the grammar of the border, a manipulation of its genetic codes, or, if you like, a refusal to take the rule as anything but a command. Let us speak with absolute precision, without fear or persuasion. This was not a jump. There was no leaping of fences or tearing them down, no falling into the cinders of modernity – as necessary and as liberating as such actions can be. Nor was it an action that moved the group on the train forward or backward in any way. Certainly, there had been some ad hoc planning and discussion as the train approached

the border. And with this there came a scintilla of contention, both from those concerned that movements illegible to the border control would spark reprisal and from those who thought the action altogether without fire. But, even though the group had earlier expelled an individual who had lost a passport, precisely because his passage across this line could not be guaranteed, there was, in these movements, no effort to atone, to displace or condense. To be sure, this would happen in other times and places. But, at this point, another dynamic and potentiality were at play. The border imposed an urgency in which the group’s own exclusions could not be made to stand, like some kind of algebraic symbol, for those constitutively outside it. There was a line on the ground, but it was not here that the group reached its limit. Perhaps this is because to cross the border, one must be who one is. Whether this is established through the passport photo or through some more sophisticated biometric device is hardly the issue. Any movement, any movement at all, is enough to precipitate one’s being called aside. Thus, upon return to the train, one individual was taken aside and interrogated by the Russian officials, since his mere presence in another cabin to the one he had occupied when he had handed over his passport rendered him suspicious. The event was innocuous and forgettable enough. But its relevance is not to be underestimated. To cross the border, as became clear in Sukhbaatar,

the Mongolian border town, one must stand and say who one is. And so the group chose to rise and face itself as at once highly mobile and free to move, even as each stood before the guards as an individual and a citizen. This crossing of the Russian-Mongolian border was a routine process with a routine outcome. Let us remember though that contemporary capitalism cannot be reduced to the culture of speed and deterritorialisation. And the border, while an older technology than the current networks of informatic mobility, remains instrumental to the smooth functioning of the global system. It is a block to separate zones where labour attracts different costs, a means of controlling populations who resist proletarianisation, and a device to allocate the access of capitalist speculation to geographical space. This is too easily forgotten in the metaphorisations that make border crossing an act of aesthetic-epistemological rupture. In towns like Naushki, all this hits the ground. In the lineaments of the passage, right there on the platform, another time and space was conjured. There is nothing here to be celebrated or remembered. No stab at posterity or utopia. Just a number of bodies in motion, feeling the thud of the repetitive tug, back and forth, this way or that, again and again, for several minutes only, for an eternity of delay, between one point and another, in a straight line or curve, as the train endured its stop, and waited to return to velocity. +

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Harren

The Trans-Siberian Radio Project

The writer is an independent curator and graduate student in modern and contemporary art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work focuses on contemporary interventionist performance. David Rose, a co-creator of The Trans-Siberian Radio Project is a journalist for The London Times and a regular contributor to the online arts and culture review Beardscratchers. (1)  The Trans-Siberian Radio Project, cretated by Natilee Harren in collaboration with David Rose, equipped the Capturing the Moving Mind conference with its own microradio station. Public broadcasting of the on-train seminars was made possible with low-power FM transmitters, and interested participants were instructed on how they could use this simple technology to create their own broadcasts. At night, Trans-Siberian Radio turned a train car into a nightclub, and to conclude the conference, Trans-Siberian Radio hosted a final broadcast in the Dashanzi artists’ district in Beijing to premier newly commissioned audio works by Scanner, Nathan Davis, and Angel Sánchez Borges. . www.trans-siberianradio.org (2)  Tetsuo Kogawa, “Toward Polymorphous Radio.” Accessed 16 October, 2005.

Natilee Harren

The Trans-Siberian Radio Project: Enacting Polymorphous Radio

Inhabiting the Trans-Siberian train, you become part of an odd culture where your relationship to the world is turned on its head.  Rather than a life of rushing around the city, an insignificant pedestrian amidst a blitz of cars, bicycles, and other humans, you as a train passenger become one with Siberia’s singular means of cross-country travel.  The jerking, clicking, rushing and sighing of the train become part of your own bodily movements.  It seems odd to walk towards the back end of the train – that which has suddenly become the wrong direction.  Everything moves forward. At the same time, there is a strange feeling of mental stasis within the train since there is nowhere to go.  Sure, one is always in motion, but the most natural of human actions become impossible.  Walking movement is directed in a strict, linear expanse by the train cars.  Running is not appropriate.  Everything looks the same.  You can go to the next car, but the feeling is that you have not moved at all. How to mark home in a moving container, one that through and through reminds one of its cultural of impermanence, constant change and exchange (of staff, passengers, currency, cars)?  How to establish ourselves a home without a home in these unreal

tention of the project. These circumstances forced us to adapt our mission to that for which our equipment was best suited: a model of polymorphous radio, as articulated by Japanese radio activist Tetsuo Kogawa. Polymorphous radio recasts radio as a highly localized, short-range, listener-controlled media. Rather than creating a one-way relationship where a singular, inaccessible broadcast power relays information for a large group of people to digest, polymorphous radio multiplies the number of transmitters nearly to equal the number of receivers. Tetsuo Kogawa writes, “If you had the same number of transmitters as receivers, your radio sets could have completely different functions. Thus radio transmission technology could be available for individuals to take control of their transmission and reception … Radio stations which can only cover areas within walking distance might already exist as a form of a particular unit of polymedia, a chaos unit. Polymedia are not intended simply to link smaller units into a larger whole: instead they involve the recovery of electronic technology so that individuals can communicate, share idiosyncrasies and be convivial.”(2) This folding of listener and broadcaster into one body, caused by frac-

settings, which make it impossible for us to go through a day in any of the normal ways we know how? The Trans-Siberian Radio Project looked for a response in media, specifically a medium of our own making, and more specifically that of radio.(1) The train cannot maintain connection with any of the communities through which it passes.  One can catch snippets of AM and FM signals here and there, grab a newspaper whenever possible, but soon enough, with the passage of time and kilometers, the media becomes obsolete and loses its grip on the train and on our present reality as passengers on it, until we come into the next station and grab a piece of home there.  But those homes are fixed to the earth and we will always outrun them.  We are fixed in motion, and so our media must come with us.  We are our own, temporary spatiotemporal matrix. Through the Trans-Siberian Radio we mark the space with a collective sound that is both created and received by us.  The source and subject are wrapped into one.  This is radio on a micro scale, created by transmitters that are fractions of a watt apiece. The oppressive metal architecture of the train forbids a mass broadcast to all conference participants at once, which was the initial desire and in-

turing a broadcast area into several, easy-to-operate mini stations, keeps radio from growing out of control or beyond its best use, which is to foster communication within a community of those who do not have one. It is also accessible to all since microtransmitters can be purchased inexpensively or built with basic soldering. They are transportable (the Trans-Siberian Radio Project being an exemplary case), so a radio community can arise anywhere where basic short-range communication is desired. Schools, churches, malls, protests, campsites, parties, caravans, boats, festivals, etc., are all appropriate. Kogawa’s idea of microradio stations as chaos units may seem revolutionary, but in actuality it is simply a backwards-looking redirection to the simplest, first and best uses of radio. Not only are microtransmitters easy to acquire, operate and maintain, they are (often) legal and flexible enough to be adapted to any situation that requires organizing communication. And so it is to no surprise that for the purposes of a conference taking place in the environment of the Trans-Siberian train (controlled yet always shifting, not-quite-modern, makeshift), polymorphous radio proves to be the only sustainable model. +

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Clarke

The Trans-Siberian Photo Project

The writer is an artist based in London. She is connected with the Centre for Mobility Research (CeMoRe) at Lancaster University, UK.

Elly Clarke The Trans-Siberian Photo Project As a conference participant and firsttime Trans Siberian train traveller, I was interested in finding out who was on the train, apart from conference goers. I wanted to know where my co-passengers were headed, for what reasons and how they felt about their journey. Despite being the longest train journey in the world, I was aware of the fleetingness of any experience or encounter I would have within and across three countries over a period of less than ten days. I wanted to find a way to capture and expose parts of it my own eyes wouldn’t see by themselves, and glimpse stories I might otherwise have missed. My method was to conduct interviews with passengers at all points along the way, using Russian and Chinesetranslated cue cards listing questions I wanted to ask about people’s journeys, and also a letter, explaining my project in full. The project had two parts. The first was the interview, which, with permission, I video-taped. The second was a photo project, whereby each passenger or group of passengers interviewed was presented with a disposable camera, together with a form to list details of the photographs they would take – date, place, time, title – and a request for these photos to be taken in a way that reflects their journey or expe-

rience of travel. I asked for at least one photo to be taken each day, from the day we met until the day they reached their final destination. From there, the camera would be posted back to me in the UK in the envelope provided (with money for postage as negotiated), and, once processed, I would send a complete set of prints to them. All this was explained in the letter and interviews began only once all this had been clearly understood and agreed. I gave out ten cameras in total: five to Russians, four to Mongolians (including one to the National Ice Skating Team of Mongolia). The only Chinese person I could persuade to take part was the train’s conductor. Conductor 119, as he is known, was happy to take the photos but he did not want to be interviewed and neither did he fill in the form with any information. Despite the fact I had a fluent Chinese speaker with me and despite inviting almost every Chinese passenger on the train to participate, on the whole, as far as the Chinese passengers were concerned, my project was met with suspicion and unease. This was in contrast to the Russians, who welcomed me into their cabins, and, with their offers of food and drink, made it sometimes actually quite difficult to get away...

Conductor 119 may have been reluctant to be interviewed, but his photographs - which I have, since he returned the camera to me when we arrived in Beijing - are at once stunningly beautiful and interesting. As a conductor, he knows this route better than any passenger. His photographs could also be said to illustrate his knowledge of the timetable: one of the fifteen pictures he took shows a train approaching in the opposite direction, quite late in the evening. This did not happen often, so to be ready to take a picture of it at the precise time he did would take some forward thinking. The other camera I have back is from three Mongolian men who were travelling from Ulaan Baatar, where they’re from, to Guangzho via Beijing, for part holiday, part business. When asked whether they enjoyed travelling by train the answer was in the affirmative “Outside you have vast landscapes, which broaden your horizon. Inside you have the space to take a walk.” As with all participatory projects, the process (getting there) is often as interesting as the end result (destination.) I am still waiting for the remaining eight cameras to come back and I do not know how many will make it. From how the interviews went I would expect to see at least three. But it is dif-

ficult to tell. When working in an unknown context such as this, it is hard to know when to project a meaning onto a situation, or when to admit that one doesn’t know. Through my work, I am interested in finding alternative ways of capturing particular aspects of life and lives that are normally not given a great deal of exposure. The Trans Siberian Photo Project was based on a model of another project I did in 2003 in the East London Council-owned apartment building where I live. In The Broadway House Photo Project, I circulated a single disposable camera around my building, asking residents to take three photographs from and within their flats, (one looking North, one looking South and a third picture of what they wanted inside their homes) and to give their pictures titles. One in five flats in the building took part. The project culminated in an exhibition at a gallery five minutes’ walk away, where my neighbours got to see their photographs for the first time, as well as to meet each other, also in many cases for the first time, despite several having lived in Broadway House for more than twenty years. It is always a huge challenge working with people in this way. It involves building trust, careful explanation and respecting people’s privacy and boundaries. One can never assume anything about anyone. I found this true with my neighbours, but felt it ten fold whilst on the train, when I had no common language and no means of communicating other than the cue cards, the letter and body language. Body language, however, was the clearest communicator in this situation. +

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Holmes

Continental Drift

Brian Holmes is a writer and activist-researcher, a member of Tangent University and an initiator of the networked seminar Continental Drift. For documentation, see www.u-tangente.org.

Notebooks by Bracha L. Ettinger, 2002-2005. Courtesy of the artist.

Brian Holmes

Continental Drift Activist Research, from Geopolitics to Geopoetics

How does a world come together? How does a world fall apart? Neoliberal globalization made those opposite questions into one – before September 11 showed that the answer cannot be a perfect synthesis. Locating yourself against the horizons of disaster, then finding the modes and scales of intervention into lived experience, are the pathways for intellectual activism in the contemporary world-system. Neolib Goes Neocon A double dynamic is at work today that destroys what it constructs, dissolves what it unifies. And that is exactly what we all have to deal with. One prime example is the enlargement of the European Union, right up to the fiasco of the ultraliberal constitution. The end of the historic split with the East now appears as the beginning of the Core Europe/New Europe divide, with the social-democratic bastions of the West seeking shelter from the global market, while postCommunist states refuse any speed checks on the road to riches. But the absence of a democratic constitution only favors corporate lobbies and bigpower deals, leaving national parliaments as a smokescreen over the real decisions. An even more striking case is the self-eclipsing rise of the WTO, which just yesterday seemed fated for the role of world government. No sooner was the international trading regime consolidated than tariff wars sprang up between the US and the EU, protests

flared around the globe and the process of bloc formation gathered steam, with negotiations for both the FTAA and a renewed Mercosur in Latin America, moves toward an expanded ASEAN system (joined by China, Japan and South Korea) and finally the Venezuelan proposal of ALBA, calling for a leftist “dawn” after the sundown of free trade. But as any historian remembers, trading-bloc formation was the prelude to the global conflicts of the 1940s. For the strangest embrace of contradictory forces in the world today, consider the symbiotic tie between industrialized China and the financialized United States. China constantly struggles to produce what the US constantly struggles to consume – at an ecological risk that no one can even measure. To make the wheel of fortune go on spinning, the Chinese lend their manufacturing profits back to the US, so as to prop up speculation on the almighty dollar and keep the world’s largest market soluble. What will happen if the Chinese pipeline to the US Treasury stops flowing is anybody’s guess; but as New Orleans floodwaters recede into a domestic quagmire that can only recall the international disaster in Iraq, America’s attempts to save its fading hegemony look increasingly desperate and uncertain. Levels of conflict are rising all across the globe, and the problem of how to intervene as a world citizen becomes more complex and daunting than ever. The counter-globalization move-

ments marked the first attempt at a widespread, meshworked response to the chaos of the post-’89 world system. These movements were an uneasy mix between democratic sovereignists, no-border libertarians (David Graeber’s “new anarchists”) and traditional, union-oriented Keynesians. They could all critique the failures of neoliberal governance, but they all diverged and faltered before its cultural consequences. And the latter wasted no time coming. By undercutting social solidarities and destroying ecological equilibriums, the neoliberal program of accelerated capital expansion immediately spawned its neoconservative shadow, in the form of a military, moral and religious return to order. Nothing could have made better cover for the denial of democratic critique, the clampdown on civil liberties and the continuing budgetary shift from social welfare to corporate security. The backlash against globalization became a powerful new tool of manipulation for the elites who launched the whole process in the first place. The current scramble to consolidate regional blocs reflects the search for a compromise between global reach and territorial stability. Beyond or before the “clash of civilizations,” a feasible scale of contemporary social relations is the leading question. From this perspective, the free-market policy of the Bush administration in Latin America is comparable to Al Qaeda’s dreams of an Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East. The networked produc-

tion system forming around Japan and China, or the EU’s continuous diplomatic courtship of Russia despite flagrant atrocities in Chechnya, give similar insights into this quest for a workable scale, which is essentially that of a “continent,” however elastic or imprecise the term may be. Paradoxically, continentalization is not countered but is driven ahead by global unification. Behind the tectonic shifts at the turn of the millennium lies the accumulated violence of a thirty-year neoliberal push toward a borderless world, wide open to the biggest and most predatory corporations. Disorienting Compass The extraordinary breadth and speed of the current metamorphosis – a veritable phase-change in the world system – leaves activist-researchers facing a double challenge, or a double opportunity. On the one hand, they must remap the cultural and political parameters that have been transformed by the neoconservative overlay, while, on the other, remaining keenly aware of the neoliberal principles that remain active beneath the surface. In this effort, the social sciences are the key. Economic geography is crucial for tracing the global division of labor, and grasping the wider frameworks of what European activists now call “precarity.” The sociology of organizations reveals who is in control, how power is distributed and maintained in a chaotic world. The study of techniques charts out the fu-

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Holmes

Continental Drift

ture in advance, and shows how it operates. And the toolkits of social psychology offer insights into the structures of willful blindness and confused consent that uphold the reigning hegemonies. This kind of analysis is critically important for activist initiatives, which can stumble all too easily into the programmed dead-ends of manipulated ideologies. Yet the disciplines also have to be overcome, dissolved into experimentation. Autonomous inquiry demands a rupture from the dominant cartographies. Both compass and coordinates must be reinvented if you really want to transform the dynamics of a changing world-system. Only by disorienting the self and uprooting epistemic certainties can anyone hope to inject a positive difference into the unconscious dynamics of the geopolitical order. How then can activist-researchers move to disorient the reigning maps, to transform the dominant cartographies, without falling into the nevernever lands of aesthetic extrapolation? The problem of activist research is inseparable from its embodiment, from its social elaboration. Just try this experiment in public presence: literally tracing out the flows of capital, the currents of warfare and the rise and fall of transnational organizations since 1945, using hand-drawn dates and arrows on a conventional Mercator projection. The effect is to build a cartographic frame-narrative of the emergence, complexification and crisis of

US hegemony since 1945; but at the same time, through gesture and movement, to act out the ways that geopolitical flows traverse living bodies and become part of tactile consciousness, entering what might be termed “felt public space.” Intellectual work becomes intensive when it is unmoored from normalizing frameworks, acted out as a social experiment in a self-organized seminar, in a squat or an occupied building, at a counter-summit, on a train hurtling through Siberia... As supranational regions engulf ever-larger populations and the passage of shifting borders becomes an ever-more common activity, geopolitics is increasingly experienced in the flesh and in the imaginary, it is traced out on the collective skin. This is when geopoetics becomes a vital activity, a promise of liberation. How to interpret artworks and artistic-activist interventions so as to highlight the forms taken by the geopoetic imaginary? Through analytical work on the dynamics of form and the efficacy of symbolic ruptures, one can try to approach the diagrammatic level where the cartography of sensation is reconfigured through experimentation. This level comes constantly into play whenever it is a matter of translating analysis back into intervention. Because of the transverse nature of global flows, it is possible to draw on the experiences of far-away acts of resistance in the midst of one’s own confrontations with power, both in its brute objective forms, and in its sub-

tle interiorizations. The relation between the Argentine pot-banging cazerolazos and the almost continuous urban mobilizations in Spain, from February 15, 2003, all the way up to the ouster of the mendacious and powerhungry Aznar government in March of last year, is a large-scale example of this process of transfiguration. And this is the generative side of the contemporary continental drift. To sense the dynamics of resistance and creation across the interlinked world space is to start taking part in the solidarities and modes of co-operation that have been emerging across the planet since the late 1990s.

cratic societies) or positive and forward-looking (activist interventions, the invention of new modes of social self-management, cultural reorientations, ecologically viable forms of development). Another goal of the critique is to raise the level of debate and engagement in the cultural and artistic sectors – the vital media of social expression – where a narcissistic blindness to the violence of current conditions is still the norm. But the most important aim is to help relaunch the activist mobilizations that were so promising around the turn of the millennium. “Help” is the right word here, because there is no intellectual privilege in the activist domain. Activist-researchers can contribute to a short, middle and long-term analysis of the crisis, by examining and inventing new modes of intervention at the micropolitical scales where the even largest social movements begin. Who can play this great game? Whoever is able to join or form a meshwork of independent researchers. What are the pieces, the terrains, the wagers and rules? Whichever ones your group finds most productive and contagious. How does the game continue, when the ball goes out of your field? Through shared meetings in a meshwork of meshworks, through collective actions, positions, projects and publications. And most importantly, who wins? Whoever can provoke some effective resistance to the downward spiral of human coexistence at the outset of the twenty-first century. +

Practicalities If you want to accomplish anything like this kind of research, don’t expect much help from the existing institutions. Most are still busy adapting to the dictates of neoliberal management; and the best we could do for the first big round of meshworked critique was to hijack a few of their people, to divert a few of their resources. What is more, the open windows that do subsist are likely to close down with the neoconservative turn. Self-organized groups will have to generate a collective learning process about the effects of social atomization and economic subjugation – essentially, a new understanding of the forms of contemporary alienation – and they will have to explore the reactions to these trends, whether intensely negative (the fascist and racist closure of formerly demo-

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Framework 4

Visitor’s Voice FRAME’s Visitors’ Programme is a major way of expanding its international contact network and exchanges, as well as collaborative projects. Under the programme dozens of curators, critics, art historians and scientists are invited to Finland annually to do research for upcoming articles, exhibitions and other projects. FRAME also collaborates with other institutions to facilitate research projects. Several visitors have given lectures and interviews or written articles during their visits. Each Framework includes a Visitor’s Voice section, which presents some of this material. Jordan Crandall is an artist and media theorist, and Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at University of California in San Diego, USA. His recent project was Under Fire at the Witte de With Centre for Contempo-

rary Art, Rotterdam. His most recent books include Under Fire: The Organization and Representation of Violence (2004) and Drive: Technology, Mobility, and Desire (2002). Jordan Crandall was going to participate at the pre-conference Capturing the Moving Mind: Management and Movement in the Age of Permanently Temporary War, held in Helsinki on 7 September 2005; he also was scheduled as a key speaker for two workshops at Frame. Due to the serious natural catastrophes and human tragedies caused by Hurricane Katrina on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico last August he had to cancel his participation and postpone his trip to Finland until next year. Jordan Crandall’s contribution thus concretizes the theme of this issue on an utmost personal level.

Jussi Niva (born 1966) lives and works in Helsinki. Niva’s principal medium is painting. His massive and intensive oils from the series Twist have a strong dynamic character. The movements of the brush are easy to sense on the board. Niva’s artistic point of view lies somewhere between the abstract and the figurative. The figurative elements suggesting the landscape

are still present, but the landscape has lost most of its familiarity and recognisable character. Niva’s paintings are like fast glimpses of the surroundings, caught through the window of a fast moving car or other vehicle. With sufficient speed, the passing familiar landscape turns into an abstract view with stunning, bright colours and formal elements.

Visitor’s Voice

Introduction

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Visitor’s Voice

Crandall

Between Movement and Position

The writer is an artist and media theorist. He is Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. Language editing Mike Garner.

I am sitting in a hot hotel lobby, hoping to catch up on email. Next to me are a woman and a man, huddled together, peering intently at their laptop. The woman is speaking to the man and clicking away with forceful pushing motions, causing the computer, perched on her knees, to sway perilously. She is “flying” the computer like a fighter pilot. I listen intently to what she is saying. On all fronts, she says, she has to constantly battle interruptions. She employs a research technique that is designed to “cut through the clutter” and save time. To quickly find relevant material, she simply types in phrases in Google and then scans the web, telescoping in and out as necessary, zeroing in on the bits and pieces that she needs. After typing and clicking furiously, the woman suddenly pauses for a moment and sits back, as if to catch her breath. She glances at her companion and grabs a pencil for emphasis. According to her, she says, this search-and-target method allows the pinpointing of relevant content with greater exactitude. “It’s more preCISE,” she emphasizes, thrusting the sharp end of her pencil toward the

Jordan Crandall

Between Movement and Position: Tracking and Its Landscapes of Readiness

computer screen as if it were a missile honing in on its target. Drawing out the sound of the “sssss,” she seems to propel the pencil forward with the force of her enunciation, as if it could puncture the computer screen itself – or rather, the abstracting field of language – to apprehend her Real quarry.

yet it belongs as well to our technologies, which provide its conditions of emergence. Above all, this machine-enabled perception is driven by the relentless time pressures that have always defined the modern era. It is driven by the need to eliminate time and space intervals. To cut through the clutter. It aims to reduce the intervals between detection, analysis, and engagement, or desire and its attainment, in order to arrive at a real-time perceptual agency. Such a real-time agency is one in which multiple actors, both human and machinic, are connected through high-speed networks and able to act in concert. This is the motor of military history and much else. In such a landscape, one could say that cooperation reigns. We’re all in this together, after all, building the utopian dream of the global village, the wired world, the global brain. And yet: competition plays an equal, if not more primary role. We don’t necessarily want to see on a level playing field alongside everyone else. We need to see faster, better, and more precisely – whether in the name of convenience, profit, or protection – in order to outwit competitor and combatant alike.

-------------------This is one of the forms that reading takes at the close of the year 2005. One could see it as an effort to reach beyond language, tap into its technological support, or directly connect to the material and affective reality to which it refers. One could see it as part of a larger drive to augment and automate human capabilities; to develop new human-machine composites; and to eliminate gaps between symbol and event. What form of analysis is appropriate to it? Semiotic analyses fall short, because they seldom account for the technological vehicles that drive acts of viewing. Such an act of viewing is always produced through the machinic capacities of a time: a machine capacity that can no longer be ignored, especially as viewing becomes increasingly machine-enabled. Perceptual activity belongs to the individual body,

Even though we seldom acknowledge it, we are driven equally by such acquisitive and aggressive impulses. They derive from the production demands of both consumerism and warfare – to the extent that these become mutually reinforcing components of the same economic engine. The engine is also a subjective and somatic one. When, in a competitive, real-time consumer-security culture, machine-aided perception moves toward the strategic, the panoptic, and the pre-emptive, then we no longer see but track. -------------------Tracking arises as a dominant perceptual activity in a computerized culture where looking has come to mean calculating rather than visualizing in the traditional sense(1) and where seeing is infused with the logics of tactics and maneuver – whether in the mode of acquisition or defense. When we track, we aim to detect, process, and strategically codify a moving phenomenon – a stock price, a biological function, an enemy, a consumer good – in order to gain advantage in a competitive theater, whether the battlefield, the social arena, or the marketplace. In an accelerated culture

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(1)  Lars Spuybroak, cit. in Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (MIT Press, 2004) p. 123. (2)  One could begin with the development of radar during World War II, or even much earlier. But my emphasis is on computer-enabled tracking. (3)  Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Weiner and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21:1, Autumn 1994, pp. 228-

266. See also Peter Galison, “War Against the Center,” Grey Room 04, Summer 2001, pp. 6-33. (4)  Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. (MIT Press, 1996), pp. 1-15. (5)  Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 19.

