Nowiswere Issue 5

Cover comissioned by Cenker Kokten, 2009

nowiswere was founded in January 2008 Copyrights of the magazine are the property of Veronika Hauer & Fatos Ustek. All rights of the contributions are the property of their contributors.

Impressum Editors: Veronika Hauer & Fatos Ustek Layout: Veronika Hauer Contributors: Catherine Borra, Cuneyt Cakirlar, Jurga Daubaraite, Iddo Drevijn, Mara Ferreri,Veronika Hauer, Cenker Kokten, Adeena Mey, Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, Ghalya Saadawi, Ali Taptik and Kay Walkowiak.

Editorial comments and proofreading: Kevin Dooley, Mary Jane Miltner Contact: info@nowiswere.com www.nowiswere.com

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Uncertainty in Rudolf Steckholzer’s photographs.........................4 Adeena Mey TH When the world is thinking about you........................................10 Iddo Drevijn EF DANGLING FUTURES AND CREATIVE WORK Here comes the Carrot Bloc!..................................................11 Mara Ferreri TH Untitled, 2008 / Kleines Planetarium, 2009 and Ich Ich, 2008......................................................................14, 15, 17 Kay Walkowiak TH Struggles of Recognition................................................................18 Jurga Daubaraite TH “Edit Board for the series ‘Nothing Surprising’ 1”...................24/25 Ali Taptik CC Undercover Brick in the Wall: The Testimony of Soldier Z32.............................................................26 Ghalya Saadawi TH Instructions For Films..................................................29, 30, 45, 51 Karen Mirza and Brad Butler CC THE YOUNG PEOPLE VISITING OUR RUINS SEE NOTHING BUT A STYLE. FormContent at GAM, Turin.....................................................32 Catherine Borra THematics: hosting texts up to 1000 words or image material of up to four pages focusing on a single theme.

EF Expecting Future: Is a sub section of THematics, hosting texts pointing out possibilities of future and positioning the potentials of the to-come-true. As expecting future requires awareness of present, the section will be the gathering of the today’s variety of practices, attitutes, tendencies...

AS Artist Specials: hosting evaluations on or interviews with artists.

CC Critics’ Corner: hosting reviews on current exhibitions, performances, events, happenings...

TH “Edit Board for the series ‘Nothing Surprising’ 2” ................36/37 Ali Taptik AS Queer Art of Sodomitical Sabotage, Queer Ethics of Surfaces: Embodying Militarism, Masculinity, and Turkish Modernity in Erinç Seymen’s Portrait of a Pasha (2009)...........................................38 Cuneyt Cakirlar CC talk talk:The interview as artistic practise Kunstverein Medienturm, Graz................................................46 Veronika Hauer

Adeena Mey

Double-trouble. Uncertainty in Rudolf Steckholzer’s photographs.

An addendum to nowiswere issue 4 by way of introduction Criticality. Such is the mantra that characterized most of the pages of nowiswere, at least, until the previous issue. Indeed, as its readership – used to incisiveness of speech and whose ability to embrace criticality makes no doubt – could have noticed in issue 4, glossy, commercial-like surfaces have appeared.

What can explain the presence of Rudolf Steckholzer’s photographs? Does such an editorial decision respond to the so-called death of criticism? Is this a confession of failure in the face of postmodern aporias, a withdrawal from the search for alternatives, the acknowledgement that perhaps yes, “anything goes”? So why not insert fashion photographs and make them sit comfortably among texts whose footnotes encompass Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan, Zizek and their caustic arguments. But please, let’s not be cynical! Shouldn’t the pages of this journal be devoted to criticism and the assessment and presentation of subtler, more progressive aesthetic/political positions? Aren’t fashion photography and the tentacular industry to which it pertains precisely among the (worst) sites of production of simulacra and the spectacular i.e. what, in the field of contemporary cultural production, we should struggle against?

This makes no doubt, but what if things were slightly more complicated? What if the spectacle had no backstage and if the simulacra was everything but a simulation?

1. Your Trace is not my Trace To introduce Steckholzer’s work, I could have carried on with the hypothesis I started with. And similarly to Steckholzer’s operation of reappropriation of the fashion spread, I could have mimicked captions found next to pictures of catwalks: this could have read like this: raw plastic roughly cut and folded into four, will be your best companion at cocktail parties. Then, immediately, the “trick” would have been revealed. Indeed. Looking a bit more carefully at his pictures, one would discover that the usually perfect(ed) epidermic surfaces, the carefully choreographed gestures and postures of the models and their strategies of seduction, as well as the chic, extravagant or ragged clothes and accessories inhabiting fashion’s visual culture have been the object of some kind of dysfunction, or at least a (re-) make-up…

For this series, Steckholzer’s practice consisted of re-staging fashion ads. Up to a certain point, his modus operandi is simi-

lar to that of a professional fashion photographer: he works with real models, uses real fashion accessories (only partly though), collaborates with real make-up artists and set assistants. Yet, behind an apparently perfect scaffold, “not so real” elements also participate in the scenes he (re-) creates.

While your gaze might be attracted by the design of a pair of sunglasses, or by the meticulously balanced composition of signs that constitute these images, your eyes might also encounter elements which seem to pertain to a different visual landscape. This, even if the presence of such elements barely disrupt the photos’ visual consistency, but rather participates in it, in the most subtle manner. Hence, on the one hand, Steckholzer’s mode of production ambivalently performs that of an actual fashion shoot and, on the other, this ambivalence comes to be found within the compositional qualities of the image. The likeness of Steckholzer’s photos to that of his references, while prima facie familiar for they do use a semiotic language and codes that over-saturate society-at-large’s visual culture – namely that of fashion –does in fact prompt the viewer to give a doubled-attention. Effectively, certain astute features in the images subtract them from one’s address within the frame of the familiar and the well-known. By using visual codes one is accustomed to, Steckholzer’s photographs precisely suspend the corollary viewing (and consumption) habits that are ours as well as the judgements that virtually accompany them.This doubling of visual experience provoked by a “doubled” image echoes Freud’s seminal notion of the uncanny, which in its most generic sense was defined as “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.”1 If Steckholzer’s images don’t exactly provoke the frightening impression suggested by the father of psychoanalysis, they are no less driven by the two, still unified, poles – the not known which is also familiar – that make a phenomena, a situation or an experience uncanny. I would like to suggest that the uncanniness – or an in-betweenness or indecision – found in Steckholzer’s photos stems from the already particular material economy and mode of production he is working with, and that it is reflected within the image itself and the possible modes of address of these images.

It is thus necessary to sort certain things out and ask what actually differentiates Steckholzer’s work from fashion imagery? Apart from the different economies and audiences it addresses, Steckholzer’s scenes, first of all, differ from the very material they are made of.2 Cheap pieces of fabric or plastic (instead of clothing) and improvised, DIY sets, act as surrogates of the highly luxurious products and means used in the fashion industry. Be the likeness of the image very close to the original (as in a recent series inspired by fashion ads scattered within the pages of Artforum) or leaning towards a more recomposed picture, Steckholzer’s photos work as ghostly doubles coming from non-localizable sites. Moreover, fundamentally different from their models in terms of an economy of means, these images nevertheless succeed in producing a similar effect of seduction present in fashion photographs. The oddness of such elements, when

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mixed with others that would or could clearly pertain to the visual economy of fashion also come to blur semiotic codes and the indexicality one reads images through.

In his classic essay on photography, La Chambre Claire, Barthes suggested two concepts that have since become cornerstones within photography and visual theory, the studium and the punctum.3 Thanks to those notions, Barthes was able to distinguish, first, a relation to photography that is invested with cultural values, which is mediated by a context and its moral and political meanings. Such photos arouse, for Barthes, what he calls a “medium affect” (un affect moyen): this is the studium.4 As for the punctum, it is the element that “troubles” (dérange) the studium. Moreover, not only does it “trouble”, but it also literally “punctuates” a photo. A punctum, Barthes writes, is also: […] a sting, a little hole, a little stain or a little cut – but it is also like a throw of dices. The punctum of a photograph is also its part of randomness which touches me (but also bruises and grasps me).5 From this dichotomy between a studious response (the studium) and a more personal and affective one (the punctum), it is possible, as done by Laura Mulvey, to assign the first to the photographer’s position and the second to the viewer’s.6 Mais voilà. Since elements that normally refer to an identifiable cultural repertoire – in Steckholzer’s case that of fashion – are consciously “troubled” by other features that could trigger a response in terms of punctum, the opposition between those two types of relation to a photographic image becomes unclear. Not only punctum and studium get stumped, but moreover, what follows is that the opposition between viewer and photographer also gets blurred.7

Such a stance poses questions about Steckholzer’s position.

Indeed, it is reasonable to ask if his work is critical towards fashion and its system of representation. Do Steckholzer’s gestures constitute a critique of the stereotyped – gendered, sexualised, racialised and fetishized – images of bodies and of the ways we look at them and consume them? Are Steckholzer’s gestures iconoclastic ones? Looking at two other series of work, Artforum and YSL, might tell more about his relationship to fashion. Indeed, both stem from the observation that the worlds of fashion and art are permeable to each other. As mentioned above, Artforum (the magazine) has its regular amount of fashion ads and, on the other hand, fashion ads have recently made more and more blinks to the art world. This probably stresses the mutual fascination the two milieus have for each other, but also, and more crucially, the economic edge on which most artwork potentially stands, one that can confuse singularity and luxury.

It is this relationship that those two series render visible.

Thus, Steckholzer has restaged or recomposed ads shot in white cubes or picturing models standing on plinths. Is he thus merely mimicking the fashion industry cynically stating that “fashion is the new art”? Along with his use of reduced, DIY material and means, Steckholzer’s “against the decisive moment” is a gesture that borrows from fashion’s aesthetic strategies, without adopting their logics to their conclusions.

Working within a similar economy of means, gestures and materials, Steckholzer’s operations neither surrender to the

2. (Un-) Critical Images?

In addition to the elements composing the particular restaging of Steckholzer’s “fashion scenes”, another moment in the process of production is the choice of the photographs and of the poses represented that contributes to assert the thin and fluctuating yet essential barrier between Steckholzer’s work and fashion photography. If the “fake” clothing and sets create a visual distance to their models which, in turn, provoke the visual obliqueness that characterize the artist’s images, another notable gesture fosters the creation of ambivalence in his work. Indeed, within the numerous shots taken, the images kept for presentation are those reflecting Steckholzer’s intention consisting in positioning his work against “the decisive moment”, which has a particular twist within fashion photography’s milieu. In addition to this idea as it is conceived in photography at large, i.e. carrying a heroic conception of the photographer capturing a romantic, idealised object in its perfect and almost magical moment, fashion photographers add to that a certain seductiveness, embodied in the lips and gaze of the models.

