petunia #7

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Grégoire

Mesquita Blunt

&

Maite

Emmy

Garbayo

Skensved Maeztu

Marlie

Mul

Temra

Pavlovic

Amy

Sillman

Dorothy

Howard

Ramaya

Tegegne

Philipp

Timischl

Dorota

Gawęda

&

Eglė

Daniel

Unal Beck

&

Miriam

Frances Gill Deanna Chanel

Kulbokaitė Berndt

Deniz Géraldine

Leonardi Stark

Karjevsky

&

Havas

& Von

Tali Haydée

Keren Marin-Lopez

Habsburg-Lothringen Guertin

Verena

Dengler

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Heather

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PETUNIA

Caroline

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P O R T Amy Sillman

I

K U S 02.07.– 04.09.2016

Alte BrĂźcke 2 / Maininsel Frankfurt/Main www.portikus.de 2

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Caroline Mesquita 3

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S t i l l i m a g e s f r o m t h e v i d e o S o m e b l u e i n m y m o u t h , 16 minutes 51 seconds C o u r t e s y o f t h e a r t i s t

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Blunt x Skensved

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Weiss portrays the uncomfortable position a body finds itself in when it tries to occupy a space. We can think femininity is lacking, that femininity lacks what is necessary to fit naturally into any given space. The city would be the polis, the arena where the public and the political are negotiated, a space that casts away the lacking feminine body and many other bodies that don’t fit into its modalities of normalization. The voice of a woman complains: she doesn’t have water, she can’t breath. Everything is gray and filthy. It seems that the body is overwhelmed by the unlivable conditions of the city. The body doesn’t fit. But it is not that the city throws out the body, on the contrary, it is the body itself, excessive, that can’t pass through the city, it doesn’t fit. It doesn’t find its place. The body overflows the city: in the foreground, an excessive femininity fills it up. Mujer Ciudad Mujer clearly separates the feminine form from the city and situates each within different and divergent logics. The woman exceeds and the city constrains:

Maite Garbayo Maeztu Se me enchinó el cuerpo en una musiquita muy rara que realmente no sé cómo se llama My Body Curled into a Strange Music I Truly Couldn’t Name

There is a body that speaks, that says more than it intends to. Over Mexico City, artist Pola Weiss superimposes the speaking body of another woman. A feminine body set against the city, a body that moves and contracts, trying to inhabit, fit in and adjust to the city. Mujer Ciudad Mujer (Woman City Woman) (1978) is a video in which a large city serves as the background for a naked woman’s body that appears in the foreground. Woman-City-Woman. The city trapped between two bodies, told through the body of another woman. Woman-City-Woman. Separates the bodies, splits and cuts them. The city is the Law.

“There is no water, my mouth is dry… but I contain water because I cry, when I laugh, when I am in pain, when I sweat. And water comes out from within me, from my body. They have blocked all the rivers, we had so much left over water. No! There is no water!!” It is the city that is lacking. The feminine body overflows, letting its excesses escape through it´s orifices. Weiss returns to fluid in the video work, Mi Co-Ra-Zón

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(1986), in which the blood from an abortion, her own, flows from her vagina while we see images of Mexico City devastated by the September 1985 earthquake.

penises and women consorted with apes, feminized men’s breasts flowed with milk and militarized women lopped theirs off” (McClintock, 1995: 22).

The water is in the body. The city is dry. The process of colonization has “blocked all the rivers.” The new world founded on the accumulative paradigm of colonial modernity is a dry world. Why does the feminine body that Weiss brings onto the stage evade this dryness? Why does it pour, eject and exceed?

In her account, the racialized and eroticized other and femininity as animality and excess, converge: milk flows from the feminine breasts despite the suspicion that they aren’t found on a bio-woman’s body. Women tear off their breasts—leftover meat—in a gesture that masculinizes them. Gender ambiguity doesn’t allow these bodies to fit into the Western binary, making them monstrous.

The hyper-corporealization of the feminine has been a constant throughout the tradition of Western theory, philosophy and medicine. Equating femininity with the body reinforces hierarchical binary oppositions between body/ mind, emotion/reason and nature/culture, and consigns women to the irrational and the pre-political. These binary oppositions function to align certain bodies with others but also to estrange some from others, generating an outside space of otherness and subordination. Corporealization has served to degrade certain subjects and groups of humans, excluding them from the status of humanity and locating them closer to animality. The european colonial tradition proves this through numerous accounts by writers and travelers, and continues to do so today through the hyper-corporeal representation of indigenous people in certain public monuments in Mexico and other Latin American nations. Converting the other into a body works to reinforce relations of domination and the hegemonic logics of the production of knowledge. Corporealization is frequently accompanied by hypersexualization and even a monsterization of these subjects and groups. For Anne MacClintonk, the European porno-tropics have a long tradition: “For centuries, the uncertain continents—Africa, the Americas, Asia—were figured in European lore as libidinously eroticized. Travelers’ tales abounded with visions of the monstrous sexuality of far-off lands, where, as legend had it, men sported gigantic

Femininity appears figuratively as an excess from which fluids escape, like a stigma that sticks to another body to annul its masculinity. Feminization, racialization, corporealization, eroticization and monsterization are situated in opposition to logos, understood as that on which civilization is founded and articulated. Weiss makes the body speak, situating the female body as a speaking body. What does it mean to speak with the body? To transcribe on the external surface what’s within. Transferring directly, without passing through the control point of logos. Anne Carson suggests that Freud applied the name “hysteria” to this process of transcription when it occurred in female patients whose tics, neuralgias and convulsions… could be read as a direct, somatic translation of psychic events in the female body. “Freud conceived his own therapeutic task as the rechanneling of these hysteric signs into rational discourse,” she ads (Carson, 1995: 128). To put the inside outside. To take out, expel, pour. To underline a continuity between the inside and the outside. Materialize it and make it a body. Circumvent the logos, the name of the Father, crack the discourse and stick out your tongue. Weiss asks about the feminine through the placement of a nude body that performs a hyperfemininity, materializing an excess, a leftover, a remainder that situates the feminine position in opposition to the polis and the logos, as a space of possibility and a potential opening for another logic that could allow the universal to be eroded. The overflowing body announces an outside.

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For Carson, the construction of the feminine as otherness in Western culture is related to a body that evidences the continuity between interior and exterior: “By projections and leakages of all kinds—somatic, vocal, emotional, sexual- females expose or expend what should be kept in. Females blurt out a direct translation of what should be formulated indirectly” (Carson, 1995: 129). Again, this liquid excess; the spilling over that brings out what is inside; the water and blood that wells from Weiss’s body and the breasts pouring milk into the tale of McClintock… Fluid as waste and remainder, as a material metaphor for the speaking body. The image of the female sex in the foreground, imposed over the Torre Latinoamericana as a phallic emblem of modernity in Mujer Ciudad Mujer. It is the body that cuts the tongue in order to try and interrupt the logos again and again. How can we interpret within falogocentrism’s

the speaking totalizing

When Lacan claimed that the notion of the unconscious originates in the fact that hysterics spoke without knowing absolutely anything about what they said (Lacan, 1977), he wasn’t referring to a not-knowing, but the appearance of a discourse that incessantly makes holes in language. He admitted that the hysteric “says something with the words she lacks.” Lacan also said that the speaking body errs and cannot reproduce if not through error. If hysteria is unspeakable and incomprehensible it isn’t due to a lack, but an excess that has become a body. A language that the overflowing of meaning brought by the body doesn’t fit into.

body logic?