(6)  Edwards, op. cit. (7)  Felix Guattari, “Regimes, Pathways, Subjects,” in Crary and Kwinter, eds., Incorporations (MIT Press, 1992), p18. (8)  Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (Athlone Press, 2000), p48. (9)  Edwards, pp. 75-111. (10)  “A Network of Warfighters to Do Battle in 21st Century Conflicts,” New York (AFP) Nov

13, 2004, from SpaceDaily.com, 15 Nov 2004. Thanks to Irving Goh for this forward. (11)  General Fogelman, speaking to the House of Representatives, cited by Paul Virilio in Strategy of Deception (Verso, 2000), pp. 17-18, from an article by F. Filloux entitled “Le Pentagone la tete dans les etoiles” in Liberation, 20 April 1999. (12)  See Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon, Film, Typewriter (Stanford University Press, 1999) pp. 1-2.

of shrinking space and time intervals, tracking promises an increased capacity to see the future. Leapfrogging the expanding present, it offers up a predictive knowledge-power: a competitive edge. It promises to endow us with the ability to outmaneuver our adversaries, to intercept our objects of suspicion and desire. To track is to endeavor to account for a moving object – which could be one’s self, since we track our own activities and rhythms – in evermore precise terms so as to control or manage it, lest it become unruly, wasteful, dangerous, or unattainable as property. When the suspicious and acquisitive eye tracks its objects, it fixes its sights on them as targets to be managed, eliminated, or consumed. While tracking is fundamentally about the detection and strategic codification of movement, it is at the same time a reaffirmation of precise categorical location, whether in terms of geography or identity. It is about a semiotics of mobility, yet is also a reassertion of temporal and locational specificity – studying how something moves in order to predict its exact position in time and space. It signifies the dynamic between position and movement-flow – what we might call inclination-position. Based on my previous patterns of writing and the liter-

ary conventions that it follows, I am likely to write three more sentences in this paragraph. Based on previous patterns of key strokes, I am likely to take a break at 3:10. The tracked object may be THERE, but it is moving like THIS and will be in THIS future position at THIS future moment. This is a landscape in which signifiers have become statistics. It is how computers think, and how we begin to think with them.

information about position and movement was integrated with geographic data and superimposed upon schematic maps. Each SAGE control center tracked all aircraft in its sector and could automatically direct jets to intercept hostile incoming objects. Within the matrices of SAGE, tracking emerged as a form of machine-aided, calculated seeing, studying movements of objects in order to prepare for their possible interception. It was a vigilant seeing accompanied by a demand for “preparedness,” both in terms of one’s own body and the collective machine-body of the military: an individual and collective alertness on the “edge” of action. An analytical perception combined with an incipient mobilization. SAGE created demands for new patterns of organization, vigilance, and action: new modes of awareness and perceptual activity that could enframe and make sense of the volumes of abstract information that were suddenly at hand. It created new landscapes of preparedness, which traversed individual body, nation, and culture alike. We are not only speaking of a technology, then, but of a subjectifying and socializing technique, which impacts on language as well as the entire sensorium of the body. According to Paul Edwards, SAGE was an archetypal “closed world” sys-

tem. From within its isolated confines, abstract images of the world were generated on banks of computers, managed through the control orientations that the technologies helped set in place. The systematic, logical rules of computing helped produce the sense that everything – warfare, ground realities, markets – could be formalized, modeled, and managed. Reality was figured as mathematical and “capturable” through a formal programming logic. The world became a predictable, manipulable entity, and the future something that could be dominated.(4) Such an orientation carries over into popular media, where the spectator is infused with an artificial sense of control over the machine and an exterior world represented on the screen. Reality is subsumed within the dictates of the interface. An unruly or unproductive situation is dominated, over and through the technology, and a de facto power relation is established between observer and observed. Moving through a world of information and communications technology, information is increasingly seen as more essential than that which it represents. Pattern is privileged over presence.(5) The history of structuralism is part of this technical-discursive ensemble: an orientation where reality began to be seen as determined by linguistic codes,

-------------------Tracking emerged out of the midcentury demands of war and production.(2) It emerged through the development of computing, the wartime sciences of information theory and cybernetics, and the development of structuralism. It helped to generate a semiotics of war and a wartime subjectivity. It coalesced out of a fear of the enemy Other, and helped bring a modality of both friend and enemy into being.(3) Its first manifestation was the military command, control, and communications system known as SAGE. This was a system that automatically processed digitally encoded radar data generated by linked installations around the perimeter of the U.S., and integrated it with information derived from analog communications, weather, and other military data. Abstract

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and attention turned to the codes and conventions that produce meaning. Such orientations of control are not produced by computing, but develop in conjunction with it: as computing creates the technological possibility of war, so war shapes computing. Technologies are always clusters of tools, procedures, and metaphors, functioning at the level of language, materiality, and belief.(6) As Guattari would point out, information and communication machines do not merely convey representational contents, but contribute to the development of new assemblages of enunciation.(7) A “technoscientific semiotics” becomes stored in the operational strata of organization and practice.(8)

on data patterns over essence: an evergreater abstraction of persons, bodies, and things, and an emphasis on statistical patterns of behavior, where the populace is pictured as a calculus of probability distributions and manageable functions. Third, a fundamentally agonistic orientation, deriving from a world built on confrontation and oppositional tactics, of tactical moves and countermoves. SAGE unleashed a wave of command-control projects, which eventually formed the core of an emerging worldwide satellite, sensor, and communications web geared for panoptic global oversight and instantaneous military response.(9) Contemporary descendents of this system – “networkcentric” or “next generation” warfare systems – aim to link sensors, weapons, communications systems, commanders, and soldiers into one giant computing grid, offering a comprehensive picture of the battlefield that can be viewed and acted upon collaboratively in real time. Today the military traffics in panoptic visualization ideals. Plans are underway for the development of a “Global Information Grid” – a secure, wireless network that will fuse US military and intelligence services into one unified system, making volumes of information available instantly to all mili-

tary and intelligence actors. Proponents of this “war net” say that it will change the military and warfare the way that the Internet changed business and culture. The consortium established to build it includes a who’s who of military contractors and technology innovators. According to the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, one of its primary partners, this system will allow every member of the military to have “a God’s eye view” of the battlefield.(10) Tracking orientations are always entangled in beliefs and mindsets. In 1997, the Chief of Staff of the US Air Force predicted that by the year 2000, “we shall be capable of finding, tracking, and targeting virtually in real time any significant element moving on the face of the earth.”(11) Tracking as the ultimate panoptic ideal, propelled by a sense of divine right, could not be more explicitly stated.

tion: they have developed in conjunction with popular news and entertainment media. There is a constant flow between these media as well as across the divisions between military and civilian. Tracking has been integrated into a wide-ranging culture of spectacle. It is an assemblage of enunciation that no longer heeds media distinctions, or civilian-military divides. To understand tracking, then, we are compelled to look at the combination of media forms and agencies that it produces and registers. For quite obviously, tracking has been integrated into a regime of networked spectacle. It plays out across all manner of visual and rhythmic media, whether used for entertainment, communication, or locationing, by the military, policing, or civilian sectors. There is nothing outside of this system, and especially as it is increasingly able to tap into the affective dimension, where danger is eroticized. It produces a subject who is prepared for both disaster and desire, as both are subsumed into a larger cosmos of affective stimulation: a citizen indoctrinated to “be ready,” in both a physical and cognitive sense, for any call to action.

-------------------One could suggest three intersecting areas, descending from this wartime technical-discursive ensemble, that are bundled into tracking from the start. First, the perpetuation of an idealist orientation where humans have no access to unmediated reality and the world is actively constructed in terms of relational information systems. Here the world is scripted as inherently controllable, filtered through a scrim of information that modifies both system and materiality. Second, following from the first, is an emphasis

-------------------Such a paradigm involves erasing the distinctions between media,(12) between agencies, and even between rhetorical forms. Tracking generates abstract data that must be filtered through new forms of computer-aided visualization, oriented toward the viewers who must interpret and act on it. These graphic systems have not developed in isola-

-------------------According to Virilio, the real-time interface has replaced the interval that once constituted and organized the

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history and geography of human societies. Problems of spatial distance have been supplanted with problems of the time remaining.(13) One could say that tracking was motored by the need for an instantaneity of action, where time delays, spatial distances, and “middlemen” are reduced through computational systems that facilitate the sharing of human and machinic functions. A new form of agency emerges within this coordination and command network, spanning spatial distance and merging information from multiple sources. A combinatory field of perception arises within a distributed field of shared functions. This is not something that is particular to the military: it operates across the board in a generalized and extended condition of visuality that has been called a “machinic vision” – a condition where all perception necessarily passes through

a technological circuit, and thereby emerges in a shared space between human and machines. In the most extreme case, which we find in the ideal of fully automated vision, the human can be left out of the loop.(14) However, the human is never replaced by technology but continually co-evolves with it, modifying itself in response to technological change. As Ryan Bishop suggests, the integrative history of military technology – a history of prosthetic extension, especially that of sight – has been paralleled by the rise of mass media and its manipulation of vision to create illusions of simultaneity, movement, presence, and depth. Not only are instruments designed to collapse distance and time, but they aim to close the gap between the perceiving subject and the visible world. In this sense they are haunted by the fundamental problems of representation, which concern

the illusory correspondence between model and reality and the impossibility of eliminating the referential gap. This problem is not confronted – rather, a return to a mythologized time of unproblematic perception is substituted.(15)

tation of pre-emptive seeing: a form of vision that was always slightly ahead of itself, which not only anticipated probable events but, in some corner of the imaginary, seemed to mold reality to fit the simulated outcome. Simulated worlds paralleled real worlds, and beliefs about each were reflected in both. To be prepared was to anticipate the worst, and the worst could only be modeled. Once modeled, it is introduced into reality. In a sense, there exists a probable construct – a kind of idealized scenario – that stands in relation to reality as its tendency. It configures as a statistical inclination, which hovers like an ideal form awaiting a reality that will fill it. It becomes a silhouette that models future positions, a ghostly forebear into which reality “snaps.” The DARPA “futures market” – a system whereby investors could bet on the probable occurrence of eruptive global events,

-------------------Abstract strategy games were always necessary for testing military operations and tactics. During the Cold War, increasingly powerful modeling and prediction technologies were needed in order to reach into the future and anticipate events. They were of vital importance since actual outcomes were too catastrophic to consider. Simulation was actively used in contrast to actual weapon technology that could not be used. Predictive simulations aimed to see the future through sophisticated scenario-planning techniques. They fueled an orien-

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(13)  Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (Verso, 1997), pp. 10, 19, 30. (14)  John Johnston, cited in Hansen, p.99. (15)  Ryan Bishop and John Phillips, “Sighted Weapons and Modernist Opacity: Aesthetics, Poetics, Prosthetics,” Boundary 2, 29:2, 2002, p. 158-9. (16)  John Armitage, “Beyond Postmodernism? Paul Virilio’s Hypermodern Cultural Theory,” in Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, eds., Life in the Wires: The CTHEORY Reader (CTHEORY Books, 2004), pp. 354-368. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (Verso, 1989). (17)  See Peter Weibel, “Pleasure and the Panop-

tic Principle,” and Ursula Frohne, “Screen Tests: Media Narcissism, Theatricality, and the Internalized Observer” in [CTRL]SPACE: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, Thomas Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, eds. (MIT Press, 2002), pp. 215-219; 253-77. (18)  Paul Virilio, [CTRL]SPACE, p. 112. (19)  Paul Virilio, “Cold Panic,” Cultural Politics, Vol. 1 Issue 1, 2005 p. 29. (20)  Hansen, pp. 134-5 (21)  Brian Massumi, cit. in Nigel Thrift, “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect,” Geografiska Annaler 86 B (2004), p. 61 (22)  Thrift, op. cit.

(23)  Thrift, p. 65. (24)  John Armitage, “On Ernst Juenger’s ‘Total Mobilization’: A Re-Evaluation in the Era of the War on Terrorism,” Body & Society, Vol. 9(4), 2003, p. 204. (25)  Thrift, p. 69. (26)  Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (W. W. Norton, 1978). Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, (Verso, 2002). (27)  Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (MIT Press, 1999). (28)  J. McKenzie, cit. in Thrift, p. 64.

Previous page: Jussi Niva, Twist - Yellow, 2005, oil on board, 122 x 130 cm. Photo by Kari Paajanen.

with the idea that such markets could anticipate actual situations – was an outcome of this predictive formalism, as is the ideology of pre-emptive war itself. To speak of pre-emptive simulation in this way is to speak of the formation of a disaster imaginary, which traffics across the worlds of fact and fiction, promiscuously borrowing its parts and depositing them across a wide range of cultural phenomena. Preparedness became something that could only be accomplished by way of simulation. Assumptions, beliefs, and mind-sets arise out of the technical-semiotic machinery of simulations as they are practiced, as such orientations in turn get embedded in its operational strata. Through these a subject is trained in new forms of movement, combat, and identification. As simulations flow back and forth across the commercial sector, in various combinations of serious use, entertainment, recruitment, promotion, and proprietary engagement, perhaps “simulation” is becoming less a modality of representation than a mechanism of translation – or at least, a form of incipience or potentiality, moving across various stages of enaction. In new training scenarios, live units are connected to simulation units, allowing a switching back and forth between virtual and real situations – a process that will have analogues in the civilian realm. We are here in the territory of what John Armitage, after Virilio,

calls the “logistics of perception management”(16) – the realm of spin and “reality control,” where facts, interpretations, and events are mutually shaped to conform to strategic doctrines; where reality is positioned as something that is inherently pliable; and where the public becomes a surface for the production of effects.

of new forms of maneuver and masquerade. Within new ecologies of mind, we benefit from machine-human interactions all around us, a pervasive web of shared resources that offers boundless opportunity for identity refashioning. Further: in a database-driven culture of accounting, one needs to appear on the matrices of registration in order to “count.” To be accounted for is to exist. New technologies of production aim to narrow the intervals between conception, manufacturing, distribution, and consumption. Aiming toward instantaneity in shopping and media-entertainment development, they shrink the delays between detecting an audience pattern and formatting a new enticement that can address it. These technologies and their discourses aim to increase productivity, agility, and awareness, yet they vastly increase the tracking capabilities of marketing and management regimes. You are able to get what you want faster, but your behavior is tracked and analyzed by marketers who also can provide this information to police and military sources, who increasingly depend upon the business sector for a large part of their intelligence. After the Civil War, the U.S. military was prohibited from future interventions into the domestic realm. Since most spy satellites are owned by the military, the military outsources some of its domestic intelligence needs to commercial satellite providers, while relying on data gathered through the private sector on a number of fronts,

especially to meet the sudden growth in intelligence demands after 9/11. Information from buying habits, travel locations, and audience demographics can be integrated into one comprehensive system, which aims to target consumers at the one-to-one level, offering individually-tailored enticements. Tracked, the user becomes a target within the operational interfaces of the marketing worlds, into whose technologies state surveillance is outsourced. We internalize conditions of surveillance and tracking. They enter into the logic of perception. We are both origin and object: the one who tracks and who keeps track. These conduits are not particular to the domain of policing, for they not only compel a watchfulness of the state, but a civilian watchfulness, where a suspicious or concerned eye is cast upon one’s self and one’s fellow citizens. Think of the way that one is compelled to assume a position of extreme vigilance – to “track” or scan rather than simply see – in the reporting of “suspicious activity” at an airport. Looking for such “suspicious activity,” I suddenly realize the most insidious part of the drill: What about me? With this realization, I am transformed. I am the person at Sartre’s keyhole, caught in the act, who knows that he is seen at the moment that he sees. I have now become an object for the gaze of another. Looked at, I look at myself. Concerned that I could be “suspect,” I modify my actions accordingly.

-------------------Fundamental contradictions remain. With the seemingly boundless opportunity, safety, and convenience that comes with tracking technologies and their assemblages, their user is increasingly able to be targeted and managed within new control regimes – a mobile focal point of a distributed Panopticon. At the same time that individuals are objects of a controlling gaze, they are also able to mold and “perform” their visibility, identity, and connectivity within new social networks, in a reverse panoptics of pleasure. In media-saturated societies, surveillance has gradually been made “friendly” and transformed into spectacle, to the extent that it is no longer a condition to be feared. Rather, it is a condition to be courted: witness the phenomena of reality television, blogs, friendship networks, and webcams, and the rise of the media mise-en-scene as the primary form of social authentication.(17) This “friendly” control can be regarded as self-regulating: we are an integral part of systems that self-adjust through market dynamics or adaptive behaviors, allowing for the emergence

Previous spread, right: Jussi Niva, from the series Bow, 2005, oil on board, 85 x 122 cm. Photo by Kari Paajanen.

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talking of meaning but of motivating power. Affective intensities are deeper than semantics. This is primarily a non-discursive activity, which does not function through linguistic mediation but as a direct stimulation of the body, as one finds in athletic training, and as such is engaged in qualities of movement or rhythm over calculi of symbolic positioning.

It is the perception of one’s own aliveness, vitality, and changeability, which can be sensed as “freedom”(21) – the body’s sense of the aliveness of a situation, which also moves across the intercorporeal world.(22) It is about the incorporealization of information, not its representation: a corporeal “thinking” that is preconscious and pre-active, and which does not resolve to a statement. As Nigel Thrift suggests, this is a site that has become increasingly analyzable and explicitly political through practices and techniques that are aimed at it specifically.(23) It has become measurable through new technologies of tracking and filtering that are able to probe into the intimate and nearly instantaneous states of bodily movement, orientation, disposition, mood, arrayed as calculations, statistics, and simulations, cross-referenced with databased records of consumer or citizen behavior: a newly constituted body of measurable states and functions, whose inclinations to act are quantifiable and

understood as predictable. According to John Armitage, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s “Be Ready” campaign operates on this space of imminent mobility. The “readiness” it promotes has no real object, and is simply perpetuated in a kind of self-generating machine. Yet it is a profoundly operational space, where the individualized “desire for mobility” – the consumerist impulse – is recoded and displaced onto the theaters of embodied threat.(24) Desire and fear cohabit here at the threshold of action, as such concepts as “freedom” do double duty, promoting a freedom of mobility as well as a sense of freedom that can only result from “defending our way of life” – that is, the right to own and consume. Buying, then, functions as both pleasure and defense: a form of bodily and social enhancement, and a form of defense against that which would threaten it. This is an interlocking mechanism of acquisition and defense that becomes the very condition of mobility

Jussi Niva, Twist - Blue, 2005, oil on board, 122 x 153 cm. Photo by Kari Paajanen.

If tracking moves toward an instantaneity of action – eliminating time and space intervals and connecting multiple actors, human or not, as if they were one – then in the extreme case, as Virilio would have it, this real time arena is one in which “coincidence” takes the place of communication(18), and the emphasis shifts from the “standardization of public opinion” to the “synchronization of public emotion.”(19) In a real time world where there is less and less time to act, or where action plays out in barely measurable fractions of seconds, interpretive attention must turn to the realm of the micro – those semi-”interior” states that accumulate at the border of action, just under the horizon of visibility. This is the realm not of visible action, but of a disposition to act, or a certain readiness to act. It is the realm of the affective. It is a domain of contradictions, where scopophilic pleasures and surveillant anxieties cohabit, irresolvable within the scrims of representation. For we are not only

-------------------According to Deleuze, affect fills the interval between perception and action. It is a modality of perception that ceases to yield an action and instead brings forth an expression. It is not about movement, but rather the quality of a lived interior state, which marks a pure coincidence between subject and object. It is a movement that is not engaged outwardly but absorbed inwardly – a tendency or interior effort that halts just this side of doing. It is about how one experiences oneself as oneself, or senses oneself from the inside.(20)

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Jussi Niva, Twist - Green, 2005, oil on board, 122 x 160 cm. Photo by Kari Paajanen.

– a “freedom of mobility” that is about defending the right to own and circulate objects, to constitute oneself as an object to be marketed, to defend these objects from harm, and to forge new pathways within unruly, “dangerous,” or adventurous market territory. It is a process of defining the self in terms of an unbounded menagerie of attractions and fears, which leaves it forever lacking. Through an interlocking mechanism of selling and consuming, looking and buying, acquiring and defending, one grazes along endless arrays of enticements offered up for the desirous and protective eye – enticements that are aimed at the replication of desire in the eyes of others, or of drawing the groundlines of defense. What is needed in order to address this landscape is, following Foucault, Agamben, and Thrift, not only a biopolitics but a microbiopolitics.(25) If new technologies of networking, speed, and tracking have opened up this site of the micro – an affective space-time of bodily awareness, dis-

position, and readiness – then this is a space that can be politicized. The state of “readiness” opens up a new site of operations in the intervals between perception and action. We can define it as a condition of heightened awareness and alertness, where the vigilant and optimized machinebody is roused and poised to act. In this state, one is not only cognitively but affectively engaged. Through the scrim of readiness, we can understand tracking as characterized by a shift toward real-time engagements and continuous, heightened states of alertness and preparedness in such a way as to generate an embodied state of receptivity for both conflict and libidinous consumption. It produces the body as a receptive site for both fears and attractions, and thereby integrates combat and commodity. It functions as a hinge between war and consumerism. -------------------To enter this domain is to acknowledge the circuits of intensity that traf-

fic under the symbolic register, continually confounding politics of representation. It is to enter the domain of contradictions, where violence can be both horrific and pleasurable, and where surveillance can be voyeurism: a realm where one secretly thrills to the potential spectacle of crime, and where danger is not only avoided but also secretly courted. This is the realm of the disaster imaginary and the criminal unconscious, played out in the “adventure factor” in military recruitment advertisements, immersive games, and extreme sports. It manifests in the “morbid curiosity” we feel when, present in the aftermath of a violent act, we have to look, but we don’t want to see. It requires the acknowledgement of danger as a constitutive element of attraction: the unpredictable, dangerous web of intrigue that pulls us into the narrative world. Here we are also in the dimension of the Lacanian Real: the hidden fantasmatic underside of our sense of reality, which cannot be assimilated into

the symbolic order of language or into the domain of shared images. It provides the fundamental support of reality, yet it cannot be incorporated into it. It results in the construction of sublime objects – impossible-real objects of desire – or simply in the jouissance one feels in the face of the catastrophe.(26) Tracking is the result of a machine-aided process of disciplinary attentiveness, embodied in practice, and bound up with the demands of a new production and security regime(27) – yet it is not repressive in a disciplinary sense, but also “excessive”28 and thus spills over any conception of disciplinary power. In the end, the workings of tracking – born of a formal programming logic, of the primacy of pattern over presence, and of the agonistic calculus of tactics and maneuver – cannot be understood by formal linguistic meanings alone. It requires a vocabulary in which the limits of logical reasoning and ideology are recognized. +

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Framework 4

Features

Features To examine the ways in which the artistic practices today participate in forms of knowledge creation and understanding contemporary networked societies, an important dimension has been to reveal aspects of a fundamental shift in our sense of self. It has often meant exploring and discovering social and communal contexts, as well as providing the means for as-

sessing new ones. In the following the featured or interviewed artists Gun Holmström, Sanna Kannisto, Jaakko Niemelä and ROR Revolutions on Request offer personal toolboxes for processes which animate a creative life. They give insight also into debates around the body and feelings, difference, as well as technology.

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Pessi Rautio on Jaakko Niemelä

Constructions to Be Lost

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Harri Laakso on Sanna Kannisto

The Silence of Species

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Angela Rosenberg and Anders Schlaegel on ROR Revolutions on Request

The Core of ROR

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John Gayer on Gun Holmström

Describing the Undescribable

Introduction

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Niemelä

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Rautio on Niemelä

Constructions to Be Lost

The writer is an art critic and curator based in Helsinki. Translated by Tomi Snellman.

Pessi Rautio

Constructions to Be Lost Over the years I have seen works by Jaakko Niemelä that have always been total experiences in the space they occupy. There has recently been a clear increase of images of destruction, catastrophe and war in them, following themes that I associate with childhood and imagination. It would be simple to say that Jaakko Niemelä has become more political, and less personal, than before. After talking with Jaakko Niemelä at his studio in early autumn 2005, I noticed that the personal in his work has perhaps increased. Now it feels that Niemelä has throughout his production been investigating the space wherein the personal is formed, since the world is in any case always perceived through models. Our conversation kept coming back to the same themes, of which seven below. Scale Niemelä originally made prints, with fine and precise lines. These later developed into three-dimensional wire constructions that built worlds whirling in all sorts of spaces. The precision required by printmaking actually involves the same kind of method that Niemelä has used since: the careful construction of scale. In his current works, a model representing some situation may be life-size, but it does not alter the basic method, which is systematic and thorough, yet incorporates a certain wonderment at the model’s functioning. The dimensions of Niemelä’s work seem to be growing, however. In contrast to his early prints, Niemelä now wants to tailor his works to specific sites. In this they differ from inher-

ently enlargeable festival art. It is the site that gives the scale of Niemelä’s work its power, and together with the site the work creates a powerful emotional experience. Niemelä’s exhibition Black Box in Turku at the Wäinö Aaltonen Museum in 2002–2003 seemed to transform the entire museum into an idiosyncratic path into the visions of the artist: the familiar had become strange, almost terrifying. “I find these days that I want increasingly to use emptiness as my medium. By placing a small object, a model in a big empty space, you can create an enormous emotional impact, blowing up the insecurity of a small house.” Toys Niemelä is interested in toys and scale models. “On my travels I always try to visit shops selling toys or scale models, to find out if there are differences in the way that toys prepare children for adulthood in different parts of the world. But it’s usually a very foreseeable disappointment: they are the same everywhere.” Through toys, children learn in their mind those activities that the adult community expects of them. Toys are seldom unreasonable or wild. Perhaps that is why the war toys in Niemelä’s work seem such a natural part of an attempt to describe the real world situation. The action figures with their chiselled features – realistic toy soldiers – suffer alone, miniature fire engines and police cars hoot and blink, standing powerless next to a ruin. “I wouldn’t like to say these works are playful any longer, as my works have been described for a long time. In a sense, I have been rebuilding the world

that we meet every day in the media. I get so incredibly pissed off when I see war documentaries, for example.” So: the models embodied in toys and scale models, through which children learn the tacit expectations of adulthood (such as the acceptability, aesthetics and conventions of violence), can also be applied to present a model – for us adults – of the violent reality constructed as a result of those very same expectations. In that sense, no clear boundary can be drawn between playfulness and reality. The realism of play is the realism of truthful depiction. It is also true that Niemelä’s earlier works based on scale models, light and shadow always involved a feeling of tragedy despite their basically friendly mien. When you are about to fall asleep, the toys in the nursery can turn into monsters; in horror films, this transformation can even be depicted as a kind of nocturnal truth. A shadow or a monochrome picture from a surveillance camera is not the same as the wireframe model that casts the shadow. This comes across quite clearly in Niemelä’s early works, where the scale model of a house or a residential district made from wire is transformed from a shadow cast by a single source of light into a huge revolving space that engulfs the viewer. The surveillance picture of a scale model achieves the same perplexing transformation when it is projected at the back of a revolving scale model, as in the Black Box exhibition in Turku. Black shadows and a turning motion that seems to be condemned to go on forever, may despite their aesthetic appearance be a terrifying reminder of the real realm of shadows, of eternal punishment. The

metamorphosis of the familiar, desired and intimate into different, black and huge echoes the archetypal horror of seeing something familiar as terrifying and threatening. Models “I see my work rather as models of reality, they are like an imitation of play, because we seem to have a need and an ability to understand the world through models. This is something that is increasingly prevalent these days. What with computers, various fairly realistic techniques of modelling have become an increasingly integral part of our understanding of the world.” One of the things that have intrigued Niemelä for quite some time are the precise schematics of the course of accidents, published in tabloids complete with a timetable of seconds. “As if it were particularly important to see how a truck, boat or helicopter has turned over, in stage one, stage two and so on. Perhaps we somehow feel we have been able to deal with the destruction, when a model has been made of it, it appears to have been unavoidable and that there were reasons for it.” Niemelä is emphatic about wanting to change things and make statements. In art this is done by diminishing ambiguity and having elements point in the same direction. Niemelä’s message in his works is, for example, that violence is wrong. But there is so much more to his work. Actually, Niemelä says that the thing he most aims at in his work is the expression of emotion. The works tend to portray sorrow or loss: a lost childhood, history, person, life, even a lost present.

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Jaakko Niemelä, Unfinished - A Model Of A House, 2005, from the series Red Room: 3 Elements, installation. Photo by Jussi Tiainen.

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Left: Jaakko Niemelä, Burned, A Model of A Soldier’s Room, 2005, installation, model, surveillance camera, videprojection, motor. Photo by Jussi Tiainen.

Right: Jaakko Niemelä, City, 2002, toy city, surveillance cameras, video projection, computer steered toys, toysounds, scaffolding. Photo by Jussi Tiainen.

Next page, top: Jaakko Niemelä, Silent Movie, 2002, scale model, surveillance cameras, video projection. Voice: Antti Niemelä. Photo by Jussi Tiainen.

Next page, bottom: Jaakko Niemelä, The Cellar, 2001, wire netting, electric motor, halogen light, slide projection. Photo by Jussi Tiainen.