Rudolf Steckholzer, CFA, 2009

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latter, nor frontally criticizes it. Rather, it both exaggerates and downplays it, producing very like glossy surfaces, seductive poses and calling the viewer to both consume and reject the image. What remains is uncertainty. Moreover, the critical position corollary to uncertainty is not one that performs the gesture of the iconoclast (nor on the contrary that of the iconophile), which consists in revealing the truth hidden behind images and their nature as simulacra. This reasoning has been largely elaborated by sociologist of science Bruno Latour. For him, iconoclasm and “critique” share a common structure, which imply that if all images are human-made (i.e. involving a certain gesture or movement of the hand), thus: To show that a humble human painter has made [these images] would be to weaken their force, to sully their origin, to desecrate them. […] Thus, to add the hand to the pictures is tantamount to spoiling, criticizing them. […] More generally, the critical mind is one that shows the hands of humans at work everywhere […]8 The intentions of the iconoclast are clear whereas, in the case of what Latour calls iconoclash, “there is uncertainty about the exact role of the hand at work in the production of a mediator”.9 Indeed, to carry on with analogies, Steckholzer’s exaggeration/downplaying echoes the process of defacement/refacement of images at work in iconoclasms, as identified by Latour. Yet, the “refacement” part is denied by the iconoclast since it would reveal the sarcastic and contradictory nature of his own enterprise (replacing hated images by loved ones). In contrast, an iconoclash is about this process itself. This has consequences for critique too. If iconoclasm consists in revealing the hand behind images, its corollary in what we know as “critique” consists in revealing ideological simulacra behind so-called reality, social, and/ or political. Such a critical procedure is, according to Latour, “cheap” and somehow obsolete: “suspicion has rendered us dumb. It is as if the hammer of the critique had rebounded and struck senseless the critic’s head!” In contrast, an iconoclash consists of “a revision of the critical spirit, a pause in the critique, a meditation on the urge of debunking”.10 Following Latour, it thus seems that uncertainty and iconoclashes are about opening up a gap, a moment of different potentialities within the moment of critique. It is such a gap, moment, that Steckholzer’s work opens up.

3. Uncertain Moment – Moment of Uncertainty Looking back at the images scattered through the pages of nowiswere’s previous issue, I grant them closer attention, a more careful look. While I had deemed them uninteresting, unworthy to engage with because of their appearance, which merely seemed to restate what is, elsewhere, an already overly present slickness and glossiness, I realise that I’m in front of “fashion photographs” that do not exactly present fashion. While their gestaltic way of appearing to me and

Rudolf Steckholzer, Phillips, 2009

their effect are similar, particular features and components in those images shift me away from the repertoire of fashion.

Their presence seems precisely to be justified by a will to direct my gaze towards a site of more undefined, floating codes. But if those photographs could somewhat perform the seductiveness of fashion photographs, what do they tell about the latter? If imperfect (-ed) make-up, pieces of raw fabric and plastic, improvised shooting sets, in other words, a reduced economy of means can to some extent “do the job” of fashion, the latter’s mode of production is obviously characterised by and based on the production of excess. Indeed, the other semiotic landscape intermingled with that of fashion, while also “troubling” it, co-exists within the same pictorial scene and seems as if it was both an excess and its moderate part, yet always in surplus. In this regard, Steckholzer’s photographs seem to point at fashion’s economic logic, one that resembles what Georges Bataille has called “the accursed share”. Bataille’s provocative hypothesis is the following: “it is not necessity but its contrary, “luxury,” that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems”. Excess, for Bataille, must be understood in the frame of a “general economy” able to encompass any kind of surplus energy, from any system. Thus, he wrote that: When one considers the totality of productive wealth on the surface of the globe, it is evident that the products of this wealth can be employed for productive ends only insofar as the living organism that is economic mankind can increase

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Rudolf Steckholzer, together equals fire, 2009

its equipment. This is not entirely – neither always nor indefinitely – possible. A surplus must be dissipated through deficit operations: The final dissipation cannot fail to carry out the movement that animates terrestrial energy.11

1 Freud, Sigmund « The Uncanny » Writings On Art and Literature, Stanford California, Stanford University Press, ([1919] 1997), 195, reproduced from, Standard Ed, 17, 219-56.

2 It is likely that if shown in the world of fashion, his work might also provoke ambivalent reactions.

3 Barthes, Roland « La chambre claire » Œuvres complètes V. 19771980, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1980,785-892.

4 Ibid. 809. Original emphasis.

5 « […] punctum, c’est aussi : piqûre, petit trou, petite tache, petite coupure – et aussi coup de dés. Le punctum d’une photo, c’est ce hasard qui, en elle, me point (mais aussi me meurtrit, me poigne) ».

Ibid. My translation.

6 Mulvey, Laura Death 24x a Second. Stillness and the Moving Image, London, Reaktion Books, 2006.

7 Another productive engagement with Steckholzer’s work could consist in discussing it in regards to another of Barthes’ texts, The Fashion System. Indeed, in this book he distinguishes “written clothing” (le vêtement écrit) from “image-clothing” (le vêtement-image), which are both separated from an analysis of actual material clothing, which for Barthes belongs to the region of sociology, not semiology. There is no doubt that this text by Barthes could contribute to a critical engagement with Steckholzer’s work too. I would be tempted to say that in that case too, Steckholzer’s work would incline us towards the caducity of such dualisms.

8 Latour, Bruno « What is iconoclash ? Or is there a world beyond the image wars ? » Iconoclash, Latour B. & Weibel P. (eds.), Cambridge MA, London, ZKM, MIT Press, 2002, 16.

9 Ibid. 18.

10 Ibid. 25.

11 Bataille, Georges The Accursed Share, Volume 1, Trans. Robert Hurley, New York, Zone Books, (1967) 1989, 22.

This accursed, rejected, yet fundamental part seems to be at the basis of Steckholzer’s very own economy of means and visual language and the way he articulates them to negotiate the border between his work and their references. Here again, uncertainty comes to blur evidences as those reduced or/and excessive materials, means and poses suggest a moment that could either come before or after fashion. Indeed, are his images made from the imaginary leftover taken from a fashion shoot or are they cheap attempts to recreate adds that will never take place? Thus, while working within a similar system, the modality that characterizes his work process might be more similar to that of Chris Marker’s film La Jetée in that it emphasizes the role of the photographic image as first, yet non-original memory. Effectively, by freeing fashion photography from its very own telos, Steckholzer enables the viewer to meditate on the pervasiveness of fashion imagery within our contemporary visual culture, creating, within the latter’s own, a moment outside of it, a moment of uncertainty.

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Iddo Drevijn When the world is thinking about you 2009

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Mara Ferreri

Photo: Mara Ferreri

DANGLING FUTURES AND CREATIVE WORK

What’s in a carrot?

Here comes the Carrot Bloc!

On Saturday 28th March 2009 a masked group of people marched along the streets of London in the colourful protest rally in alternative to the agendas of the G20 Summit.

Wrapped up in glamorous pashminas, shielding behind diva’s sunglasses, plastic and cardboard donkey masks, the protesters carried large speech bubbles (image) that spelt out:

FREE LABOUR ISN’T WORKING I WON’T BE YOUR ASS! SMASH THE CARROT INTERNS UNITE! One last prop elicited the greatest curiosity: long bamboo sticks with plump, bright orange carrots, crowned by lush green leaves, held up by a long string and bouncing merrily in front of the marching donkeys.

“Great props!”– shouted some demonstrators, while others ventured to ask whether the carrots represented the bonuses of bankers and hedge fund managers, to be smashed in the hyper-choreographed anger of the working masses... but that wasn’t the case.

At odds with the general logic of placards, demands and blames, the carrot is born out of a reflection on the contemporary conditions of free labour and cultural self-employment, mainly but not solely in the field of arts and culture.

From a reflection and, most importantly, a self-reflection on the modes of working and living and the myth and aspirations that mould them.

A carrot is dangling and someone/something is holding the stick, but who and what?

Collectively casting and re-casting iconographies, the first image that comes to mind is the expression “the carrot on the stick”: the promise that keeps the donkey pushing the chart, straight ahead with the eyes focused on the unreachable food. It’s the promise before its fulfilment. In the field of culture, it’s what keeps us working for free unquestioningly.

It’s having money, security and time, what-we-really-want-todo and how-we-really-want-to-do-it always at an arm’s stretch, but always moving and moving us farther in our attempt to grasp them.

Others have argued that the correct saying goes: the carrot or the stick, that is, being induced to work through the offer of a reward or a punishment. If the donkey does the work, here’s the carrot (maybe). If the donkey doesn’t, here is the stick, the beating. Either way, the donkey will work for its master in a cycle of constantly renewing threats and incentives.

Similarly we keep on working for free because we know that otherwise we’ll lose ground, credibility, our limited and ephemeral fame in a constantly renewing cultural field. If we refuse, our name or the name of our project will cease to circulate on people’s mouths and our networks will dry up, therefore giving up all hope of ever receiving payment for what we do.

The master-donkey So, who is holding the stick? In all these interpretations, the carrot is a tool of the master to whom the donkey is subjected. It can be read as the reassuring victimisation of the wage earning shouting for her rights at the employer, the master, the power that strings her along and imprisons her.

Smash the carrot! Break free from the tools of slavery and subjection! Down with the bankers, the gallerists and all the other masters and triple hurrays to the freedom of, ehrm...

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Photo: Mara Ferreri

post-industrial and post-Fordist creative self-employment and entrepreneurship....?!?

Who is our master when we have voluntarily chosen our present condition? Who’s holding the stick of a precarious freelancer or an intern? Who is dangling before our eyes a successful future, a contract, a well-paid profession and future financial stability?

Perhaps, looking back at the now-obsolete Cool Britannia’s promises of London as a creative hub for fashion, contemporary art and music...? Or maybe the imagery called into existence by the names of successful art professionals dropped in conversations or at school, or read on glossy art magazines? That is, the artist as the urban bourgeois-bohemian, the mythology of the glamorous life of art critics, curators and “creatives”. And before that, our parents’ experience of welfare states, the straight trajectory higher education-professional job-family&house-a dignifying retirement.

Whichever the sources and their combinations, the carrot of a well-paid glamorous creative future can be easily conjured up in our minds and equally easily seen vanishing as the gloss of the creative economies is shown threadbare. It’s now apparent that much of the contemporary creative bubble relies on a constant in-flux of self-produced no-budget projects run by unpaid interns, voluntary freelancers and other precarious graduates caught between the options of a never ending sequence of internships and short-term projects, on

one hand, and paid jobs in unrelated fields, on the other.

Confronting these mythologies and the unglamorous dayto-day reality, it is easy to be caught into circuits of selfblame whenever everyday life proves different from the projected successful career. The neo-liberal culture in which we are embedded is -of course- of little avail. Those who have “made it” will narrate their success as talent, persistence, hard work. Those who haven’t made it yet, well, they have clearly not worked and competed hard enough.

Any intermediate position, any attempt to set up sustainable alternatives seem impossible: and so it happens that you find yourself in the paradox of being at the same time a stick maker and stick holder, in a spiral of hyper-individualised selfblame.

The fragmented nature of cultural work and the myth of individual talent haven’t but exasperated this contemporary individualistic tendency.We are our own masters, the masters of our success – great neo-liberal incarnation of self-sufficient, competitive individuals, strung along by their ambitions, the ideal type of the contemporary artist or cultural practitioner who doesn’t need anyone, equipped with a laptop, a mobile phone, flexible, always on the move.