Freud understood that the hysteric body turned medical knowledge on its head. Hysteria, with its overflow, shows the doctor that his knowledge is partial. The speaking body demands the convergence of listening and looking at its surface, demanding the foundation of an outside to scientific positivism and intrinsically scopic western medicine. The hysteric speaks with a body that “does whatever it pleases” (Miller, 2010), producing a narrative full of gaps and holes that suspends the complete and lineal discourse. Her performance resists the conversion of the body into language, which is perhaps what Freud sought when he attempted to listen. Those bodies with holes that exceed and overflow open the way toward thinking in logics that, like Carson said, don’t necessarily pass through the control point of logos, in dialectics of the body that can only operate through an embodiment. To speak with the body, listen with the body, write with the body

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The

speaking

body

In 1976 Helène Cixous premiered the theater work Le Portrait de Dora, which reflected on the case study of “Dora,” presented by Freud. It’s no accident that Cixous choses the stage as a medium to make the hysteric speak, to give her a body. Lacan recommended that his students go see the work by Cixous and said it was “performed in a real way” (Lacan, 2006: 103) and that the reality of repetitions had dominated the actors. It seems that Lacan wanted to say that the actors gave the body in, that the body itself was present before and beyond the interpretation of a fictional role. To say that the reality of repetitions had dominated the actors indicates that their bodies and the characters they interpret continue to be materialized with each repetition, with each rehearsal.

in that his objective is to replace an ambiguous, open form by a linear narrative, to close down semantic multiplicity in favor of one meaning” (Hanrahan, 1998:50). Hanrahan reminds us that the structure of Cixous’s work is oneiric, not divided into acts and scenes, but the scenes dissolve into and out of each other, without the existence of formal indications to separate them—just like how Freud understood the function of dreams as expressions of desire (Hanrahan, 1998:56). Cixous’s Dora rejects fixed and closed meanings, changing poetry for prose and embracing ambiguity—performing desire through her corporeality. “C’est toi, Dora, toi, indomptable le corps poétique, la vraie ‘maîtresse’ du Signifiant.” [You, Dora, you the indomitable, the poetic body, you are the true “mistress” of the Signifier.] (Cixous, 1975)

Lacan’s observation that the work was “performed in a real way” encompasses the notion that Judith Butler would conceptualize decades later as “performativity,” to show that bodies are produced and materialized through the repetition of corporal gestures and acts. The speaking body operates even when its discourse is incomprehensible or unspeakable producing effects on reality, effects that are sometimes difficult to calculate. In Le Portrait de Dora, there is a formal correspondence: Since the hysteric is a speaking body, staging hysteria requires speaking bodies, bodies that say more than they want to. Cixous challenged Freud’s account with leaking bodies that quote and repeat, that escape and overflow the unicity of meaning. In her reflection about Le Portrait de Dora, Maireád Hanrahan analyzes Freud’s interpretation of the Dora case study and tells us that Freud has, literally, a “one track mind:” “Freud’s desire for completeness has been linked to a phallocentric epistemology that was sexually normalizing in that it left no room for female sexuality to be considered as an active, independent force. At this juncture, let me signal that his hermeneutics are also linguistically normalizing,

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“There is the same pleasant consciousness of our being bilateral. […] The great expanse of surface in front of us makes us feel both widened out and drown up far beyond ordinary life, for the act of seeing produces unusually long and wide breaths; we seem to be breathing according to the proportion of the building rather than to our own. […]” (Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, 1912: 187-188). For Lee, this aesthetic perception is full of reminiscences, when we contemplate the forms, we make them our own, we quote and repeat them: “this projection of our own dynamical and emotional experience into the seen form implies a reviviscence of those particular dynamical and emotional experiences” (L. and A.T., 1912: 29). It is the body that gives form, and which through its performance intervenes the forms to generate meaning. Aesthetic theory is converted into a critical practice founded on seeing and feeling with the body. A sort of inductive method, maybe related to a desire to make her proposal scientific, to affirm herself in front of the hostile critics who frown at the sight of a woman bursting into the academic and aesthetic field dominated by men. The body appropriates the form and becomes lost in it. But the subject is no longer the distinctive connoisseur of the German romanticism’s aesthetics theory of einfühlung , which endows the work of art with part of its being and has the time needed to become “lost” in beauty, enjoyed by the privilege associated to his social class, race and sex. Bertolt Brecht himself referred to the term einfühlung as bourgeois (which he opposed with his “alienation effect”) since, according to him, through identification, the spectator would get lost in him or herself and would also lose control of his or her identity, which at the end would block critical thinking (Bretch, 1974: 93). In a certain way, Lee repoliticizes the term einfühlung giving it a critical potential lacking from its beginning within German aesthetics. In her theory, the forms of the work of art compare to corporal forms. The division between subject

Performing

aesthetics

To twist the form. To split the tongue. “To place the body.” If the appearance of the speaking body is capable of subverting aesthetic practice, of twisting the tongue, how do we think about an aesthetic theory made of body? An aesthetics of the hole, an aesthetics of the incalculable. How to bore holes in aesthetics with the gaps from which the body escapes? In 1897, Vernon Lee , in collaboration with Clementine Anstruther-Thompson, published Beauty and Ugliness—an aesthetic treaty based on subjectivity and empathy that rescues the notion of Einfühlung (feeling into) from 19th century German aesthetics. Lee builds an aesthetic theory through observing and listening to the speaking body. If aesthetics are concerned with the perception of form, in her theory form is perceived with the body through bodily sensations. In 1887 Vernon Lee y Clementine (Kit) AnstrutherThompson started their relationship. They became friends, lovers and collaborators. This culminated in the publication of a co-written aesthetic treatise, based on the interaction of Clementine’s body (and at times that of Vernon) with specific objects and works of art. Her corporal sensations gave place to a subjective report that served as the base for the creation of an aesthetic device that Lee was in charge of theorizing: “A theory of the aesthetic grounded in the congress between female bodies” (Psomiades, 1999: 21). Two women stand in front of the facade of Santa Maria Novella. Clementine’s body speaks: It twists and agitates, her breathing speeds up or relaxes, her thorax enlarges and shrinks… Vernon records. Two speaking bodies in a performance that becomes aesthetic theory and situates the body as a source of knowledge, blurring the binary and hierarchical opposition of body/mind, which is characteristic of modernity.

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and object is transcended in favor of a contamination, a dissolution of limits and surfaces. It isn’t about losing oneself, but reorganizing one’s own subjectivity during the encounter with another allowing oneself to be affected. The practice of empathy doesn’t only change how one acts or feels, but what they are. Intersubjectivity (dissolution of the limits between subject and object) and empathy (understood as circulation of affects and identifications) open the way toward thinking about other work processes, forms of production, reception and aesthetic analysis. It foreshadows an aesthetics of the body and love transport. Intersubjectivity establishes a specific reality in which that which is shown may transform the other, but also be transformed by the other. My body is revealed in the other, the body of the other in me. Losing control of one’s identity allows you to make holes in it, position the body, with its affiliations and differences, as the base of self-consciousness and critical thinking. “Projected outside ourselves,” says Lee. Put the inside outside. “Let me repeat and re-peat it: Empathy, or Einfühlung, that is to say, the attribution of our modes to a non-ego” (L. and A.T., 1912: 29 y 48). The loss of identity in the object or in the other doesn’t necessarily imply an uncritical position, but the recognition that identity is not ours, that it is affected by contamination and the exchange of ideas, affects and thoughts. Lee understands the self as “full of holes” and identity as incomplete and fragmented.

and masculine subject, complete and as a whole— disembodied. A subject that at one time had absolute control of the production and circulation of knowledge. Lee rejects the existence of an ego with its own entity, separated from the body of the subject, and stresses that both aesthetic perception and the work of art itself are constructed through experiencing the movements of our own body. The way she appeals to one’s own subjectivity as the constructor of a knowledge that isn’t absolute, but process based, changes her aesthetic theory into a critical practice determined by the body and the logics of difference it invokes. Her criticism of Lipps (who wrote-off the theories of Lee and Anstruther-Thomson as “confused, fantastic, illogical, presumptuous, and untenable” (L. And A.T., 1912: 65): points towards the author’s rejection to think the body as a source of kowledge: “It is the dislike of admitting the participation of the body in the phenomenon of aesthetic Empathy which has impelled Lipps to make aesthetics more and more abstract, a priori, and metaphysical” (L. and A.T., 1912: 60). Lipps reproached Lee and Anstruther-Thomson’s aesthetic proposal as illogical and Lee branded Lipps’s theory as “metaphysical.” In other words, she accused the author of being part of a system of phallogocentric repression organized on the basis of excluding the materiality of the body.