Constructing Niemelä’s interest in models has to do with his interest in architecture and its physical spatiality. Just as his works using shadows or surveillance cameras offer our eyes two different yet simultaneous scales, thereby creating a totality that is larger than a mere scale model, so do other things emanating from the work affect us. “I have noticed that, for me, the sheer volume of sounds that I use in some works makes the model seem terribly real, like a physical environment.” In other words, as a result of a minor manipulation of the viewing experience, the model becomes a physical reality. The viewer is in a space where they are looking, like the Creator, at a model which is smaller than them, and therefore subservient. But at the same time, the model also creates an overpowering environment, bigger than the viewer, and one that determines the viewer’s perceptions and, above all, feelings. The sense of control and of superiority and unshakeability arising from knowledge are shaken by Niemelä’s works. There is certainly a difference between architecture and the impudence of the emotion expressed here. Niemelä says that he has talked with an architect friend about how people in the profession seldom talk emotion-

ally about architecture, rarely even using emotive adjectives. A building may be light, dense or open, but it would be awkward to say that a building expresses “sorrow” or “a sense of loss”. As all other aspects of Niemelä’s work, so constructing too contains both a social and a personal, almost autobiographical and confessional dimension. Although Niemelä’s works are critical studies of the human urge to construct things, executed in construction, Niemelä is genuinely fond of building things, especially scale models. He readily admits to this manic side of his personality. When he builds, say, a bed with his wife for their home – “just a simple thing” – he has to make a scale model of it first. According to Niemelä, building might be regarded as a basic need. Somewhere at the back of the mind, many of us may be nursing a wish to get our affairs in shape so that we could build a house of our own. Only then would things really be in shape. Such a socially constructed wish clearly exists, at least in Finland. But also the building instinct of animals, such as birds, does suggest that constructing might also include an aspect that is close to sexuality, a profound, deep need. Also the way we use the concept of ‘structure’ suggests that we are dealing

with a fundamental way of perceiving the world. “People may talk about the structure of their relationships, how their relationship to the wife is structured. Or what kind of a structure this conversation has. Even the universe is supposed to have a structure. The world is becoming structured, or may very well be disintegrating and falling out of its structure, for all I know.” Because nearly all things can be seen as structures – albeit structures that always depend on the viewer – we need to ask, is there such a thing as permanent structure? That is precisely why incompleteness can be meaningful. “I’m reminded of the arc of life. When you don’t get something that you would have wanted. Then you come to face the fact that you must accept incompleteness.” Consequently Niemelä’s latest works are often structures that have disintegrated or are perhaps in the process of disintegration, such as Slow Performance, (from 2004, shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki in 2004, in the Vision and Mind -exhibition), where Niemelä spent the exhibition period demolishing a wall that he had built in the gallery. The wall was destroyed, but it also changed and unfolded, was slightly different every day. According to Niemelä, taking

things apart is not just negative. “I’m certain there are situations where you have to destroy. For instance, if you have worked within some conceptual framework, which no longer works, it must be demolished. Destruction can in certain circumstances be a good thing, but it is always a sad thing, too. That is why I would like to keep at least some slightly positive mood in these works, even in destruction.” Destruction and interrupted arcs lead inevitably to dark thoughts. In spite of the generality of his modellike works, Niemelä does not want to conceal the fact that they, above all their emotional content, is very much influenced by his personal life. “There has been a lot of sorrow and death in my life recently. I arrived at a situation where I had to accept defeat and rebuild myself. These works, too, are in a way about the fear of death or loss, which is a familiar and arresting feeling for me these days; and age has certainly something to do with it.” Temporariness Therefore Niemelä knows, or suspects, that the future may very soon be different than it looks. He finds it difficult even to think about works or exhibitions that would be realised first in two or three years. “I am sure that I

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Jaakko Niemelä, Toy Story (detail), 2002, toys, light bulbs. Photo by Jussi Tiainen.

Jaakko Niemelä, installation view from Forum Box gallery exhibition in January 2005. Photo by Jussi Tiainen.

would be able to carry through a work that I am planning now, but what if the situation is different then, what if some other feeling predominates and it would be important to be making other kinds of works? I have to watch out for things turning into mannerisms, so that I would be known as ‘the guy who always demolishes things’ when I used to be ‘the wireframe guy’. I mean, I want to be very careful always to do things so that they come from inside.” That which seems finished now, may soon prove to be temporary. But the beauty of transience and loss, the appeal of ruin aesthetics, was adopted in art ages ago, during early Romanticism at the very latest. Paintings began featuring ancient plinths and fallen columns, and soon gardens were decorated with structures designed to look like ruins. The purpose was to create a place of contemplation next to lost generations and events; the highest cultural achievements eventually turn to dust. The thing was to experience a kind of collective melancholy, a feeling of loss and sorrow. Thus art could, on the pretext of remembering a noble Golden Age, give people a legitimate chance to seek contact with their personal, suppressed feelings of sorrow. Niemelä is interested in “what today would be a building that is left a ruin, that is important and imposing enough not to be demolished. Churches may be such buildings. But if you preserve any ruin long enough, it becomes valuable.” A ruin, too, is a kind of model. It is a precise indication of what used

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to be in its place, yet one that leaves room for the imagination. And just like an architectural model which refers to a future circumstance, a ruin in all its specificity leaves lots of room for a wish concerning what that space might be in reality. The romantic idea of art is associated with emotional turbulence that has detached itself from control and real facts. Niemelä seems to be referring to the existence of such an experience when he says: “In a certain aesthetic way, some of the traces of the destruction of war, fire or earthquakes may be grand, damned incredible, even though you know all the time what has happened.” A visual emotional impact is perhaps emotional power at its rawest, most unfiltered state, without any moral judgments, like an echo of the situation when rules of the game were not formed yet, a situation where play retains the grandness of pure emotional amazement, first reaction. But this reaction is perhaps accompanied by knowledge and premonition of the fleetingness of the emotion, of the situation when knowledge, conventionality and reason once again take over. Many of Niemelä’s works deal with transience that is precise as such, yet already at a distance. Something where you no longer fit or can no longer go, something that is temporary, lost. Loss and Sorrow “Sorrow is an arrested moment,” says Jaakko Niemelä. But perhaps amidst all this transitoriness and loss, in a time that seems to fly past all too quickly,

there is something comforting about stopping. “I have learned to see that sorrow is actually rather a beautiful emotion, it’s really terribly fine. You can’t change it with words, sorrow is a frozen feeling. When you meet a person in sorrow, you don’t quite know how to react. When you are with such a person, perhaps it’s best not to do anything, but just be there and let the emotion take the space that it needs.” And Niemelä continues: “Sorrow used to be a slightly embarrassing feeling for me, whereas now it seems that one should never show one is angry or sad. Being happy is much easier, and an acceptable emotion. I finally decided recently to take up sorrow as my theme, even though it embarrassed me at first.” Sorrow must actually be a more common and widespread state than one would think, or would like to believe. “When there have been losses in my life, I have noticed how large is the circle of those touched by even a single death. There are parents, children, relatives, friends – dozens of people. What a huge thing that circle of sorrow must be after some catastrophe, when thousands of people have lost their lives.” Loss appears in Niemelä’s works on at least two levels, on the broadly general, and the deeply private. A lonely toy soldier may be the general image of a person who has lost something, or a more precise image of someone who has suddenly lost a friend or, as in the anagnorisis of Greek tragedy, when it suddenly dawns on you that you have lost your humanity, you are guilty

yourself. Similarly, a construction of a catastrophe area is of course an extreme manifestation of great destruction and great loss. But the fact that toys are used in these works, as well as the fact that there is often something smaller in them than an adult person, introduces an even more chronic and fundamental personal level of loss into it: the loss of childhood. With the reality of personal loss, the theme has become tangible for Niemelä. The demolishing and destruction of structures he has made himself is surely an aspect of an active processing of sorrow. At the Mänttä Art Festival in the summer of 2005, Niemelä locked himself in a basement and started to make signs on the big wall with primitive tools. Finally he was alone in the room, naked, hammering at the wall with a stone, even though he had tools at his disposal. The situation was stripped to the bare minimum, and one may wonder, was it not perhaps overdramatised in its asceticism. Yet it is in the very search for the circumstance of destruction and loss that it is perhaps entirely appropriate that one enters that place through the dismantling of obviously social structures, through emptiness and nakedness. Niemelä videotaped his action. Watching the tape afterwards, he noted that although the situation felt extremely intensive afterwards, it included surprisingly long periods when nothing was happening. “I was totally limp at times, there were no signs of destructive energy.” The result, The Greatest of These Is Love, however, was something that,

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Jaakko Niemelä, Repentance, A Model of an American Soldier from Vietnam, 2003, installation. Photo by Jussi Tiainen.

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Niemelä’s works do include a political interpretation of the general circumstances of control society, but the recurring, almost manic immersion into the techniques and themes of control and surveillance suggests something more personal. Jaakko Niemelä has recently given a lot of thought to control. “Issues of control have been important to me in my work, too, as they even include real surveillance cameras and all that, but I still feel that it’s more about control in all our actions, especially self-control. – I think I’ve always been very much in control in whatever I do. For example, I never really processed the inevitable sorrow of my father’s death. In the same way, I have left many things undone in art because they could have felt too naive. One of the things I’ve thought about is how naive it is to say that people should not kill other people. That it is something that The Beatles sang about, for God’s sake! But

then it occurred to me that there is not too much touting of it anyway. Selfcontrol comes from thinking that your environment thinks you should be like this or that.” Then, sometimes, self-control is removed by that noble and evasive feeling: sorrow. Sorrow can even lead one to consider the nature of control. When there are enough reasons for sorrow, one must necessarily come closer to one’s emotional core. Niemelä has worked a lot as an art teacher for children. “It’s fun. They are so eruptive, it feels sometimes that they don’t have any control, all ideas seem just as good to them, unlike art students who have already learned things.” “Play can be a state of control-lessness, and for adults, being in love – it can seem really silly, irresponsible. But rage and anger are also states where you step outside yourself.” There is surely a dimension of un-

controllability in play. Yet play is also a state that always contains the seeds of rules, models, learning by observation – in other words, control. War and destruction are also extreme manifestations of uncontrollability, but we may also ask, to what extent are wars the result of utilitarian structures and models made of others – these are controlled phenomena. And on an even more abstract level: How possible is it for us to enter a state of uncontrollability, for might we be constructed so that, immediately upon attaining the state of play, the play turns into an introduction to a reasonable, controlled reality producing great structures that may give rise to sorrow when they break? This is what Jaakko Niemelä seems to be processing in his works. Niemelä constructs and takes apart. Controlled action in art may lead one close to emotions, and for grownups that may very well be possible only through all manner of structure and destruction. +

Jaakko Niemelä, Slow Performance, 2004, process work from the exhibition Vision and Mind at Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, May 29 - September 19, 2004. Photos by Jaakko Niemelä.

Niemelä has been told, made several visitors to the exhibition weep. “I thought it was really good that it allowed some people to get in touch with their feelings.” Control The situation of control or surveillance is a recurring one in Niemelä’s work. We watch the scale models from above, as it were. Almost as if in secret, surveillance cameras reveal things from inside Niemelä’s scale models, giving us a feeling that not a single point in space or angle could remain unnoticed. Or alternatively, that from a tiny crack or window, someone is peering out, looking at us. The dramatic contrasts of the lighting set the object of perusal forth, and we are able to watch from the dark, without showing our faces. This is probably about the power of the gaze, that by looking out, by searching for evil out there, we can feel safe in here. Beyond a doubt,

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Jaakko Niemelä, The Greatest Gift of All, 2005, installation at the Mänttä Art Festival 2005. Photo by Jussi Tiainen.

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Harri Laakso is Photographer and post-doctoral researcher at University of Art and Design, Helsinki. Language editing Tomi Snellman.

(1)  Michael Taussig, ”The Language of Flowers”, Critical Inquiry 30 (Autumn 2003), 108. (2)  Georges Bataille, ”The Language of Flowers”, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. Ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 10-14. (3)  Ibid. 10 (4)  Ibid. (5)  Ibid. 11. (6)  Taussig, 109. (7)  Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species. (New York: Mentor, 1958), 450.

Laakso on Kannisto

The Silence of Species

Harri Laakso

The Silence of Species There are some artists to whom Nature speaks, but the nature of the artist’s medium speaks to every artist. Nowadays it might seem strangely out of place to say that the cultural construction we call “nature“ could speak and odder still to extend that capacity, in the post-medium era, to the “nature“ of a medium. Yet these two natures are symptoms of the same persistent dream, one that is under constant threat – that of the irreducible base. In the work of the contemporary Finnish photographer Sanna Kannisto both natures remain visible. Kannisto’s work resides on the thin divide between appearance and artifice, or what could be called “art in nature“ and “art of nature“ – the former acknowledging art’s debt to forms pre-existing in nature and the latter to the artist’s skill in arranging them for us to see.(1) Her art also superimposes these two natures, displaying the natural world as a theatre of light (a sort of camera) while also curiously speaking about photography in a natural way. The starting place for Kannisto’s art is the diversity and density of the rain forest, not a blank page or a white canvas. This plenitude is the source and mental backdrop of her work, from which she isolates and frames her images and against which their fantastic forms become projected. The white background of the field studio that Kannisto uses is only the secondary, although important, stage in the play – the act in which the details of

the isolated specimen reveal the specimen’s own uncontainable fullness. Kannisto works on the edge of science, sometimes using its instruments, always examining scientific ways of thinking and its limits. Kannisto’s art positions itself alongside the philosophy of science, keen to observe in visual terms the ways in which the forms and patterns of nature adhere to, or escape from, the conceptual frames of reason. Fed by this slippage new and elusive figures of thinking also evolve. But how can one conceive of such unscientific forms of thinking? The Language of Flowers In his essay “The Language of Flowers“, first published in Documents in 1929, Georges Bataille also sought to display some of the ways in which natural models might fertilise our thinking.(2) This thinking was not just directed at an increase in knowledge, caressing instead the crevasse that separates experience from knowledge, flirting with the heterogeneous elements of nature. Bataille’s text is an embrace of non-savoir, a plunge to the limit of reason, yet at the same time attentive to the possibility of a secret language – listening carefully to what flora, flowers in particular, might have to say about things, about the constant movement of thought dipping and elevating itself, knitting and binding the beauty and fragility of blossoms with eroticism, violence and decay. Bataille knew that what “the fresh-

ness of the pistil betray[s] doubtless cannot be adequately expressed by language“.(3) For him it was nevertheless necessary to approach this “inexpressible real presence“, to expose it and to expose oneself to it.(4) In his text he starts out by agreeing that connections between plants and their interpretations can be based on well-known legends (like that regarding the narcissus) or on functional claims (flowers are connected to love because they precede fertilisation.) But Bataille was also looking beyond, for the more elusive bonds, especially for ones between appearance and word. To show this Bataille examines the relationship between flowers and love. It is immediately evident to him that it is not altogether true that flowers are connected to love because of their function: a lover gives the corolla of petals to his loved one, not the pistil and stamen. This displacement Bataille finds to be similar to amorous sentiments between humans, who also do not fall in love with the organ, but with the person who has the organ. He takes the thought a step further pointing out several other “betrayals“ of a rose: how a rose, stripped of its petals leaves behind only a “rather sordid tuft“ (in some other flowers the “filth“ of their organs) and how the fragile corolla, after its short period of magnificence, “rots indecently“, becoming earth again.(5) Thus Bataille, presents on the stage of his natural theatre a play of tragicomic oppositions, even-

tually binding the flower, stem and root of the plant – the high and low – together in one endless cycle. Blossoming and rotting, beauty and death, sacred and sacrilege tied in continuous oscillating motion. These musings on “betrayal by appearance“ are not far removed from the oeuvre of Kannisto. Neither are Bataille’s claims that interpretation should not rely heavily upon the connection to function or metaphor. In her work Kannisto examines the appearances, events and mechanisms of the natural world. More than that she examines our ways of looking at them – in the moments governed by an objectifying scientific gaze, as well as in those moments when looking itself becomes veiled in awe. Her work highlights and adjusts the relationships of things, fervently contesting the notion – which Bataille was already questioning – that only words could be useful when considering relative situations, things in relation to one another. In fact much of Kannisto’s work centres around collecting, the very act of removal from the environment – and its recourse to the photographic gesture itself. Black and white images by Karl Blossfeldt – the German photographer, for whom nature was a sculpture garden, an ornamental cathedral of forms accompanied Bataille’s original text. Michael Taussig has suggested that Bataille put Blossfeldt’s images in connection with his text because he saw how the unresolved tension be-

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Top, left: Sanna Kannisto, Dictyophora indusiata, 2003, c-print, 75 x 94 cm, edition of 7.

Bottom: Sanna Kannisto, Passioflora vitifolia, 2003, c-print, 76 x 91 cm, edition of 7.

Top, right: Sanna Kannisto, Aristolochia gorgona, 2003, c-print, 76 x 94 cm, edition of 7.

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Page 68: Sanna Kannisto, Bee Studies: Orchid Bee Males, 2004, DVD, 8’06. Page 69: Sanna Kannisto, Bee Studies, 2003, cprint, 130 x 160 cm, (105 x 130 cm), edition of 7.

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tween “what is art and what is nature“ became visible in them.(6) Kannisto’s vision is more pulled back. She seems uninterested in the design elements of nature as such, but in the ways in which our confrontation with nature designs our thinking. It could be said that in this respect Kannisto’s works fulfil and accentuate the promise Bataille saw in Blossfeldt’s images.

this connection. In Kannisto’s works science fiction becomes redefined, not as a genre, but as intermittent movements between science and fiction. A look at Kannisto’s video “Bee Studies“: We see an extreme close-up of a leaf in front of the darker background of a tropical forest. The setting comes from nowhere and the viewer intrudes upon it unprepared. Suddenly the setting is disturbed by human hands, fine nails, introducing a Petri dish filled with white cotton wool, balancing it on a leaf. Immediately action ensues. Tropical flies, in all metallic colours and of various sizes, invade the Petri dish in a rush. Intoxicated by an invisible scent, the leaf swaying softly under their weight, the insects buzz at various pitches, landing and taking off again. Their flight postures and minuscule armatures are reminiscent of space ships, machines or alien creatures. (Reminding one also of the long history, most notably represented by artists like H. R. Giger, that combines insects with figures of science fiction.)

Once the initial sensation of witnessing a science fiction scene or an absurd video game fades one becomes aware of the many layers present in the work: the construction of the space in depth; the way in which the colourful insects are drawn by the invisible, colourless substance, (as if to conquer and fill the whiteness of the cotton); the constant motion of the flies that creates an energised space, a mesh of movement. In the video there are many layers of transparency – both visual and acoustic. Kannisto’s works open up theatres (operating theatres as well as theatres for plays) where the actions of nature and photographic events fuse and become exposed against each other. The photography of nature becomes superimposed on the nature of photography. In Kannisto’s theatres one sees what adhesion is, what collecting means, and what it signifies to be attracted by a scent or by the brightness of a light. More than anything Kannisto’s works teach about the existence of two

different kinds of light, or about two different “wavelengths“ of light. There is a fierce inquisitive light, that of science, harsh and powerful, but one-dimensional. Then there is a luring light, maybe just as strong, but a light that points to the places where the more silent parts of nature speak. Such divisions are by no means forced in Kannisto’s work. They are sometimes barely even visible. She has examined the ways and the rigour of natural sciences far too carefully to make such generalisations. Yet, in time, these elusive and more fleeting visions of the world, of relating appearance and image, might turn out to be the ways towards which knowing evolves. Maybe, in the end, it all comes down to appreciating – alongside studying the instinctive behaviour of animals – also one’s own instincts, to being able to say in wonderment how “[…] endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved“ as Charles Darwin chose to end his famous book.(7) +

Science and Fiction A second oblique angle from which one could illuminate Sanna Kannisto’s work and thinking (if the first one was the non-savoir of Bataille) could be that of “science fiction“. Like many works of science fiction Kannisto’s work is also often based, usually in a very subtle way, on postulated scientific discoveries, on science pushed to its limits. The fact that these postulations are not openly verbalised or sensationalised in the work, as would be customary in the more popular science fiction genres, does not abolish

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Sanna Kannisto in an E-mail Conversation with Harri Laakso

Sanna Kannisto (SK):  I think it is the idea that decides which is the best way to execute it. For many years now I have worked almost exclusively using still photography. It takes time to learn a new medium (video) and to learn to think using its vocabulary. Photographers’ videos can easily have a “still“ quality in them; camera on a tripod and start shooting, with only a few edits. My videos are also such “moving photographs“. I think it is even fun in a way that an artist’s background or premises are visible in the end result. There is so much moving visual stimuli and bombardment by advertising imagery in the world that I am not at all worried if I make videos that are subtle and simplified. The moving image has become important for me because I want to extend the range of my work. I try to constantly break my own conventions.

For example, you have made a series where you alter the tropical landscape, “making it more natural“ (change), examine decomposing leaves alongside each other (variety) or capture the flight patterns of birds (motion). Such series have their reference points and precedents within the history of photography (motion series in the work of Muybridge, Marey, for example). How do you see the relationship – in your work – between these different photographic series and video?

Harri Laakso (HL):  It seems that you have recently become more active in using the video medium. The video camera even earlier had a “presence“ in some of your images – “Bee Studies“ for example – but the main focus of your work has been on still images. Is this how you see it, or has video always been one of your interests alongside photography? What do you think of the relationship between these two ways of image making?

HL:  You have previously also made a number of image series, in which you examine change, variety and motion.

SK:  It is inevitable and interesting that my work has something in common with the history of photography, early natural historical illustrations, or the tradition of still life painting. In this way my images are not alone in the world. Lévi-Strauss speaks of the artist as a bricoleur, who always works with materials and elements that have already been used. They carry earlier meanings and an earlier history. An artist then collects these elements and arrang-

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to interpretation that a photograph offers, and the problem or mystery that it poses. My hummingbird series clearly has a video or an animation quality in it. The viewer starts to fill in the missing motions between the images and inevitably starts to read the series in a temporal way. However, there is also another side to it. The hummingbirds, when photographed in the simplified frozen way, distance themselves from photography and start to resemble more drawings or paintings. As a photographic series the work also has qualities that differ from video aesthetics. The prints have specific tones, darkness, sharpness and framing.

works. My way of working is based on seeing and experiencing. The moving image could in the future help resolve the contradiction between the performativeness of my fieldwork and the immobility of the photograph. I am first and foremost a photographer and I believe in photography as a medium.

large or small are the views or details that I have photographed. Space and perspective are important elements in my images. The images often have a clear division of foreground and background. The main subject is often centred and light draws and accentuates it, like on a stage. I often use lighting, two or three flashes. In the video “Bee Studies“ it is natural light that creates spatially the same feeling of a stage. In my “Dark Forest“ images I have studied how light creates the perspective in the forest. When light disappears, it feels as if the whole reality of the forest was only created by light. The immense disorder of the forest becomes two-dimensional and clear. At night the forest tells nothing, it is just surface. It preserves its concealment.

Sanna Kannisto, Poison Arrow Frog Males, 20012004/work in progress, DVD.

es and combines them in a new way. Chance always has a say in the work of the bricoleur. The choices made by the artist-bricoleur also reveal something about the artist, about his or her person and life. I think it is always possible to read references and influences in artworks. HL:  But you do see a connection between your serial works and your video works – in relation to time or to interpretation, for example ? SK:  The sense of time is different in a photograph and in video. Video is more present in the time at hand; in a way it is in the same time dimension as us. In that way one can get more involved and drawn into video works. The viewer can, for example, begin to hope for or fear a specific turn in the story. I think my video works always have at least some dramatic structure and tension, even if one cannot identify with the main characters, since they are insects and frogs. A photograph, on the other hand is absent, always in the past tense. Somehow it is more declaratory, more available as an image for the viewer, but not as an interpretation. I believe that my photographic series “Making Nature More Natural“ – which examines change in landscape – is more open to interpretation as photographs than it would be as a video piece. As a videowork it would have a more documentary feel, the viewer’s interpretation might have more to do with the genres of environmental or performance art. As a series of photographs it is more open to interpretation. Personally I enjoy this feature in photography – the openness

HL:  A number of Finnish photographic artists have recently turned to video. Do you feel it has partly to do with sensing a certain “inability“ within the medium of photography, of brushing up against its limit? To clarify: you work in tropical rainforests which are full of scents, sounds and movement – everything that a still camera is unable to portray. Has your working with video anything to do with wanting to capture and collect more of those actions, which have already had an implied presence in your photographic works (we have seen images of you recording sounds, of scientific experiments to do with insects attracted by fragrances etc.)? SK:  When walking in the forest one first senses the smells, sounds, colours, taste and feel of surfaces and only afterwards the forms, quantities and mobility. As an artist I try to contain narrative and sensory information in my

HL:  The aspect of a stage has been central to much of your still photography work. Most obviously I see this in your use of the portable studio, framed by the black curtains, where you photograph the different species. But it is evident also, I think, in the way you approach the forest itself (as a gradually revealed place of mystery), as well as in your way of arranging the sites of the biological experiments you photograph. In your videos there is the added dimension of drama – literally of life and death, sometimes. You let us witness the final moments of the prey of a praying mantis, or a wrestling match between tiny frogs. I see this as a natural extension of the stage theme: to set things in motion, once the stage is set. How do you think about this “theatrical“ aspect of your work? SK:  The field studio has several meanings for me. It is a research laboratory, in which I analyse and dissect my subjects. On the other hand, it is a place of action or presentation, much like a theatre or a museum. The theatrical aspect in my images and videos is based on my way of looking and experiencing, on the way in which things appear to me and how I have placed the camera. The image surface is often divided into a space in a similar manner, regardless of how

HL:  I think “revealing“ or “undraping“ things is an important aspect of your work. In many of your still works one enjoys the fantastic forms and appearance of plants and animals – sometimes in awe – while there is also, at the same time, a hint of “staging“ – of something that forbids the beholder to fall for the image completely. Your video works reveal things and actions in a different way. At the beginning of your video “Poison Dart Frog Males“, for example, we perceive the “muscular“ wrestling of the frogs in a totally different way than at the end when the camera pulls back to reveal how tiny they are. Do you think this aspect of revealing things works differently in still images and video? SK:  It is true that there often are incidents on the “stage“ of my field studio, which are not captured in the photo-

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Laakso on Kannisto

The Silence of Species

Top: Sanna Kannisto, Hummingbird flight: Eupetomena macroura, 2005, series of 1-12, c-print, 44 x 56 cm.

Bottom: Sanna Kannisto, Private Collection, 2003, c-print, 130 x 161 cm, (105 x 130 cm), edition of 7.

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Sanna Kannisto, Dark Forest 1, 2003, c-print, 90 x 110 cm, edition of 7.

graph. A snake moves in the plant or changes its posture, or a rhizomatic fungus keeps growing and after a certain time already starts to wither. Changes appearing over a long period of time are more clearly presented in a video, using time-lapse technique, for example. On the other hand, there is a lot of information in fast motion that the eye does not perceive. In the “Poison Dart Frog Males“ stills one can clearly see details of the harshness of combat. The same is visible also, when the video is slowed down. HL:  A similar thing (where a small gesture has an immense effect) also happens in your “Bee Studies“ video where the giant hand – deus ex machina – interferes at the beginning and also in your “Praying Mantis“ video (where the hand decides the destiny of a living thing). These all seem far more decisive actions than anything you have done in your photographic work. This also makes visible a new dimension, one might call it a certain harshness and even cruelty – although one hesitates to use such words, for one is accustomed to distinguishing scientific exploration from such human sentiments in favour of its “objectivity“. Partly this is because the artistic research you do is viewed differently from the usual research work in the field of natural sciences. How do you view your work in this context

Laakso on Kannisto

The Silence of Species

Sanna Kannisto, Dark Forest 2, 2003, c-print, 90 x 110 cm, edition of 7.

and in the context of ethical responsibility? SK:  My videos tell about the animal world and contain references to scientific methods. In nature something happens, a praying mantis eats a grasshopper, which horrifies people, why? I think this is an interesting question; why does the natural behaviour of animals shock us? Maybe it tells about our estrangement from nature, or of the unnaturalness of our own ways of eating. Nature has existed for millions of years and does not answer our questions concerning the origin of morality. Nature is amoral, unpleasant, even cruel. I am interested in the way in which animals are so attached to their instincts, and to the moment at hand. A praying mantis will eat a grasshopper in artificial conditions in a studio; during a photography session a bat held in a human hand smells a fruit and begins to eat; two poison arrow frog males are lost in a white box until one of them hears the recorded call of a third frog which initiates a fight for the territory between the first two. In this way the animal reminds us of the limits of human understanding. The animal is, in a way, beyond our reach. Science has been unable to rid the animal of this astonishment, it leaves one speechless. How could we know what kind of consciousness directs the bat, what an

insect’s metamorphosis is truly like, or what a hummingbird thinks, when it – after spending some time in the field studio – decides to place trust in the great hand: sits on the photographer’s finger and allows itself to be taught to use a drinking machine? Etology has in my view always been underestimated as a science. People tend to belittle animal intelligence. In my videos I make references to the methods of science. The researcher’s hand comes, touches, and changes things and the course of events. The experiment starts. In the name of science an enormous amount of research is done to increase learning, utility and discovering new things. It has become standard practice to use animals for science. Even the (humanly speaking) questionable actions of animals are interpreted. Curiosity is a founding force in science and in art. In my images and in my thinking both art and science are equally important. Therefore, I think that it is unnecessary, in my images to distinguish, what research is done by me and what by the scientists. I think I have always worked in an ethical way. I have read up on the animals and my subjects are “on loan“ from their environment only for as long as necessary. I have not pinned down the insects, or preserved the frogs in formaldehyde. But I think that if the artist’s idea required such realisation it

could be possible to do it. Personally I would not make collections like those of Damien Hirst, by using the animals of the rain forest. I have photographed some of the samples in the collections of the Zoological Museum of Costa Rica University, like the extinct golden toad specimens. HL:  I think, at the same time, that your video works have an enhanced feel of humour accompanying this vaguely describable “harshness“. I think this is partly due to our tendency to humanise frogs, for example, or to identify aspects of science fiction or video games in the buzz of flies and bees. And the flip side of this is the sheer mismatch in scale, which heightens the absurdity. Do you find humour in the rain forest? SK:  Scientific research, as well as my own projects, often seem humorous or absurd to me. One cannot adequately describe the various aspects of reality in a rain forest, or express them numerically or visually. The forest is so rich and full of species that our ways of approaching them easily seem limited. The selected viewpoint in relation to what is looked at decides the result that is presented as a truth. An artist’s viewpoint is different than that of a scientist. In the artist’s toolbox, chance, irony, humour and imagination are good instruments. +

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Top: Sanna Kannisto, Praying Mantis, 2001, DVD, 10’20.