Without a collective reflection on widespread working conditions, the effects of large scale cultural policies, such as cuts to publicly-funded institutions and the shift towards un-

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paid positions, are perceived as personal shortcomings or lack of individual commitment.This in turn triggers insidious forms of competition, to be always one step ahead, always a bit more dedicated, more up to speed. All common struggles silenced, all concerns internalised.

1 See “Interns are workers and should be paid”, Indymedia London, 31st July 2009.

2 See www.carrotworkers.wordpress.com.

And soon there’ll be available for download the Counter-Internship Guide – a collection of research and actions.

Smashing... our desires?

It is clear that such a train of thought can become extremely harmful, and a critique of this behaviour seems to lead once again to a personal failure. To break free from this vicious cycle, it’s crucial to rethink the carrot as a positive symbol for what is yet to come, a yearning for a future that has not yet materialised and of which we want to be in control. Going beyond the emotional cul-de-sac of success and blame, the carrot is also the form of the future we desire. It’s the quest for a sustainable present, economically, emotionally, socially, spatially. It’s the desire to turn “what we do” into “what we do for living”, but according to our desires, not the pre-fabricated neo-liberal promise of individual success.

The carrot is all that keeps us going, all that we aim towards, our desires and aspirations, and by casting our own conditions, we can shape it.

Beyond the current mythology of individual success and failure, the Carrot Workers Collective has initiated an analysis of the connections between macro and micro social and cultural politics. Through collective readings, performances and close analysis of government policies1, it has started “a participatory action research around voluntary work, internship, job placements and compulsory free work in order to understand their impact on material conditions of existence, life expectations and sense of self, together with their implications in relation to education, life long training, exploitation, and class interest”.2 The question is to recognise different needs and desires and to modify our aims and modes of work and live accordingly.

It’s a matter of taking control of the desiring machine that makes us write or edit a free art magazine - to take an example close at hand!- or participate in unpaid, self-managed projects, or run independent art spaces that cannot afford to pay curators and artists for their work. It’s a question of realising the paradoxes of the internalisation of conflicts and competitiveness, and of weighting the time and energy invested against our social and affective necessities, breaking the mould of individual hyper-productiveness and being able to discern other possibilities, and to actively embody them.

Don’t destroy the desiring machine: acknowledge the secret and not so secret reasons that move the self-enslavement of compulsory (and compulsive!) free work, without crushing the ideas and desires that move it. In the path towards a collective and sustainable autonomy,

DON’T SMASH THE CARROT, SEIZE IT! EF + 13

Kay Walkowiak Untitled 2008 Kleines Planetarium 2009 (page 15)

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Kay Walkowiak Ich Ich 2008

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Jurga Daubaraite sence, when the subject constitutes itself from the position of trauma and does not know how to eliminate traumatic lacks. Therefore the subject strives for a more secure position, one of silencing that past.

Such perceptional gaps within post-communist society are conceptually approached in the artistic practise of David Maljkovic. Consisting of video installation and collages, his latest artwork, Lost Memories from These Days (2006-2008), oscillates between the experience and the representation of yesterday and today. His work constitutes a cultural and historical exploration of the events of Croatia’s recent past, through confrontations between the country’s current younger generation and its historical monuments, and also presents his interpretation of the future of the former Soviet bloc societies. The narrative pieces evolve from the emblematic architecture of the Memorial Centre for a Partisan Hospital designed by Vojin Bakic in 1981, and Giuseppe Sambito’s Italian Pavilion for the Zagreb Fair dating from 1962.

David Maljkovic, Lost Memories from These Days, 2006/2008 Image source: A Prior, #17

STRUGGLES FOR RECOGNITION A quote from the artist Deimantas Narkevicius about Lithuania: “During the Soviet period it was the farthest territory in the West, now it’s the farthest territory in the East.”

From the perspective of the creation of historical memory and the future of it in post-communist countries, it is worth drawing analogy with the situation of the classified KGB archives in Lithuania. The necessity of lustration that commenced in the first years of independence is still undergoing a process of polemics1. Reserved changes in people’s mentality prevent the opening up of archives and the critical observation of our past, now placing ‘real’ names upon the map of history.The director of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, Dalia Kuodyte, asserts that we are lacking not only the strength to name the truth, but also to hear it. 2 Filling the voids in the fictionalised past is not a subjectively necessary process, as there are always too many - or too close - facts possibly emerging, and there is still a comforting nostalgic approval of the past’s heroes, as the philosopher Leszek Kolakowsky’s opinion shows: “now they offer us a new definition of truth: one that is told by the KGB. That definition at least must be disputed.”3 At the same time it constructs a morbid consciousness of an ab-

What do images of self-definition offer to now abandoned, and derelict sites of previously vibrant representational architecture? Maljkovic cuts out images of buildings once associated with modernity and the progressive future, and by means of renouncing the past and doubting its representation, questions how history is exchanged through its architectural representations. One of the collages bearing empty space instead of the building, reminds us of a time of optimism, development and vigorous growth, laid down for ‘us’ from above – the myth of a ‘better tomorrow’ being imposed as a real and common belief. Other collages bring together images of those abandoned sites in their heyday. However, most profoundly, it might show that representation itself is empty. Fictionalised soviet history emerges as the same confusing trap of representation found today. Maybe there is nothing behind the curtain (where soviet and postsoviet reality and fiction meet). Still, the determination of the geopolitical situation influences our self-perception in relation to bygone and current affairs. The image of power and progress, that Maljkovic nullifies, would tend to (or was tending to, in its real presence) contaminate ones clear and confident position to the self.

Croatian artist David Maljkovic could be described as a creator of narratives in progress, as his developed relation with the utopian architecture of the 60’s and 70’s presents the struggles of the recent past for a contemporary understanding. As the title of the work I’m focusing on suggests - Lost Memories from These Days (and a video counterpart These Days) – it analyses a reminiscent lack of historical clarity that results in a tiring wait for a ‘better tomorrow’. Video parts of the work take us to the former Italian pavilion of the Zagreb Fair, designed by Italian architect Giuseppe Sambito and established by Josip Tito in 1961, as a rare example of economic and cultural exchange between the former East and West. A few people in their early twenties are sitting, standing, lingering around the parked cars, in front and inside of the building, almost still. The car wheels are trapped

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David Maljkovic, Lost Memories from These Days, 2006/2008.Video installation with collages DVD, 6 min, color, sound, loop Image source: http://www.kopenhagen.dk/typo3temp/pics/3a84fdf491.jpg

in polystyrene geometrical forms that seem to repeat the columns of the iconic pavilion, reminiscent of a static and, as if paused situation in post-communist countries (Croatia in this instance). People are trapped in the time of transition and translation. Those waiting on the outside of the building (in These Days) are contemporary looking characters of artists, architects, “as (recognisable) protagonists of non-institutional cultural practices in Zagreb, that in recent years have developed various ways of working in opposition to dominant models of representation, capital and ideology constructed by national culture and pragmatic demands posed on the way to European integrations,”4 but still, they slowly and without interest are repeating falsely optimistic phrases from English language learning tapes: “it’s a beautiful sunny day!”, “fantastic!”. Young ladies in the pavilion are silent and this quietness is only sometimes intervened by the sound of a car’s engine, they scarcely gaze in to the camera as it zooms closer.

Simple Math First: Youth is Romania’s hope. Second: The Youth wants to leave Romania. (Dan Perjovschi) The observation of these characters is uncomfortable; it asks one to define him or herself in relation to this gaze.

A continuous attempt to re-integrate and be recognised in the West appears as a constant self-exposure to the outside.

Therefore in addition, the location of the semi-abandoned,

conspicuously empty, out-of-use pavilion escalates the disillusionment with the processes of accession to Europe.

However, Maljkovic says that a dead end is a good start.5 A post-communist subject in the face of this disillusionment with the past is in need of constant self-creation and recreation of one’s identity. Maybe, this depressive and dystopian moment of decisions could be turned into the positive creative experience of “there is an alternative”.

Maljkovic’s posed view to the emptiness of the Italian pavilion from today’s perspective is a metaphor for a complex relation that is being created nowadays between the two Europes. It questions our self-perception as lacking ‘Europeanness’ and new-marketability - relevant criteria for recognition. The past suddenly swept under the carpet and submission to the representational and mimicking theatre does not bring the expected affluence and feeling of security.

Abandoned buildings and longing characters speak up for the act of being included in the New Europe as the Other, attempting to be added to the universal body. The curatorial collective from Zagreb, WHW, describe the tensions of recognition in their review: “Maljkovic questions the very notion of high Western modernism as a never completed project, whose promises of progress and security from today’s perspective appear as an ‘unfinished future’ (…) What they (his works) offer is rather a clear and precise diagnosis of the inability to recompose the desire that is the project of modernism.” Maljkovic critically locates the East’s view in the West (and possibly the West’s in the East, as the artwork

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is being widely presented in the international art scene) and posits our political and cultural definitions against the Western image and interpretation. At the core of the current European society is the question of how we are determined by seemingly unavoidable geopolitical positions; rephrasing WHW: the so called ‘peripheral’ modernisms and ‘real, ideologically unburdened’ Western modernism.6 Balkans In the early 1990s I was Central European. In the mid-1990s I was called an Eastern European. At the end of the century I was seen as a South-eastern European. Today I am called a Balkan artist. But I lived all this time in Bucharest.

(Dan Perjovschi) This uneasy feeling is fed on the still common assumption that distance to the communist past is automatically a subversive attitude of the modern subject and one would more easily appear as ‘normal’, recognisable in the new representational system. In this sense a creative strategy of employing the emptiness frustrates the system precisely by showing that lack and void of meaning is self-perceived. “Modernization as a state of mind”, as Dytchev puts it, in the postcommunist art scene becomes a characteristic aim of the cultural critique of the representation of Eastern Europe in a western art context. Representation could only represent itself, its own means and ideological mechanisms for producing meanings and status in contemporary culture. Such distrust targets the politics of the art market as a hierarchical structure differentiating ‘within’ from the ‘outside’.

Boris Groys claims that conceptually different Western in-

terests in the cultural situation of the eastern block started emerging only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is rather interesting to dig deeper and see the basis of such a point of view, as Groys links it to the contemporary mediamarket economy, based on the diversification of products.