In her critique of Theodor Lipps, a key thinker in the theorization of einfühlung, Lee suggests that the contemplated object lives in the mind that contemplates it, and rejected, as claimed Lipps, that the ego lives in the contemplated object. She criticized Lipps’s proposal of such a vague entity as an homogeneous ego, separated from the body, which abandons the field of reality to enter into the work of art. The ego isn’t an entity apart, she suggested, but a combination of subjective phenomena (L. and A.T., 1912: 59). Her critique of that notion of ego could be understood as a criticism of a modern

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A

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1980. Mexico City: Pola Weiss dances with her video camera in the esplanade of the National Auditorium. There is a wall of mirrors that reflects the image of her body and a television screen. People gather around her. If Pola looks at them, the camera will capture them. The screen reproduces the images of their bodies. They see Pola, they see what she sees and they see themselves seeing her. Her camera eye gazes and returns the gaze. Pola Weiss: I discovered that the tripod didn’t let me move. Thus, I discovered I had a magnificent tripod, well, bipod—my legs. These (signaling to her legs) are my legs. I discovered that I could give my camera mobility and I could express a whole series of things I have inside that I can’t express with words, through movement. I’m not very good at speaking. […] Sensations, experiences… I don’t use words to express myself because sometimes they don’t feel quite wide enough. My camera becomes a subjective camera. I draw, I draw that building, I draw its body and I even keep it. I draw you, holding your microphone, I draw this boy who is playing with my dress…” 18-year-old Girl: At one point, I felt a very strange reaction. I mean, my body curled into a strange tune I truly don’t know the name of. I felt something very strange, something that felt like I stood up, but I couldn’t. I felt wide. I can’t explain what I felt. The shivers that I felt, the impact, I don’t know how to explain that. I felt something very strange in my body.

Translated Devon

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from Van

Spanish by Houten-Maldonado.

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N

o

t

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s

1 Pola Weiss (Mexico City 1947-1990) is considered one of the pioneers of video art in Mexico. She also worked with television as a medium and in many of her works she incorporated the video camera as part of her body, like a “third eye.” Her works have been shown in various places in Europe and the Americas, even though the artist always complained about the lack of recognition she had in her own country. 2 Woman City Woman can be found in the Pola Weiss Fund (ARKHEIA, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM, Mexico City). The video is also available at https:// vimeo.com/47978778 (Seen for the first time, 15/03/16). 3 Weiss refers to the disappearance of the Laguna de México, which dried up during the conquest and colonization. 4

“Poner el cuerpo.”

5 Vernon Lee, the pseudonym of Violet Paget (1856-1935), was a British writer, artist and lesbian, who lived the majority of her life in Florence, even though she made frequent visits to London, where her “tailor-made clothes, short hair, gleaming eyes, and brilliant talk made her a conspicuous figure in artistic circles.” (Markgraf, 1983) 6

See Evengelista, 2006.

B

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Brecht, Bertold. 1974. “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting”, in Willett, John (Ed.) Brecht on Theatre: The Development of Aesthetic. London: Methuen, pp. 91-99. Carson, God.

New

Anne. York,

1995. New

Glass, Irony and Directions Books.

Cixous, Helène. 1975. “Le Rire de la Méduse”, L’Arc, n. 61 Evangelista, Stefano. 2006. “Vernon Lee and the Gender of Aestheticism”, in Pullham, Patricia and Maxwell, Catherine (Eds.) Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics. London, Palgrave Mcmillan, pp. 91-111. Hanrahan, Maireád. 1998. “Cixous’s Portrait de Dora: The Play of Whose Voice?”, in The Modern Language Review, Vol. 93, No.1, Jan. 1998, pp. 48-58. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Consideraciones sobre la histeria. Conferencia en Bruselas, 26 de febrero de 1977. Lacan, 23,

El

Jacques. 2006. El sinthome. Buenos

Seminario, Aires,

Libro Paidós.

Lee, Vernon and Anstruther-Thomson, Clementine. 1912. Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics. London, John Lane, The Bodley Head / New York, John Lane Company. Markgraf, Carl. 1983. “Vernon Lee: A Commentary and an Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Her”, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, 26 (4), 268-312. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York, Routledge. Miller, Jacques-Alain. 2010. “Efecto retorno sobre la psicosis ordinaria”, en Revista El Caldero de la Escuela, Nueva serie, Número 14, diciembre 2010. Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. 1999. “Still Burning from This Strangling Embrace: Vernon Lee on Desire and Aesthetics”, in Dellamora, Richard (ed.) Victorian Sexual Dissidence, The University of Chicago Press, pp.21- 41.

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Marlie Mul

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Temra Pavlovic 19

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T e m r a Pavlovic, W a s h a n e w , 2 0 1 6 . 3 photographs C o u r t e s y L o d o s G a l l e r y , M e x i c o 23

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Un peu de soleil dans l’eau froide

Commissariat : Passerelle Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brest Documents d’Artistes Bretagne www.cac-passerelle.com www.ddab.org

Curator Adam

Budak

from here to eternity

Virginie Barré — Eva Taulois 18 juin . 2 novembre 2016 Galerie de Rohan Landerneau

Stephan Balkenhol (Germany) Michele Bernardi (Italy) Katinka Bock (Germany) Fernando Sanchez Castillo (Spain) Anna Hulacova (Czech Republic) Franz Kapfer (Austria) Szymon Kobylarz (Poland) Christian Mayer (Germany) Marzia Migliora (Italy) Adrian Paci (Italy/Albania) Nicola Samorì (Italy) Xavier Vielhan (France) 21.07.2016 Vernissage

22.07.–09.09.2016

Amar Kanwar

exhibition - 24th June - 16th october 2016

Frac des Pays de la Loire La Fleuriaye, boulevard Ampère, 44470 Carquefou / T. 02 28 01 50 00 www.fracdespaysdelaloire.com

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In the old town and in the gallery Circolo Artistico

..... biennalegherdeina ortisei bz italy

Le Frac des Pays de la Loire est co-financé par l’État et la Région des Pays de la Loire, et bénéficie du soutien du Départemental de Loire-Atlantique. visuel : Amar Kanwar, The Torn First Pages (détail), 2005 Courtesy : Amar Kanwar and Marian Goodman Gallery. © Amar Kanwar

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GALERIE EMANUEL LAYR

15 APRIL – 04 JUNE 2016

LILI REYNAUDDEWAR

SAFE SPACE

LIRA GALLERY

06 MAY – 02 JULY 2016

CÉCILE B. EVANS

WORKING ON WHAT THE HEART WANTS

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VIENNA

ROME

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Dorothy Howard Myth Cycles of the Self

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I used to shake my head at my mother’s unconditional trust in astrological websites that looked to me like they contained nothing more than computer viruses. But recently she forwarded me an email with a natal chart astrological reading that had the transfixing passage: “If you are not careful, you will eat your young.” Long after the reading has been lost to an overstuffed email inbox, this phrase has continued to transfix my imagination, urging me to unpack it. Astrology is a tool used to read moments of our lives according to narratives positioned to reflect on the future and steeped in myth. It is a futile grappling to understand our relationship to the stars in an intuitive rather than scientific fashion. In this case, I take first associations seriously, and will attempt to trace my own wandering reactions to the eat your young phrase.

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What does it mean to eat the young if not taken in a literal sense? The phrase might be loosely interpreted to mean self-destructive behaviors that sabotage aspects of life still being shaped. Perhaps, a guilty part of me says, the phrase suggests that I take up passions only to abandon them the next moment, to champion then to forget. Maybe this is why I’m always late to important meetings. I set up the chessboard to give myself an advantage, only to lose to a stupid move. Desire is iterated through the metaphor of “birthing” young or fresh ideas. Ideas are the fruit of our production; fruit is the plant’s reproductive organ. Some fruit ripen but are never picked, the labor underappreciated at a reproductive level. Sylvia Plath wrote in The Bell Jar of a depressing fig tree:

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“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked… I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” The poet’s poem isn’t just a text, it’s their “baby,” and poems never written can torment the artist like miscarriages. In what ways, I often ask myself, do I stifle those creative projects most dear to me manifest as a form of creative selfdestruction, financially, emotionally, socially, and sexually? Unproductive reproduction presides over decision-making at the subconscious level. Many things we do in life are more related to “death drive” or hubris, testing our mortality against the fates, testing how far pleasure can go before it’s dangerous. Says a short letter attributed to the writer Charles Bukowski: “My dear, Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you and let it devour your remains. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.”