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Laakso on Kannisto

Bottom: Sanna Kannisto, Night Pollination, 2004, c-print, 105 x 130 cm, edition of 7.

The Silence of Species

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Rosenberg & Schlaegel on ROR

ROR at its Core

Angela Rosenberg is an art historian based in Berlin. Andreas Schlaegel is an artist and writer based in Berlin.. Language editing by Anneli Chambliss.

Angela Rosenberg and Andreas Schlaegel

ROR at its Core One of the most exciting events of Helsinki’s 2001 art year was the second show ever by a heterorganic group of artists, ROR Revolutions on Request. Works like God Says No (2001 ) a huge white escalator leading nowhere; Battle of the Worlds (2000), a football table that pitted teams of plastic crucified Jesuses against Shiva statuettes; and self-stitch embroidery patterns of Bob Marley occupied much of the Kiasma Museum for Contemporary Art’s floorspace, making up the surprisingly fresh and vivid ensemble of the exhibiton, entitled Utopia. The members of ROR could by no means be considered your usual bunch of art school graduates – they had in fact recently graduated from Institute of Design of Lahti. Instead of embarking on their designated careers as designers or engineers, however, they started a business venture in 1998 that manoeuvred itself by 2002 into an impressive series of exhibitions. After a spectacular set of exhibition tours – Terror 2000, which made its way from Helsinki’s Into Gallery, to Reykjavik, and Stockholm, and Utopia’s own passage, from Kiasma to Skulpturens Hus in Stockholm and Kunsthalle Kiel – in addition to a notable series of publications, rumour had it that the group had called it a day. In February 2002, however, we met with ROR members Jiri Geller and Karoliina Taipale for the first time in their studio in Helsinki to find out what ROR were up to, only to learn that the group had actually just taken a short time-out after this intense two-year period of exhibition production. ROR had by now re-invented themselves as a quartet of artists –

Klaus Nyqvist, Karoliina Taipale, Jiri Geller und Panu Puolakka – working in two studios with big plans in mind: most portentously, to ”ror” Manifesta in Frankfurt in 2002. What is ROR? We conducted our first email interview with ROR in February 2002 to be published, in part, in the Flash Art International November-December 2002 issue (p. 95). The group chose to answer to our questions as a group, quite often in a rather elusive way, that at times ring like a manifesto. The interview revealed that ROR was originally founded as an effort to avoid the line at the unemployment office by founding a company cum co-op. In the beginning, ROR’s original membership was all about 15 freaks, hippie shit, ”Soviet Union”, no money. In their outset, ROR had a big studio in the midst of the Helsinki municipaltraffic authority’s depot warehouses together with Heke, a group of inventors producing psychedelic objects –“not so good as inventions, but we felt they were great art, though”. Heke had a great influence on ROR and actually manipulated them into starting the firm. At ROR’s first stages, it wasn’t at all clear to the members that it was art that they were producing. Soon, it became completely clear that the business side of the company was going nowhere (its finances have sucked ever since). Finally, ROR shed most of its members, and the ones who stayed started working on pieces for a collective art show. When their first exhibition Terror 2000 was ready, they moved uptown, and produced

Utopia there – a significant change of pace, as ROR used to be very much about running the company together and sharing the studio space. Today, while there are just four members left of the originally larger group, ROR has become much more immaterial. “ROR is a way to exist,” this last quartet claim, but their principles have remained: ROR operates by producing art, exhibitions and other related projects, basically doing everything by themselves, from individual artworks to exhibition architecture and graphic design. They also curate their own exhibitions, inviting in other artists to ror along with them. Revolutions on request: at your service? In the course of this first interview, we asked ROR if revolutions on request are the “service” they offer. ROR replied: “We offer movement. ROR pictures revolutions, all forms of revolutions. It also stands for rotation, revolutions per minute R.P.M., evolution, cycle of life. Our service is to bring art back to the people. Our service also contains messages, comments and visions, sometimes flashes of the future beforehand. We presented the computer game Killing Talebans (Kokko Nieminen, 1999, pc/mac), in which one played the USA bombing the Taliban. At the last Utopia exhibition in Stockholm, [the bombing] started to happen in the real world. Also, the exhibition place in Stockholm was related: it used to be the factory of Mr. Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, and in the name of Mr. Nobel they also give this famous prize for peace. Boom-Boom.”

In fact, Nobel was so shocked that his dynamite, which he had intended for the building of tunnels, was being used to build bombs that he founded the Nobel peace prize. His act sounded nearly as sad and cynical to us as “Revolutions on Request” – that revolutions are also ultimately products that you can buy. Naturally, we wanted to know if the concept of revolution was significant to ROR at all – and the reply was just as elusive: ”Significant with revolutions is the time when you are making one, not when it’s finished. Once done, they become institutions and the revolutionaries become bureaucrats. Movement matters. Nobel was naive or he was just playing one. Quite typical Swedish hypocrisy.” What, then, was the relation between evolution and revolution for ”Revolutions on Request”? The slogan sounded like an ad campaign for ”Diesel Jeans”! But ROR insisted: “We make art, not jeans. Actually, we are dead serious with what we are doing: MassProduced-Do-It-Yourself-Art. It is about religion, mathematics and entertainment. Keep your tools in shape, no evolution without revolution.” Pekka Luhta’s last sentence about ROR’s work in the Utopia catalogue for Kunsthalle Kiel 2001 is that ”ROR is self-reflective.” ROR admitted that he was right: the group is a mirror like Mir, a Russian word with two meanings – “the world” and “peace” – or like Recycling: when someone comes up with a good idea it’s stolen in no time by someone else. When several heads are trapped inside togeth-

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Rosenberg & Schlaegel on ROR

ROR at its Core

ROR, Symbol, 2000, mixed media, 6 x 34 x 6 cm. Photo courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Photo by Sakurai Tadahisa.

Next spread, left: Klaus Nyqvist, Protection, 1998, oil on canvas, 81 x 116 cm.

Next spread, right: Jiri Geller, God Says No, 2001, escalator, ready-made components, steel, MDF board, urethane paint, 550 x 150 x 900 cm. Courtesy of Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo by Jani Mahkonen/Central Art Archives?

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er, things start to rotate and rollate, whether material or immaterial, good or bad. Among other things, ideas, too, get stolen inside the group.

group concept. But then, ROR never had that much in common with the Beatles; they never turned into a uniformed rock band and have made sure from the start that every single piece in their exhibitions is clearly attributed to its maker. Only the exhibition as such is a group effort. Why do we want to keep on employing the rock band analogy? The choice has to do with how ROR’s members like to represent themselves. In their press photograph, for instance, they look like a hip rock outfit in leather jackets and scruffy jeans. But they are certainly more than meets the eye. Often ROR have been called “nihilist”, and we would like to show how far this is from the truth. The artists’ answers reveal their concern for nature and ecology, their country’s economy, and political issues, extending even to the heights of theological and philosophical discourse. But the members of ROR prefer not to comment directly on the discourse as such; in fact, they feel more comfortable in the realm of caricature, where they are free to be laconic, witty, sarcastic, and certainly not free of cynicism. An individual form of distrust concerning theory in general and a limited interest in the art world might be better descriptions of what makes ROR special. Yet they also show an incredibly generous interest in their friends

who are artists, artists they met while showing abroad, and the craftsmen and engineers whose work they deem artworthy, inviting them to show with ROR – at least until recently, when their own showroom, the ROR galleria, was (sadly) disbanded after the final exhibition with the Danish artist Tommy Støckel. The openness left in the wake of the gallery’s closing challenges the group itself, testing and confirming the strength of their integrity. The photographer Gered Mankowitz once said of the Rolling Stones: they were just five young guys who wanted to present themselves the way they wanted to, and not the way that conventions required them to. ROR chooses quite carefully which conventions to keep and which ones to discard, and it’s working because that’s what ROR is: something that happens when things come togetherand works. To put in ROR’s terms, it “kicks ass”. One might expect as much from them in the context of the upcoming show Evoloution will not be on television at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo next year.

mour. We like the same aesthetics and we share the idea of kick ass art. We are like an old couple hating each other’s guts, but are still able to produce superior shows. Klaus: Lameness is not an answer. Stones are pumped with money and fame and they are LAME! (Ever since the 80´s). There should always be present the feeling of losing control.

Three years later... During the last two months we conducted our second e-mail interview with ROR, trying to pick up things the threads where we thought to have left them in 2002. Talking to them isn’t easy, and writing emails doesn’t make the process much easier. One can liken it to a famous interview with a very young Pete Townsend of The Who where the interviewer asks a very long and complicated question, to which Townsend replies, after staring at the floor for a while: “….yes…”. Three years since our first interview, ROR has developed into a proper four-piece band, each member playing their own instrument of sorts, while all four members fill different and complementary roles in the context of the group. Unlike in the first interview, the artists chose to answer our questions individually this time and requested to be asked questions about their individual works. If we stay within the rock band analogy employed in the Pete Townsend example and look at the artists as if they were the Beatles, they would be entering into their Revolver phase, where individuals start to appear within the

How do you envision the future of ROR, do you want to become the Rolling Stones of the art world? Panu: Stones. Jiri: What keeps us together is hu-

Tell us something about your world – Finland in the eighties… Panu: I mostly remember boredom. Sex pistols really was something else, I remember hearing it for the first time and being convinced that this could get exiting after all. Jiri: In the 80´s Finland was cold and grey, I got my kicks out of heavy and punk rock... today Finland is cold and grey and I still get my kicks out of heavy and punk rock. Karo: I come from Heinola, a small town of 20.000 inhabitants. Finland is a small country. In the 80’s I was a teenager... doing whatever teenagers do, but there was not much to do in Heinola. I was interested in music and art, and learned to smoke cigarettes and to drink Vodka like Finnish teenagers do. In the beginning of 90‘s I turned 18 and at that time Finland started to sink into a really heavy state of depression. Basically there were no

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ROR at its Core

jobs for young people without „relationships“. Of course that affected us. I wanted to study photography, then I changed my mind. We started „a business“ – called ROR. Klaus: I spent my teenage years in late 80´s and early 90´s in a Helsinki suburb. The fight against boredom lead me to play guitar in a metal band called Sediment and we did some gigs and that was a good choice instead of doing drugs or stealing cars. I started to draw a lot at school instead of being educated – so I decided to go art school. The rest is history.

ture, KISS – mystic and spectacle, AC/ DC-simplicity, Punk-attitude, History, especially WW2. Panu: Star Wars & Pistols... I guess that’s ancient, like Van Gogh? Still diggin’ popular entertainment though. I’m jealous about big and sexy industrial productions like Snoop Dogg. The man has his own grill label! Karo: I guess I take my influences out of normal (?) life. On TV I like to watch documentaries and movies, very rarely there is stuff worth watching. I guess we have an American television here in Finland, stupid “reality” shows and never ending series of whatever programs I wouldn’t recommend to anybody. I’m interested in “the popular icons”, like Jesus, George W. Bush, Osama & Co and Barbie, the Doll. And all the nature and history and contemporary times... and some-

times I wish I never knew anything. Klaus: I got strongly influenced by MTV in the late 80´s when we got cable in our house. I mostly watched Headbangers Ball, but I guess got influenced by all the other crap too. Nowadays, if I hear a pop song of that time, I can instantly say, after the few first beat, who is the artist and the title of the song. Lots of other (important) things are lost though. So I think that the influences you receive as a sensitive teenager are the strongest ones, that determine the way that you live rest of your life.

bad guys of the 90’s. Wisely maybe, we named the group more commercial and sexy ROR – revolutions on request. Panu: I always thought we were in the same posse as Jesus, Bin Laden and Rastas in general. Nowadays dreaming about a grill with your name on it as merchandise. Maybe signature rims too… Karo: In the beginning there was this wonderful feeling, before our first exhibition was published... we knew we had a kind of explosive material in our hands. At that time there was basically me, Jiri and Klaus, though we had 15 “members” in ROR. We were young and innocent and hungry. I am still hungry... dreaming of pizza now. And yes, we are a tiny part of 6.3 billion homo sapiens, consuming, eating, producing... sad but true.

What are relevant influences from popular culture on your work? Jiri: Discovery Channel, Scrapheap Challenge, American Chopper, Superstructures, Hot Rod & Kustom cul-

Did you consider yourself as part of a bigger scene, or did you feel more like a secret terrorist cell against the rest of the world? Jiri: Absolutely, originally the group was called the Hard Front Serbs, the

And today? Is there a relationship to other

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ROR at its Core

artists you feel close to, or curators, or do you feel closer to people outside the artworld?

an old bizarre magazine and coloured it golden. I also changed the head, in the work there is Barbie doll smiling, mouth shut. Also put snakes appearing around her every now and then, and one of them is right on her eyes but she can see trough it. The title is sarcastic (it can be about sleeping and seeing part of destiny beforehand and being awake and see things happen in reality).

the government can take care of competitive assumptions. We would like to remark though that this promise cannot be extended in ten years from now. The situation is changing every year and every action has its effect on it. Thus we are claiming more such constructive and encouraging solutions, which would help to increase the productivity of the group. As a decision we propose a working scholarship system and government increasingly acquiring art works. The structure of the scholarship system is one of the drivers (driver) of lucrativity even there has not been much public discussion about it. Hence, as a solution, are we proposing to increase financing, which would work as a support for art work. It is our opinion that increasing financing and acquiring art works supports the foundation of the state and its prosperity, and does not dissolve it. We think that spiritual growing is at the centre, while creating dynamics of the society.

ones. Like they do in real life too. And Luke’s home is the best architecture I’ve never ever seen man, real or sci-fi.

Karo: To feel close to some person doesn’t require he/she is an artist. But it is necessary to understand each other. Art is important to me, but basically I don’t like any of the egoistic phenomena involved. I like ordinary people who know their place in the world and take care of the responsibilities... there is lots of cleaning to do in the world. What do you mean by that? Karo: ... pollution, values, attitudes, noise… etc. Do you still paint traditionally? Karo: I still paint, and I’m also doing some small sculptures and other stuff as well.

As the only woman in ROR, do you feel you have a special role? Karo: I wish I was not the only woman in the group. There used to be more women in ROR but they left one by one because they were not happy. A certain attitude towards women pisses me off... actually ROR has made me a feminist. How important is living in Finland for you? Are you going to move to the Bahamas?

What attracts you to lenticular images? Karo: That it is hiding and revealing, dependant from the angle you see it. Things come and go. I was something like three years old when I saw one for the first time. It was a 3D postcard with kittens I got from my uncle. Your images deal with universal themes and systems of belief: religion, the universe. Who’s the woman in “Yeah Right”(2001)? Karo: There is a woman in a golden package, some kind of present for somebody, so that she cannot move her arms or legs. I took the image from

To this question ROR would like to answer by freely quoting Mr. Jorma Ollila from Nokia, who was cited in the main Finnish daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat on 27the of January, 2002: ROR denies that its former statement about moving its headquarters would have been a threat. That can be read in the statement “only with really bad wish”, and that wasn´t what the announcement was meant to be. It suffices to say, that already now a part of the company’s headquarter activities have been moved on broad. We can neither see any problem to continue production in Finland. The group has an intention to stay in Finland, if

Panu, what does the pixel mean to you? Panu: Nothing, I used it to imitate computer stuff. Is the explosion an image from Star Wars (the explosion of the Death Star)? Panu: Nope, its from Doom. Didn’t you notice? Tell us more about how Star Wars, (Frage????) Panu: Its the basic good vs. evil – stuff, all very graphic and simple. The bad guys looking better than the good

You have a rug The TV2 (1999), is there still that image on the Finnish TV screen? Panu: No there ain’t anymore. Not sentimental, just thought it was a beautiful image. Klaus, you are the painter in the group, you must have produced much more than the few paintings seen at the ROR shows? Klaus: Actually there is not so much of them in total. I also do other things in my life, too. For me painting is a process where some times are better for that action than others. Sometimes there has been a few years gap between the sessions. I have all the time. I also destroy works. I am quite sensitive with the painting thing. There is still lots of material in a kind of “fermenting” stage, where time is playing quite a crucial role in form of “layers” of works. Also not all of my paintings are ROR works or fitting into the concepts of ROR’s output. Please tell us more about “Protection”. Klaus: The idea came from a protective suit catalogue, I thought it was absurd that the guy in the picture is protecting something and he has to protect himself for that action and I thought it would be even more absurd to see that as a painting. I guess the work has a similar message like the symbol where a snake is biting its own tail.

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ROR at its Core

Every time we see your carpet piece we think it is a take on impressionism.

by gravity, feedback, brainwaves, animals etc. It is difficult to view works like your “Self-Portrait”, Jiri, as a winged monkey, the “Staircase” and the “Wave” in relation to ROR’s steep ascent to stardom. Does it signify a turning point in your career?

value of about 7000 euros. Over 50m 2 of surface was build from atom to finished surface. Lots of sanding.

Klaus: Yeah, it is a purely feeling based work: A blurry moment in the heart of a forest at morning. I find it close to some hazy German Schlager-videos which have this kind of “distant” or “underwater” feeling. Melancholy. What is your relationship to impressionism?

Jiri: I guess all those works have that sort of sublevel connected to my career, but, on a general level the winged monkey is the image of Western world culture, where everyone seems to have the free license to fly. The reason I named it “Self Portrait” is that I wanted to take responsibility for using living material for an artwork. On this sublevel the “Wave” can be the turning point in my career, but where is it taking me? I don’t know, I just know, that I wanna go forward. Primarily the works are made to be strong images for the viewers advisory, instead of me wanking about my career.

was on the Tokyo City View observation deck on the 54th floor of the skyscraper in front of a breath taking view of Tokyo city. At night time it reflected the image of a humangolous tsunami over Tokyo to the window. In the context of Japanese culture it is also a big time tribute to the ukiyo-e print master, Hokusai´s iconic “Beneath the wave off Kanagava”. On the other hand I wanted to express the unstable element of the wave, in particular the wave in stop-motion, as a three dimensional work. You can see it also as stop-motion image incorporating four stages – the swell, the moment when it reaches its highest point, the moment it begins to descent and when it breaks – simultaneously in a single work.

Klaus: I think the guys did a great job back then. I think the world is a better place now, than it would be without impressionist movement. They introduced rock´n´roll to art. True freedom fighters for expression and experimentation. Gogh had the rhythm. Can you tell us about your laser works, how are they related to the paintings? Klaus: The Lasers are just a part of a bigger process called Let-the-NatureDo-It, LNDI in short. The LNDI process affects optically to the output of the laser-piece, where a laser beam is transformed to moving amorphous constantly changing image. The LNDI process takes place also with various media like painting, audio and video, where the output of the work is made

But is it metaphoric? Did you produce it in Japan? Jiri: It was manufactured especially for the Japan-show. Our installation

Can you tell us about the manufacturing process? Jiri: It was manufactured on an island outside Helsinki. The insane size of the piece was challenging. All the chemicals made it impossible to work on it among civilisation. It took 3 people 1,5 years of work to make it, and finally finished it was in Japan. The whole process was heavy, in the time sense, and financially. The paints alone had a

Do you know if Gene Simmons ever saw your portrait of his? Jiri: We wanted to show Gene Simmons’ monster boots in ROR galleria and we contacted Mr. Simmons, so he knows the work. Still waiting for the army of lawyers. Did other Kiss fans comment? Jiri: Obviously KISS fans like it. Everybody likes it. Do you feel like you are in a band sometimes, and do you have plans for a solo album? Karo: I used to feel that. And we have performed as a band on the stage, playing a punk rock version of the Roky Ericson song “You don’t love me yet”. It was fun and we kicked some ass! I have had a solo exhibition last year, and I am planning a new one, like always. Also working on a new group show outside ROR, the “Behind the Mascara” – exhibition with Eva Brownies.

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Rosenberg & Schlaegel on ROR

ROR at its Core

Previous spread, left: Karoliina Taipale, Yeah Right, 2001, collage, optical PVC-board, 28 x 28 cm. Photo by Jani Mahkonen.

Previous page: Jiri Geller, The Big Time, 2005, fiberglass, wood, polyurethane, automotive paint, 350 x 500 x 400 cm. Photo courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Photo by Sakurai Tadahisa.

Previous spread, top right: Karoliina Taipale, Friendship, 2005, collage, optical PVC-board, 28 x 28 cm. Photo by Perttu Saksa. Previous spread, bottom right: Panu Puolakka, Highway Patrol, 2004, digital print, plastic foam, 38 x 38 x 110 cm (x16). Photo by Perttu Saksa.

Panu: Jesus, I do! I am the drummer, one two three... What is the next big project you are working on? Jiri: Since the scale of my works is 1:1, it can be anything between atom and aircraft carrier. I just made a new series of patches and right now I am working on some, let’s say, reasonable size pieces. Klaus: I have started working with realtime video editing and performing in some performances, and collaborations with some bands. I am working on adding the LNDI-factor to video output, by, for example using IBVA system (interactive brainwave visual analyzer) or plants as controllers of events. Panu: My solo album. What is the next small project you are working on? Klaus: I am going to shoot a promotional music video at a studio backyard here in Finland for a singer from Togo, West Africa. And then to edit it, and add some old school video effects. Panu: Going to local pub. What is the favourite work you ever produced?

Jiri: My favourites are works like Battle of the Worlds (2000), Continue (2002) and Lick It Up (2003), because they were a lot of fun to produce, all the casting, mechanics and electronics. It is a great moment when things come together and the idea finally functions. Panu: My upcoming Jesus-piece might be the one. It has Jesus with a black lamb. My favourite not-produced work is Stetson Void-sculpture. It would have kicked the shit out. Never know, I just might drop it out some day. And what is your favourite work you never produced? Jiri: Maybe a large-scale abstract sculpture titled But What Is It? Klaus: I think it must be an installation called iAltar.. It was about selfworshipping and hedonism with a kind of a voodoo vibe in it. Some parts of installations is exhibited, but it has never seen the daylight as a whole. Let’s talk about the ROR Galleria – was it an extension of your show practise of inviting other artists? Karo: The first show in ROR galleria was ours, with new pieces only. It was called Contemporary Plastic (2003).

The second was Skull Weeks (2003), there was lots of skull art and stuff, and works from Panu and Klaus, too. Third one was called...something like Pussy Rally (2003), we invited Anna Gudmundsdottir from Norway to paint the walls, in the middle of the floor there was the coolest motorcycle ever made by Isto Kotavuopio and a few sexist miniature sculptures from Mr. X. The other exhibitions were all solo exhibitions from different artists, and I also had my solo exhibition OZ (2004) there. Jiri: The concept was to show RORart from around the world. The ROR galleria was run by the ROR association and there were also people involved outside the group (6-8). Basically what was shown was decided collectively. We (ROR group) met Jeppe Hein in London, Anna Gudmundsdottir in Frankfurt etc. Most of the artists we met were in exhibitions ROR took part. Some of the gallery’s exhibitions were solo shows and others a collection of strange stuff, like skulls or custom motorcycles, mixed with more traditional art objects. ROR galleria was planned to be a project instead of a permanent joint, but it ended a bit too early… too much work, not enough peo-

Left: Klaus Nyqvist, Laser, 1998-2001, hobby project(or). Photo by ? Right: Karoliina Taipale, Live and Learn, 1999, oil on canvas, 38 x 46 cm. Photo by the artist.

ple and the financial part also was too heavy. What was your favourite show at the Galleria? Karo: My favourite was the Jeppe Hein show with the Self-Destructive Wall (it started to be really dangerous in the opening because something went wrong... there was also Smoking Bench and Flying Cube. When the exhibition was going on I was there at the Galleria when one gallerist from London came to visit, and first thing she said was “oh, I thought you have an exhibition going on now, but you are in the middle of construction work here.“ Jiri: Jeppe Hein, Tommy Støckel and ROR-show Contemporary Plastic. Should ROR found a ROR school? ROR is a school! And? Karo: We are not responsible for everything (like saving the world). Klaus: Nor are we not responsible for destroying the world either. Karo: Peace, love, action, money, health, work, home. +

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Gayer on Holmström

Describing the Indescribable

The writer is an art critic currently based in Washington, D.C.

John Gayer

Describing the Indescribable

Gun Holmström and the Art of Perception

Gun Holmström’s video work has received increasing international attention in recent years. Never afraid to experiment, her deft approach and strong visual sensibility informs a body of work that includes photography, sculpture, and projects incorporating sound and light. This article traces some of the currents that run through her work.

Reality – that world around us which we experience through perception and which continues to be redefined by art – can be understood in so many different ways. But social and cultural conventions, coincidences of time and place, force of habit, and parallel needs and desires all work to condition one’s outlook. This process mitigates heterogeneity by compelling individuals to follow seemingly standardized patterns. The rituals and routines comprising the haze of day-to-day life not only dull the senses, but also reduce one’s ability to recognize the unique or unusual characteristics of one’s surroundings. While many find comfort in following social and cultural directives, others witness an environment marked by constraint, an observation leading them to question the influences guiding society. Constraint may be identified as the most significant experience comprising Gun Holmström’s youth. Growing up in a small Swedish-speak-

ing village in the Finnish archipelago, she lived outside mainstream Finnish society in an environment where one received little or no exposure to contemporary art. Her exposure to more experimental art forms only came at the age of twenty while working as an au-pair in London. There she spent her free time trying to see as many exhibitions as possible. Five or six years later, her ambition to be an artist suddenly took hold and she immediately abandoned her sociology thesis to take up sculpture studies at the Turku Art Academy. “Coming from a small community one becomes very aware of the regulating norms… It’s always interesting to think about the reasons why certain things are condemned as bad…” Holmström has said.(1) While such measures help control negative influences, a sense of ‘otherness’ brought about by physical and linguistic isolation are inherent features of this situation. Learning to speak Finnish properly only as an adult, Holmström finds that being considered a Swede within Finland and a Finn outside her homeland presents few drawbacks. The fact that “it gives an awareness of different ways of thinking that are built into a culture” forms one important by-product of this context. Many individuals remain critical, even bitter, about such parochial beginnings, but recourse to diatribe is

not part of Holmström’s style. Driven by a desire to understand rather than deride, her questioning gaze aims to reveal the complex nature of the world around her. As a result, her creations encourage viewers to assess her findings and draw their own conclusions from them. A Womb of One’s Own (1999), perhaps the artist’s best-known work, stands out as exemplary of her approach. Like many of her works, its source lies in personal experience. Clouded by my North American perspective, I believed the title referred to the abortion issue that has been so controversial in the United States. What a surprise it was to have the expected scenario turn out to be an elucidating monologue dealing frankly with surrogate mothers, gay fathers, and the widely held prejudices surrounding the notion of a family – subject matter to which any person faced with infertility could also relate. Looking back on the experience, Holmström remarked, “When I made it, I didn’t know if it was ‘art’ or not, the issue just seemed important… The video got much attention when it was exhibited for the first time. Much was positive, but also negative. Many people can’t grasp it because the whole thing feels too serious… After this I became very aware about the ethical issues when making a documentary work…”

The video stands as a potent work, and like much art that is experimental or that appears ugly when it is new, it requires time for evaluation. While the idea of giving a child to persons who cannot produce their own passes as an act of generosity in many small non-Western societies, it challenges the social, moral and legal frameworks set out by church and state in Western ones. Reaction to this notion is bound to be strong. As a portrait, the simple, straightforward presentation of the subject and the conviction with which she speaks about her project bears an intensity that cannot easily be forgotten. With regard to artistic precedent, Holmström’s unadorned treatment of socially significant subject matter brings the work of Courbet and Kollwitz to mind. Other works that delve into the predicaments of certain individuals and their place in society include Sermon (2002), Cosmos (2001) and The Cleaning Woman (2001). Whether depicting the situation of a church minister, childhood acquaintance, or domestic worker, the artist’s camera captures the poetic qualities or inherent contradictions that invest these people’s lives. In most cases, these videos are accompanied by a second element that allows viewers to cross-reference what they are witnessing. Accompanying A Womb of One’s Own is an enlargement of an ultrasound scan show-

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Top: Gun Holmström, Living Paintings, 2005, DVD, site-specific installation (five videos), loop, 5’00 each. Commissioned by the Turku Art Museum.