Accordingly, you can only bring a product to the globalised market by stressing its difference, originality and its otherness. At the same time, the European concept of culture clearly marks its self-defined borders and “those who come to Europe should conform, thank you very much”7. Such tradition pressures other cultures and different identities to measure themselves in accordance to the universal values that Europe represents. Thus something like the shattering theatre of representation comes as no surprise to Eastern Europe, blindly and often without comprehension, accepting and wearing those values as theirs. And that is also fuelled by the demands of the globalized market for diversity.What the audience is interested in, what their “certain postmodern aesthetic choice” likes, according to Boris Groys, is this “colourful diversity”, and not the “uniform, repetitive, boring – everything grey, homogeneous, and reductionist”8 look of, for example, (post)-communism. And, indeed, it makes the question: where are you from? rather significant. Is this why my answer is usually followed by uncertainty and uninspiring silence? The question surely is in what manner and light one is defined. Just looking for the origin of such a position makes some critical thinkers such as Groys and similarly Babias claim - “it is the taste formed by the contemporary market, and it is the taste for the market”9. Therefore, the issue of different cultural identity is being employed not only for “suppressing it or finding a representation for it in the context of existing political and cultural institutions, (...) but also to sell, comodify, to commercialize this cultural identity

Daniel Knorr, European Influenza,Venice 2005 Image source: 3rdartnet.com/.../Images/robinson6-20-1.jpg

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on the international media and touristic markets”.10 Artist Dan Perjovschi,as his contribution to“In den Schluchten des Balkan“ at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel (2003), had a tattoo with the legend “Romania” removed from his upper arm. He had it done in front of a live audience at a Romanian performance festival when the period of transition, and with that the cultural self-colonization of Eastern Europe, had entered its first days. In that way Perjovschi revealed the process of re-identification by accepting the new definitions of ‘Romanian’ and ‘Eastern European’. The latter removal of the inscription during the performance Erased Romania (2003) demonstrated the process of self-definition in a way foreign to him. One who needs to define his/her relation to the Center also posits the struggles for recognition; “by removing the tattoo he has now articulated the necessity of liberating oneself from the Western identity patterns that had literally inscribed themselves into his flesh”.11 An artist during a recent interview at the Nasher Museum (2008) said: “every time I make an exhibition abroad people come to me and ask about the political situation in Romania, and not about my work.”

Why could it be important to question strategies of representation and recognition today? Mainly to remap the cultural situation in the face of the struggles formed through rules of inclusion and exclusion, visibility and invisibility. It is about questioning the strategies of commodified diversity and the influences of the contemporary art-market in order to explore how Eastern European art history and cultural theory could resist its ‘exoticisation’.While the essentialist construction of difference asserts the post-colonial terms in the western discourse, it’s “much trumpeted cultural diversity, (...) actually marks an explosive point in the politics of representation – the identity-forming moment of the European feeling of superiority over the others”.12 European geography runs through nation states and identities making places of interest and marking them with struggles for recognition. What if there is no authentic language according to its definition, as earlier remarked, or no articulated account of its experiences to deal with the new system of meanings and values? Thus the post-communist artist in some cases refuses (in his/her own way) to be representative in the representational narrative.

The transitory place and time, due to bonding east and west together, produces cultures of representation, focusing on the distinctions, rather than of mixing.13 The difference of cultural, political, social origin in such a system has to be worked with, shown and discursively accepted by its visibility.

The unsolved issues of national representation repressed by the cracking rhythm of integration is particularly approached in the self-titled ‘maker’s of the invisible work’ from Daniel Knorr.

Artist Daniel Knorr represented Romania in the Venice Biennial in 2005 showing the work European Influenza. In fact he did not show anything. Knorr left the entire pavilion empty

with traces of the pavilions former activity remaining evident in paint stains and irregularities on the walls. Two doors of the pavilion were both left open: the entrance door for the art crowd from the Giardini, and the exit door, towards the park, leading directly to the “real” world, outside the space of the biennale.You can leave through that door the biennial but not enter. Before the entrance, Knorr installed a pile of thick pocket books, with white covers, with no title or author, readers with critically cutting and harsh texts about the world we live in, about Europe, art, criticism, and the independent scene. It was an intellectual discussion platform for old tenants and new arrivals to the EU. The artist in the pavilion didn’t have a CV or a critique and the curator didn’t talk about this exhibition nor did the artist. Visually unspectacular, transgressive emptiness was actually “presence” unnoticed.

The permanent Romanian pavilion in Venice in 2005 was turned towards the systematic viewer, contemporary art audience, biennale member, in a transgressive manner, and also rather paradigmatic way for Eastern Europeans one could say. What has to be shown in the space where staged cultural translation is crisscrossed with alienation of the self’s other? Emptiness that dominated the abandoned quality of the pavilion in this sense was a pure cancellation of the representation of the distinction. A Romanian identity that had to be shown in its cultural substance contested the act of recognition as eulogy of the other. In such a way the curious gaze towards the national pavilion is returned to itself, by the gesture of showing nothing.

“Identity is by definition not an absolute distinction, removed from everything and, therefore, distinct from nothing: it is always the other of another identity” – says Jean Luc Nancy when talking about the process of identification in Sarajevo as pure and naked identity: “it is such, so that nothing else will get mixed in with it, and so that we do not get mixed up in it, that is, we other cosmopolitan Europeans.”14 And this pavilion was left empty because of today’s post-communist subject’s break with a recognisable identity. In fact, I believe Knorr went further by deploying the discourse for experiencing this difference, which is preset in each subject. It asks for a reconfiguration of ones faculty of sight, foundation of the self and encounter with the other. The requirement to demonstrate ones alleged ‘specific’ cultural identity tends towards, according to Nancy, “crude and obscene” thoughts of purity. It is important to speak of culture, identity, not in one smooth simple descriptive tone, but to identify oneself through and within that difference.

Could we talk about these issues from the current positions each of us are now taking?

“A true identification photo would be an indeterminate melee of photos and scribbles that resemble nothing, under which one would inscribe a proper name.” 15

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1 “According to the Lithuanian mass media, there are more than 1000 personnel, all employees of the KGB and about 4000 former secret agents of the Soviet special services in Lithuania left un-lustrated. The Law “On the Registration, Recognition, Reporting, and Protection of Identified Persons Who Secretly Collaborated with the Former Special Services of the USSR” was passed by the Sejm in 1998 and amended in 1999. It demands that the former employees of the KGB and other Soviet special services inform a special commission of that status and be registered by it. During the established year and a half term close to 1500 ex-agents and employees came to the commission on lustration.Their names are kept secret.

The names of those who didn’t come to the commission were supposed to be published. The law bars former KGB members from legal practice and working in banks, and also restricts their opportunities for taking jobs in private companies. But after promulgating the law, the Lithuanian government did not launch any further actions to screen former KGB members, and the law was quietly dropped.” http://www.axisglobe.com/article.asp?article=478 2 TV inteview with Dalia Kuodyte (2000) 3 From interview with Tomas Venclova (2006). http://www.veidas.lt/ lt/leidinys.full/44eea1034cb8e 4 What, How and for Whom collective (WHW), (2008). “Waiting Time”. http://www.aprior.org/articles/4 5 David Maljkovic, from the interview Charles Esche – David Maljkovic (2005), in the artist’s book Place with limited premeditation.

6 What, How and for Whom collective (WHW), (2008). “Waiting Time”. http://www.aprior.org/articles/4 7 Boris Groys (2008). “Europe and Its Others”. Art Power. (p.173) 8 Ibid, (p.150) 9 Ibid, (p.151) 10 Ibid.

11 Marius Babias (2005). Catalog essay, Dan Perjovschi, “Self-Colonisation: Dan Perjovschi and His Critique of the Post-Communist Restructuring of Identity”. http://www.lombard-freid.com/artists/ perjovschi/perjovschi_press/perjovschi_babias_5_22_05.htm 12 Marius Babias (2003). “The New Europe. Culture of Mixing and Politics of Representation”. European Influenza, (p.197) 13 Ibid, (p. 197) 14 Jean-Luc Nancy (1993). “Eulogy for the Melee. For the Sarajevo”. The New Europe. Culture of Mixing and Politics of Representation. (p.123)

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Ali Taptik “Edit Board for the series ‘Nothing Surprising’ 1” 2009

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Ghalya Saadawi

Undercover Brick in the Wall: The Testimony of Soldier Z32 To learn to see the frame that blinds us to what we see is no easy matter (Judith Butler) In cartoon land it was once rabbit season. In Israel today, it may be testimony season - especially that of perpetrators.

With Ari Folman’s polemical Waltz with Bashir (2008), the tale of a former Israeli officer coming to terms with his past, came a flood of opinion articles in the international press.

Uninterestingly, or perhaps even predictably, as with most mainstream media criticism, the film divided critics and viewers into two camps with very little room in between. With, in the case of some because the Waltz was a clever formal twist, the animated testimony of the Israeli soldier who served in Lebanon in the 1980’s and was an accomplice and witness to the Sabra and Chatila massacre. Blending graphic novel, documentary, and autobiographical genres, the film was said to excel aesthetically, purge psychoanalytically, and document truthfully, for the record. Against, were the likes of columnist Gideon Levy. He argued that the melancholic, visually powerful form was devoid of content and context, diffusing Israel’s burden of responsibility for its invasion of Lebanon, and its continued, unjust occupation and subjugation of Palestinians. In other words, to paraphrase filmmaker Avi Mograbi, ‘in Israel we have an expression; we shoot and we weep.’

Which brings us to Mograbi’s own recently released testimonial film, Z32 (2009), which was also previewed at Goldsmiths College in London last spring in the presence of the director. Four elements are interlaced to bring a certain Israeli soldier’s testimony to grotesque but faceless life. Voyeuristic scenes of him and his girlfriend smoking cigarettes in bed, while we and the camcorder witness a discussion of how, one cold night, the army awoke him to a murderous revenge mission against a few Palestinians, and if she – his girlfriend – could forgive him. These are intercut with scenes of Z32 (his classification number as part of the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence’s ongoing archive of solider testimonies) describing step by detached step how the Israeli army’s training camps are full of testosterone-filled,

competitive youth waiting to empty their ammunition into the Palestinian enemy. Interspersed with this are shots of a visit, together with the filmmaker, to the ‘scene of the crime’, where he describes how he killed those men in cold blood.

Z32 walks around the Palestinian village in noon-light as if he owned the place, trying to jump over the wall of a private residence, oblivious to local passersby, while simultaneously fearing a sniper shoot him dead. His acts, which have become a narrated memory, leave us questioning whether they were ever traumatic at all. In addition, the absurdly Brechtian or tragi-comic theatrical element is Mograbi harboring a 7-piece orchestra in his own living room as he sings his guilt, confusion and complicity with an Israeli killer in his smoky, off-key voice – zero calorie confessions of shameful collusion.We wonder at times whether the film’s Judeo-Christian undercurrents, though often facetious, at all undermine the State politics and system Mograbi finds himself in.

Mainly though, the film figures frontal headshots of the soldier in question offering his ‘testimony’. This form is one of the most conventional tools of the documentary mode, and when engaging with murderous political acts, decades of colonization and totalizing discourses of power and control, the representational apparatus and machinery of reportage become problematic. In a good intentioned way, Mograbi might see himself as an artist engaged with the contemporary political conditions of Palestine and Israel, as implied by his previous oeuvres and his virulent leftist discourse postfilm screening. Yet it’s possible in this instance, that the dog ate his homework.

However, like the Catholic priest’s dark room, the testimonyconfessions are faceless. In other words, instead of Z32’s actual face, there is an animated prosthesis-cum-mask digitally fixed to him and his girlfriend. In wanting to remain anonymous they unknowingly universalized and perverted their testimonies: E Pluribus Unum. As it is usually prisoners and victims who are masked, this also activates a controversial ‘gray zone’ – the distant cousin of the one once elaborated

by Primo Levi – where oppressors appear like the oppressed and executioners like victims.