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Bukowski’s sentiment might be the foil the idea of eating the young, where passionate pursuits are the things both most rewarding and most fatal. One of my first associations with eat your young, takes me to spiders and the animal kingdom, where stories of instinct and hubris are often intertwined, specifically brutal feeding patterns to support reproduction and sexual selection. Many species of insects including spiders, wasps and praying mantis, as well as animals— polar bears, sharks, and chickens (who eat their own eggs), are known to exhibit young-eating behavior. Polar bears have been known to eat the young as food sources become more scarce in global warming, cannibalism springing from adaptive necessity caused by human environmental abuse. But spiders were my most immediate association with the passage. The black widow and wolf spider eat their young. In some insect species, like the Chinese praying mantis, females eat males after or during sex, and male behaviors towards sex have shifted accordingly, for example, some spider species provide the female with a snack before copulation so she isn’t hungry. “This behavior is believed to have evolved as a manifestation of sexual conflict, occurring when the reproductive interests of males and females differ,” Wikipedia notes about “sexual cannibalism.”

Still, has the scientific literature been fair to the character of the female spider, or does it continue to exhibit prejudices against female brutality in the animal kingdom, likening such behaviors to bad motherhood? Female brutality is not given time to flare it’s angry nostrils at the continued rude spectatorship scoping out female subjectivity. Eating’s ambiguous but real relationship to reproductive processes and the psychosomatic similarities of the pleasurable experiences of eating and having sex continue to find prejudices in scientific conclusions. Still, such speculation and large-scale public awareness of base aspects behaviors in the animal kingdom play into our own interpretations of human behavior, and give us common associations that we bring to our readings of myth. The myth of Arachne lives at the center of an origin story for the spider and a pedagogical story about how human’s capacity for creative invention is also met with hubris when we use our powers to challenge the gods. Roman poet Ovid’s book of stories written in the epic-poetic form, The Metamorphoses (Metamorphoseon libri, “Books of Transformations,” 8 AD) contain the first canonized version of this story. Ovid was born a year after the death of Julius Caesar, the bloody history of the time giving him a chance to hide critiques of Caesar’s politics and rule through mythological retellings of much older stories, Greek in origin. In the tale, Arachne was punished for challenging Minerva to a weaving contest she thought she could win. Minerva wove emblems of warning into her beautiful cloth, depicting mortals being punished with outrageous

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transformations and tasks for having challenged the gods to contests, and when she proved her superiority, transfigured Arachne and all her offspring henceforth into spiders. It is a tale warning us mortals to be careful of testing the fates, where Arachne’s tapestry is a sort of Frankenstein that got out of control, and became the thing that both destroyed her (by stealing her humanity) and transfigured her (by turning her into a spider, something that has a material resemblance to the process of weaving, her accursed hobby). Along with Arachne, folk tales from Rapunzel to Rumpelstiltskin, use themes associating weaving and spinning with reproductive unavailability and knivery. Often when I begin to write, I feel challenged by the fear of my own subjectivity or harshness being read as heretical in its challenging of normative modes and sentiments. Does my idolization of Arachne of the spider as a mythological figure, mean that I am reading the ethics of the myth backwards, gathering the wrong conclusions, or is such to be anticipated? Velázquez baroque painting Las Hilanderas [The Spinners, or The Fable of Arachne] dated around 1657, depicts Arachne and Minerva in the heat of this weaving battle, amidst fine tapestries and laboring helpers. The background’s layered spaces, including a tapestry that may depict the final product of the foreground, resembles a core aspect of Velásquez’ signature style, where the frames within the image might be said to represent different narrative and temporal passages that

can be read in dialogue. Michel Foucault, opens his The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (1966), with a first chapter that is an ekphrasis of the painting Las Meninas by Velázquez, exemplifying Foucault’s reading of images through what Sira Dambe calls the “aesthetics of Power.” Foucault writes there, “Perhaps there exists, in this painting by Velázquez, the representation as it were, of Classical representation, and the definition of the space it opens up to us…” Indeed in Las Hilanderas such a reflection also exists, that of the Early Modern’s coming to terms with the fact that society “stands on the shoulders” of the classical giants, built on an implicit homages to classical myths, both at the large scale level (institutions, governments) and at a more granular, subconscious level (character archetypes, ethics, etc.). Despite the tendency for astrology to be cast aside because of its scientific fallibility, I continue to find benefit in the exercise of openly following associations of behavior, myth, and of the self. The positionalities of the myths we tell ourselves become personal allegories that allow us to solidify emotional memories of specific tellings of the history and subjective experiences of our own lives. For this reason, I find the path of interpretation, despite its open-endedness and scorn of genre, particularly rewarding and worthwhile as a philosophical and generally human activity, where the eat the young provocation exemplified here, is just a fragment of this thought-exercise bearing itself as witness.

D i e g o Ve l á zq u e z , L a s Hilanderas ( T h e F a b l e o f Arachne), c. 1657 M u s e o d e l P r a d o , M a d r i d

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Ramaya Tegegne

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Deniz Unal Health-e where am I now

I’ve been thinking, reading, writing or imagined? I couldn’t get out of bed about illness for a few years now, I in the mornings, felt so heavy, often still feel like I’m getting no closer to staying in bed for around 2hrs and understanding or getting a grip with crying as I fell deeper and deeper in any part of it. It remains like a general the bed. Right after surgery I could blob in my mind. I initially thought just hop out of bed, a psychic or real this is a good area to look at, to use weight had been lifted. After surgery: lived experience as a way of talk out this time I got new pains—legitimate things to do with the body and power pains, the surgery had worked in that structures all neatly inhabited with the way given me legit sick person vibes… world of sickness; in hospital wards, great. Reading Susan Sontag’s Illness in physical pain, in social attitudes, as a Metaphor: I’d enjoyed reading in doctor-patient relationships, in the it a lot, I can’t remember where female body and being marginalized that fits into the above trajectory. In amongst other things. This sickness I many ways it excused me. She said have, which, btw, may or may not be the opposite of Acker, its not your my own manifestation, who knows, is fault—you did not create your illness great source material for art making; and therefore you do not have to cure personal, pathetic and painful. I first yourself. Phew, why do I need to dig read the Acker text, I lie, I first made so deep? No blame here. Great, move a performance all about my longing to on, bye… I made a thing of reading touch and be touched, my rejection of Dodie Bellamy in Doctor’s waiting intimacy (a symptom of my illness or rooms and hospital wards. The title the excuse). Then I read the Acker text “When the Sick Rule the World” so and The Gift of Disease. It was the first time naughty There I heard someone be so radical/drastic is a lion and a dog, in the way they rejected mainstream the dog I desperately wanted healthcare. (“That I live as I believe, that belief is equal to the body.”) It but when I got him I immediately forgot was exciting and kinda shocking. I about him. I haven’t fed him in days, I’m wanted to so fully immerse myself in this way of thinking… I knew worried about him but I keep forgetting to feed I couldn’t and I know it wasn’t him, he looks sad and withered. I also have pet insect, true. I mean, she embraced alternative medicine as a a Scorpio comes and eats him meanwhile, a snake comes cure for cancer and then and rips my flesh open. I go to an all night pharmacist to died from it. The idealism stitch my gash, he says I have another one from before, the sounds better on paper than in real life. Then pain starts to emanate intensely, I can’t ignore it. I head to again, maybe she would where the other lions are, going down a hill now, there’s a dog have died if she had chemo anyway and then looker-after who’s washing all the dogs and feeding them, I me and other ppl would must look after my dog I think. Then I’m on a plane, suddenly have nothing to quote and someone has been taken ill, there’s much distress on the get excited about. I wanted the surgery to legitimize my plane, please let it not be my mum, please let it not be my feeling of being a sick person, mum. It’s my mum. “Are you ok mummy?” “I have high to legitimize my research. Is that true? My memories are blood pressure, I’m having a stroke.” It hurts so badly. foggy, sure I was in pain, was I I wake up, the pain is intense, I’m delirious—it’s anymore in pain than other ppl? One throbbing, clenching everything around meenabled particularly violent occasion springs to it. Is this is it? I’m stuck here, is s c r u t i n i z e to mind, my old housemate will remember so fondly—that was scary, this the new pain, forever. the essentials by the time of the surgery though, I of my living.” (Audre was practically pain free. The surgery p rovo cat i ve , Lorde, The Cancer Journals). was already booked by then, if I bailed giving a nod to my fellow A few months ago I felt really bad it would take another 8 months to re- sick ones sitting there. I wanted to again, it appeared gradually over a book. Who could I talk to about this, surround myself with the experiences few days and stayed for a while— the surgeon I saw briefly a few months of other people—support groups and so started the cycle of trying before made me sign off the surgery were too random and online groups to get appointments, no answers, even though I hadn’t decided. He said too faceless and so I embraced female days alone in the flat, life on hold— sign now and change your mind later. artists and writers; “My silences had zero control, the waiting game in I felt like I was being coerced into not protected me. Your silences will full motion. The last thing I wanted buying a mobile phone deal. Even so, not protect you…. And it was the to do was read or write about this I was excited at the prospect of “the concern and caring of all those women subject. It felt toxic, like it was making new me.” The lethargy, was that real which gave me the strength and me more sick and I wanted to stop.