Features

Gayer on Holmström

Bottom: Gun Holmström, Sermon, 2002, DVD, 3’30. Commissioned by the Showroom Gallery, London.

Describing the Indescribable

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Gayer on Holmström

Describing the Indescribable

ing a foetus, the triptych Sunday I –III (Cross, Death, Resurrection) (2002) join Sermon, and a black and white animation forms part of Cleaning Woman. In each of these pairings, Holmström pairs reality with something more abstract – a meditative component consisting of related imagery modulated by colour, movement or scale; a new perspective causing the topic to resonate and illuminate it more fully. The image of the foetus, for example, dwarfs the video image, bringing the child’s future into question; scenes showing a city intersection, a ferry crossing water, and a congregation rising to its feet evoke the foundations of Christianity; and a simple, animated line drawing recasts the cleaner’s motions as a kind of dance. In the catalogue essay accompanying the London exhibition of Sermon and Sunday I-III, Harri Kalha has made some similar observations. “To the persuasive sound of church bells, viewers are offered a passage from concrete to abstract, from unique to universal,”(2) With regard to Cleaning Woman, Holmström has expressed it somewhat differently: “Like if you make a landscape drawing – I wanted to exhibit the ‘landscape’ as well as the drawing.” More recently, Holmström has been moving away from incorporating obvious documentary footage into her work. Becoming personally frustrated

with the technique, she began to sense that she “was stressing the intellectual content too much… or in the wrong way.” Having dealt with themes involving illness, low social status, and other negative aspects of life, she felt it was time to look toward more positive things, investigate the spiritual side of art, and place more emphasis on visual expression. One could argue that Holmström’s interest in the spiritual side of art and emphasis on visual sensibility have informed all her production, imbuing it with a richness that would otherwise make it much less gripping. Implying that which is immaterial, the term spiritual can be understood in many ways. It may refer to a religious belief, forms of energy, a mood or feeling, suggested psychological aspects, and so on. People attending one of Holmström’s presentations admired the subtle spirituality in her work as well its humour.(3) Her training in sculpture, web design experience, and inherent pictorial abilities also inform her approach by aiding in the synthesis of concept, form, materials and technique that result in works of art. Her work Vitamin Power (1996) stands as a perfect example bearing this duality. This work consists of a dozen small porcelain animal figures with various types of vitamins adhered to them. For Holmström the vitamins have two purposes. On one hand, vi-

tamins ensure that animals are healthier. On the other, they offer insurance against poor quality foodstuffs and, as such, represent a critique of contemporary society. One of my first reactions to the work was the wish to hold the animals. Their enticing tactile quality reminds one of Aarikka sheep figures made from smooth balls of wood. Despite their cuteness, though, something sinister lurks behind their diminutive scale and colourful appearance. They reminded me of the steroid use scandals in Olympic sports and the oversize AZT capsules used by the artist group General Idea in their installations dealing with Aids. By coating tiny animal bodies with vitamin pills, Holmström has created a startling image out of modest means. The paired works Moving I (1999) and Moving II (2000) operate in a similar way. The first video shows an apartment repeatedly being filled with and emptied of furniture. In the second, a female figure stands by a roadway while a sequence of residential buildings block out her face. Juxtaposed with the physical process of moving is the mental one. Resembling an elevated storage shed, the work addresses the concept of home in an open-ended way. The home is a repository for one’s belongings, but the idea of home – its meaning – resides in the mind. The donning of architectural masks externalizes and generalizes the psycholog-

ical and social impact that moving has on one’s life. Repetitive movement and the literal, even primitive, act of placing a house over one’s head contribute a ritualistic air to the process. This humorous expression of reorientation makes an impact on both the visual and emotional planes. In recent years Holmström’s move away from a signature documentary style has been much more obvious. In her sound and light pieces, videos, and curatorial projects, general situations and conditions have supplanted specific ones. Instead of focusing on a specific illness, she has emphasized healing, another multifaceted term. Her documentation of persons with poor social standing has evolved into an examination of the paralysing effect of fear.(4) The dryness of earlier exposés has given way to the lively video postcards through which the artist freely experiments; and through the group exhibition äga:rum,(5) she has expressed the diverse nature of time and place as witnessed through the work of several Scandinavian artists. The process seems to be one of refinement, of learning how to better communicate the ideas and areas of interest lodged in her brain. Finding certain formats restrictive, Holmström seeks out other means to realize her goals. Interestingly, some recent projects are also more easily described using terms more common-

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Previous page: Gun Holmström, The Cleaning Woman, 2001, DVD, two channel installation, loop, (stills from the animation part).

Top: Gun Holmström, Sunday I-III (Cross, Death, Resurrection), 2002, DVD, loop, three channel video installation. Commissioned by the Showroom Gallery, London.

Gayer on Holmström

Describing the Indescribable

Bottom: Gun Holmström, Moving II, 2000, videoanimation, DVD, loop.

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Gun Holmström, A Womb of One’s Own, 1999, DVD and an enlargement of an ultrascan picture of the baby, 12’45, Collection of Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki.

ly associated with two-dimensional forms of art. For example, the video postcards suggest a form of sketching, a process that lets her escape from the traditional narrative and structures of filmmaking. The artist also likens In the Raw (2004), another recent video installation, to a collage. With regard to producing three-dimensional work, Holmström does not make drawings. Like the architect Frank Gehry, she develops ideas through a model-building process. This directness of her approach infuses the work with a candor that can also be likened to the spontaneous manner with which some painters apply media to bare canvas. Holmström’s shift in focus has resulted in light and sound works such as Caleidoscope (2002) and Omphalomine (2005), pieces that take the artist’s ideas outside the gallery circuit. Offering Holmström the opportunity to expand her technical range, these public commissions engage viewers in an entirely different way. As the name suggests, Caleidoscope’s RBG LEDs mimic the prismatic effects seen through such objects. Placed in a health centre, the work provides an alternative and purely visual experience for patients in an austere, clinical environment. Similar-

ly, the intended location for Omphalomine is in a public park. Noting that this “sound sculpture and outdoor instrument can be played by the local residents, young and old,” the artist’s democratic program enables the site to be experienced on at least three levels. As an environmental component, the sculpture’s sound would cast the immediate surroundings in a new light. The work’s interactive capability not only enables each individual to explore his or her creative potential, but also encourages people of various ages and walks of life to interact around the piece, thus enhancing the shared nature of the public space. Other tangents include Disco Tonight? (2005) and Where’s That Pig? (2005), both from the video postcard series, and Living Paintings (2005) that formed part of the Sediments exhibition at the Turku Art Museum. Whereas the artist incorporates humour and layers SMS messages over imagery to produce enticing visual puzzles in the former two pieces, she took to layering footage of street activity and window reflections over images of historically significant Finnish paintings from the museum’s collection in the latter. In both cases, viewers must parse what it

Gayer on Holmström

Describing the Indescribable

“I already knew quite well before I got pregnant what the problems would be, whether I can do this or not. And my views haven’t changed during the pregnancy. It’s about being able to know about your feelings beforehand. You can know yourself and to some extent break away from the mold you think you’d fit.” “What really hurts me is the people who think that I can’t know whether I’ll be able to give up the baby, while they are implying that if I do, it somehow makes me a bad mother, uncaring or something... like having a limb cut off or losing a part. A mother’s love is something everyone

thinks they know, even someone else’s mother’s love, it always has to be something so grand and all-encompassing.” “… I at least explain it to myself as the way people hang on to such things... it must feel like the world would collapse if we had to admit to ourselves that a child gets by with anyone who looks after it. Of course it’s safer to believe in home and country and a specific household arrangement before all’s good for the child.”

is they are seeing by watching the videos over and over again. The deciphering process not only dispels one’s initial confusion but frees the eye to seek out other relationships deriving from the superimposition of various kinds of imagery and motion. Taru Elfving, curator of Sediments, has noted that the Living Paintings series “literally brought the museum’s treasures, which are part of the collective visual and highly symbolically charged memory or even subconscious of the inhabitants of Turku, in contact with the city and its contemporary landscape.”(6) Situated in the museum, a KappAhl shop window and a market hall café, these complex images presented a momentous architectural, social and cultural synthesis that offered a compression of current and historical elements of Finnish life for gallery goers and casual spectators on the street. Stressing the inalienable interrelation of past and present, the inherent subtleties and visual richness created through the superimposition process induce further contemplation. The intersection of past and present from an autobiographical perspective forms the basis for Holmström’s twochannel video installation In the Raw.

The work sequences images and text that carry no obvious relationship to one another. Memories, real or imagined conversations between friends, pictures of childhood surroundings, and natural phenomena coalesce into a story devoid of a clear plot: a child pictured in absence; the comments of a little devil; images shifting from colour to black and white, all united by a meditative musical score bring about a range of thoughts and feelings. Holmström describes this work as “a saga… that would allow for both the viewers’ own associations and possibilities for new stories to evolve.”(7) Another view describes this exploration of social constraints and the complexity of contradicting emotions as fable, the moral of which is the passage of time. Despite the fact that the work’s basis lies in reality, the tale Holmström relates through this sequence of unrelated events and fragmented memories makes no literal sense.(8) A booklet accompanying the work’s Montreal exhibition extends the project’s scope by presenting a pared-down version of images and text for personal use. Here, archetypal juxtapositions that include both turbulent and calm views, man and woman, and texts in French and

This text may not be published, copied or used in any way without permission. © Gun Holmström

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Describing the Indescribable

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Gun Holmström, Where’s That Pig?, 2005, DVD, single channel, 1’00.

Gayer on Holmström

Describing the Indescribable

Gun Holmström, Disco Tonight?, 2005, DVD, single channel, 1’00.

Next page: Gun Holmström, In The Raw, 2004, DVD, two channel, 10’45. Music by Tuuli Helve.

(1)  Unless noted otherwise, all of Holmström’s comments, whether paraphrased or directly quoted, come from an interview the writer held with artist in June 2005. The Act of Generosity, an edited version of this interview, appeared in the September/October issue of NY Arts Magazine. (2)  Harri Kalha, Gloomy Sunday? Non-Destruc-

tive Laughter and the Nature of the Sacred, Showroom Gallery, London, UK, 2003. (3)  Anne Golden, Groupe Intervention Vidéo, Montreal, Canada. Personal communication, September 20, 2005. (4)  I am unknowing (2004) was included in the travelling group exhibition Parameters of Fear.

(5)  äga:rum/oma:tila/take:place, Gallery Elverket, Ekenäs/Tammisaari, 19.5.-4.9.2005, exhibition catalogue. (6)  Personal communication, September 19, 2005. (7)  Press release for the exhibition In the Raw, Optica , Montreal, Canada, 22.4.-28.5.2005. (8)  Réjean-Bernard Cormier, Fables et emotions

ineffables, ETC, no. 70, june, july, august 2005, Montreal, Canada, pp. 8-9. (9)  Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. (10)  Blake Gopnik, The Keen Art Insight of Svetlana Alpers: It’s All on the Surface, The Washington Post, Sunday, October 9, 2005, p. 6.

English not only delineate life’s contrapositive diversity, but also reflect the local context. The inspiration for In the Raw came from a lecture the artist once attended where the visual materials bore no relation to each other or to the topic of discussion. Nevertheless, the absurd narrative presented an experience that was processed by the audience and transmitted to others by way of anecdote or complaint. This is an example of fact being stranger than fiction; where one could say, as Holmström has noted when considering reactions to A Womb of One’s Own, “since I know the people involved, I know it’s true.” More important-

ly, though, the significance and, for Holmström fortuitousness of the lecture experience lies in the way the lecture disrupted the audience’s expectations. The traditional presentation format had been subverted, thus giving image, word and context a new set of relationships. Minds drifted off. Eyes likely refocused on the speaker’s shoes, on the texture of a wall, or on the patterns in the floor. The effects of both the lecture and Holmström’s video installation suggest a type of space that primarily exists within graphic work and paintings, as well as a way of looking at our surroundings that is called simultaneous perception.(9) In the former, un-

related images arranged on the same plane present a non-linear narrative, the reading of which frequently remains open-ended and allows viewers to establish individual conclusions from the visual clues. The latter process involves de-focusing the eye and mind in order to perceive everything within one’s range of view. This mode of perception reorders what has always seemed familiar by revealing the overriding character of a place. Previously unnoticed features attain new status, and interrelationships deriving from the site’s organization and its effect on people’s behaviour are delineated. This is what much of Holmström’s art, not only her videos, encourages viewers to

do. Attempting to describe the indescribable, her work returns again and again to the rich complexity of dayto-day reality to show us what we take for granted. Spirited as well as spiritual, her sound and light pieces, multi-channel projections and use of abstracted and layered images document the simultaneity of experience. The art historian Svetlana Alpers has claimed that Rembrandt’s painting was not about portraying reality as it is found outside, but “about using its artificial ’vexing’ of reality to gain insights into both humanity and art.”(10) This motivation also underlies Holmström’s visual constructions. +

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Framework 4

Opinions, Analyses & Letters

Opinions, Analyses & Letters Opinions, Analyses & Letters offers a forum for both invited and submitted texts by those in the fields of art and science, to discuss different perspectives on cultural criticism, as well as institutional and cultural policies. The general theme of Framework 4, Permanent Transience, is commented first by Mark Kremer, whose approach is structured on and in re-

lation to the film by Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, and the way it touches deep social issues having to do with the conflicts and desires of people residing in the Netherlands. Serena Giordano and Anna Daneri bring up some examples from the near past to analyze mechanisms of border formations and their re-formations in the art world that constantly create multiplying minor states under the influence of

a few “superpowers”. Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, in turn, gives an example of the intellectual generals of general intellect by telling about his own experience as a contributor in an art performance. Jan Olof Mallander reviews the book Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (2004), edited by Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob.

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Mark Kremer

Poldergeist, or How to Confront Dutch Resignation

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Pierre Guillet de Monthoux

Intellectual Generals of General Intellect

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Serena Giordano and Anna Daneri

The Moving Borders of Art

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Jan Olof Mallander

“You Are the Eyes of the World”

Introduction

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Opinions, Analyses & Letters

Karvonen

Dalai Lama

Otto Karvonen, How Many Dalai Lamas Does It Take To Move A Mountain?, public sculpture, limestone, plaster, paint, books, shown at the group exhibition White in Fiskars in 2004. Photo by Petri Salmela.

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Opinions, Analyses & Letters

Kremer

The writer is an independent curator and writer based in Amsterdam. Copy edited by Mike Garner.

Poldergeist

Next page, left: Marcel Osterop in Mandarin Ducks by Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, 2005. Courtesy of Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne. Photo by Thomas Manneke. Next page, right: Annemarie Osier and Liz Snoijink in Mandarin Ducks by Jeroen De Rijke and Willem De Rooij, 2005. Courtesy of Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne. Photo by Thomas Manneke.

Mark Kremer

Poldergeist, or How To Confront Dutch Resignation

Holland, my beloved country, a relaxed place where even bicycles would get stoned on a warm summer’s day, is no more. Two murders, their victims LPF leader Pim Fortuyn (6.V.2002) and filmmaker/columnist Theo van Gogh (2.XI.2004), gave shock treatment to the political and cultural landscape of the Netherlands. The respected Dutch values, tolerance and multi-culturalism, suddenly became the subject of an emotional public debate. Given that the world is changing, and that worrisome global phenomena are approaching and crossing our borders, are our traditional values still sufficient to confront 21st-century challenges? It has also been asked why an artistic response to the murders failed to occur? Is this because of the lack of a Dutch tradition of art that overtly addresses political issues? Perhaps we lack an enemy that we could point to and shoot at? After all, political art has a tendency to flourish in contexts where there is a clear adversary. An exhibition like Populism, instead of bridging a Dutch art-politics gap, underlines the lack I mentioned. The most you could say about participants like Marc Bijl and Erik van Lieshout, who figured as Dutch artists with political concerns, is that their work illustrates politics. It’s not that in their art, an authentic political voice (hardcore, subversive, indignant) speaks up. With them, it’s more like courting politics. How come? Perhaps it’s simply that in the Netherlands we’re doing too well, that we were always – from the 17th century onwards – well off. That affluence didn’t make it necessary to scrutinize ourselves, to look at what’s wrong, at

what we did or are doing wrong; let alone prompt us to look at and truly engage with people and countries that are worse off. What has been preferred is a practical – read minimal – engagement, enabling us to do business. Meanwhile we’ve lost the opportunity to get to know the world, and ourselves better. But, who knows, perhaps in the near future this problematic condition could become the focus of another type of Dutch art. A recent work such as Mandarin Ducks, Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij’s film at this year’s Venice Biennale, is interesting in this respect, as it addresses the complexity of the Dutch mind-set. Maybe, their work suggests, the real enemy is inside us, and what matters is to get him out. 1. In Dutch contemporary art you come across two disparate traditions, which sometimes interact. One embraces reality, the other defies it. These tendencies are rooted in art history, they may possibly go back to Brueghel versus Bosch. Their art was fuelled, respectively, by wonder and curiosity about how people make a world and entertain bonds between them, and anger about a destructive aspect, the fact that people often have no mercy for their fellow human beings. Central to the first tradition is the documentary aspect of observing/ framing reality, asking when reality becomes a work of art; certain elements in the work of contemporary artists such as Daan van Golden, Johan van der Keuken and Marijke van Warmerdam can already be discerned in Vermeer’s paintings of the everyday. Scholars like Svetlana Alpers and curators such as

Chris Dercon have analyzed and advocated for the tendency.(1) But I’m more interested in the second, slightly obscure tradition, the obstinate one, in which artists look at Dutch reality and confront it. At the core of this tradition is a desire ‘to add fiction to what’s already there’.(2) Artists defy daily life as lived in the Netherlands. Or at least, they defy one aspect of that life: a heavy kind of materialism, a head-on, down-to-earth way of perceiving reality which leaves no space for fantasy and smothers the imagination. The mythical prototype of this obstinate mentality features a figure who stands up against his surroundings: the Flying Dutchman. The term denotes the legendary and proud skipper Van der Decken, who, because he wants to round the Cape of Good Hope, which means sailing against the prevailing storm, defies God and pledges his soul to the Devil. As a result of his rebellion he is doomed to roam the oceans forever, but he embraces this fate. Van der Decken was a guy with a temper. His countenance made an impression; 18th-century accounts describe him as an atypical Dutchman, devoid as he was of the phlegm that foreigners attributed to the Dutch. In contemporary art, the rebellious tradition is driven by an attitude that I have called the ‘Poldergeist’.(3) Superseding matter is its project. To get a picture of this entity and what it does: imagine a certain character who craves grandeur and clarity as it hovers over the absurdly orderly, fenced-around Dutch polder landscape – where once there was only brackish marshland – not unlike the destructive character with a positive disposition that Wal-

ter Benjamin described as ‘young and cheerful’. Detached from order and flatness, high in the sky, the Geist has all the space there is to entertain more lofty thoughts. This is only a fantasy, of course. But from an artistic point of view the idea corresponds to a real, critical situation, i.e. the lack of physical and, correspondingly, of mental space in the Netherlands. In our tiny country 16 million people are negotiating the space to live together. It has been remarked and experienced by others that, in our country, there is no real space for grand enterprises, either physical or imaginary. Bas Jan Ader is a perfect example of an artist who, like the anti-hero in a slapstick film, defied and denied Dutch reality. Think of the short films in which he falls out of a tree in the ‘Amsterdamse Bos’, or rides his bike into a canal. One could well argue that in these works Ader is simply trying to augment his own personal space. Another of his early works, the installation Light vulnerable objects, threatened by eight cement bricks (1970), was about an egg, a loaf of bread, a sugar cube and some other items, above which stones hung from strings, like so many swords of Damocles. This is just another picture of the weight of the material aspect of things, and of how this can crush interior life. A very Dutch picture, in a way. An attempt to list Dutch artists who connect with the rebellious tradition would result in quite a heterogeneous group, less of a clear lineage than is the case with the Dutch ‘documentary’ art. Historically, Rembrandt plays a role, his paintings show the personal imprint an artist may make on reality.

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Opinions, Analyses & Letters

Kremer

Poldergeist

The contemporary part could start in the 1930s with Mondriaan, and continue with artists from the 1960s such as JCJ Vanderheyden, who reinterpreted the abstract and elated element in the work of De Stijl, bringing it somehow back to reality. In the 1970s, conceptual artists like Bas Jan Ader, Ger van Elk and Pieter Laurens Mol came to the fore, and in the 1980s, a new generation of conceptual sculptors, among them Fortuyn/O’Brien, spoke up. Recently Joep van Lieshout, Aernout Mik, Lisa May Post, Job Koelewijn and Klaas Kloosterboer have joined them. These artists have in common a sort of brisk, intense way of seeing reality as it is, and a capacity to project alternative worlds; their fictions are often projected onto a surface or against a backdrop in which the viewer recognizes ‘what’s already there’. For example, Job Koelewijn made a beautiful work while he was living in New York in 1998, a street performance for a photo-camera. In the resulting picture we see a figure wreathed in skyscrapers. In his hands he holds a thin tower of trays and beer glasses (A Balancing Act). The fragility of his enactment points out the vulnerability of human life amidst surroundings that are only there to impress. Here, a work of art offers a true alternative to what we see before us.

ity of a Holland in crisis, and specifically into the sentiments of frustration and discontent seething beneath the surface of everyday life. At least that is the way I see it and want to discuss it. Earlier, the artists had acknowledged a kind of bi-polarity that informs their work in toto; they said the work is driven by an artistic desire for both autonomy and commitment.(4) Their film, shown in the Dutch pavilion in the Giardini, is a fiction. Unusual, as the artists are better known for the serenity and elegance of their cinematic registrations and explorations of, for instance, a mosque in Amsterdam, a garbage dump for a shanty town in Indonesia, and a carpet from the Caucasus that is in the collection of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.(5) Apparently the artists felt that a fiction film would be an apt tool for engaging with the aggravated political climate in the Netherlands, which set in after the murders of Fortuyn and Van Gogh. Their choice makes sense. Recently, a number of commentators have, indeed, even compared our mental climate to a fiction, because for a brief moment of time that climate was hysterical: in what people thought and publicly said a hitherto hidden or suppressed xenophobia and intolerance became manifest. De Rijke and De Rooij’s film portrays a group of people of different generations, without material worries, but, nevertheless, bothered by psychological ones; maybe because they have made it, or are about to make it, careerwise, but at a personal cost. One way to characterize the work’s contents is by saying that this is about the abyss of deep social space. The viewer sees a sequence of tableaux vivants

with gradual, persistent mood and atmosphere shifts. The start is light and gentle, with people sharing a soft, comfortable intimacy. But soon a tone of potential conflict is struck; this is the prelude to the psychological confrontations that take place in the central section. It all ends in a kind of déconfiture, formally inspired, or so it seems, by James Ensor’s paintings of masked figures. In an outburst of collective laughter, the physiognomy of the characters’ faces almost blends into a single grotesque mug. This hysterical moment is followed by a kind of over-all resignation, which signals the end of the story. I have not yet mentioned the setting for the film, a sparsely decorated interior, both minimal and sophisticated. One of its elements is an oriental chamber screen, showing a scene of two mandarin ducks. This is an emblem of fidelity, as these birds supposedly only have one partner throughout their whole lifetime. From the script we learn that the characters are allegories; instead of names they are referred to through qualities: pragmatism, phlegm, enigma, bitterness, materialism,... What you get from the film as a whole is that it wants to be an allegory itself, but of what exactly? Here, I’m reminded of a passage in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, where the writer, describing a salon scene which baffles him because of the parchment faces of those present, people he knew when they were much younger, finds himself thinking aloud that it reminds him of an allegory, but of what? He cannot make up his mind, so the reader thinks that what the writer sees before him must surpass all comparisons.

With its fancy lighting, stilted acting, and mannered staging, De Rijke and De Rooij’s film is emphatically ostentatious. You sense that the film wants too much to be about something, and that it does this by trying too much to be something. That is troubling. An artwork that conveys such an ambition embarrasses viewers. On the other hand, this is specifically a Dutch ‘painpoint’: that we want to be something so much that, in the process, we’ve lost view of ourselves. So here the artists are confronting something critical. Their film displays and reveals a social environment that, with its splendid order and well-proportioned aesthetics, denotes Dutch success. This is scenery in which everything above the surface is well arranged, so as to keep out the wars in the world at large. But in that very scenery there is an inner war going on under the surface, and what is at stake is no less than the Dutch soul.(6)

2. Mandarin Ducks, the much disputed film installation by Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij presented at this year’s Venice Biennale, is a work that somehow finds itself in, and re-defines the Dutch gap between the documentary and the obstinate. The artists made a work that links into the current real-

3. De Rijke and De Rooij’s artistic project is serious. It deserves to be defended, though at times it seemed to me to be too self-aware, too strategic, bringing into play what the artworld supposedly lacks (slow, read profound pictures). I have been bothered by a lack of liberty, by a sense that here we are confronted with a product, not an artists’ world. Yet, what I appreciate is their consistent professionalism and competitiveness, which is rare on the Dutch art scene, and their ambition to construct works that epitomize ultimate purity. Mandarin Ducks could turn out to be a critical work in their oeuvre, and it probably signals a change. A year

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Opinions, Analyses & Letters

Kremer

Poldergeist

(1)  Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing. Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983); ‘Dutch Reality’, Chris Dercon interviewed by Martijn van Nieuwenhuizen and Jan van Adrichem, Flash Art, 1994 no. ?, pp. 45-48. (2)  Statement by Aernout Mik in a public interview with the author, Rietveld Academy Amsterdam, October 1997. (3)  Mark Kremer, ‘Polder spirit’, cat. Klaas Kloosterboer. Shivering Emotions + Feverish Feelings (Karslruhe: Badischer Kunstverein, 2003),

pp. 138-160. (4)  Martijn van Nieuwenhuizen, ‘Art pays no attention to our definitions’, cat. Venice Biennale 2005. Jeroen de Rijke / Willem de Rooij. Dutch Pavilion (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2005), p. 11. See also ‘Las Lanzas’, Willem de Rooij’s insightful analysis of a painting by Velásquez, in Now what? Artists write! (Utrecht / Frankfurt am Main: bak basis voor actuele kunst / Revolver Verlag, 2004), pp. 159-164. (5)  Dario Gamboni, ‘Fasting on Images: Ten years of De Rijke / de Rooij’, idem, p. 54 ff.

(6)  An interesting review of the film in the context of the whole Venice Biennale was written by Adrian Searle (The Guardian, Tuesday June 14, 2005), but he missed this one. Searle commented on the title: “Maybe what the artists were really talking about was fidelity to their own reputations, and how sometimes it is necessary to move in a new direction. This in itself is … a creative necessity.” (7)  Here I follow the artists’ description, cat. Cordially Invited (Utrecht: bak basis voor actuele kunst, 2004), p. 54.