Yet, this is not Mograbi’s take on it, it seems. Mograbi explains that the digital mask was chosen to preserve a trace of hu-

Filmstill, Z32, 2009

Filmstill, Z32, 2009

man emotional expression, rather than force Z32 to cover up with actual headgear. He maintains that it was merely a random strategy to maintain the boy soldier’s anonymity. In other words, the digital facial shots of Z32 were not a formal measure undertaken to raise questions about responsibility or otherness. Of course, chance and inexactitude are often part of an artistic process, or so reminds us the great painter Francis Bacon. However, the figure here, though potentially Baconian in distortion and blurriness, is a soldier testifying to murder. The fact that the choice of a digital mask escapes Mograbi, renders his obliviousness both artistically and politically problematic. Although this does not imply that the face must be celebrated as an icon of identity, or some such, at least in projects such as this, it must be problematized.

Seen from another perspective and despite the bones we have to pick with him, for philosopher Levinas, the face is a crucial site which marks our ethical relationship to the other. Does this underscore the absence or withdrawal of a certain ethicality? One wonders to whom the invented facemask on Z32 really belongs, if to anyone at all and whether facial digitalization allows for the possibility of a non-human or post-human face. If so, is this where “human power borders on the inhuman”?1 Moreover, the intricate ideas around trauma and bearing witness have sometimes centered on the impossibilities of full knowledge and speech in the face of disaster, as well as on the fictive and literary possibilities inherent to testimony.

They have been critically and lyrically tackled in filmic essays such as Level 5 (1997) and Notre Musique (2004), among many others, through forms of montage and narration that undermine easy conclusions and linear, normative histories.

These films work to destabilize and fragment expert documentary modes giving images the potential to raise vital political questions, anew. It is perhaps impossible to make a ‘war film’, or as was once remarked by Chris Marker, there will only be a war cinema when there is an olfactory cinema. In some segments of Notre Musique, the archival footage of war, destruction and destitution from the world over is headlineless, almost subjectless. The viewer is not told what state or era they belong to. Some are recognizable as familiar, mediatized images, others are not. In this sense, it appears as though Godard is saying that it is the use of the subject, the subjectifying of the other in most journalistic and documen-

tary genres, that renders a certain usage of images (and the politics of difference) politically problematic. Naming can be limiting and exclusive, but he (un)does it so well. In visually ‘listing’ and juxtaposing the images, akin to philosopher JeanLuc Nancy’s list of war zones and resistance movements in the first pages of Being Singular Plural (2000), he universalizes them. In no longer becoming the passing, exotic subjects of pity that belong to a specific localized country or conflict, Godard breaks open the image and we see the horror of war and the world anew.

In this sense, the alternative flights, imaginaries and possibilities proposed by Z32 are unclear, and one questions where its poetics and politics stand. The film also raises concerns about how archiving could be an ideologically-driven process, and what constitutes an artwork emerging from such an archiving. It could be that Mograbi’s formal and aesthetic choices - bringing the solider into his own living space to testify, and giving him a digital non-face rather than a mask - highlight the current apathy and helplessness felt by few Israelis about the occupation of Palestine. However, the potential for cinematic form and content to conjoin and resurrect (or even choose not to frontally address) necessary political and ethical questions, is missing in this film. Mograbi facetiously sings his complicity from within, rather than questioning or upturning it. Although it could be implied that the boy solider has trouble narrating his story, that the killing machine is bigger than him (and hence repeatedly asks his girlfriend to narrate the mechanics of the murder in a man’s voice, to speak for him), the film also appears devoted to a faceless, nameless, oblivious boy who carries not a grain of affect or lucidity for the acts he and others have committed: A reversed mini-Eichmann of sorts. Because Mograbi’s film does not perform the banality of evil (breaking out into song with unambiguous lyrics doesn’t count), or even engage with the machinery of power like Eyal Sivan’s The Specialist (1999) did for example, what his film attempts to articulate about or translate within this very banality, remains painfully unclear. A misery that exceeds the detached enumeration of (f)acts: such is the aporia of Palestine.

1 p. 77 Agamben, G. (2002). Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books.

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Karen Mirza and Brad Butler Instructions For Films 2008 4 of ongoing series, selection of four 150mm x 200mm Ink, pencil, cardboard

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Catherine Borra

THE YOUNG PEOPLE VISITING OUR RUINS SEE NOTHING BUT A STYLE FormContent at GAM,Turin 18 June 2009 – 30 August 2009

Giulio Paolini, 174, 1965 Photographic paper mounted on wood. Courtesy GAM

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The artist is constantly faced with the decision of whether to advance as a saver of differences or as a warlord of innovation against the general public. Given this ambivalence in modernist aggression, the so-called postmodern is not totally wrong to define itself as the anti-explicit and anti-extremist reaction to modernity’s aesthetic and analytic terrorism. (Sloterdijk, 2002) The present is non contemporaneous to itself. (Derrida, 1993) In 1965, conceptual artist Giulio Paolini produced a work called 174 – a visual mapping of artistic currents transforming themselves progressively from one to another. Our age can be seen as one of competing reconstructions of history, where defining dates, beginnings and ends, is more of a symbolic practice than an exact science. Writing down history is but one of the ways of apprehending it: its deadlines and starting points are archival techniques, borders that help to memorize.

Paolini’s diagram on one hand notes down the passing of the years, while on the other it lists Jugendstil, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism up to Abstractionism, Neo-Dada and Pop Art – explicated by a bundle of diagonals that connect one movement to another, one generation to the following until the system of relations is so confused that it precisely illustrates the problematics of experiencing events in a linear and onedimensional format.

It is with this emblematic work invested with the role of curatorial stratagem, that FormContent’s exhibition at the GAM (Galleria d’Arte Moderna), Turin, starts to unfold.

FormContent, which was founded in 2007 by Francesco Pedraglio, Caterina Riva and Pieternel Vermoortel as an experimental project space in East London, was invited by the institution to develop a show in its gallery headquarters.The brief invited the three curators to respond to GAM’s collection, and at the same time blend it with ‘their renowned acquaintance with the latest contemporary art’ (Volpato, 2009 – from the exhibition catalogue). For this exhibition, it is the gallery of modern art itself that asks for a redefinition of the idea of modern. FormContent is asked to survey its history, opening up the opportunity to test a different register on which to develop an argument about contemporaneity, created by a dialogue between works belonging to past generations and more recent examples.

The Young People Visiting Our Ruins See Nothing But A Style is the result of a mediating process between the agenda of an independent space aimed at supporting a younger generation of artists, and the GAM – embracing the responsibility of an established museum towards history. GAM’s collection comprises an important archive of works spanning from historical pieces marking the pace of Italian art history at the beginning of 1900, such as Felice Casorati’s Woman and

Installation shot. Photo: Bruna Biamino.

Featuring: Sol Lewitt, Complex Form #52, 1990 Clement Rodzielski, Grands a, 2008

Armour (1921), and progresses through to Arte Povera, with documents such as Penone’s photos for Working on Trees.

Maritime Alps (1968), reaching out to internationally established practices with Richard Serra’s hypnotic video Untitled, from Identifications curated by Gerry Schum (1970).

In The Young People Visiting Our Ruins See Nothing But A Style, Casorati’s figurative research falls into place with Andrea Buttner’s Nativity (2007), while another trajectory encompasses Serra’s gaping hands, followed by Florian Rothmayr’s archetypic neo-ruin Time Flows Differently for Some Forms (2008), a late piece of Dadamaino’s exploded abstractions, and Michael Dean’s grasped form, Yes (Working Title) (2009).

The installation of the work by other participants, such as Steve Claydon, Thomas Houseago and Vanessa Billy, takes their working methodology as a form to suggest how influences can develop constructively into sets of independent narrations. The curatorial direction defines a fine line balanced between the format of the historical survey with its scientific precision, and an intuitive approach – following the echoes and suggestions evoked by the artworks themselves.

In the complex construction of conceptual mapping, which is of relevance to most of the younger artists in the exhibition as much as it is a curatorial concern, ideas are borrowed or stolen, and then embedded into personal cognitive structures in order to produce new concepts, ideas and work.

According to the French sociologist Bruno Latour, these processes of appropriation and re-design are the dominant

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methodologies producing contemporary culture (Latour, 2008). Having learned from the side-effects of the quasi-naïf optimism and faith in acceleration characterizing the Avantgardes of the past century, a stream of generations developed in antithesis to the refusal dialectics that dominated modernity, and became concerned with an alternative ideal of the modern. The modern in this context, becomes a holistic explanation of progression based on change and development as organic processes, which evolve from experience and knowledge.

Incorporation is considered as a kind of comprehension, evidencing the metabolization of the past as an essential yet profoundly subjective activity. The Young People Visiting Our Ruins See Nothing But A Style is an exhibition conceived of as a habitat, tuned to the invisible milieu of historical narratives at large, where generations of ideas grow into each other – promoting the format for a culture that grows ecologically.

Installation shot. Photo: Bruna Biamino.

Featuring: Steven Claydon, Good Dithyramb (The Folly of Equivalence), 2009 Mino Rosso, Nuns, 1930 Andrea Buttner, Nativity, 2007

Derrida, J. 1993: Spectres of Marx, Oxon (UK): Routledge, 1994.

Birnbaum, D. and Olsson, A. 1990: ‘An Interview with Jacques Derrida on the Limits of Digestion’, in E-Flux Journal, 06.

Guattari, F. 1989: The Three Ecologies, London: Continuum, 2002.

Groys, B. 2009: ‘The Obligation to Self-Design’, in E-Flux Journal, 06.

Latour, B. 2008: A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk), http://www. bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/112-DESIGN-CORNWALL.pdf. Accessed 27/03/09 Rancière, J. 2007: ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, in Artforum, 2007.

Sloterdijk, P. 2002: Terror From the Air, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009.

Verwoert, J. 2007: ‘Living with Ghosts: From Appropriation to Invocation in Contemporary Art’, in Art&Research - A journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods - Volume 1.No.2 Summer 2007; http://www.artandresearch. org.uk/v1n2/verwoert.html - accessed 04/03/09

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Ali Taptik “Edit Board for the series ‘Nothing Surprising’ 2” 2009

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Cuneyt Cakirlar

Queer Art of Sodomitical Sabotage, Queer Ethics of Surfaces: Embodying Militarism and Masculinity in Erinç Seymen’s Portrait of a Pasha (2009) I see art as sabotage.

If you can’t plan it well, you’ll end up with the police.

(Erinç Seymen)1

Erinç Seymen, Portrait of a Pasha, 2009 Photo: Cuneyt Cakirlar. Courtesy of galerist and the artist.

Reproduced with permission.