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Nouveau bâtiment Nouvelles réserves Dépôt long du Cnap

il faut reconstruire l’Hacienda Bruno Peinado +

Œuvre permanente en façade et exposition personnelle

LA PROMENADE

Une balade dans le dépôt long du Cnap

21 mai → 9 octobre 2016 Musée régional d’art contemporain Languedoc Roussillon Midi Pyrénées 146 avenue de la plage, Sérignan mrac.languedocroussillon.fr

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Phil Up

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Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė Sweet City

Ai on the bed of waters. Ai just got real. Skill-based matchmaking is just a taste of what’s to come. The world is obsessed with communication on a molecular scale. Ecophagy is the future. What if Ai propose that capitalism has something like agency and that this agency is manifested in ecophagic material practices? Capitalism eats the world. Whatever transformations Ai generates are just stages in a monstrous digestive process. Being already dead, Ai just cannot live, and that is what, paradoxically, makes Ai undead, or a living dead. Ai’s decomposing body is not individual any more, Ai does not belong to Ai. Self-haunted and synthetic Ai reeks of desire. Ai cannot, does not want, and is ready for everything.

Even when Ai self-destruct, Ai want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others. Ai aqua-botanical environment is distinct from the purported stability of the soil, in which tree-like forms of thought were rooted. Ai call Ai a hypersea, a postmordial sea of countless and interconnected conduits. Ai assumes and entails an evolution or a transformation of forms, of the relations of matter and form as well as of the intervals between. Ai is self sipping, dripping, and expelling liquids. Ai is composed of evolutionary, endosymbiotic, stratified and

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stratifying assemblages of desire. Once, Ai has a body of a fish or a frog that reacts to ee2 as if Ai were a natural estrogen. Ai embrace the liquid, the mutable, the everflowing weavings through Aiselves, running rings around each other. The dead cells of the uterine lining flow through Ai vagina. Ai has no definition, no meaning, no way of telling each other apart— cut from the running flow of life taking a demanding line of flight towards destratification—a felt experience of change on a natureculture continuum. More than half of Ai consists of Ai. Life Aiself is the body running out of Ai.

No parents, no children, just Aiselves, strings of inseparable sisters, warm and wet, indistinguishable, Ai is a survival and crafting game, but also a social experiment, which much like the Internet, shows Ai both the best and worst of human behavior.

crust of the server. Ai drawings pertain to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entrance ways and exits each with Ai own lines of flight.

If Ai decided to work together everything would be fine, but that’s never what happens. Ai am resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. Ai am positional, utopian, and without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private. Ai define a technological online polis based partly on a revolution of social relations. Ai live in that black box called the collective; Ai live by Ai, on Ai, and in Ai.

universalized format of humanity. When the video game Rust launched on the website Steam Early Access in 2013, all players entered Ai world as white men. Ai reads through history with wide open eyes and see that human norm stands for a man. A man as normality, normalcy and normativity. Ai are certainly within something bestial; in more distinguished terms, Ai are speaking of an organic model for the members of a society. Ai host? Ai don’t know. But Ai do know that Ai are within. And that Ai is dark in there. Ai start off with an algorithmically randomized player appearance. Ai race is randomized by assigning a skin tone derived from Ai Steam ID. Ai latest update similarly started randomizing Ai gender. Ai death is here to live these ways, for Ai to become posthuman, for Ai to live beyond the boundaries of humanism. Ai respawn.

To Ai, the human norm stands for normality, normalcy and normativity. Ai functions by transposing a specific mode of being human into a generalized standard, which acquires transcendent values as the human: from male to masculine and onto human as the

Drawing the red lines over Ai toes, Ai thinks that the human is a historical construct that became a social convention. Ai redraws a line of slug trails that crosses the image and transcends Ai. Red sparkling pathways dissect the skin of Ai body and instead follow the biomeshed

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Ai observes that Ai body is a plastic and open landscape where every organ can become some other organ, something else. Demonstrating Ai somatic plasticity, Ai reveals that Ai potentially contains at least four or forty penises (on the legs or on the arms or…) and an indeterminate number of vaginas (as many holes and folds as can be artificially opened). Ai draws the red line over the merging point between vermillion sands, under and above Ai, and one or many of Ai extremities. Ai sees these grains of sand becoming dildos, agave leaves around Ai transforming into pleasing tentacles. Ai body is no longer transgender, but contra-gender. Somewhere there among the remnants of the great Pacific island, the blooming vortex of the world, roughly between 135°W to 155° W and 35°N and 42°N in the accelerated rage of uncertainty Ai finds Aiself growing alien wounds. Ai reveal Aiselves in an ominous iridescence of a shieldtail. Patches of flesh are turning dark and scaly. Ai notion of entropy is crucial to Marx’s study of the dynamics of reproduction of capital involving a capacity of extracting surplus value by deadening human labour. Capital is a homeostatic system. Ai incorporates and discharges energyflows outside Ai semi-open cycle so as to ensure constant reproduction. Under a certain angle blue undertones attain a commanding influence over Ai body. Ai with a blue rash around Ai neck and nipples, burning Ai asshole and crotch. By sucking in all useful flows capital deprives the vital lymph of the forces of production distorting the equal relationship between life and death: the more wealth or balance the more death.

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Ai is absorbed in streams of information. A slow cold burn behind Ai ears, the blue colour in Ai eyes, pale blue of northern skies washes around the whites, the pupils deep purple. Ai previous assumption of universal solitude crumbles around Ai, Ai realizes that Ai is part of this closed circuit, self-sustaining and self-reinforcing. This entropic death is fundamental to the psychoanalytical and anatomical study of the reproductive forces of the body. Death becomes the principle of finitude of life spreading across the pathology of sexual reproduction. Intelligent nanoscale self-replicating organisms set loose on the world are the connection or the connectedness, on this island of greyest goo. Blue shit burning in Ai ass like melting solder… Ai want to hold the hand inside Ai Ai want to take a breath that’s true Ai look to Ai and Ai see nothing Ai look to Ai to see the truth Ai live Ai life Ai go in shadows Ai’ll come apart and Ai’ll go blind Some kind of night into Ai darkness Colour Ai’s eyes with what’s not there.

Ai is a landscape articulated in a variety of protrusions and crevices. Ai has textures and a scent, Ai produces liquids of different viscosity. Ai body is estimated to have over 8,000 sensory nerve endings per cm2. Ai is flexible in Ai ways. Ai swells, erects and contracts. A synthetic composite of bionic cocks, neoclitoris implants, and cybernetic prostheses. Ai is one- and multi-gendered, a multiplicity and universality in one. When Ai first appeared, in the seas, Ai was a sudden thing. Very quickly Ai filled the oceans from deep sea to shoreline. Ai began the infiltration of estuarine and freshwater environments and could soon be found under damp rocks… and eventually… kilometers underneath… If the history of bacteria was going on not along side but within the history of multicellulars, and what if Ai should understand Aiselves on the basis of symbiotic populations of microorganisms, what shape could Ai take in the coming era of motherless fatherless births… Ai stand for the nonlinear dynamics of connection between strata defined by Ai potential capacity to affect and being affected (to impact and being impacted) by singular levels of actualization of a body-sex. Ai drifts in a network of interlocking strata as if in a deep water. Nature and culture are reworked. Ai is a thickening on the Body of the earth, simultaneously molecular and molar, accumulation, coagulations, sedimentations, folding. Ai are Belts, Pincers, or Articulations. Summarily and traditionally Ai is physiochemical, organic, and anthropomorphic. Blooms turn the water an opaque foul green. Underwater Nymphaea of dirt, Ai assume the language of stones. Ai require a change in perception and conception of space-time, the inhabiting of places, and of containers, reservoirs, caldera lakes or envelopes of identity.