Below: Bantar Gebang, Bekasi West Java, May 2000. Courtesy of Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne.

ago, it would have been easier to define what De Rijke and De Rooij are about. In 2004, they made a work which was an artistic statement. Orange, a series of 80 monochrome slides projected in succession onto a white wall(7), refers both to the fact that most films are developed to avoid having that colour in their spectrum, as its presence in photographic material tends to turn white skin an unrealistic pink – and to the popularity of the royal House of Orange in Holland, which has grown in the last decade. This development corresponds, not surprisingly, to an increase in Dutch nationalism and conservatism. What is special about this artwork is the attempt to make a work that is both autonomous, in that it shows true colour, and political because it reflects on an alarming cultural reality. The work bridges form and content, which stands out in the Dutch art context, where there is a strong tendency to keep the categories apart. (The institutional art context, especially, has driven a wedge between form and con-

tent. The Dutch art tradition, however, is more complex; therein you will find plenty of works where form and content intertwine.) I have a friend who understands the ways of the world better than I do. Recently, he summed up how Holland is put together: there’s money [oil and gasoline], power [in our expertise in corporate tax laws], and prestige [International Court of Justice], on the one hand, and a kind of ‘tralala-culture’, on the other. People not only enjoy, but show off and celebrate their wealth in vulgar ways. No wonder some Dutch newcomers, descendants of the first generations of the socalled ‘guest-workers’ from Turkey and Morocco, who cannot find a place in this society (luckily a lot of them can and do), view what surrounds them with estrangement and bitterness. My friend went on to say that the Dutch theory about a worldwide conspiracy of extremists that led to the deaths of Fortuyn or Van Gogh is sheer bollocks. It’s simply a matter of certain people not being able at all to take part in and

thus identify with the liberal, licentious life that Dutch people project. And then there’s art. Artists who’ve been around for longer in Holland have also acknowledged the changes. Aernout Mik, for example, known for work in which what happens, happens under the skin, last year made an installation consisting of large video projections, arranged to form a closed space. In Vacuum Room a silent story is rendered, in which you follow a putsch or take-over by a group of demonstrators of what looks like the government of some exotic country, while it is in session. The protesters carry a small sculpture that looks a bit like Pim Fortuyn, their gestures seem driven by anger and frustration. In vain, or so it seems, the two groups, officials and desperados, try to find common ground. Another example is Joep van Lieshout, who, in his inimitable way, presented us with The Disciplinator, a work branching out into various components, such as a barred cage containing logs which, in an imaginary scheme for reforming people’s minds and bodies, have to be

chopped into the smallest possible bits and pieces using a tiny chisel. In fact, the idea of disciplining delinquents in labour camps, a remote descendant of the protestant belief that bodies need to be subjected to discipline so as to control desire – of course considered to be wicked (what else could it be?) – has been on the political agenda in the Netherlands on a couple of occasions. At moments like these, reality catches up with fantasies as lived in art. Suppose the omnipotence fantasy, as enacted in Van Lieshout’s art, became reality? It would be frightening. We may need works such as Mandarin Ducks so that we can face the real demons of our little country, instead of only poking fun at them. De Rijke and De Rooij were probably not motivated by the Poldergeist when making their film (I’d say its content is too sick for that), but they must have had a little help from an obstinate spirit. I can’t stress enough that it would be good to see more of this in Holland, where there is at present too much resignation. +

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Opinions, Analyses & Letters

Kremer Monthoux

Poldergeist Generals Intellectual

The writer is Professor of General Management at Stockholm University and Fellow Adjunct Professor, Centre for Art and Leadership at Copenhagen Business School.

Pierre Guillet de Monthoux

(1)  Guillet de Monthoux, P. (2004). The Art Firm: Aesthetic management and metaphysical marketing. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. (2)  Boltanski, L. & Chiapello, E. (2005). The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso. (3)  Guillet de Monthoux, P., Gustafsson, C. & Sjöstrand, S.-E., Eds. (forthcoming). AestheticLeadership: ManagingFfields of Flow in Art and Business. (4)  Virno, P. (2002). Grammaire de la multitude. Nimes: Conjunctures & L´eclat.

Intellectual Generals of General Intellect Three times we met, the artist and me. She was planning a performance, and I was to be part of it. In retrospect, perhaps I should refer to the event as an “installation” instead of a performance. But I get ahead of my story. As a scholar- or at least trying hard to be one - I was as happy as a Dutchman on a cocoa box! I had sent the artist my latest book(1) and she had called it interesting, en passant. In return she added me to her mailing list, which entitled all of us to information on her shows. My God, I thought. She certainly is active: one show in London followed by a show in Amsterdam, in Krakow, all over the place. Soon she will be a global phenomenon. Finally, despite our busy schedules, we were able to find time to meet to plan the performance. Our meeting was like a business meeting: you know, a meeting where you feel someone expects something you are supposed to deliver, something for which the client has very special expectations. Still it was not quite a business meeting. The difference between a business meeting and this somewhat strained conversation was the lack of forms, standards, and specifications. I was to be part of this artwork, or performance, or installation, and she would tell me what to do. And that was that. End of discussion. Soon we began talking about the common topic of art and business. “I like your book,” she began, “but do you realize what it means to have a recommendation from a guy from Harvard Business School on the jacket? Do you realize that your book will never be read by any serious artist?” After an appropriate silence, she went on. “I don’t agree with that kind of simple judgement, of course, but it is a fact. I know what I am talking about. I have worked in management consultancy myself. In fact, I loved that world; it

still continues to inspire my work.” She used to spend long hours in the office, she continued, gaining inspiration from the things going on around her. And always she kept her artistic work out of the business. She realized how her work as a management consultant would hamper her career as an artist. “It’s much the same way the recommendation of someone from HBS would repel most artists from even touching your book,” she pointed out. Some time later she asked me to come to the bar for a drink before the performance. I arrived and got acquainted with the team she had flown in to cover the show. There was an art critic deeply concerned with the problem of finding a spot “outside capitalism” in our time of global capitalism! A Benjamin scholar, she lived in Berlin and was a very interesting person. There was also a “facilitator” from the UK, a smart and interesting man who accompanied an artist who was to create commentary drawings during the performance. His job was to draw a huge cartoon on one of the walls of the gallery. Some local art students, obviously impressed and happy to be part of the event, completed the team. I too was delighted to be there. This was fun, I thought, although I felt a little anxious about having had no real discussion about what was to come. As nice as the meeting was, I really needed further details. No one said a thing, though, and I remembered that the only instructions I had were those she had given me at our first meeting. She had asked me to tell the audience about a case in my book, and the story she wanted me to tell was about Jacques-Louis David and his work organizing a revolutionary feast in Paris during the terror of the 1790s. I honestly don´t know what happened next. What I do know is that

I really did not want to do what she had ordered me to do. Only the devil knows for sure why, but I wanted to sing a little song instead. Seems irrational, doesn’t it? Singing a song… and I can barely carry a tune. But there I was. I said a little something and then opened my mouth and delivered my little ditty. Since the piece was not long, I don’t think people minded too much. At the beginning of the program, the critic had spoken, then I had spoken and sung, and if I remember correctly, the artists next presented, using the templates from a standard PowerPoint program. The whole program was managed by the facilitator while the draftsman drew his big cartoon in the background. Then everyone enjoyed a drink, as usual, and a very few people asked questions, also as usual. I left the session with mixed feelings, at least one worth mentioning. Why in the world did I sing my little song? Why not give this professional lady what she wanted: the story of Jacques-Louis David? Why not accept and comply with the orders of the client, who had even included a budget item to provide me with a fee for my work. Had I asked for money? I later felt badly about what I had done, but damn, it felt right at the time. As I sat in that particular environment, directed by that particular facilitator, and listening to that particular critic in quest of an Archimedean point outside what she called global capitalism, I had no choice. Jacques-Louis David, that second-rate painter turned opportunistic revolutionary, no longer was relevant. Or was he perhaps too relevant? Anyway, I had to do something other than perform as the business professor telling the story of a mediocre painter turned political activist. I am accountable. I did what I did, and I am sure I will never again be asked to

do something in an art context. Maybe I should ask the artists to perform to my business students. They would not be a terrifically good audience, though. They are slowly but surely abandoning PowerPoint aesthetics and are feeling less and less compelled to comply with a corporate culture that is eroding and disappearing. They have picked up bits and pieces of Negri and Hardt, and they agree with Boltanski’ and Chiapello’s diagnosis of project-manic neo-management sucking the aesthetic energy out of the art world.(2) They are out there in the labour market and dream of getting the protection and privileges their parents got as corporate condottieris. To the new generation seeking employment, corporate culture is at best a peregrination into rosy nostalgia. Corporate culture, with its set roles, clear cut functions, and methodological success orientation has become dusty history. Regardless of how it is defined, culture in general now constitutes the foundations for aesthetic leadership(3). Oldfashioned management, with its facilitators and PowerPoint graphics, is today best enjoyed at Putin´s Russian and Deng Xiaoping´s Chinese CadreAcademies, where the guardians of the wall between art and business defend the domain of the pure political power recently witnessed in the Chodorkovski show trial. When management, performing as the rites and religion of big business, becomes a well-documented piece in museums of contemporary art, some want to replace it with general intellect, in the service of which artists can then pretend to be Intellectual Generals. And will there really be room for more Jacques-Louis Davids in the Multitude?(4) Or shall we just forget it all and warble our guileless songs in this strange post-fordist, or better, post-corporative era. +

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Opinions, Analyses & Letters

Daneri & Giordano

The Moving Borders of Art

Serena Giordano is Professor of Visual Arts at Università di Genova. Anna Daneri is associate curator of Fondazione Antonio Ratti and teaches at Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti in Bergamo. They both live in Genoa. Translated by Simonetta Caporale and Chris Gilmour. Language editing by Mike Garner.

Anna Daneri and Serena Giordano

The Moving Borders of Art

If we went to investigate the places where the border between one country and the next unfolds, we would see nothing but earth, asphalt and vegetation: no trace of an outline. The border does not exist, you can’t see it, and it is exactly this lack of physical form which paradoxically makes it unquestionable. It is not born from the lay of the land, it is not a natural given, it is not tangible and it is not the consequence of a geological transformation. If this were the case one could remove it, as happened with the Berlin wall, and this physical destruction, tunnelling through a mountain or building a bridge, would result in its definitive elimination. It is therefore difficult to oppose something which does not physically exist, but which exists in a very concrete way in the conditioning of those who find themselves on this side or that of an imaginary line. It brings to mind the film by Louis Buñuel in which a group of rich bourgeois people at a party find themselves unable to leave. Every time they try to cross the threshold of the house something pushes them back: the doors are not locked, no one has blocked them, but something stops the guests from leaving, something which is inside each one of them. Simply, the border is nothing but a set of pre-conceived and internalised ideas which define not so much the portions of territories, but rather identities which are internal and external to that territory. Its function of exclusion and inclusion is played out through definitions of others and of self: the border between man and woman, the border between rich and poor, between Muslim and Christian, between believer and agnostic and so on. The internalisation of borders is

lematic if we look at them in a spatial way. An example: some of Turner’s seascapes, when seen from a nontemporal point of view, could be seen as examples of abstract expressionism, but from an exclusively temporal point of view they can only be placed in the field of romantic painting. As with all borders, those of the geography of art also give rise to two essential phenomena. The first is the construction of collective identities through nationalist rhetoric (movements, trends and related subversions), the second is the exclusion of anyone who does not have a precise role within the geography as defined at that time. We could say that, in order to enter each individual state, one must show an identity card, and if this card is not in order you will be excluded. Another example: let’s look at socalled Outsider art. This label brings together the mentally ill, prisoners, solitary individuals and even the questionable sub-category of “folk art” (art from places which have been defined by someone who is not familiar with them as being “exotic”). Examining this phenomenon with slightly more objective eyes, these are certainly artists just like all the others, independent of events in their private lives. They make artwork, they show in private galleries and museums, their prices can be high, they are written about. However, in order to enter the world of “normal” artists they must present a passport on which their identity as “outsider” is clearly indicated (the mad, the primitive or the naïve). The simple definition of “citizen of art” is not sufficient, in the same way that “citizen of the world” is also insufficient outside the artworld. In both cases it will be necessary to specify a sort of belong-

seen in at least two ways, which are only seemingly different. The first is the more obvious and tangible way, of those who deny others access to a defined territory, and every day, foreigners, a priori aliens, who can never be citizens of the world, clash against this brutal and absurd border. The second is more subtle, but no less damaging, and is that which separates individuals in the name of the right to difference. This unquestionable right is often used to create imaginary categories, inexistent borders and identities which belong to no one. Capturing moving borders The world of contemporary art might seem to be totally free and without borders. The languages are infinite, they mix together, and every artist can express themselves as they best see fit; through transgressions and provocations, abandoning the very idea of the artwork, or negating the condition of the artist. A world in which, apparently, there are no limits to free individual expression or to the continual re-invention of “new differences” constantly opens up new directions. We are used to reading the history of art as a series of events in chronological order, with one event a direct consequence of another. But we could also consider reading it in a dimension which is not temporal, but rather spatial, thus recreating a geography rather than a chronology. Major states which unite smaller regions bordering on each other, where border crossings by artists are strongly determined by the identity they declare. This identity is determined by a series of commonly accepted conventions, which are unquestionable if considered from a temporal point of view, but which are much more prob-

ing: a race (in the worst cases), a gender, a nationality. Only then, certified as outsiders, will the border open for these artists. Both worlds live within their own borders, and, when someone crosses over, it is not as an artist, but as a madman. Whilst the immigration of the mad into the world of “sane” art is impossible, “tourism” for “sane” artists in the world of the mad doesn’t present any problems. Madness or “socially unacceptable” behaviour can be worn by “sane” artists as a tourist might wear a garland of flowers around their neck as they step off the boat in some exotic land. This type of souvenir (think of body art and self-harming practices, for example) is much appreciated in the homeland, and the stamp in the passport won by this journey has often been very useful, as we see in the vast range of rhetoric about madness and transgression in art. As often happens outside the borders of art, in other – much more worrying – worlds, the construction of a collective identity and claiming the right to this identity leads to the construction of a terrible discrimination. The rhetoric of the excluded, the naïve, the deviant, becomes an essential ingredient for winning the right to citizenship. Presenting oneself as a simple artist and asking to be judged in terms of one’s work, keeping one’s own psychological state private, will not be enough to avoid exclusion: the border is well defined and well guarded. In considering outsider artists, we cannot talk of “self-inflicted marginalisation”, as these people are often manoeuvred by psychiatrists and specialised critics, but there can also be cases in which the artists do consent: consider the last Venice Biennale. This was an

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Opinions, Analyses & Letters

Daneri & Giordano

The Moving Borders of Art

exhibition which, starting with the female curators, saw a substantial female contribution. Some of the artists stated that they accepted the invitation only because of the female curatorship, and a small female state was brought into existence. Like all small states this had its own rhetoric, well represented by, for example, the group Guerrilla Girls. This female collective, from the inside, states their objection to exclusion, but there is more to it. It is exactly this being excluded which makes them more attractive, and therefore included. The construction of a collective identity allows them to have a type of nationality (dangerously close to the idea of “race”, given that they proclaim themselves to be supporters of the rights of ethnic minorities). These two examples (outsiders and women) are, respectively, examples of the two objectives of the nationalist rhetoric of the “united states of art”. The first defines the exclusion of the foreigner, the stranger, the second defines inclusion, made possible by the construction of the borders of a minor state of female art, which groups together a range of different citizens (the artists) under the flag of the so-called “female-specific”. The internal organisation of these minor states is like that of a constitutional monarchy, in which a number of art historians play the roles of the king and queen, without power, but essential as representative icons; while critics play the part of true leaders of government with full powers. Furthermore, critics are the unquestionable strategists and geographers of art. They re-draw borders, decide the laws and re-invent the behaviour and identity of their citizens: movements and currents which exist in a more or less

peaceful and agreed state of permanent war. The patriotism of art has nothing to do with the anachronistic divisions of the Venice Biennale based on countries, but with other concepts which are just as much of a pretext – conceptual, post-expressionist, transavant-garde, non-expressionist, and so on – rearranging an atlas “artfully” drawn up by critics. And it is critics, in exchange for protecting their citizens, that gain consensus and space, thus becoming “the artists of art”. Critics organise their armies, they choose generals and recruit soldiers, but even in the artworld there are forms of “conscientious objection”:

the will of the critics, despite understanding the essential function they play in promoting work for the market. They have not been collective revolutionaries, but individuals, and the most notable is without a doubt Andy Warhol. Simultaneously playing all the parts (critic of himself and artist) Warhol founded “Warholand”, a free state inside the territory of Pop art, politically autonomous and governed exclusively by himself. Like all absolute rulers, Warhol declared war on the countries which he saw as too powerful (abstract expressionism), was hated and feared by foreign enemies (the critics), had many internal enemies (those who described him as cynical and cruel), was loved by others for his generosity (Warhol promoted many artists through his Factory). The following text illuminates what was his clear-sighted revolutionary project from the start:

On that afternoon in 1960, Warhol hadn’t yet painted anything. The canvases were white and the tubes of paint unopened. Warhol the artist had not even started to work, but Warhol the critic was already active. Warhol didn’t know what he was going to paint, but he knew he was going to “start Pop art”, “thinking of something different”. Since then, the borders have changed and re-formed many times and the minor states have multiplied under the influence of a few “superpowers” who decide on their selection and production. We have passed through the cold war between conceptual and new-figurative, which, like all wars, had not been decided on by the citizens (the artists), but by those who redefine the borders (the critics). It is they who created “war propaganda”, which on both sides painted the enemy in simplistic terms, at times resorting to genuine smear campaigns, criminalising the other side with strong words. These battles often used outdated categories and schemes which we thought were consigned to the past. Ideas such as the supremacy of painting (for which Michelangelo criticised Leonardo long ago) or the necessity to expand artistic activity to the real world (as if it was not part of the real world). And we as citizens (and we hope also those who read this) do not recognise ourselves in nationalist rhetoric. In the same way, although they may be in the power of the politics of art which grants or denies their right to citizenship, artists too work in a dimension in which, fortunately, there is still a degree of autonomy. +

“Although these festival (Fluxus) represented the first major public platform for our work we where all at odds with George Maciunas when he tried to organise us into a group, with a common strategy and aesthetic.He himself stood out as the most amazing, self-con-tradictory mixture of neo-Dadaism and Leninism.He tried manifestos. We all disagreed. He tried to create unity. We all disobeyed. He wanted to appoint us ambassadors of Fluxus. Everyone disassociated. But we where at the same time rather amused by his innumerable slogan, diagrams designed to show the true connection and all the other propaganda material that gushed from him.” (Eric Andersen, “What is?” in Sandra Solimano (ed.), The Fluxus Constellation, Neos.e, Genova 2002, p. 27.) Anderson’s independent behaviour, and that of many other famous personalities connected with Fluxus, could be the expression of a small revolt, but we can also find genuine revolutions in contemporary art, where some artists have refused to submit to

In 1960 Leonard Kessler met Warhol coming out of an art shop with paint and canvases. “What are you doing, Andy?” he asked. Without blinking, Andy, answered: “I’m going to start Pop art”. “Why?” asked Kessler. “Because I hate abstract expressionism, I hate it!” answered Andy. A few weeks later, while Ted Carrey was expressing his admiration before a Rauschenberg collage at the Museum of Modern Art, Andy spat out: “This is nothing, it’s a piece of shit!” Carey replied: “If you really think it’s all advertising, and that anyone could do it, why don’t you do it?” And he answered: “Huh! I have to think of something different”. (Victor Bockris, Andy Warhol, Leonardo Paperback, 1991, page 111, Translated from Italian.)

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“You Are the Eyes of the World”

the Art Object 1966-72. Now Tucker draws forth, from relative obscurity, an extraordinary artist, Tehching Hsieh, and his heroic performances, few, but all the more intense. During twenty years, from 1979 to 1999, Hsieh executed five mind-blowing one-year long performances. Hsieh’s activities can be seen in the light of the more eccentric Siddhas and Zen masters of the past – or of our own Diogenes (who lived in a barrel) for that matter. Tucker is followed by Laurie Anderson, who finds herself in Greece, contemplating at the foot of the Acropolis. “Why, by the way, do the archaic Greek statues smile so much like Buddhas?”, she asks and goes on musing about things her mind brings up on Zen, suffering, the Greeks and dramas. The most relevant essay for me, however, is by Kay Larson, an art critic for the New Yorker magazine and recently for the New York Times. Her essay Shaping the Unbound. One Life. One Art takes off prophetically with a quotation from the great Mahayana vision, the Flower Ornament Sutra. In it the Buddha has just reached Enlightenment – the ultimate freedom – and ponders over how to act in the world, now that there is no Ego or business to indulge in anymore. Larson quotes Robert Thurman, the charismatic Buddhist professor of Columbia University: “Everything He (the Buddha) does…every breath he draws, every gesture he makes, every word the Buddha speaks, is an artistic manifestation… a communication of compassion to other beings, creating doorways to open up their imagination, and then their whole beings, to enlightenment to Nirvana.” And Thurman goes on, saying: “You have to present Nirvana first as a work of Art, and that allows people to perceive it, and opens up the possibility that they can experience it for themselves…” From this, Larson brings her

essay to the central themes of Western art: the views of Romanticism, self expressionism, attempts at transcendence and so on. She focuses mainly on Duchamp, John Cage, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, but also on Louise Bourgeois (whom I have never thought of in Buddhist terms). The major surprise of the book comes from the Chinese art historian Tosi Lee, who is based in Taiwan. He continues along Larson’s line, but presents a new chapter for Duchamp by putting forth another interpretation of his art. Lee focuses on Duchamp in the mirror of Kuan Yin/ Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. As fantastic as this interpretation may seem to some Westerners, Dr. Lee gives ample proof of his view by showing that it is quite possible that Duchamp knew Buddhism already during the Dada years. Buddhist texts were translated into French early in the 20th century; it seems obvious that the Dadaists were aware of Zen; Duchamp’s friend Brancusi read Milarepa all his life; Frantisek Kupka practised Buddhism; there was the Musee Guimet. In 1912 Duchamp saw, according to Lee, a huge Buddhist exhibition in Munich. Later Duchamp said that it was in Munich that he achieved complete liberation. Lee focuses on how the element of water figures in Duchamp’s works, in relation to Kuan Yin, who is often depicted with a water vase. The bodhisattva Avalokitesvara/Kuan Yin is looking down, with compassion on all beings who are suffering. Lee sees something of this also in Duchamp’s enigmatic version of Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q (1919), which according to Lee can mean “LOOK”. Mona Lisa can thus be seen as Avalokitesvara in disguise, or just another manifestation of the Bodhisattva. Why not! In some texts, such as Eleanor Rosch`s contribution, there is a dan-

“YOU ARE THE EYES OF THE WORLD”(*) Review by Jan-Olof Mallander Buddhist thinking has been of great importance for artists and philosophers in the West for some hundred years, but it is only in the last 40 years that it has taken root and started to flourish in the United States and Europe. It is estimated that there are currently some three million Buddhists in the West, and many more sympathise with its views and values. Thus, Buddhist influences have become ever more pervasive in many aspects of contemporary Western culture. Consequently the stream of publications about Buddhism is growing every year. One of the most recent is Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (2005), edited by Jacquelynn Baas, Director Emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Mary Jane Jacob, Professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an independent curator. In the field of the arts, the book is a pioneer and thus a very timely and welcome project. This multi-faceted volume is heavy not only by the sheer virtue of its mass (almost 300 pages), but also by the knowledge and information it offers about the relationship between Buddhist practice and contemporary art. The book consists of articles by 12 writers and interviews with 12 artists. In her introductory essay, the chief editor Jacquelynn Baas interestingly weaves a kind of Mandala around Marcel Duchamp, who emerges in the book as the main “Bodhisattva”. Mary Jane Jacob, in turn, raises a number of important themes and views on current art practices to create a frame for the artists presented in her interviews. Among the essays, one of the most contemplative and enjoyable is Upper West Side Buddhism by Arthur Danto, who weaves together his philosophical wanderings and reflections with what was going on in the art world in New York, starting with the early 1950s and the lectures of D. T. Suzuki at Colum-

bia University (which Danto attended, along with such figures as John Cage, Philip Guston and Ibrahim Lassaw). Among the key figures is J.D. Salinger, whose Catcher in the Rye (1951) mesmerised many of us in the 1960s. Among its many tones there is also a tone of Zen. And now Danto brings up the possibility that Salinger, too, attended Suzuki’s lectures. A guiding image for Danto’s essay is a Japanese print by Kuniyoshi, showing Nichiren going into exile. One of Robert Rauschenberg’s often quoted statements is how he “tries to act in the gap between Art and Life”. In his article, Mark Epstein, a Jewish psychiatrist in New York, whose texts appear regularly in Buddhist magazines, such as Tricycle and Shambala Sun, takes up the interrelating of art, psychotherapy and Buddhist views of the world: “Much of the excitement about Buddhism in therapeutic and art-making circles has to do with this: both artists and psychoanalysts have to find their own path into a state of in-between attention. --- Buddhism knows, and can teach, the way; and has some important things to say about what to do when You get there”. One of his cases is Basho´s well-known haiku about the frog, which jumped into the pond – plop! Also Marcia Tucker’s text has very much to say in this context. She knows the art scene very well having worked as an art critic, as well as a curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the director of the New Museum in New York. Her text confirms that the mid-sixties was indeed a very creative time in New York’s art world, and that many key insights, attitudes, orientations and ways of making art that emerged in the 1960s are actually still in full swing today. Tucker does us a great service by bringing up this historical paradigm shift, reminding us, for instance, of Lucy R. Lippard’s classic book The Dematerialisation of

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The writer is an artist, curator and writer based in Helsinki. He practices Buddhism in the Tibetan Longchen Nyingthig tradition. In the 1990s he was the editor for a Buddhist magazine Tiikerin silmä (The Tigers Eye). In 1993 he made a film In the realm of the Lotus together with Sangaharshita, an English Buddhist master. As an artist he is best known for his series of outdoor brick installations To the Pure Land from 1983-2003. Language editing Tomi Snellman.

Mallander

“You Are the Eyes of the World”

Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob (eds.), Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, The University of California Press, 2004, 264 pages.

(*)  A title of a book by Longchcenpa, a Tibetan Master from1308-1363.

ger, though. When Buddhism is incorporated into other fields of knowledge or discipline, the central insight, the Buddha mind, becomes diluted, misused or gets lost altogether .What we get is a lot of “aboutism” instead . An example here is the restless stream of words, supposedly on “engaged Art” and “engaged Buddhism” that only succeeds in conjuring up a lot of confusion, grasping at straws everywhere, as it does, reaching for substance where there is none. May the author find peace in her mind. Carol Becker’s essay Intimate, Immediate, Spontaneous, Obvious: Educating the Unknowing Mind is in turn sympathetically subjective, and also educational - in spite of its conformist tone. “Once people live with and in this state of ambiguity, they can glimpse an idea as it approaches without being certain what exactly is coming towards them. They learn to let the idea reveal itself as it chooses, and when it chooses. As painters say, they ‘let the painting talk to them’. This process requires both trust and receptivity,” Becker points out. Linda V. Bamber’s Reading as a Buddhist rounds off the first part of the book with some sharp close reading of important poets, such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and a more recent one, Mark Halliday. Through analytic reading her intense essay brings their texts alive, almost reading the minds of these poets. Every artist’s horror, I guess. But Buddhist meditation may develop these abilities, too... -------------------Among the artists’ interviews, one of the most interesting is the one conducted with the performance artist Marina Abramovic, whose groundbreaking Night Sea Crossing-Conjunction (1983, together with Ulay) Here the artist briefly tells her story, dwell-

ing on some recent projects and their relationship to Buddhist ideas. Examples in the interview are The House with the Ocean View (2002) made after September 11th (in response to it) and At the Waterfall (2002), a huge video triptych with the heads of 120 Tibetan monks chanting and praying in chorus. Another artist from the same era is the video artist Bill Viola, who matured in the transformative atmosphere of the 1960s, already then taking up meditation and reading Buddhist books. But it was in Japan in 1980 that Viola encountered the living tradition of Buddhism and met his Zen master, a slightly eccentric man, who is also an artist. Ananda Coomaraswamy’s books have also had a profound effect on Viola’s artistic development. Viola began to study Western spiritual art, of which his recent work Five Angels for the Millennium (2003) manifests a lot. A big surprise for me is the Cuban-born artist Ernesto Pujol, who has spent many years of his youth as a Trappist monk gaining transcendence there. Later he converted to Buddhism. His talk has the ring of authenticity, which is rare nowadays. Sanford Biggers, an Afro-American artist, is quite a special case. He grew up with jazz, indulging also in break-dance and hip-hop, from where he got on the cross-cultural wagon, and also into the art world. Biggers became involved in Buddhism during a sojourn in Japan in the 1990s. The book presents his performances, one including a great number of temple bells, another break-dance on Mandala forms, on the floor. He brings up the issue of Buddha mind in jazz music, which is an interesting point. Improvisation is a direct way to the Nature of Mind, and some excellent jazz musicians, such as Wayne Shorter and Don Cherry, are accordingly practising Buddhists. It will be interesting

to see where Bigger’s activity will take him. Kimsooja’s back, with her long black tuft of hair hanging down, has been seen in numerous art exhibitions worldwide. There is a certain sense of homelessness in her Needlewoman, who is walking around with a sack of clothes on her back, biblically “being in the world, but not living of (or for) it” … In the interview with Jacob Kimsooja, however, talks about her experiences which definitely carry Buddhist views, too. Some of the most sublime images in the book are from Michael Rotondi’s and Hirokasu Kosaka’s architecture project The Verandah: Art, Buddhism, Presence (2003).In the interview, Rotondi talks about processes and the complex (and often painful) thinking and labour that planning a building involves. Interestingly, when Lord Buddha achieved Supreme Enlightment, one of the utterances he made was: “Now I know how the house is built”! In his youth Lee Mingwei was trained in the tradition of Cha´n Buddhism in Taiwan, but when his monastery was burned down in the 1970s, he emigrated to the United States. There Mingwei began to study in a Catholic school, but concentrated later on biology, architecture and textile design. His interview can be seen as excellent proof of how smoothly an open and clear Buddhist mind works in various environments and spheres of human life. It is also a sane reminder of how naturally many creative processes unfold when the mind is in harmony, the senses refined, and the being open to the world around. “I seek to make work that is a sincere and honest reflection of my interior world, either with a Buddhist theme or not,” he says, with a remarkable innocence that pervades his whole work. This quality is in sharp contrast to some of the other contributors to the book.