So the story goes, in the late 1980s, the Turkish general Kenan Evren, who led the 1980 coup d’etat in Turkey, encountered the popular Turkish music icon known widely as ‘the Pasha of Art’, Zeki Müren, who was a much respected performer – well-known for his extravagant costumes on stage and his mannered queer performance. This encounter was followed by a conversation initiated by the general’s curiosity about the honorary title bestowed on Müren by the Turkish public, namely pasha, a title reserved under the Ottoman sultanate for high-ranking military personnel.2 Evren asked Müren why this symbolic title had been given to him.

After some hesitation, and at the general’s insistence, Müren answered the question:‘This nation was so angry about what you did during the military coup, but they couldn’t be very open with their anger. Rather than calling you and your colleagues faggots (ibne), they called me pasha’.

Despite the variously different versions of this story, what matters here is that the final answer remains the same, where the story gains its so-called narrative climax in queer performativity and works to exploit the national/ist accents of homophobic masculinity and militarism in Turkey. The ‘conventionally non-evidential’3, but seriously viral propagation of the story acquired the status of gossip and seemed to presuppose another gossipy truth about Müren’s gayness.

The stubborn everyday presence of this story addresses, and makes the listener witness, a collective signature of the Turkish cultural memory: an effect of phantasmatic investment in testimony, evidence and historical truth-telling.

As Irit Rogoff has argued, in gossip one can find ‘a radical model of postmodern knowledge which would serve well in the reading and rewriting of gendered historical narratives’.4 Aligning with, but articulating further Rogoff’s critical framework, Gavin Butt reads the queer potential of gossip and its epistemic status as the ‘projections of interpretive desire and curiousity’ about deviant encounters and sexual practices.5 Implicating Zeki Müren’s homosexuality publicly never outed, both the above story and Seymen’s artwork enable a discursive articulation of Butt’s focus on gossip as a de-closeting performative speech-act with regard to marginal sexual identities and practices. However, what the artwork might also mobilize is a quest for a queer possibility AS + 38

xy

Erinç Seymen, Portrait of a Pasha, 2009 Photo: Cuneyt Cakirlar. Courtesy of galerist and the artist. Reproduced with permission.

for translating a rumoured-thus-fantasized encounter into a deviant artistic pleasure, so as to disclose ‘the homosexual’ as the repudiated, but constitutive abject-other of the militarist nationalist masculinity.

Briefly, the artistic performance in Erinç Seymen’s Portrait of a Pasha (2009) is inspired by the gossipy story of Müren and the general, and the artwork’s reclamation of this event attempts to play with the very ontological foundations of straight masculinity and national identity in Turkey. It treats the encounter as an imagined confrontation between the two oppositional, culturally phantasmatic bodies, the SoldierCitizen and the Male Homosexual, within the history of the modern/ized Turkish subject. In this particular national context, Seymen reanimates and re-embodies that moment in order to queer the identification with militarist masculinity.

Seymen’s Portrait appears to put an emphasis on the ritualistic process of making the portrait – by means of supplementing the artwork with a single-screen video installation.

In the video, the image of Zeki Müren is roughly portrayed by the artist on canvas covering a white wooden panel. In fact, we see that the panel is a target in a shooting range being shot at by a licensed marksman. Thus, the finished portrait appears from the bulletholes on the panel, after the canvas having been removed. By canvas, I do not mean a conventional sheet or surface which covers uniformly the wooden panel. The artist’s sketch of Zeki Müren on the panel is neither a laboriously crafted drawing nor a pure mechanically

reproduced copy. Seymen uses yellow sticky dots on black background to produce target points for the marksman’s performance of gun-shooting. The word ‘canvas’ is thus used as the skin of the artist’s aesthetic authority, a minimal surface of artistic intentionality/mind, or in other words, a projective skin of the artist’s bodily agency removed from the final product.The remaining bulletholes seem to embody the flirtatious gaze of Zeki Müren’s eyes. I wish to explore here Seymen’s performative translation and transposition of the fantasized pasha-to-pasha encounter into queer art-practice through a libidinal reappropriation.

My own spectatorial enjoyment of and intellectual investments in Seymen’s artwork, embrace, contest, negotiate and sublate the dichotomies of Western/non-Western, global/local and universal/particular.6 What is embedded within Seymen’s aesthetic discourse of queer appropriation is what it works to allegorize within its Turkish referentiality.

The use of Müren’s iconic image in Portrait of a Pasha does not work to assign the figure to the critical, and resistant, agency of marginal gender subjectivity, but enables this popular queer image to disclose and re-enact the hypocrisy of Turkish nation-building project and its heterosexualizing normative urge in the sociopolitical treatment of the queer citizen.7 To call Müren pasha does not imply any sense of irony: He was, in fact, widely admired as a performer. The title pasha demonstrates a way of managing the ‘Queer Müren’

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by negotiating with and normalizing his persona through valorizing his professional artistic achievement. In his work on the cultural image of Müren, the ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes, argues that it is ‘necessary to probe the hypernormativity’ of that nationalist negotiation with Müren’s gendered persona ‘for the contradictions and tensions that lie within it’.8 As well as the heteronormative investment in Zeki Müren through Turkish melodrama, and the ‘pseudoautobiographic’ scholarship and journalistic inquiries, Stokes also refers to the viability of what he calls ‘the nostalgic argument spun around’ the singer: It is that [he] and other queer singers represent a continuous Middle Eastern tradition of gender ambiguity and deviance, nourished by the Ottomans, but forcibly repressed by obsessively heteronormative republicans in the early twentieth century. For them ‘the freedom of women’ was a key rallying point, and westernization was constantly imagined in terms of ‘hygienic’ and ‘efficient’ nuclear family. Queer critique in Turkey on the subject of popular culture, as on Islam and globalization, sees the late Ottoman period as a model of cosmopolitan civic, political, and cultural virtues in the light of the bankruptcy of the republican tradition.9

I would argue that Turkey’s experience of a localized form of modernity and of a never-ending crisis in the very status of a homogenized citizenship (a crisis cathected by the cross-fertilization of Islam and modern nation-state) strongly affects patterns of heterosexualities, body politics, or, more generally, identificatory regimes of genders/sexualities. If idealized national heterosexuality (by which I mean ‘the mechanism by which a core of national culture can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behavior, a space of pure citizenship’10), is perturbed and hybridized

by Islamic heterosexualities within the context of a crisis of secularism, then how can we rethink the relationship between the local, the ‘off-white’, the queer and the heterosexual itself? As in the case of Islamism as the return of the repressed, is it possible to treat the Ottoman inheritance of gender ambiguity and sexual dissidence, repressed by the modernist machinery of Turkish nation-building, as a queer dispositif for a strategic return from the collective cultural unconscious? Can we think today of an ideological dynamic of the normal/normative to be mobilized cross-culturally by a queer discourse? In particular, what would it mean to be(come) a queer, to queer, to perform ‘queer art’, in Turkey after all? What could becoming-queer signify in a collective geopolitical memory that has no historic catalyst like Stonewall, without an AIDS-crisis to be melancholically reflected upon, to be grieved over, and to act ‘militantly’ upon?11 How might a contemporary artist in Turkey, by sublating the particular and the universal, the local and the global, cultivate a queer critique in art?

Queer aesthetics, according to William Haver, implicates and inspires a pornographic art of existence. Haver argues that

queer’s obsession with, and insistence on, surface as ‘being’s most profound depth’, works to undo the heteronormative constitution of sexual differentiality where the corporeal depth can operate only as an abyss to be veiled in the field of vision.12 What Haver embraces as queer is an erotic of critique where the queer critic’s ‘pornographic reading’ and his/her ‘absolute devotion to the flesh’ remain the only way to ‘make the [queerly] political happen’.13 In this sense, Erinç Seymen’s art practice prioritizes a queer agenda: ‘My art is concerned with normalization of any mode of violence … violence of the state and the police … any xenophobic discourse of hate including militarism, transphobia, racist nationalism, class elitism, etc.’.14 Seymen’s queer vision and method, his strategic erotics and politics of appropriation/ exploitation, ‘operate through a series of technologies of otherness’, the critical urge of which Erden Kosova discusses under the conceptual markers of ‘curiosity’, ‘cruelty’, and ‘contamination’. 15 The logic of surface and the visual rhetoric of embodied penetration in Seymen’s Portrait work to invert the performative of militarist masculinity by enacting a masochistic jouissance.

The work over-genders the rumoured encounter by which it has been inspired. The animated encounter in Portrait acts as a commentary on heteronormative masculinity in Turkish society, which the image of Müren is mirroring back to: the more exposed the figure is to the penetration of bullets, the more radically visual it becomes. Seymen enacts a queer methodology in such a way that the art object functions not only to address what has been universally valorized as the discursive patterns of queer theory, praxis and aesthetics, but also to recontextualize and re-localize it, and thus re-write it, from within the context of the contemporary Turkish subject.

While queer theory – as a cultural, theoretical, aesthetic and/or political practice in imagining different ways of knowing gender and sexuality – inhabits various critical and methodological tendencies, one might still argue that its critical agenda crystallizes around the exclusionary political economies and imageries of the heteronormative constitution of body and desire. In this regard, critical interventions into and interpretations of ‘the figuration of masculine reason as disembodied body’ (where norms of masculinity operate through its ‘phantasmatic dematerialization’) are fundamental matters of queer practice.16 Its implication of the Foucauldian emphasis on ‘pleasure as an ethical substance’ and ‘the stylistics of life’ triggers an analytical and ontological affinity between art, performance and queer/ness.17 Arguing for an anti-instrumentalist conception of queer theory and practice, I would argue that Portrait of a Pasha enables queer performativity to be read not as a hegemonic and universalizing but as an effectively travelling concept.Through Seymen’s performative and even scatological use of the queer male, portrayed as the receptacle penetrated by militarist ejaculatory virility, hegemonic disembodied masculinity operates as

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a rematerialized and thus troubled referent in Portrait.

Although this critical meditation would seem to resonate well with the queer rhetorics of parody, drag and/or copy, I will not venture into what Sedgwick identifies as paranoid queer discourses that work to ‘place paranoia’s faith in demystifying exposure’.18 Aesthetic and/or critical investments in exposure can also be interpreted by means of what Sedgwick conceptualizes – in opposition to ‘paranoid mode of reading’ – as ‘reparative reading’: a relational ‘motive of seeking pleasure’, an ‘additive and accretive … desire of a reparative impulse’, and an ethics of sustainability in cultural critique.19 In this regard, I would argue that Seymen’s agenda in portraying Müren goes beyond a paranoid urge to expose the homosexual reference. It fictionalizes a queer encounter and attempts to form an artistic agency which confronts the Turkish militarist hegemony with its erotic investments in what it abjects.

Erinç Seymen, Portrait of a Pasha, 2009 Photo: Cuneyt Cakirlar. Courtesy of galerist and the artist.

Reproduced with permission.