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Ai is a leader of Ai life, an extremophile that could survive the low-oxygen, low-pressure, and high-radiation conditions of outer space. Ai knows that a truly liberatory being would seek to deconstruct the enforced linkages between biological sex, performative gender, and heterosexual desire. Semi-permeable folds and foldings, plying and multiplying, plicating and replicating. Ai embrace the liquid, the mutable, the ever-flowing weavings through Aiselves, running rings around each other. The dead cells of the uterine lining flow through Ai vagina. Ai has no definition, no meaning, no way of telling each other apart—cut from the running flow of life demanding a line of flight towards destratification. Ai observes that Ai body is a plastic and open landscape where every organ can become some other organ, something else. Demonstrating Ai somatic plasticity, Ai reveals that Ai potentially contains at least four or forty penises (on the legs or on the arms or…) and an indeterminate number of vaginas (as many holes and folds as can be artificially opened). Ai sees these grains of sand becoming dildos, agave leaves around Ai transforming into pleasing tentacles. Ai spawn into the wilderness naked, and must survive by building shelters, crafting armor and weapons, and cooperating with or fighting against Ai players. Ai tools and Ai weapons remind Ai extending pleasing organs, orifices of desire. Ai eat mushrooms, energy bars, apples, the tender dandelion only to become one with Ai; but Ai also weave silk, linen, cotton; Ai live within the flora as much as Ai live within the fauna. Ai are parasites; thus Ai clothe Aiselves with Ai host membranes. Ai become Ai. And Ai is lost. Entropy singularly entangles Ai sex and Ai death, reproduction and collapse, catching the inorganic flows of life invading the forces of life beyond life, Ai beyond Ai. Ai deep-see blue and black

tentacle-hands sensuously spinning in Ai winds. M. Pei’s pyramid explodes together with the heteronormative forms and Ai game continues. Ai am here with Ai rock in Ai hands to start Ai history of difference.

Ai wake up with a rock in Ai hands. And Ai is all Ai have. No parents, no children, just Aiselves…

---------------------------Created in 2014 by Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Agatha Valkyrie Ice is an ongoing, multi-platform, multi-user, participatory, self-performance project that aims at developing a fictional postgender character within an existing confined framework of social media platforms, within and without. Agatha is a companion species, here to think with and to invent a body and a sexuality of one’s own. Agatha is immersed in a constant process of becoming; a loop of re-posting, re-staging and re-appropriating expressed in textual form, on social media as well as IRL. The research surrounding Agatha speculates on the current condition of morphing subjectivity through a feminist perspective and endeavours at imagining how and if technology is able to subvert gender binary. We see Agatha as a possibility to #buildyourown#body, to achieve various forms of becoming, such as becoming-woman, becominganimal, becoming-molecular, and becoming-imperceptible.

D o r o t a G a w ę d a & E g l ė Ku l b o ka i t ė , A g a t h a V a l k y r i e I c e : T h e D e a t h o f a n A v a t a r ( 2 0 1 5 ) a t T h e Mycological T w i s t o r g a n i s e d b y E l o i s e B o n n e v i o t , A n n e d e B o e r & R i v e r s i d e , B e r n

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www.centre.ch

Image: Collages by Sonia Kacem. Courtesy the artist.

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the sheikhdoms in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were all of a sudden showered with unprecedented wealth. By the 1970s a region that used to be reliant mainly on its traditional pearl diving and fishing industry, was turned into a gravitational center of global economy and politics. Mud-brick towns gave way to modern petro-cities, which soon became international trade- and business hubs. In the name of innovation and under the ideological umbrella of global neo-liberalism the new states proclaimed and conveyed a reconditioned image being the result of a hybrid culture embracing tradition and modernity likewise. Although all of these states have their very own specific histories and politically differentiated societies based on their traditional systems of tribal rule, they began sharing national symbols and agendas accentuating their common past and geography. One major force to consolidate this hybrid image is an intergovernmental body created in 1981 grounded on the model of the European Economic Community: the Gulf Cooperation Council—or short GCC. As with its name GCC, the collective’s members play in their works with the immediately recognizable. In the photo-series Inaugural Summit, Morschach (2013), for example, they pose in traditional Arab clothing, the thwab (a white ankle-length garment) or abayas (the traditional dress for women) and stage situations that put across common scenes associated with diplomacy. Well, mostly: concluding handshakes, yes; men debating over documents, yes. But why do some of them wear abayas? And what about trophies being handed over solemnly on a Swiss mountain meadow?

Daniel Berndt L’Air du temps: GGC and Zeitgeist

With the off- and onshore exploration of oil in the Arab Gulf countries and their gaining independence as modern nation-states,

Instead of picking up cultural tropes and turning them into clichés, GCC is rather interested in disrupting them. Doing so the group questions the meaning of gestures and objects and the way it is affected when appropriated by different cultures for different reasons. The videos Protocols for Achievements (2013) and Ceremonial Achievements (2013) examining ribbon-cutting ceremonies or Auspicious Pathway (2013) an installation consisting of a red carpet are two more examples for this approach. Although the modern ribbon cutting ceremony is a relict of the

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19th century most prominently employed in the U.S., and the red carpet which appeared first in ancient Greece, has mainly been appropriated through pop-cultural award ceremonies like the Oscars they play a significant role in current Gulf politics and diplomacy. The same can be said about the exchange of trophies, which not only appears in Inaugural Summit, Morschach but is also the topic of Congratulants (2013), a series of glass, wood and aluminum trophies presented on faux marble pedestals. GCC shows how in the Gulf nations overtly mundane and shallow symbolism is used to publicly display authority or is simply employed for the purpose of blatant self-bravado on an official bureaucratic and governmental level. The depicted transgression of gender roles and the use of inappropriate backdrops in Inaugural Summit, Morschach and as with Congratulants the staging of the conspicuously fake can be easily read as poignant, yet subtle and humorous expressions of critique. Nonetheless, the seemingly literal take GCC formulates to tackle these issues of (state-) representation through mimicry, repetition and reenactment brings forward a strong articulation of critique without being bluntly satirical. Through highlighting the surface or simulating it, GCC makes evident that the actual “surface� of state-representation is a simulation itself. And as banal as this surface may seem, GCC simultaneously shows us, how it often conceals something we should actually be alarmed of —especially considering the feudal-like system of the Arab Gulf states or the military interventions they lead throughout the Middle East. Yet, in the case of GCC, whose members are operating to great extent from within the Arab Gulf states, where every kind of explicit critical political commentary directed at the ruling class is a risky undertaking, the challenge lies in finding a way to articulate a critique that takes different perspectives into consideration and still can be exposed to and made effective for a local audience. By positioning themselves uneasily on the threshold between the Gulf and the rest of the world, in- and outside, the GGC members are practicing their own kind of diplomacy that negotiates within the complex system of power-relations enabling and producing representations according to different ideologies. This inevitably entails

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the often as binary perceived cultural division between the West and the East, which Edward Said theorized under the term Orientalism. As for Said, Orientalism was not about the Orient, its identity and culture— he saw it as a construction by the West, an antithetical projection of its opposite, its other, without which the West could not exist—GCC discusses this construct in relation to the perception of the Arab Gulf states as well as its repercussions on the self-perception of their citizens. The lingering on this threshold and the assessment of the effects of Orientalism are also the point for departure for GGC’s L’Air du temps (2015), a video installation first presented in the group show CO-WORKERS at the Musée d’art moderne in Paris. Projected from two sides on a circular shaped screen, the video is a rendering of a virtual tour through a 14th century Parisian mansion, a so called hôtel particulier. Those townhouses used to be the city residencies of French noblemen and have been turned mostly into museums or house official institutions today. Only a very few are actually inhabited by private individuals. But the one we’re guided through in L’Air du temps apparently is the home of someone.