Some of them seem to me to be just hopelessly and neurotically reflecting on today’s rat race in the artworld. Maybe their art displays some true insights, but as Sogyal Rinpoche points out, “their lives remain confused”. I fail to find anything of ‘Buddhist’ value in the interviews with Ann Hamilton or Ann Carson, and am wondering why they are included in this context. Neither can I find a reason to include ‘Smartist’ Rirkrit Tiravanija. His selfserving posturing in the interview is rather distasteful. The bungalows he built in Thailand seem especially grotesque in the atmosphere after the tsunami catastrophe. The oddest one to me in this context, however, is Mariko Mori. Her fancy visions have a lot of charm, and without doubt appeal to arty people of today. Her sweet visions seem here, however, slightly escapist; a kitschy Never never land… Supersamsara! But on the other hand, “Nirvana is not different from Samsara”, the realised ones say. The tour-de force of this book, the one who really hits home, is Zhang Huan. His performances are both heroic and cathartic, as well as being supremely dramatic. Huan’s interview can be read like preaching by Dogen or some Tibetan lama, such as Chögyam Trungpa (whose views are lurking behind some texts). The editors are to be congratulated for including Zhang Huan; the world needs this! Yvonne Rand’s glossary of Dharma terms is useful for readers who are interested in Buddhist views and maybe want to find out for themselves what the Buddha mind really is: “Awake fully, seeing things as they are”. Hopefully this important and groundbreaking book will find many readers and thus contribute to the transformation of our culture towards an enlightened society. Artists are important in this work. I wish this book a long life: Om mani padme hum! +

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framework News contents 4/Dec 2005: Global Watch Finnish Artists Abroad 2005-06: Picks In Brief Biennials and Residencies Calendar

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Introduction

Global Watch Global Watch comments on international events. This issue includes three reviews: Denise Robinson (London) takes a look at the 51st Venice Biennale and Mika Hannula (Helsinki/Berlin) at the 9th Istanbul Biennia, both widening their approaches also to the biennial phenomenon at large; the latter also analyzes the recent exhibition Making Things Public. Atmosphären der Demokratie, curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel for ZKM Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe, Germany. In addition, Heie Treier (Tallin) discusses with Sirje Helme, Director of KUMU, the new art museum in Tallin that will open to the public in mid-February 2006.

Otto Karvonen, Fish With Convictions, 2005, performance at the Kuopio market hall, during ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival in Kuopio, Finland, in September 2005. A large selection of fish representing different faiths – Buddhist, Christian, Taoist, Jewish, Hindu and Islamic – was on sale at the fish market for two days. The work led local people shopping for fish to face new questions. What similarities and differences do fish with various convictions have? Or how to put together a balanced and peaceful meal out of this pluralistic selection?

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51st Venice Biennale

Denise Robinson is an independent writer and curator based in London.

Denise Robinson

51st Venice Biennale “What’s in a Name”

The Venice Biennale carries with it the weight of the highly managed representation of its history. Other biennials throughout the world have often mimicked the Venice Biennale in some regard, and in their initiating stages were often defined in relation to it. We need to consider though that while the Venice Biennale continues to gain in amplitude, Venice itself, the city through which this history has been woven, recedes. Each Venice Biennale also declares itself as a distinctive project within the trajectory of its history.  For instance, the 2005 biennial in Venice was publicized, in the main, as the first Biennale curated by women; two women, in fact (and two separate catalogues) - |Rosa Martinez and Maria de Corall. Why, then, in taking up this place to speak did the curators  refuse to articulate a position or perspective, both in terms of the collective potential of the works - which is after all what curated exhibitions are - and in their written texts in the catalogues? Maria de Corral, who curated the Italian pavilion with The Experience of Art, writes in the exhibition catalogue: ”The Experience of Art’ is not intended as a closed discussion on current art but as an open place where the desire to exchange experiences, ideas, reflections, and to provoke them, can be fulfilled. I would like the labyrinthine path through the Italian Pavilion to be seen not as a finished story, but as a process defined in terms of relations between different subject, forms, ideas and spaces, more like a centre of research, that there are no certainties”.  This is a vague text that negates desire, but is not without meaning. For perhaps what guides this resistance to speak is the shadow of a question deemed impossible: What is at stake in this selection of the works of artists? Who and what does it serve? For some reason, Corral considers that any such questions might create “resistance to the idea of pleasure in contemporary art”.

Amongst the forty artists in this exhibition, there is clearly work that engages with the question of what might be at stake in the work’s production. The film/installation  of Chen Chiehjen presents, a strange eulogy, both for, and in collaboration with, women now discarded from their source of survival in Taiwan’s textile industry, while EijaLiisa Ahtila persistently scours the surfaces of technology for a means to address the real; – in the sense that Lacan would have it, the real is the missed encounter. This address to the real is also present in Stan Douglas’ filmic, narrative interventions into the underbelly of race.  Maybe there is something significant to be said about figuration and painting with the inclusion of Phillip Guston, Marlene Dumas and Francis Bacon in this collection of works, but then the work could all simply have been a part of the curatorial rationale to include ‘another generation of artists’. A gesture that can also embrace amongst others, Cildo Meireles, Jenny Holzer etc. More, importantly, and of greater interest is the territory of ‘pleasure’,  indicated by Corral as significant, then emptied of its potential through her reactionary approach, and therefore absent in the realization of the exhibition. The curator, however, somehow seems to think that the artists all survive this context – and the threat of globalization – through their ‘personal aesthetic universe’ –  they don’t. In fact, Corral is speaking against the work of artists in this exhibition. Her inclusion of the work of Bruce Nauman’s, Shit in Your Hat, Head on a Chair (1990), provides some idea of what the gap between the work and the curator’s’ compilation of the exhibition might be.  In Nauman’s sculptural transformation of the screened image, a retroprojection shows a clown who performs as auditory instructions: a scathing application of performative speech - distilled to the range of a few repeated words – and ending with the tragi comic action

leading to the clown’s mimicking the act of placing her head in her own shit. Nauman is offering us an encounter with the speech act and it’s not simply a chance to examine our willingness comply, with its humiliating result, but the implications of the gaps that the limits of speech opens up for us all. The clown potentially stands in for us – dumb, but ‘acting out’.  The insertion of ‘shit’ into this ‘routine’ absorbs what would have been our laughter. The moulded head on a chair that hangs down between us and the screened figure of the clown is both brutal joke and an act of empathy? Whatever it is it disturbs the purity of any form and as such it could just as easily be included in Rosa Martinez’ curated exhibition, Always a Little Further. Rosa Martinez’ contribution to the Venice Biennale was a lost opportunity, with a facile approach to a loaded discursive field: ‘transgression’.  At one level the curation included the banal work of Centre of Attention, who presented us, with their proposal to select music we would like to hear at our own funeral, and then to lay down and listen to it - coming across more like a refused script for a reality TV show than as the high seriousness with which they offer this work. This work was set against the highly charged interventions of the beautiful, queer subversions of designer, and performer Leigh Bowery, no facile reference to death here - work that risks tracing death in life. Here presented and contextualised – in the absence of the ‘performers’ who would otherwise be inextricably sutured to these ‘designs’ – with clumsy mannequins. Their grace and impact is destroyed. The luscious, large scale photographs of Fergus Greer were enough.  The Gorilla Girls as was the first work to be encountered in the exhibition, offered the possibility that this exhibition may just be a taking a risk that is necessary: addressing something in

excess of the market, possibly a reverie on activism, politics, or psychosis, even. It didn’t, and in relation to Martinez’s silence on the issue of transgression, it is not enough to quote Pascal in this situation: “If I had more time, my text would be shorter.”. The hesitation to elaborate a critical framework or a perspective is everywhere in both the exhibition and in Martinez’s text: “In this constant struggle, confronting and adapting to political, economic and administrative constraints is a major part of the game, because an exhibition is also a ‘product’ launched into the marketplace to compete with other similar products ... Curating an exhibition is living the romantic illusion of creating a temporary world, it is exercising the power to name and map artistic trends, and it is also an essay in the creation of meaning, critically reordering the unending chaos of messages”. Such confused writing harbours a disturbing level of self- censorship and an equally disturbing reluctance to challenge ‘the game’. What is it that is not being said? Samuel Beckett, too, is included in this exhibition. Yet, where Martinez is concerned with not failing, ‘failure is impossible’, Beckett’s work, on the contrary, advocates the productive force of failure: “I gave up before birth, it is not possible otherwise, but birth there had to be...it’s impossible I should have a voice.” (From For to End Yet Again, John Calder Publishers, London, 1975. p43) Of the pavilions, the selection of Jonas Mekas for Lithuania for his exhibit Celebrations Of The Small And Personal In The Times Of Bigness was to prove amongst the best and most curious. Mekas, the now much- adored lifelong archivist of experimental and independent film in New York since the 60’s, has his work here literally embedded within an archive one that in-

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Below: Pipilotti Rist, Homo sapiens sapiens, 2005, video installation, installation view from the San Stae Church in Venice. Photo by Elena Tondello.

cludes a return to his ‘home’. This ‘return’ is, importantly, far more ambivalent than the nostalgia wielded to manipulate the lives of the many in the diasporas: those that have been torn from any possibility of ‘home’. Mekas’ exhibition was delicate and incommensurable, yet surprisingly, Mekas insists on speaking of purity. The brilliant Jack Smith, 60’s filmmaker and scintillating critic –  who battled with Mekas all those years ago over the screening right of  (Smith’s) film Flaming Creatures –  would re-ignite his corrosive, beautiful voice from beyond on hearing Mekas’ comments: “I consider too much attention is given today in the arts to dramatization and to psychological and other perversions.”.  Such is the ‘life’ in the archive. Of the many other pavilions, the ‘Latin American’ pavilion titled The Weft and the Warp,  and commented on as, ‘the art of our continent’ remains – as in the past – a shameful collapsing of the radical political, historical, cultural, and psychic differences amongst those cultures  contained by this term: political, historical, cultural, psychical, their singularity – (their becoming – )  and, their means of negotiating identity therefore are all defined by and drawn into eurocentric projections. For all of the effects of ‘globalization’, in this regard nothing has changed in terms of the nationalist agenda on which the Venice Biennale was founded, while raising questions as to the failure of the curated exhibitions to deal with this context. As one of the many projects outside of the dynamic of the pavilions and curated exhibitions, Pipilotti Rist’s Homo sapiens sapiens at Chiesa

51st Venice Biennale

Next page: Servet Koçyiğit, Blue Side Up, 2005, installation: mixed media. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Muammer Yanmaz.

San Stae, Santa Croce  had us stepping away from the canal and into the potentially troubling silence of the meeting of the sacred and profane. This was not a meditation; but it is something else; on the ceiling was a precisely calibrated film projection – a filmed fresco – with its illusion of permanency reinforced by being precisely contained within the parameters of the architectural features. The image projected was a prismatic, rendition in which two women, ‘Eve-like’, fragment and reconfigure within paradise. In the spaces of the church below,  polished orbs provide fish-eye lens views of the entire space, suturing together the projection and the beholders who gaze at these ‘new Eve’s’ from supine positions on soft mattresses. A question remains as to whether the realm of the eidetic we experience here, creates the frisson that it should in the context of the ‘sacred’.  The work had the feature of being both a mimicry and a transplantation as it formed its temporary new skin. In this sense, the work was not unlike Barbara Kruger’s ‘new skins’; her billboards that are literally stretched throughout cityscapes, both a critique and embedded in the formations of mass media. Kruger’s work sits within the realm of the problem of the very communicability of the media’s ability to communicate. This communicability has another face, as Agamben notes, via Debord: one where “humans (are) separated by what unites them”.  Kruger’s mural on the front of the Italian Pavilion missed its mark in this regard.  As part of   The Experience of Art,  her lettering filled the facade with “poteri”, “soldi”, and “money”, “power”, and “God is on Our Side” –

better cited/sited, I think, on the cusp of the commerce of the sacred already buried within the cityscape of Venice. Another reach into the sacred was the Gregor Schneider’s site work - and part of Always A Little Further: his plan to build, in St. Mark’s Square, a copy of the Kaa’ba; the most sacred holy site for Muslims, located in Mecca.  There was a kind of quiet embarrassment at the work not being realized, and no clear idea of precisely what occurred. Though it was not unsurprising that this work was thwarted, the bland tone of ‘official’ explanation, also reflected in the curator’s comments at the press conference, meant that the meaning of its failure was lost. Given the apparently unresolvable interaction between what has become ‘Venice’ for the Venice Biennale, it is worth considering the 9th Istanbul Biennale in 2005 for its encounter with the its city, albeit a city of an entirely different kind. ‘Istanbul’, largely determined by the narratives of location; on the ‘edge’ of Europe and Asia and on the threshold of its recent history of internal suppression, also fuels the debates on the city’s relationship to the EU along with the implications of that relationship. Titled ‘ Istanbul’ the Biennale immediately distinguishes itself, and is far removed from, the Venice Biennale’s, ‘Venice’. The cover of the catalogue/guide is a black and white, documentary photograph of a view of the city that sweeps up the city’s precincts in an image that has no place within the narratives that would otherwise overwhelmingly determine and reduce the identity of Istanbul as exotic. The minarets of Istanbul’s famously exquisite mosques cannot be seen on

this skyline; The image doesn’t ‘privilege’ any aspect, its almost banal in this sense, in a city now continually under the force of the ‘civilizing influences’ of urban development, and its within this representation of Istanbul that the Istanbul Biennale venues were located; for the duration of the Biennale, these venues, momentarily stood in for, ‘Istanbul’. All of which allowed the Istanbul Biennale its highly effective realization. There were few of the major commercial galleries here, and none of the large productions by artists that proliferate in the International scene, but there was a productive, almost tender encounter between the works this city. A question remained for me as to why it is that a consideration of the political is deemed separate from the unconscious in such an encounter. Also by splitting one publication containing essays only, from the publication that referred to the work of artists only in the form of a ‘guide’, is almost suggestive of the idea that the art works are the unconscious, ‘unspeakable’, and the publication the rational context. The inclusion of some works that operate in the fantasized realm of a transparent social projects also at times incorporated the rationalist very logic of the State – that ‘Istanbul’ critiqued. It is possibly because of the visibility of these contradictions and the declared tension between culture and politics – and the psychosis of any city – that unlike the Venice Biennale, a form of pleasure was produced in this encounter with ‘Istanbul’. It is only left now to jettison the term ‘Biennale’ from the name. “Old earth, no more lies, I’ve seen you.”  (Samuel Beckett). +

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New Hope for the Dead

Next page: Pilvi Takala, Women in Kahves, 2005, six-channel video installation, 0’54, 1’53, 2’12, 2’23, 3’02. Courtesy of the artist.

The writer is Professor for Art in Public Space at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, and one of the organizers of the Lost in Translation workshop and exhibition by international art academies that was part of the Positioning program at The 9th International Istanbul Biennial in 2005. Language editing Mike Garner.

Mika Hannula

New Hope for the Dead 9th International Istanbul Biennial Gives a Necessary Boost to an Old Concept

International contemporary art biennials have a problem. It is, in fact, a huge problem. They have a problem with both their credibility and their legitimacy. Obviously, all biennials are distinct, individual cases, contextualized by their site and its economic, political and cultural history, but nevertheless, all biennials share the same dilemma. They face the same challenge: how to cope with the question of quality. The problem of quality is partly connected with the mushrooming of international biennials. When every city in the world needs a biennial so as not to feel sorry for itself, something has gone badly wrong. But an even more important issue is the quality of each individual biennial exhibition. It is not just the biennial as all-around, all-encompassing exhibition concept that is in trouble, and it is not just specific sites as ongoing biennial locations that are in great need of re-articulation and self-reflection. The problem comes down to the quality of each specific exhibition that comes under the ubiquitous biennial label. But what do we mean by quality with reference to international biennials? How can we define it, or even get closer to some kind of working conception of it? In what follows, I will analyse certain central structural elements of biennials. My aim is to analyse both the underlying presuppositions and also how it might be possible to alter them – if only slightly or tentatively. I will end with an example of a biennial that has

at least taken a much-needed turn towards content-driven processes for defining what quality is through praxis. The analysis starts off with the well-known fact that biennials take place every second year. This already allows me to bring in the main difficulty embedded in biennials. This is about time. How to construct it, how to manage it, and how to live up to the implicit expectations. One way of putting one’s finger where it hurts is to say it out loud, simple and clear. Speed kills. And speed kills not only on highways, but very much so within the practices of contemporary culture, especially when curating contemporary art events. One of the main problems is the one-off character of biennials. As long as every newly appointed curator tries to reinvent the wheel again and again, there is no way out of this self-made misery. A misery that nowadays seems to take on bizarre dimensions. The Nordic pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2005 must rank high on this peculiar list. When nothing else comes to mind, the exclusivity and inventiveness are emphasised by the act of removing the glass walls of a building. Some call this institutional critique, some call it utter confusion. There is a rather conventional answer to the dilemma regarding time. The comprehension necessary for more long-term planning and more longterm construction of expectations and possibilities is achieved by giving the event a clearly stated coherence and

continuity. I am not longing to return to the solution in which a single person or a group of persons puts on the same event for many years in succession. When referring to coherence and continuity, I am talking about the content, not the personalities. But where does the content come from? Or asked in another way: what gives shape and structure to the content of international biennials? The answer is obviously the context in which it takes place. This is an incredibly easy equation. If and when the only identity that an event has is that it is just an international biennial, then there is no chance of it producing anything other than just more of the same. However, if and when a given biennial is constantly in search of its own particular identity, things all of a sudden seem much more interesting. The difference is telling, and it is crucial. Borrowing from Miwon Kwon’s vocabulary, instead of biennials at site A just happening one after another, the task is to shape them so that they happen next to one another. Of course, the question of reference can easily be constructed as an interior conversation between works of art or artists. This smells like serious trouble, because it forces efforts too far into the navel gazing of art-forart’s sake. I am confident that content can be confronted and chased out of its hiding place using a different strategy. It is a question of how a given context is defined. This year’s Istanbul Biennial, the

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9th in succession, offers a very informative case study. In itself it is not yet providing any reasonably long term answers to the common biennial dilemma, but it proves to be a fantastic example, a fabulous alternative version of how biennials can be run. In the case of this exhibition, curated by Charles Esche and Vasif Kortun, the context is constructed with the focus on its specific locality. The curators have cut the corners so effectively that the title of the exhibition reflects their minimal yet powerful choice of route. The title is Istanbul. I think it is an unfortunate mistake to take any contextualization too literally. Many commentators and visitors to Istanbul were puzzled, asking what this or that work of art has to do with Istanbul. Contextualizing a contemporary art biennial mainly through the physical and mental entity of a city would be extremely naïve. A biennial is about contemporary art, not about traffic problems in any given city on earth. Thus, in the biennial, Istanbul is taken as a framework that guides and structures the definition of the context for the event itself. It is not about Istanbul an sich, but about how this extremely unique and generous megalopolis can provide both a point of reflection and a kind of trampoline for addressing and confronting the central issues within this particular field called contemporary art. It serves as a helping hand, not as an end result. The curators’ strategy for framing

the exhibition was to situate the venues in the core of the city space. The exhibition sites were mainly located in the Beyoglu and Galata areas. All the venues were within walking distance of each other. When I say walking that does not mean that the venues were easy to find or that you did not have to struggle to get there. But getting lost and sweating like a pig are a part of this particular context. This is part of the game of Istanbul during the late summer season. There is no point in fighting it. All you can do is to try to cope with it, try to survive with it. The next step in the contextualization of this year’s Istanbul Biennial event is the focus adopted for choosing the artists. This is a combination of a little of bit of this and that from here and there with a strong emphasizes on the neighbouring countries and regions, especially the Middle East. This again, along with the city itself, gives the biennial a specific character. It creates the necessary engagement, allowing the event to grow to become something other than just the sum of its parts. The next step after the regional focus is something that is a bit tricky. The curators called it the “just enough” strategy, which does not refer to their lack of motivation or their desire to do as little as possible. “Just enough” in the Istanbul Biennial refers to the way the exhibition sites are dealt with. The concept was not to fight against the temporary locations, for example, an old tobacco factory or an uninhabit-

ed apartment building. They did not want to camouflage the sites into being white cubes. The locations were staged so that just enough was done in order for the works to get the attention and respect they deserve. Finally, the fourth step in the process of contextualizing the event was taken in the act of opening the main occasion to a lot of different quests. The aim was to include, not to exclude. This year’s biennial did not hysterically guard its own territory. The curators wanted to use the main event as a kind of large umbrella, under which numerous parallel projects, called Positionings, could take place. They created a Hospitality Zone on the second floor of the main venue that hosted projects ranging, for example, from an international art academy collaboration called Lost in Translation to a group show Free Kick curated by Halil Altindere, himself an artist taking part in the Biennial show. All in all, this aspect of the strategy worked very well. All the different events came together in one big burst of momentum that each supported the others’ aims instead of cutting back or down on them. When analysing the ways in which this year’s event in Istanbul managed to produce an alternative way of mounting biennials, we have to be very careful not to mix things up. Some of the choices were inevitable. The “Just enough” ideology turned the necessity of a low budget into a distinct virtue. This act in itself makes the achievement none the less remarkable. It just shows

how, at the best of times, one contentbased decision can lead productively to another meaningful effect. Secondly, we have to be careful not to romanticize the notion of a dirty and chaotic Istanbul. The reality of Istanbul must be respected, and not dealt with in an instrumentalising fashion. It is a meeting point filled with confusion and collisions that demands an amazing amount of good will from all sides. It is a balancing act of give and take, during which you have to understand and accept that you always win some, and lose some. In one essential way, the event has to remain a vehicle for thought, and not become just another platform for commerce or nationalistic cultural policies. The 9th Istanbul Biennial gives new hope for a dead biennial concept by being able to beg, steal and borrow enough courage, time and energy to concentrate on the content of artistic practices. It would be a shame if this year’s event did not get a follow-up that built on its experience and knowledge. Staying true to a location, staying true to the content in a biennial framework, would then, in the end, support something that we too often forget to pay attention to. It would provide, in a particular context, a fruitful long-term framework for planning and organizing sustainable conditions for the production of knowledge within the field of contemporary art. +

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The writer is Professor for Art in Public Space at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, and curtor and critic based in Berlin and Helsinki. Language ediing by Mike Garner.

Nexst page, top left: View of the exhibition Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Photo by Franz Wamhof. © ZKM.

Next page, top right: Esther Polak, Ieva Auzina and RIXC (Riga Centre for New Media Culture), MILKproject, 2004-2005, mixed-media installation. © The artists. Next page, bottom: Armin Linke, Assemblage, 2005. © Armin Linke.

Mika Hannula

M as in Megalomania and E as in Encyclopaedia

Entering this particular exhibition space at the ZKM complex, you are taken by surprise. Surprise at what you are seeing and at what you are confronted with. A surprise that your presuppositions and pre-knowledge about both the show and its curators do little to ease the confrontation. Making Things Public is a very strange event of an exhibition. One of its curators, Peter Weibel, goes so far as to claim that it “is without doubt an unusual, revolutionary, indeed perhaps unique exhibition.” I am not convinced about all the implications of the above sentence, but one thing is sure: this effort is, like, you know, totally weird. As a professional viewer of art venues and happenings for over 15 years, it has become evident to me that I have neither seen nor experienced anything like this before. Granted, there have been numerous experiments at bringing together scientific strategies, political aspirations and artistic inspiration. Nevertheless, I think the case of ZKM is unique, in its scale at least. It has over 100 artists, scientists, sociologists, philosophers and historians taking part in a process that tries to do and achieve almost everything there is to be wished for and striven for under the sky. In a word, this show is megalomaniac. And to throw in another word, it is encyclopaedic. Notions that do not necessarily make the end-result successful as an exhibition within the broad parameters of visual culture, but it certainly does challenge us and force

us to think through numerous takenfor-granted ways of both doing a show and confronting it. Making Things Public is devoutly megalomaniac due to its chosen scope of range of themes. It is a conceptual umbrella under which the organizers, just to name one aim, want to “find new stimuli for democracy.” This aim is arranged under no less than 13 subthemes that are: 1) No Politics Please; 2) The Puzzle of Composite Bodies; 3) The Good and the Bad Government; 4) From Objects to Things; 5) No Mediation, No Representation; 6) Which Assembly for Those Assemblages; 7) The Parliaments of Nature; 8) Follow the Paper Trails; 9) The Market Place Is a Parliament, Too; 10) Parliaments, Too, Are Complex Technologies; 11) The Obscure Objects of Politics; 12) A New Eloquence; and finally, 13) New Politic Passions. And just to remind ourselves: all this is one space, in one exhibition, at one time. How does one deal with this avalanche of themes and dilemmas? How do you navigate and negotiate your way through and through the exhibition space, which is practically filled with partly transparent, tall Plexiglas boxes about 3 metres wide. It is a kind of small village made of these temporary, portable brightly lit walls, which are used as surfaces for projection and display. Well, how did I do it? Did I close my eyes and collided with the monuments, or run off to the nearest toilet or go back to the cafe? One of the most

pleasant nuances of this overwhelming intake of site and situation was the way it made me feel slightly silly. And it did, funnily enough, make me laugh. There was simply so much of anything and everything that the overkill in itself put matters into perspective. The resulting perspective was not exactly what the curators were after when they wanted it to: “make you experience what it is to be enveloped in the fragile and shifting climate of political concerns, in the new atmospheres of democracy.” Instead, the perspective allowed me to laugh at this megalomaniac project, but not to laugh at it coldly ironically or in a negative, dichotomous fashion, but in a way that offered me opportunities for securing instances of clarified cohabitation with some of the works of art. And yes, amid all the noise and the infotaintment, that is still an agreeable outcome. An outcome that was available to me in the form of a model of a meeting point with two intriguing cases of works or art. The first was a rather complex installation that focused on an idea that in itself was clear enough. The name of the work, The Milkline, itself explains what it is about. It is, believe it or not, a line that is drawn across Europe in milk, from Latvia to Holland and on to Italy. It is not drawn with milk, but with the activities of a wide variety of people whose lives are intertwined via their professions as farmers, producers and sellers of cheese. In this collaboration by

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Esther Polak, Ieva Auzina and RIXC – Riga Centre for New Media Culture, we witness, for example, a plain map showing the route taken by the milkline from one place to another. A route that has been demonstrated via a GPS satellite link, and with documentary interviews with the participants in this interaction. A work that really does make something openly public and noticeable. A work that does not alter the course of the action, but which allows us to peek into it. The second example is the video and film installation Classes, Masses, Crowds – Representing the Collective Body and the Myth of Direct Knowledge, made by Ana Miljacki, who has contrasted two different worlds of images from the same site. A site that is called Belgrade. On one side, she has

put five monitors showing footage of the demonstrations from 1996 and 2000. Events that started peacefully, but which, as the action progressed, at times became bloody and violent. On the other side is a large screen onto which she has projected a documentary of the 1961 First of May parade in Belgrade. A parade of joyful expressions, happy movements and proud faces. A documentary as a classic example of how reality is constructed to constitute a certain version that includes some while of necessity shutting out other views. There is an almost too obvious contradiction between contemporary police violence against demonstrators and the dream and promise of the third-way, alternative socialism of Tito’s Yugoslavia. A

reality shock and a reality check. On the one hand, you see the baton of the policeman going up and down above a young woman on her knees and, on the other hand, you see the masses of people carrying huge wooden flowers that, for that special moment, colour the sky with hope. In the end, the second amazing feature of the exhibition is its strategy of collecting everything and of not only presenting, but also of explaining everything. This show is a rare and doubtlessly admirable example of the spirit of enlightenment. A spirit that is kind of sweet. A sweetness that takes on a nauseous savour when you are pointed towards various examples of self-evidentness that simply turn into a collection of lame clichés. Exhaustion instead of exhilaration.