The constitutive anxiety of heteronormative masculinity is an anxiety of bodily production. The fear of liminalized corporeality ‘is not so much one of influence, but as one of exfluence, of excorporation, a general anxiety about flux and fluidity, an unease not only about what comes out of the body but also about the ways bodies themselves originally come out’.20 Calvin Thomas further claims that ‘the masculine productivity as excorporation becomes destruction … a search for a killable other’, which can possibly be subverted by writing the male body ‘as a bodily function’: an écriture of queer masculinity.21 In this sense, the ejaculatory act of firing a gun employed in Seymen’s Portrait signifies anxious masculine productivity as penetration, via excorporation. It confronts the masculine with its repudiated other whose visual emergence is the very effect of the penetrative virility enjoyed by the culturally iconic image of Turkish homosexuality. Alluding to Erden Kosova’s argument on ‘technologies of otherness’, I would argue that Seymen ‘contaminates’ the gossip-encounter between the Soldier and the Homosexual by overwhelming the visual discourse with a homoerotic economy of sadomasochism.22 The portraiture and its logics of penetration become sodomy. After all, the rhetoric of appropriation in contemporary queer pastiche, its politics of intertextual incorporation, enacts the embodied discourse of the queer fuckee’s pleasure. The haunting image of Müren comes to function as the ‘sodomitical sublime’ of Turkish modernity.23 The canvas acts as a temporary skin, which covers the white wooden panel, and it allows the gunman to be guided by the outlines of Seymen’s portrayal. It is detached and discarded, not part of the finished product. The only evidence of Seymen’s authorial potency and bodily labour is lost from the performed scene of enacted violence of shooting at the canvas/panel: The artist removes his ‘hand’. The artistic process becomes strategically ego-shattering. My argument here flirts with Bersani and Dutoit’s conceptualization of failure AS + 41

as a mode of aesthetic relationality: an act of ‘self-divestiture’, ‘a renunciation of cultural authority’, which seems to ‘refuse to serve the complacency of a culture that expects art to reinforce its moral and epistemological authority’.24 What the spectator is exposed to in Seymen’s Portrait is the series of bulletholes on a wooden panel, i.e. the body which remains after the process. Ejaculation as excorporation becomes the incorporation or the enjoyed penetration of not only the artist, and his signature, but also that which the embodied presence of the portrait comes to allegorize: the Effeminate Passive Homosexual, one of the most abject, ‘unfit’, male bodies in contemporary Turkey. Through Portrait’s de-ontologized performative authorial status as well as its queer discourse as (to paraphrase Calvin Thomas) ass-fuckas-écriture, the artwork appears to perform as a conscientious objector against the pervading ideology that surrounds the mandatory military service in Turkey. Seymen’s anti-militarist gesture is articulated through the very performative mode of his artistic practice: ‘a conscientiously failed writing as a model of conscientiously failed masculinity’.25 Calvin Thomas situates ‘the anti-generative in writing’ against ‘expressivity [or] any ‘creativity’ traditionally linked to paternity, maternity, or any other imperative of the successful heterosexual reproduction of “life”, but rather on writing’s intimately sexual connection, its degeneratively metonymic connection, to murderous or suicidal ecstasy, to failure, to ‘death’ – its con nection, in other words, to the rectum’.26 Seymen’s conscientious failure in masculinity and authorship starts with a fragment of gossip, exploits it, takes it ‘from behind’. In an entirely different queer context, using Deleuze’s account of philosophy as ‘a sort of buggery, ... an immaculate conception ... taking [the author] from behind’,27 Jonathan Kemp’s conceptual reading of the penetrated male body and its possibly queerable metaphors may be of use here: The concept of ‘man’ ... [is] no longer a universal, unmarked and neutral monolith but a flux of radical jouissance, a surface shot through with holes into which and out of which sensations flow, deterritorializing masculine subjectivity and locating the penetrated/penetrable (male) body as a condition of territorialized male subjectivity. ... All representation is the embodiment of erotic thought. ... The term behind tries to make a link between the so-called crisis of masculinity and the so-called crisis of reason. To characterize a certain anxiety that is common to both corporeal and intellectual uncertainty.28

The bullet-riddled wooden panel of Seymen’s Portrait also has a behind, which acts as ‘a homograph that binds together a physical as well as an epistemological location’.29 Seymen’s portrait is a free-standing work of art.The curatorial location of the artwork in the centre of a spatial junction bridging the exhibition paths does not allow the spectator to treat the behind as a behind. It is, bodily and visually, as accessible as the front of the Portrait. The inescapable spectatorial exposure to the behind of the artwork turns the two-dimensional

surface of the Portrait into an obscene depth of abject flesh.

As the Portrait’s view from behind also shows, the splinters of wood from gunshots seen on the black panel of the back stand convey a scatological effect, which allows this interpretation of the work to flirt with the artist’s subversive intent: an inverted discourse of penetration. Seymen’s queer strategy of anal(ized) anti-militarist sabotage politicizes the unutterable ‘behind’ of Zeki Müren in Turkey’s cultural memory, or in other words, what body, what body part and what joy the hegemonic Performative of Soldier-Citizen left ‘behind his discourse’. Seymen’s gift addresses both the military pashas and the queer pashas in contemporary Turkey.

1 See the interview in Pınar Ögünç,‘Zaten hadım edilmis bir kusagın çocuklarıyız [‘We are the children of a castrated generation anyway’: An Interview with Erinç Seymen]’, Radikal, 07/04/2007. (http:// www.radikal.com.tr/ek_haber.php?ek=cts&haberno=6604, last visit on 25/09/2009).

2 After his unforgettable performance in the 1969 concert at the ancient theatre Aspendos, Turkish admirers of the artist called him ‘the Pasha of Art’. It would still be very hard and ambitious to identify and read the initial discursive urge of the Turkish public to name the artist as Pasha. Surely, this was to reward Müren and his memorable achievement in performance on the Aspendos stage.

However, the contrast between the artist’s queer presence and performative excess on stage, and the gendered status of the public’s ‘gift’, attaching a masculine and militarist virtue to the artistic achievement with the very name pasha, is nonetheless striking.

3 Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 3.

4 Irit Rogoff, ‘Gossip as Testimony: a Postmodern Signature’ in Pollock, Griselda (ed), Generations & Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 59.

5 Gavin Butt, Between You and Me, pp. 6-7.

6 Here, by sublation, I allude to the Butlerian interpretation of the Hegelian Aufhebung, that is ‘an active [and] negating movement’, ‘a cancellation but not quite an extinction; suspension, preservation and overcoming’. See Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power:Theories in Subjection, (California: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 176.

Thus, what I intend to suggest, methodologically, as a ‘middled’, sublated, intellectual engagement in reading Portrait of a Pasha (with regard to the mentioned binarisms) is what Seymen’s artistic and critical agency makes possible within its queer performativity.

7 After his death from a heart attack during a live performance on stage in 1996, it was discovered that Zeki Müren had left a considerable portion of his wealth to the Turkish Military Foundation, known as Mehmetçik Vakfı.

8 Martin Stokes, ‘The Tearful Public Sphere: Turkey’s “Sun of Art”, Zeki Müren’, Music and Gender: Perspectives from the Mediterranean, edited by Tullia Magrini (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 307.

9 Ibid., p. 312. In his ongoing research on Janissaries, titled ‘Recollecting Ottoman masculinities and male intimacies: A history of empire, modernity, and heteronormativity in the Ottoman Middle East’, the Ottoman historian Serkan Delice points out the urgency

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of ‘revealing different modes of masculinity and male intimacies’ and ‘identify[ing] a cultural tradition of homosociality in which identifications by desire types seemed to be more fluid and ambiguous, rather than being fully-formed and clear-cut’. Underlining the significance of the ‘web of connections between State-led modernization, military reforms, and masculinities’, Delice gestures to and critiques the heteronormative ideologies in researching Ottoman history. What is constitutive of Stokes’s account of ‘the nostalgic argument’ with reference to Müren, is, I contend, reclaimed by Delice in order to see more clearly the historical ruptures – de-queerings – of epistemological and political regimes of gender-sexuality in the Ottoman-Turkish context. The encounter that Erinç Seymen has animated (with or without his artistic intentions) contains these historical references, which work to demonstrate successfully the homophobic, anxious, heteronormatively modernizing process of constituting the military, or, the soldier-citizen. See Serkan Delice, ‘Osmanlı’yı Bugün Nasıl Tefsir Ediyoruz? Tarih ve Toplumsal Cinsiyet Üzerine Dü_ünceler’, Cinsiyet Halleri: Türkiye’de Toplumsal Cinsiyet’in Kesi_im Sınırları, edited by Nil Mutluer (Istanbul:Varlık, 2008), pp. 7287.

10 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, ‘Sex in Public’. Critical Inquiry 24:2, 1998, p. 549.

11 Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (London: MIT Press, 2002).

12 William Haver, ‘Really Bad Affinities: Queer’s Honour and the Pornographic Life’. Parallax 5:4, 1999, p. 13.

13 Ibid., p.20.

14 See the interview in Pınar Ögünç, ‘Zaten hadım edilmis bir kusagın çocuklarıyız [‘We are the children of a castrated generation anyway’: An Interview with Erinç Seymen]’, Radikal, 07/04/2007. (http://www.radikal.com.tr/ek_haber.php?ek=cts&haberno=6604, last visit on 25/09/2009) 15 Erden Kosova, ‘Technologies of Otherness’, Erinç Seymen (Istanbul: galerist, 2002), p. 3. For Kosova’s reference to ‘the technologies of otherness’, see Sue Golding, Eight Technologies of Otherness (London: Routledge, 1997).

16 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 48-9.

17 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 3: Care of the Self, edited and translated by Robert Huxley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 67-8. See also Michel Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’ in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault Volume 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, translated by Robert Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1997), pp. 253-80.

18 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy and Performativity (London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 144.

19 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, pp. 149-51.

20 Calvin Thomas, Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety and the Male Body on the Line (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), pp. 13-4.

21 Ibid., p. 18.

22 Erden Kosova, ‘Technologies of Otherness’, pp. 3-8.

23 Sally R Munt, Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 223-4.

24 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. (London: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 8. In the introduction of their readings of Beckett, Rothko and Resnais, ‘Art and Authority’, Bersani and Dutoit suggest: ‘Let us try to imagine a form of political and cultural resistance and renewal consistent with self-divestiture and the renunciation of authority. To be lost or disseminated in a space that cannot be dominated, and to register attentively how relations are affected by a shattered ego’s displacements within that space, may at least begin to reverse or arrest the devastating effect of a view of a space as an appropriable collection of objects and human subjects. Without an authoritative center, the impoverished and dispersed self may become an unlocatable target. ... Might there be a “power” in such impotence?’ (Ibid., p. 9).

25Calvin Thomas, ‘Must Desire Be Taken Literally?’, Parallax 8:4, 2002, p. 49 26 Ibid.

27 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990, translated by Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 6.

28 Jonathan Kemp, ‘Schreber and the Penetrated Male’, Deleuze and Queer Theory, edited by Chrysanti Nigianni and Merl Storr (Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 2009), p. 156.