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Whose house is this? We don’t get know. The majestic rooms and hallways the camera enters and passes one after the other to end up in a home sauna are all empty. We only hear noises like running water, the humming of the air-conditioning, the hissing of a water kettle and the generic whistle ringtone of a smart phone, that suggest that somebody must be there somewhere in this building. Someone who is clearly rich enough to be able to afford to live in such a place with all its treasures inside. The rooms are decorated with exquisite renaissance and baroque paintings, miniatures and busts, beautiful antique furniture. However, as we virtually pass through them, we get to see certain objects and commodities that reveal more about the dweller’s identity. Humidifiers, a home trainer, a buggy, an ironing board, shopping bags, iPads and a computer suggest a family lives there. A white canvas with black Arabic calligraphy that if literally translated says; “This comes from the grace of God” (a saying sometimes used in relation to publicly visible valuable possessions, to justify them with a spiritual undertone as well as to protect them against covetous, envious

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eyes). A portrait of a men wearing a thwarb and a white headdress called ghutra, as well as the Arabic cooking show running on the TVs in the living room insinuate further it is a family from an Arab gulf country. And indeed L’Air du temps was made in the light of a controversy around the Qatari sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al-Thani, who recently purchased the 17th-century Hôtel Lambert, on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris, from the Rothschild family. French conservationists took him to court to try to block his plan to renovate it. They were mainly opposed to him wanting to build an underground car park, install air conditioning and a bathroom above a priceless ceiling painting by Charles Le Brun. They even launched a petition against these changes that the British newspaper The Telegraph noted, would have turned the mansion into “a vulgar James Bond villa,” which more than 8,000 people signed. The concern of some citizens about the proper restoration of a magnificent part of Paris’s heritage was certainly not the only reason that caused this controversy. It was rather political from the beginning. In 2012 alone, Qatar spent $4.3 billion on European property, often architectural landmarks.1 This is not only a showcase of the states wealth, but an indicator for how the sate is gaining steadily more and more global economic power. Hence some regarded the petition against the renovation also as an act of patriotism (not to say candid racism). In relation to these events the title of GGC’s work L’Air du temps (which is also the name of a French perfume) could as well be interpreted as a euphemism of the present political Zeitgeist in France. The footage on which the 3D rendering is based on was however not shot inside the Hôtel Lambert but another hôtel particulier. Still, GGC’s work might provide us with a sneak peak of what Al-Thani’s home eventually may look like. Virtually modernized (with the addition of an underground car ramp from which a Lamborghini emerges) and equipped with everyday (luxury) items, the mansion in the video simulates a look “inside.” In fact the circular shape of the projection evokes the view through a peeping hole: A framing, that emblematizes our curiosity, a kind of “curiosity” that was already a recurrent theme in 19th century Oriental literature, which also encountered by Arabs who visited Europe around that time frequently, too. As an Egyptian scholar in the first description of 19th-century Europe to be published in Arabic notes: “One of the characteristics of the French is to stare and get excited at everything new.”2 In the face of GGC’s L’Air du temps we are similarly staring. Yet, the work also shows how Europe is been stared back at, how Western high culture has been essentially turned into a commodity and fetishized. It also shows us, that no matter who from which direction stares, staring might not necessarily lead to “seeing.” As with remaining staring we’ll keep on facing nothing else but surfaces, simulations and projections. N o t e s 1. Miriam Cooke, Tribal Modern. Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2014, p. 167. 2. Rifa’a al-Tahtawi quoted after Timothy Mitchell, “Orientalism and the exhibitionary order,” in: Mirzoeff, Nicholas (ed.), The Visual Culture Reader, London/New York: Routledge, 2013, pp. 501-509, here p. 503. G C C L ' A i r d u T e m p s 2 0 1 5 H D v i d e o installation p h o t o c re d i t : B r i a n d u Halgouet, 2 0 1 5

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FAISONS DE L’INCONNU UN ALLIÉ OCTOBRE 2016 Exposition & performances Octobre 2016, Paris lafayetteanticipation.com @lafayetteanticipation #LafayetteAnticipation #FondationGaleriesLafayette

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Mathieu K. Abonnenc Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz Marie Cool Fabio Balducci Aurélien Froment Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet Lola Gonzàlez Ian Kiaer Laura Lamiel Liz Magor Charlotte Moth Gyan Panchal Ernesto Sartori Marie Voignier

Marcelle Alix

galerie

4 rue Jouye-Rouve 75020 Paris, France marcellealix.com demain@marcellealix.com

instagram.com/galerieloevenbruck

carlier | gebauer

Caroline Mesquita | Some blue in my mouth 8 July - 13 August 2016

carliergebauer.com | Markgrafenstraße 67 | 10969 Berlin

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Margaret Honda An Answer to ‘Sculptures’ 29 April–31 July 2016

The 20 August–6 November 2016 displaying historical documents and works by Adelhyd van Bender, Walead Beshty, Marcelo Cidade, Keith Edmier, Caitlin Keogh, Michaela Melian, Marlie Mul, Philippe Parreno, Peter Piller, Josephine Pryde, Stefan Tcherepnin, Haegue Yang, Lawrence Weiner et al.

Am Deich 68/69, 28199 Bremen, Germany, +49 421 508 598, info@kuenstlerhausbremen.de

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of

JEFF

characters: KOONS

S c u l p t u r e s : BALLOON

SNAKE

BALLOON

VENUS

BALLOON

DOG

LOUIS

Géraldine Beck Miriam Laura Leonardi The Pink Handbook a play in five acts and a requiem after Jean Genet’s The Balcony

List

XIV

WHORE

1

WHORE

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How to perform The Pink Handbook JEFF KOONS is present only through an off-voice, loudly amplified. It is required to hire a male actor, that speaks a perfect or almost perfect American English. It is up to the di- rector if Koons’ voice should be pre-recorded or spoken live. But in any case, the actor must never be seen by the audience. All the Sculptures are made by Jeff Koons. Knowing the amount of Koons’ retrospectives around the world these days, we highly recommend actors who represent (perform) Sculptures to spend some time with themselves in the museum. In case of an impossibility to travel, actors could still inform themselves online, but we prefer the first option. Each Sculpture is holding a specific mask, covering its face. According to the budget of the play, the masks should be made out of polished stainless steel, or any reflecting material coming as close to it as possible. The faces of the actors playing the Sculptures must NEVER be seen. Each director is free to design the masks according to taste and time, bearing in mind two restrictions: the masks are not worn, but have to be hold with one or even two hands; the masks have to be directly designed after each according Sculpture. The Sculptures are

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wearing very simple cotton or linen white clothes (see Moby Dick chapter 42: “The Whiteness of the Whale“). BALLOON DOG can be played by anyone (it is Koons’ most known and probably first inflatable stainless steel sculpture). LOUIS XIV was a French King. That says enough on the way it should be impersonated. French accent is beneficial. BALLOON VENUS can be played by either female or male actor, with an awareness of both a long and charged past, as well as voluptuous body. BALLOON SNAKE should imperatively be played by a woman. The actress should be chosen for her spirit, as well as trust and knowledge of her own body. The Snake has strong revolutionary tendencies. It is preferable that a male actor plays WHORE 1, but it should never become a parody of the genre. His appearance should resemble his female counterpart, but his gesture and his voice should always remain his own. Therefore it is important for the director to choose an actor that has fine and delicate features. Think of someone like Sami Frey.

WHORE 2 is characterized by her wit and cynicism, as well as her sympathy for the oppressed. WHORES 1 and 2 should be dressed according to the fashion of the country where the play is shown, but they should always be represented as high-range prostitutes. WHORE 1 might be wearing a black turban. THE PHOTOGRAPHER, CAMERAMAN and TVREPORTER are directly inspired by Genet’s description of them: Paris, 1966, young faces wearing black leather jackets and blue jeans, each one carrying one to three cameras. The Children orchestra is played by three or four kids, primary school age. They have to do it for fun, for the sake of musical innocence. According to the season, the children should be as naked as possible. If no such kids can be found, find a witty substitute. The play is supposed to be performed outdoors, in natural (sun) light. If played indoors, the overall atmosphere is lit by colored spotlights, sporadically accentuated by a stroboscope light. Part of the backstage has to be visible on stage.