Nevertheless, there is something in this attitude that makes a difference, and which creates an added value of its own. You get the feeling that these people do care. They are passionate about what they do, and what they stand for – even if what they are addressing spans everything from A to Z and back again about 55 times an hour. You simply cannot help wondering: Why the urgency, why the hurry, why the blind trust in quantity? Making Things Public set out to do and to achieve so many different and inevitably incompatible things that it was clearly inscribed into the project that it would fail. But yes, as with the best failures, it did this with both style and conviction. +

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around us has changed enormously even compared with the 1980s, a boom period in museum building. The attitude of focusing on art objects has been replaced by lively social communication – there is no getting away from that, regardless of how collection-centred we would be. Of course, the core of the museum is its collections and exhibitions, but I want to stress the social environment, where the museum must be eloquent. Several Scandinavian and European museums have launched a host of activities around their exhibitions, with the museum functioning like an open arena. The field of activity that most looks to the future is education. It trains the audience for us, but in the wider social context it is also part of the upbringing of youth. KUMU is a multifunctional building. Exhibitions of our collections constitute a static side of it, while exhibitions of contemporary art are a dynamic or laboratory side, and then there is the grand hall for Estonian and international shows. The museum is a long-term project spanning generations. This gives us not only the freedom, but also an obligation to be more aggressive in our tactics and strategy. The museum stands for certain fundamental values, and it must fight to win a place in people’s leisure – a daunting task, to say the least. On the other hand, museums all over the world have used all sorts of gimmicks to bring in visitors. We are starting at a time when marketing is extremely important for museums, it is the prevalent model of operation

that was created in the 1990s. However, we must also ask ourselves, how far can we go in this direction, what point do museums occupy on the road from temple to supermarket? Could there be a new aspect to museums and their functioning, something more confident and centred on the meaning of art in its relationship to the public? Let’s see...

Heie Treier is art critic and editor-in-chief of kunst.ee quarterly magazine based in Tallin, Estonia. For background on KUMU and relevant facts, you can visit www.ekm.ee.

Heie Treier KUMU – New Art Museum Building in Tallinn In December 2004/January 2005, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov exhibited an installation entitled “The Empty museum” in the Tallinn Art Hall. They transformed the modernist white cube into a traditional interior with brownish-red walls and a row of benches in the middle, reminiscent of a railway waiting room. The main view opened on empty walls, where in the mind’s eye one could almost see illuminated works in golden frames. Although the world premiere of the Kabakovs’ installation was not in Tallinn, the work acquired a site- and time-specific meaning here – the museum with empty walls and stock rooms had become a reality! Tallinn can now boast the recently completed new art museum, designed by the Finnish architect Pekka Vapaavuori. The name of the building, KUMU, comes from the Estonian word for “resonance, repercussion; rumour”, but it is also an abbreviation for “kunstimuuseum” (“art museum” in Estonian) as well as homage to the legendary “KUKU” club/radio. At the end of September, the builders handed over KUMU to the museum personnel. Marika Valk, Director of the Art Museum of Estonia, initiator of the project and its driving force, the staunch defender of the project who for ten years had followed the parallel projects of Kiasma in Helsinki and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, did not try to hide her feelings. And for good reason, too – KUMU is the first building in the history of Estonia specially designed to accommodate an art museum. The entries of a design competition in 1936-

37 (in which, incidentally, Alvar Aalto won one of the prizes were doomed to remain on paper. Later, the museum and its various units were located in old and partially amortised buildings all over the city. In a small country, KUMU is a veritable achievement. There has been no permanent and systematic exposition of art history in Estonia since the 1990s after the Soviet time. This has certainly contributed to the hostility of young artists towards all art of the past, to say nothing about the nihilistic attitude of the public at large to art in general. The completion of KUMU will hopefully change this, bringing about a shift in the general attitudes of the Estonian public, cultural policy and the media – as happened with Tate Modern – thereby giving a boost to our self-esteem, the basis of all communication with other cultures.

Interview with Director of KUMU Art Museum Sirje Helme Heie Treier (HT): As head of the former Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia, you soon found your bearings in the much more complicated KUMU. How will KUMU position itself locally and internationally, how will the museum establish itself, what cultural policy will it pursue and promote? Sirje Helme (SH): Let me start from the wider museum landscape, with the acknowledgement that the world

HT: How actively are the personnel in KUMU currently involved in mapping eventual moves in the international context? SH: Operating as part of a chain of international exhibitions is a normal tactic for us. The former Art Museum of Estonia had difficulty inviting international exhibitions, because it had no up-to-date conditions for the works. The new building will quite understandably be a real boost. Hosting international exhibitions is part of our broader policy. On the one hand, it has to reflect the most important question: what do we really need? (And we need a lot, for Estonia was isolated for 50 years from international art movements, trends, problems etc.). On the other hand, our co-operation with European museums shows that we are trusted partners on the professional level. This is very important, not only for our professionals (hopefully they already trust us), but also for the wider public and especially for sponsors. The other side of international relations is the ability to produce exhibitions of our own that are of interest

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very simple to establish oneself as an engine of a single trend, but as soon as words like “balance” and “historical truth” and “interest” are brought to play, you will necessarily find yourself among conservatives.

an expert council for the Riga Modern Art Museum, but they have not yet worked out the architectural conditions, although the firms have been chosen. They were here a short while ago, to visit KUMU. The museum of modern art in Zagreb will be opened in 2007. A new museum will also be opened in Vilnius in 2007. It will be a total reconstruction of an old building. And in summer Anda Rottenberg raised the idea of a museum of modern art in Warsaw. It will be erected next to the Friendship Palace, an imposing Stalinist building, in the very centre of the city. I hear that the plot has already been earmarked for the museum. By any account we can say that we are really the first with KUMU.

ing as the most reasonable one for today’s understandings and needs. What is the next step, the next message that museums will be able to convey? Today’s situation and enthusiasm remind me a bit of the beginning of the 1990s, its unbelievable energy and faith.

KUMU construction site. Photos from the archive of KUMU.

internationally. There are several issues in our art and art history that would make for fine topics of research, and are also important in a wider context, such as our Soviet modernism. We have discussed the analysis of the Yaroslavl phenomenon [Estonian artists on the Soviet home front during WW II] – from the standpoint of the conduct of people and their motivation. Artistically it was not a very high-quality period, but there are two persistent myths in it – a positive myth in the Soviet era, and a negative one since independence. In this matter, KUMU, as owner of the largest collection of Estonian art today, must become the leader, the key speaker in our art history, and why not also the Baltic research centre. HT: But as of today, several international key figures have visited KUMU in Tallinn. The process of generating trust should have started. SH: I think trust should also evolve on a personal level. Trust develops between people, not just between institutions. KUMU will hopefully become an institution that can be trusted. How we project ourselves is very important, there are still many questions. Can we create a character that is specifically ours? This can be done in theory. In practice, however, it is complicated, because now we must be omnivorous, as it were. There is just one art museum in Tallinn, and it is expected to offer everything at once. Finding even a shaky equilibrium is also a question of morals. It is

HT: How is the idea to invite Manifesta to Tallinn turning out? In April, Tallinn hosted the meeting of Manifesta Journal. They came to look at KUMU and were delighted… SH: There are 3–4 candidates for Manifesta 2008. We have reached an agreement with Kiasma and Frame that we will present an application together. Getting Manifesta here would merely be normal. As it stands, north-eastern Europe is not covered in the Manifesta policy. Finland, Scandinavia, the Baltic countries are no worse nor less interesting than San Sebastian or Nicosia, where Manifesta has moved. The relations between the Basques and Spain, Turkey and Greece are interesting, needless to say. But then again, Estonia is not a conflict area. We may be able to offer something quite different. Manifesta is essential and the museum and the art centre have done everything to pave its way here. HT: Is KUMU the first new building in the former bloc of Socialist states to have been constructed specifically as an art museum? Is a museum boom also about to happen in this region? SH: I know several countries are building new art museums. I sit on

HT: Please say a few words, too about the KUMU programmes. SH: The programme is really the heart of the museum. It is the most important question for us, it is our identity, our originality. We are getting the first specially-built art museum in our history. It is like a new beginning and has greater significance compared to other countries, where such museums have been normal for social life. We have our programmes and plans, of course, but for me it is very important to start with discussion about the museum’s role and position in our society, to step away from the clichés in the mind of professionals and the public. Can it be done? We have a certain model in Europe, especially in northern Europe, that museums are follow-

HT: There are rumours circulating among artists about the gala exhibition. What plans are there? SH: We have discussed many times about what kind of inaugural exhibition we need. As you know, you can’t please everybody. We decided that our opening exhibition will be an international show. The title of the inaugural exhibition is “Schiftscale”, composed by three curators – Mika Hannula from Finland, the Estonian sculptor Villu Jaanisoo, and Hanno Soans. There will be many sculptural objects and installations at the opening, as well as some videos. Events have been planned in the city space. There will also be some Estonian artists – Jaan Toomik, Anu Põder, Neeme Külv, Jüri Ojaver and some more. Accusations that Estonian artists would be practically absent are just not true. HT: What is the opening date of KUMU? SH: 17 February 2006. Although the date for moving in keeps being pushed back, we are sticking to the above deadline. It is an uphill struggle, but we are hopeful. +

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Self-Timer

For her photographs, Sanna Kannisto (born 1974) ventured into the Latin American rainforest, where she spent months in research camps with scientists, conducting her own artistic research. In her subjective perspective on the multifarious, exotic fauna and flora of the rainforest, the artist adopts the supposedly objective research and working methods of science, exposing them, however, in her emphasis on the staged and artificial. Fanni Niemi-Junkola’s (born 1962) filmic portraits depict simple people. Mostly in concentrated calm and quiet observation of the other, she tells of daily life, and these intimate stories open a perspective on universal issues of human existence and its envi-

ronment, on the relationship between the individual and society. In her films, Salla Tykkä (born 1973) tells short stories about the transition from childhood to adulthood and relations between the sexes which elude unambiguous interpretation in their enigmatic ambivalence and complexity. An atmospheric visual aesthetic, the skilled use of well-known film music, and playing with allusions and memories generate lasting tension and a sense of foreboding and uncertainty. The Revolver Verlag has published a catalogue on the exhibition. The exhibition is curated by René Block and Birgit Eusterschulte and realised in collaboration with FRAME Finnish Fund for Art Exchange, Helsinki. +

Picks Kunsthalle Fridericianum Kassel, Germany 21 December, 2005 – 26 February, 2006 www.fridericianum-kassel.de

Self-Timer at Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel The exhibition Self-Timer at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum provides the first, comprehensive insight into the photographic and filmic work of five young artists from northern Europe. Their works focus not so much on great political and social themes, but rather the artists capture their times in personal, everyday events, portraying the reality of their lives and their relations with the external world, or they formulate subjective emotions and personal issues in fictional narration reflecting societal reality. In photography and film they rely on the force of visual staging and a highly aesthetic visual language where appearances can prove deceptive. The series of photographic self-

portraits by Elina Brotherus (born 1972) show staged moments in the private life of the artist. Instants of joy or love, of failure, loneliness, or melancholy staged before the photographic eye intensifies the artist’s direct and authentic expression of self-perception and emotional self-exposure, eliciting self-recognition in the observer. Aino Kannisto (born 1973) also works with the photographic self-portrait, but in her case they are fictive role portraits with the artist as model, adopting various female identities but not really portraying herself. Kannisto’s meticulously detailed compositions have an air of film stills of female protagonists, freeze frames capturing a brief moment in the action.

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Breaking the Ice

Kunstmuseum Bonn 16 March – 28 May, 2006 www.kunstmuseum.bonn.de

Breaking the Ice at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany Periphery and Centre is the title of a series of exhibitions, which the Kunstmuseum Bonn dedicates to the artistic production of a geographic periphery with the aim of entering into a dialogue. Because not only the centres of the international art scene but those of the European art scene as well are shifting permanently, and new art centres are emerging within only a few years, the Kunstmuseum Bonn has realized large-scale exhibitions on Portuguese and Turkish art in recent years. This exhibition series shall now be supplemented by an exhibition Breaking the Ice on Finnish contemporary art, which will be held at the Kunstmuseum Bonn 16 March – 28 May, 2006. Finland has received great attention not only after the results of the

PISA study and international studies on the competitiveness of national economies, the strong points of which are in the fields of electronics and telecommunication. Even before this the art scene was on the move, manifesting itself especially in the triumphant success of video art and photography. The Kunstmuseum Bonn has invited twelve Finnish artists for the exhibition, including the video artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila, the photographers Veli Granö, Esko Männikkö, Jorma Puranen and Pertti Kekarainen, as well as artists with ambitious site specific projects and installations, such as Marja Kanervo, Petteri Nisunen & Tommi Grönlund, Jaakko Niemelä, Tea Mäkipää, and Charles Sandison. This extensive survey exhibition

will be accompanied by a varied programme with performances and musical events. Further venues of the exhibition are planned, for example in Switzerland at the Franz-Gertsch-Museum in Burgdorf and in Estonia at the newly established Tallinn Museum for Contemporary Art. The Kunstmuseum Bonn is an international museum with a collection that focuses on German art after 1945. It forms the horizon for the presentation of artistic developments in other countries, which are introduced in the large area for changing exhibitions, covering approx. 1000 sq m. The building was opened in 1992 and Axel Schultes` architecture provides an ideal and splendid frame for the presentation of contemporary art from Finland. +

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Songs of Freedom and Love – Contemporary Art from the North of the North

Songs of Freedom and Love – Contemporary Art from the North of the North is an exhibition presenting works by ten artists of the younger generation who are working in Finland. The exhibition explores the ways and means of how we live together, how we form, shape and maintain our relationships to ourselves, our surroundings and

others who occupy the same contexts we are in. It is about the idea of sharing, about being-with, and about the growing awareness and self-reflection of not being alone. The exhibition brings together a group of artists, who each individually stand up for themselves and the themes they are confronting and ob-

Songs of Freedom

Platform, Garanti Contemporary Art Centre, Istanbul 17 March – 22 April, 2006 www.platform.garanti.com.tr

sessed with, not representing any kind of collective identity. It is a selection of interpretations on how to be and live together in a reality that is complex, pluralistic and confused. The aim of the exhibition is to construct a frame for a wide variety of sensations and sensibilities that are not insular and exclusive, but inclu-

sive and open. The participating artists are Panos Balomenos, Anna Tuori, Kati Immonen, Mauri Kuitula, Aurora Reinhard, Joonas Kota, Minna L. Henriksson, Henri Tani, Pilvi Takala, and Tuomas Laitinen. The exhibtion is curated by Mika Hannula and Minna L. Henriksson. +

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Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki 21 January – 27 August, 2006 www.kiasma.fi

ARS 06 Presents Proposals for Reality

Art seeks different ways of understanding reality. Kiasma’s international exhibition ARS 06 focuses on the significance of art as part of the reality of our time. Approximately 40 artists and collectives from almost 20 countries will participate in the exhibition. Focusing on the role of art as part of the human experience, the central theme of ARS 06 is our ability for good and evil. On the other hand, art can also offer consolation and touching experiences in a changing world. The curator team is chaired by Dr. Tuula Karjalainen, the director of Ki-

asma. The choice of artists is the ability of their works to speak to today’s audiences. In the exhibition, the artists will either present several works or one extensive piece. The participants will include four Finnish artists. The first ARS exhibition was held in 1961. All ARS exhibitions have awakened discussion and many of the works exhibited have continued to live on in the minds of the spectators. Each ARS exhibition has formed a picture of its time and offered unforgettable experiences. The 7th international ARS exhibi-

tion is an important review of contemporary art in the 21st century. The works will be accompanied by changing projects. The varied programme includes events, seminars, workshops and lectures. The exhibition catalogue will be published in January. Artists of ARS 06: AES+F group (Russia), Michaël Borremans (Belgium), Jota Castro (Peru), Dinos & Jake Chapman (Great Britain), Petah Coyne (USA), Amy Cutler (USA), Berlinde De Bruyckere (Belgium), Willie Doherty (Northern Ireland), Juan Manuel Echavarria (Columbia),

ARS 06

El Perro group (Spain), Angelo Filomeno (Italy), Carl Michael von Hausswolff & Thomas Nordanstad (Sweden), Kent Henricksen (USA), IC-98 (Finland), Jesper Just (Denmark), Tellervo Kalleinen & Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen (Finland/Germany), Juul Kraijer (Holland), Edouard Levé (France), Shu-Min Lin (Taiwan/USA), Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz (USA/ Spain), Mariele Neudecker (Germany), Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba (Japan/ Vietnam), Lars Nilsson (Sweden), Motohiko Odani (Japan), Susan Philipsz (Great Britain), Chloe Piene (USA), Alexandr Ponomarev (Russia), Mark Raidpere (Estonia), Charles Sandison (Great Britain), Monika Sosnowska (Poland), Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger (Switzerland), Tabaimo (Japan), Montri Toemsombat (Thailand), Roi Vaara (Finland), Adriana Varejão (Brazil), Yuri Vasiliev (Russia), Sergio Vega (Argentina/USA), Maaria Wirkkala (Finland), Mai Yamashita & Naoto Kobayashi (Japan). +

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Shiftscale

KUMU Art Museum of Tallinn February – May 2005 www.ekm.ee/english/newbuilding.htm

Shiftscale – Sculpture at the Extended Field The opening exhibition of the KUMU Art Museum in Tallinn Shiftscale, the opening exhibition of KUMU, is the largest international contemporary art exhibition ever organised in Estonia. About 30 artists from around the world are taking part in this exhibition. Participation of several key names of the contemporary art world together with very many artists from the region guarantees wide international attention. Among the invited artists are Chris Evans (Great Britain), Superflex (Denmark), Cevdet Erek (Turkey), Markus Copper (Finland/Germany), Kaisu Koivisto (Fin-

land), Anssi 8000 (Finland), Kosmos (Estonia), John Ruppert (USA), Pipilotti Rist (Switzerland), Arturas Raila (Lithuania), Olafur Eliasson (Germany), Helena Johard (Sweden), Karsten Konrad (Germany), Hans Hemmert (Germany), Serkan Ozkaya & Ahmet Ogut (Turkey), Anders Krüger (Sweden), Gints Gabrans (Latvia), Huang Yong Ping (China/France), Tommy Støckel (Germany/Denmark), Kaisaleena Halinen (Finland), Gediminas Akstinas (Lithuania), Anu Põder (Estonia), , Marko Laimre (Estonia),

Ojars Feldbergs (Latvia), Neeme Külm (Estonia), Veronica Brovall (Germany), and Heli Ryhänen (Finland) Shiftscale aims to take a critical but constructive look at contemporary sculpture, and to redefine the traditional concept of a sculptural monument as something static and permanent, by offering creative and innovative ways of thinking about the production of three-dimensional art. It offers means to think about who you are, where you are, and with whom you are. It is, in short, about being in the world.

Shiftscale will open in mid-February 2006, and last for four months. It extends from KUMU’s contemporary art floor to the museum’s temporary exhibitions hall, as well as the city space in Tallinn. In connection with the exhibition a catalogue, a booklet and an anthology of theoretical texts will be published. A conference focusing on the extended notion of sculpture will also be held during the opening months. The curators of the exhibition are Mika Hannula, Villu Jaanisoo, Hanno Soans and Anna Mustonen. +

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Civic Matters

Civic Matters Organized by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and Craft in Dialogue September 2005 - June 2006

Civic Matters at LACE Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions Civic Matters can be compared with an archaeological site. Standing on top of the rear stairwell at LACE, just beside the “Beauty Saloon” sign, you have a good view of the area.  The think and production tank that will take place at LACE during two weeks in January will intervene in this viewable area. The curators of the ongoing project Civic Matters, Zandra Ahl (Craft in Dialogue/Stockholm), Brett Littman (New York), Veronica Wiman (Stockholm), and Irene Tsatsos (Los Angeles) believe that civic matters matter. Together with artists, designers and craft artists they wish to understand and interact with an urban cityscape with aesthetic means. The function of craft, art and design will be discussed and applied. Artists have acted as social practitioners for many years in Scandinavia as well as other parts in the world. In the framework of Los Angeles, knowledge of the current urban and social issues here leads to discussions and artistic interventions.

Civic Matters is an attempt to research and understand an urban and social situation in a post-modern city such as Los Angeles: Civic Matters is at the same time an experimental exchange program, dealing with ideas about communication and production of material culture. Participants from abroad will be able to interact with residents of L.A., socially active artists and political collaborators. This project aims to examine problems and issues that face the city. Civic Matters will focus on the politics surrounding public space: where they are located and whom they are designed for, as well as problems related to social structures, and public services. The project will also examine private space, aiming to understand the parallel between culture and social structure on a civic level. Civic Matters defines its area of research and intervention in the surrounding local area. Participants of Civic Matters will be situated in Hollywood, which has a unique history

and thrives in the contemporary moment. The project understands its constrictions focusing on Hollywood, but will research extensively to collect knowledge and to provoke further questions and share both utopian ideas and private wishes. Among the participating artists are two Finnish artist groups, IC-98 (Patrk Söderlund and Visa Suonpää) and ROR Revolutions on Request. The other invited participants today include: Kelly Marie Martin and Jimmy Lizama of Bicycle Kitchen; Robby Herbst, Marc Herbst, Cara Baldwin, Ryan Griffis, and Christina Ulke of Journal of Aesthetics and Protest; Jeff Cain of Shed Research Institute; Fritz Haeg, Fritz Haeg Studio; Tom Marble of LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design; Julie Deamer and Kendra Stanifer of Outpost for Contemporary Art; Dave Burns, Austin Young, and Matias Viegener of Fallen Fruit; Mike Blockstein. Raketa, Hjärta Smärta, Muungano, and Sissi Westerberg. +

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In

Brief

Apart from media art, Haaslahti has also made short films. Hanna Haaslahti’s address in the award ceremony can be read at http:// www.frame-fund.fi/news/news1.shtml.

Elina Brotherus is the winner of the Prix Niépce 2005. Prix Niépce is awarded annually for a photographer under 45 of either French nationality or working in France. The price of €8000 is awarded by the association Les Gens d’Images. Elina Brotherus was born in Helsinki in 1972. She lives and works mainly in Finland and in France. Next Level has recently published the book The New Painting featuring her latest photographic work.

stitutions such as the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Museu d’Art Contemporani (Barcelona), Nederlands Film Museum (Amsterdam) and Tate Modern (London). See more detailed programme at www.tamperefilmfestival.fi.

In Brief

Hanna Haaslahti received the Media Art Prize 2005 of €12,000 by AVEK, the Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture. It was awarded now for the second time. Hanna Haaslahti (born 1969) works in new media and experimental film. She earned her MFA from the Media Lab at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki. She also studied photography at the Institute of Design at Lahti Polytechnic and set design at the Verona Academy of Fine Arts in Italy. She has had two solo shows in Finland: White Square in 2003 and Tangible Cosmologies (together with Veli Granö) in 1997. Both exhibitions were held in the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. The main theme in Haaslahti’s production is the limits and potential of human-machine interaction. The works posit the spectator’s body and movements as the interface through which the work opens up to the user. Often the subject matter of the work is the interaction itself and the physical awareness it creates in the audience.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila has been shortlisted for the Artes Mundi Visual Arts Prize 2006. The other shortlisted artists are Thomas Demand, Mauricio Dias & Walter Riedweg, Leandro Erlich, Subodh Gupta, Sue Williams and Wu Chi-Tsung. The selection was made by the curators Deepak Ananth and Ivo Mesquita out of more than 200 nominations. In making their decisions, the selectors were asked to focus on two main criteria: artists who have achieved recognition for the quality of their work in their own country or sphere and are emerging internationally, and artists who explore ideas of the human form/human condition and add to our understanding of humanity. The international panel of judges chooses the winner of the Artes Mundi prize in the end of March 2006.

Tampere 36th International Short Film Festival, to be held on 8 March – 12 March, 2006, has invited Matthias Müller, one of Germany’s most important avant-garde filmmakers and media artists, with three retrospective screenings. In his artistic practice, Müller moves across film, video, photography and installation, and his works all display a fascination with surfaces and secrets, and with memory and space. His films and videos are part of the collections of in-

AV-Arkki 2006 Festival is a survey of the latest Finnish media art distributed by AV-Arkki. The festival is held at The Korjaamo Culture Factory in Helsinki in February 2006, and includes installation exhibitions, screening series, lectures and performances. See www.avarkki.fi for more detailed information. AV-Arkki, The Distribution Centre for Finnish Media Art, is an artist association founded in 1989 to promote Finnish media art. It is a pioneering organisation in the Nordic countries with over 100 artist members. AV-Arkki distributes the works of its member artists’ to film festivals and events and collaborates with art museums, galleries, curators and researchers.

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Finnish Artists Abroad

Biennials and Residencies

Biennials and Residencies

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Finnish Artists Abroad

Calendar: Finnish Artists Abroad 2005-06

Calendar 2005-06

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Calendar 2005-06

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Calendar 2005-06

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KAIKU Galleria

KUVATAIDEAKATEMIAN Galleria 02.01. – 15.01. Benjamin Thorgren --------------------------------------------------------------------Andreas Lycke, drawings, light works 18.01. – 29.01. --------------------------------------------------------------------01.02. – 12.02. Stephen Parise, paintings --------------------------------------------------------------------Kati Ruohomäki 15.02. – 26.02. --------------------------------------------------------------------Tellervo Viitaniemi, installation 01.03. – 12.03. --------------------------------------------------------------------Antti Ruuhela, paintings 15.03. – 26.03. --------------------------------------------------------------------Emma Kyllönen, installation 29.03. – 9.04. --------------------------------------------------------------------Johanna Arola and Michiko Isogai 13.04. – 23.04. --------------------------------------------------------------------Eeva-Maija Priha 26.04. – 7.05. --------------------------------------------------------------------Spring exhibition 20.05. –11.06. --------------------------------------------------------------------Paulo Foundation exhibition 14.06. –02.07 --------------------------------------------------------------------Hanna Leena Heiska, paintings 05.07. – 23.07 --------------------------------------------------------------------Kasarmikatu 44 00130 Helsinki tel. +358 (09) 671 740 Open daily 11-17

porin taidemuseo

Specific masters’ exhibition 04.01. – 22.01. ------------------------------------------------------------------Specific masters’ exhibition 25.01. – 05.02. ------------------------------------------------------------------Petra Koivisto, monotypies 08.02. – 19.02. ------------------------------------------------------------------open 22.02. – 05.03. ------------------------------------------------------------------Claudia Calabi 8.03. – 19.03. ------------------------------------------------------------------open 23.03. – 02.04. ------------------------------------------------------------------Satu-Minna Suorajärvi, Emma Kyllönen and Anne Louise Tvete, installation 11.04. – 30.04. ------------------------------------------------------------------Exchange students’ exhibition 05.05. – 14.05. ------------------------------------------------------------------Spring exhibition 20.05. – 11.06. ------------------------------------------------------------------Kaikukatu 4 00530 Helsinki tel. +358 (09) 680 33 20 Open daily 10-17

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Photo : Lauri Anttila. 2005

ars fennica

galleria

| AMA | gallery

Lauri Anttila....................................................... 13 Jan – 5 Feb 2006 Katarina Reuter.................................................. 10 Feb – 5 Mar 2006 Heli Sammalisto................................................. 10 Mar – 2 Apr 2006 Tuomo Blomqvist............................................. 7 Apr – 30 Apr 2006 Graduate Degree Exhibition........................... 5 May – 28 May 2006 Maija Holma...................................................... 1 Jun – 22 Jun 2006 Heli Hiltunen..................................................... 4 Aug – 27 Aug 2006 Ama Gallery, Kaskenkatu 1, FIN - 20700 Turku Tel +358 2 237 8873, mobile +358 40 596 1943 [email protected], www.amagallery.net Open: Tue – Fri 12 – 18, Sat – Sun 12 – 16. Gallery Closed 23 Jun – 2 Aug 2006.

turun taidemuseo

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john nurminen

valokuvataiteen museo

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