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Veronika Hauer

A: talk talk1 B: say nothing C: I think… there are two cases for a successful interview D: Interviewer and interviewee eventually overcome the odd feeling of the question/answer situation for the sake of the subject they have come together to discuss. If so, a conversation evolves in which both partners equally connive their positions determined by the format: The interviewer authoring questions, but (eventually) ignorant of the answers s/he asks to receive; the interviewee (eventually) in possession of knowledge to answer, but ignorant of the questions s/he is supposed to respond to rather spontaneously. In this case, the conversation develops with regard to the subject itself: professional and to the point. Private asides will only be rarely mentioned if relevant and inevitable.

E: The other case of the successful interview takes place under the same circumstances, but gathers at least one less consensus-orientated interlocutor. Take for example the infamous interview between Klaus Kinski and a TV-journalist on Kinski’s programme Jesus Christus Erlöser from 1971.2 Kinski, initially quite even and relaxed, gradually gets upset with the interviewer’s questions and diction. Acting out one of his infamous rampages, he threatens to end the interview and go home if the journalist should continue to pose ‘silly’ questions and ‘not listen to his answers properly.’ The journalist responds to Kinski’s ultimatum by ending the interview herself.

a question/answer scheme, which although prewritten, to some extend has the potential to develop into an exiting, unpredictably live encounter.

H: Although often originating in an intimate one to one encounter, knowledge about the interview’s subsequent publication leads interlocutors to pursue personal/professional motives when it comes to their public representation.

Therefore the interview constitutes a playground for the renegotiation of social and political identities, roles, hierarchies as much as ignorance and knowledge.

A: One of the 24 video works shown in talk talk: Das Interview als künstlerische Praxis (The interview as artistic practise) currently on display at Kunsterverein Medienturm in Graz certainly unveils such a ‘playground for the renegotiation of social and political identities, roles, hierarchies as much as ignorance and knowledge.’ Akin to Kinski’s interview, although more subtle in its revelation of power and authority, Jeanne Faust’s work Interview, 2003 could be categorised as a successful interview in the second sense defined above.

F: Such an encounter might not effect any form of traditional knowledge on the subject of discussion but constitutes an incredibly successful interview for the audience. Lustfully, the spectator observes the communicative clash of two persons, who came together as strangers to speak about a subject but within minutes became lifetime enemies.

I: Interview shows the artist in conversation with an elderly well-known German actor to whom she loses authority step-by-step during the course of the encounter. He, who is supposed to answer, poses questions himself, mocks the woman’s accent and wording and tries to pull her in front of the camera. The more Faust resists his attempts to involve her, the more he enjoys undermining her artistic conception. Time passes without the dialogue Faust had striven to evolve and with it the actor’s life and work, ideas and thoughts remain unsaid. In this to-and-fro of authorship, the actual margin between the interlocutors is physically and verbally renegotiated.

G: An interview by definition assembles at least two persons to elaborate on a subject, with one of them possessing some kind of expertise that will be the focus of the conversation. Consequently the format of the interview builds upon

J: In line with this year’s curatorial theme of the festival Steirischer Herbst3: ‘All the same’ talk talk produces a density of chitchat and a flood of voices mimicking the steady increase of communication in a globally networked world:

Stimmen (Voices), Installation shot.

Photo: Kunstverein Medienturm

Installation shot. Featuring: Kathi Lackner, I am able to express myself in unique ways, 2008 Klub Zwei, Things. Places.Years., 2004 Andrea Fraser, Reporting from Sao Paulo, I’m from the United States, 1998 Ursula Biemann, X-MISSION, 2008 Ingrid Wildi, Los Invisibles, 2007 Corianna Schnitt, Living a beautiful life, 2003 Julika Rudelius, Your Blood Is As Red As Mine, 2004 Photo: Kunstverein Medienturm

To exhibit 24 video works in a single exhibition produces an overwhelming amount of communication for the spectator to deal with. Providing over limited human perceptivity, what is perceived visually and acoustically can only be partly understood and processed by the individual with regard to content. Additionally, due to an average duration of 23 minutes per video, most of the information passes unseen. (A partially deeply unsatisfying realisation.)

B: talk talk departs from a media critique on communication culture to an unfolding of the power-knowledge relationships that evolve during the interview while addressing a multitude of manipulative strategies of its visualisation.

K: The viewer moves through a well-grounded exhibition display,4 commuting between a cumulative density of verbal and visual information and a partly rigid separation of sound and image.As the soundtracks of most of the works can only be heard via headphones, the exhibition space itself remains - apart from the ambient noises of the installation Stimmen (Voices) - peculiarly quiet. With regards to this quietness all visual information screened or projected can be investigated in an unanimated manner before grabbing a pair of headphones and diving into another world of experience that is strongly determined by (everyday) language.

I: Things. Places.Years., 2004 by Klub Zwei (Simone Bader & Jo Schmeiser) conduct interviews with twelve mostly Jewish women, who either themselves or whose parents had to flee from Vienna to London to escape the Holocaust. This consequently hugely influenced their subsequent life and identity. Rather than dwelling on personal experiences, the women - many of them scientifically engaged in research on the Holocaust - respond with brief statements to keywords and questions. 5 L: Whereas Klub Zwei portray the interviewed women in their personal/professional environments, Ingrid Wildi’s video essay Los Invisibles, 2007 follows an entire different artistic strategy of documenting personal history. In Los Invisibles, five Columbian immigrants living and working in Switzerland

are interviewed about their daily life and working conditions.

To protect the identity of the protagonists the camera shot ends shortly beneath the chin. Hence the viewer listens to the voice, observes gestures and body language, but lacks essential information normally transmitted through facial expression. By deliberately cutting off the head Wildi’s work highlights the face in its absence raising awareness on the significance of facial expression for the (subjective) reception.

M: Where others are given a (public) voice, the initiating artists - directing the interview from outside the frame - remain mostly invisible. Only some perform in front of the camera, be it as reporting artist (Andrea Fraser), interlocutors (Julika Rudelius and Jeanne Faust), interpreters of the words of others (Kathi Lackner) or narrators of their personal story (Ronald Gerber).

N: The investigation of the nonverbal communicative potential of the body, gesture, mimic and the gaze links many of the works, albeit artistic strategies on the thematic differ.

That those features of body language are as much subject to social construction as language is in places stressed by the disruption of alleged authenticity and intimacy through the incorporation of theatrical elements in the interview setting.

O: Where actors are filmed interpreting daily chitchat or restaging ‘original’ interviews, artistic strategies play with the format’s structure and create a shift from its traditional interpretation towards a critique of medial strategies. Such is the case in Yvon Chabrowski’s re-staging of Lady Diana’s last official interview by an actress (An interview with H.R.H. The Princess of Wales, 2008). The actress’s reiteration of Lady Diana’s mimic play, gestures and exact wording in its factitiousness not only evokes a feeling of irritation here and now, but makes one consider the staging of authenticity in the original interview. (…)

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1 talk talk: Das Interview als künstlerische Praxis Kunstverein Medienturm Graz (A) 26.9. - 28.11.2009 In co-production with Steirischer Herbst 2009 2 Jesus Christus Erlöser, a monologue by Kinski largely based on the New Testament, was supposed to tour Germany in 1971. But the premiere in Berlin in November 1971 leads to insults and confrontations between Kinski and his audience. The piece is performed only one more time later that month, as the show is being cancelled for financial reasons. Peter Geyer’s film Kinski Jesus Christus Erlöser based on the infamous Berlin premiere, was released in 2008. For the interview between Kinski and the journalist see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Efhz8jxNI 3 The festival Steirischer Herbst (Festival of new art) takes place every autumn in Graz, Austria. For over forty years now, Steirischer Herbst as a truly multidisciplinary festival presents contemporary positions in art, music, performance, dance, theatre, literature, architecture, new media and theory. For more information on this year’s and next year’s programme see: http://www.steirischerherbst.at 4 The show has been curated by Reinhard Braun, Hildegard Fraueneder and Marc Ries/IAG Leipzig, following an idea by Marc Ries. After initially being shown in Leipzig (G) earlier this year talk talk will move to Galerie 5020, Salzburg (A) in 2010.

5 See: http://copyriot.com/diskus/06-1/gd-things_places_years.htm

Yvon Chabrowski, An interview with H.R.H.The Princess of Wales, 2008

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Contributors Catherine Borra was born in Bergamo, Italy in 1985, and lives and works in London, UK. She is a curator and editor, interested in developing tools that investigate the experience of cultural production. Catherine is the director of Supercream.org.uk and a funding member of The Centre of the Universe. Recent projects include Subversions (produced by Supercream, for Lux.org.uk, London, 2009); The Bunker (produced by the Centre of the Universe, London, 2009); The Green Room Studio (produced by Supercream, Royal Academy, London, 2008).

Cuneyt Cakirlar is a Research Associate at University College London, Centre for Intercultural Studies. He worked as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UCL for the 200809 research project ‘Translations/Transpositions: Intergeneric Translation’. He teaches on queer aesthetics and film at University College London (UK), Bogazici University (Turkey) and Istanbul Bilgi University (Turkey) and is currently completing a book on Queer Depth in Contemporary Visual Arts.

Jurga Daubaraite is an independent researcher-writer based in London working on the concept of emptiness in the post-communist condition.

Iddo Drevijn 1983, Rotterdam Artist - lives and works in Rotterdam. www.idodidid.com Mara Ferreri is an independent writer interested in contemporary art practices in conflictive urban contexts and their potential for social change. As a member of Isola Art Center, www.isolartcenter.org, she has recently co-authored “A ‘green’ Isola for the rich. Arts and communities against Eco-Gentrification in Milan, Italy”, with Bert Theis and Alberto Pesavento, published in Zanny Begg and Keg de Souza, There Goes The Neighbourhood: Redfern and the Politics of Urban Spaces, Sydney, 2009. She is currently PhD candidate in Human Geography at Queen Mary University, London, where she is researching the affects and temporalities of self-organisation and cultural gentrification in contemporary cities.

Veronika Hauer 1981, artist and writer; lives in Vienna.

Cenker Kokten is a sound designer and musician. Graduated from Bogazici University Chemical Engineering department and completed his MA in Sound Engineering at Istanbul Technical University Music Department. Plays bass guitar in the band sakin.Works freelance as sound designer and mixer for mostly movies and live sound projects.

Adeena Mey is a researcher, writer and translator. He studied art theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London and sociology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He is currently an Ubbo Emmius fellow in the PhD program ‘Theory and History of Psychology’ at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s artistic practice is based on collaboration and dialogue. This manifests itself in a multi-layered practice of filmmaking, drawing, installation, photography, performance, publishing and curating.

Ghalya Saadawi has taught psychology and sociology at the American University of Beirut and the Lebanese American University. She has worked as a researcher and consultant for organizations in Beirut and London including the United Nations and Zenith Foundation, and has also edited and translated texts on art, culture and politics. Some of her articles have appeared in The Daily Star, Canvas, Bidoun, and online. Ghalya is coeditor of a forthcoming book on alternative music in Beirut and is currently a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths College in London.

Ali Taptik 1983, Istanbul, where he lives and works. Currently he is working on his new series ‘Nothing Surprising’, a sequel to his ‘Kaza ve Kader’, which will be published in November 2009 by Filigranes Editions.

Kay Walkowiak Artist - lives and works in Vienna.