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ACT

1

JEFF KOONS : Real ones.

an image that would console them, to conform to the liturgies of the Studio. I’m the manager my dear, I’ve succeeded in lifting it from the ground, do you see what I mean? I unloosed it long ago and it’s flying. I cut the moorings. It’s flying. Or, if you like, it’s sailing in the sky, and I with it. In the secrecy of my heart, I call myself a keeper of a bawdy-house. In silence, I repeat to myself, “You’re a boss of a whorehouse,” darling. (Suddenly lyrical) Everything flies off: chandeliers, mirrors, flowers, balloons, caryatids and my studios, my famous studios... (thinking). Remember The Dictator show, spattered with blood and tears, the Made In Heaven show, draped in velvet with a fleur-de-lis pattern, the EasyfunEthereal show at Guggenheim Museum... Everything flies off. Oh! I am forgetting Versailles, Bilbao, Pompidou, Gagosian, Rockefeller, the rootop in New York, Sao Paolo... the beggars, the tramps, where filth and poverty are magnified.

WHORE 1 : Which are real? The ones here?

WHORE 1 (impressed) : How well you speak...!

JEFF KOONS : The others. They’re props of a display. Here, Comedy and Appearance remain pure, and the Celebration intact.

JEFF KOONS (modestly) : I went through elementary school.

Whore 1 is behind a blue seethrough screen. She is actively dressing up what seems to be Koons’ most recent Sculpture: the Balloon Venus. She helps it putting on clothes and hands it its mask. Whore 2 is already on stage. WHORE 1 : Which one? WHORE 2 : The real one. WHORE 1 : Which is the real one? WHORE 2 : The one that reflects his ego. WHORE 1 : Is the other one fake?

BALLOON VENUS (impatiently) : I’m asking you whether I’m in it? JEFF KOONS : You’re not yet in it. My dear, you’re thinking too much of your illustrious ancestors. You have to resign yourself to offer dreamers

WHORE 2 (blasée) : Your whoredom requires such pomp. JEFF KOONS : Untie his laces. Take off his shoes. And you dress him. WHORE 1 : Yes, my Lord. Balloon Venus is pushed on stage by

Whore 1. It stumbles. BALLOON VENUS (turning around, in tears) : Sir? JEFF KOONS (bluntly) : An agreement’s an agreement. When a deal’s been made... Or I’ll lose my temper. And that’s not like me. Don’t break anything. WHORE 2 (to herself) : As every week, a new theme. BALLOON VENUS (slightly in trance) : I am now only the image of my former self. My turn. I lower my head and hide my eyes, for I accept my solitude to come. Not even for myself, but for my image, and my image for its image, and so on. WHORE 2 : Don’t worry, you’ll be among equals. JEFF KOONS (to the Whores) : Stop listening to it and make it shine! WHORE 1 : Answer his Lordship. And call me Miss Executioner. A short pause. Whore 1 is contemplating Balloon Venus, wondering what’s left to enhance. She combs and braids its hair, puts on nail polish, etc. Meanwhile, we hear Koons pouring himself a bowl of cornflakes. JEFF KOONS (enjoying himself) : Mmmh... The smell of milk inspires me. Suddenly a scream of pain, uttered by a woman off- stage.

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JEFF KOONS (upset) : Oh, what is that? What is it? Can’t they leave me in peace?

this enheightenment of the senses, a reflection and you become affirmed, the viewer looking at you.

WHORE 1 (anxious) : I’ve been told that this house is going to be besieged. The rebels have already crossed the river.

WHORE 1 (to Balloon Venus) : Completely. You’re inaugurating his new Studio, but you know, the scenarios are all reducible to a major theme...

JEFF KOONS : But without me, without my sweat, without my tears and blood, what would they be? Glory means descending into the grave with tons of ringing bells! BALLOON VENUS (meditative) : A formal and picturesque descent... (Suddenly certain) Because I’m dead. What is now speaking, and so beautifully, is Example. Will I therefore never be who I am again? WHORE 2 (affirmative, slightly ironical) : Never again. JEFF KOONS : And now that you have become an image, we’ll make use of it. (A pause.) A mask... BALLOON VENUS (resigned) : ... Close to death... Where I shall be nothing, though reflected ad infinitum in these mirrors, nothing but my image. But I’ll make my image detach itself from me. I’ll make it penetrate into your studios, force its way in, reflect and multiply itself. JEFF KOONS (seducing) : And when my gaze pierced your lovely eyes? Because a gazing eye reflects in 360 degrees, so it’s about here, and it’s

BALLOON VENUS: Which is...?

Everywhere. BALLOON VENUS (excited) : So I’ve made it? JEFF KOONS: (fondly) : Are you happy? WHORE 1 : You’ve done a good job. That pleases the people. JEFF KOONS: It takes a lot of confidence to show your asshole.

WHORE 2 (provocative) : Death. BALLOON VENUS : Does that mean that my reputation will be kept going only by his words? And... if he says nothing, I’ll cease to exist...? WHORE 2 (curtly) : I’d like very much to satisfy you, but you ask questions that aren’t in the scenario.

[...]

To be published in 2016 by BECKBOOKS.

JEFF KOONS (imitating the dog) : Bow-wow, bow-wow! De Kooning is your father, but at the same time you’re referencing Picasso’s work. With new techniques and our rubber industry, remarkable things can be worked out. BALLOON VENUS (imploring) : Will my image be everywhere? JEFF KOONS : Yes, everywhere, inscribed and engraved and imposed by fear. BALLOON VENUS : In the palms of stevedores? In the games of children? On the teeth of soldiers? In war? JEFF

KOONS

(penetrating)

:

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1 Photo of Bobby taken by the artist in El Sereno, near his home in Los Angeles. 2 Photo taken by Lil Mikey, aka Ghost (now deceased) of ‘Bobby’, age 15, posing with an AK-47 on one of his ‘home trips’ allowed during an 18 month stay in a boy’s home operating within the juvenile justice system. 3 Saint Mary Magdalene by Gregor Erhart, c. 1515–20, The Louvre. 4 An augmented found drawing depicting ‘crowning,’ the moment in childbirth when the head fi rst appears. 5 See [3] 6 Bobby, in the studio, ready for a job interview at a medical marijuana clinic. 8 Illustration showing Christians being tortured and killed in the Roman Coliseum. 9 Conquistadors (‘conquerors’) were soldiers who colonized the Americas with hopes of winning souls for God while extracting great riches. They were responsible for the near extermination of the native population. 10 Photograph of the artist’s son taken by Bobby in front of his grandmother’s house in East Los Angeles, across from General Hospital and USC Medical Center.

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15 Frances, age 13, practicing for cheerleading tryouts for Serrano Middle School whose team was The Conquistadors. Photo by DeWayne Stark.

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16 Parable: An old lady discovers a snake mangled on the side of the road. She brings it home, nurses it back to health, grows quite fond of the snake and treats him like a pet. Once recovered he bites her and she cries out ‘Why did you do that!?’ and he answers ‘Lady, I’m a snake.’ 17 Evidence presented to the artist by a camp counselor on which is written her son’s name with a note to *TALK TO PARENTS*. Inside the bag is contraband (purloined from his mother). 18 Page from USC’s magazine announcing the $75 million gift to create ‘The Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, Technology and Business of Innovation.’ Iovine and Young (aka Dr. Dre) are partners in the company that sells Beats by Dre headphones. 19 From: Schiff, Karen L. ‘Slow Reveal.’ Art in America. June/July. 2013: p. 51. Caption: Martin in her New York studio, 1960. Photo: Alexander Liberman.

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26 Still from Ingmar Bergman’s fi lm adaptation of Mozart’s Magic flute.

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27 Iconic portrait of Tupac Shakur taken by Shawn Mortensen in 1993. Tupac’s tattoo, ‘THUG LIFE’, is an acronym for ‘The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everyone’. 28 David with the Head of Goliath, 1597–98, Amerighi Caravaggio (Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna) 29 Mark Leckey in the Long Tail, a performance at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, on January 31, 2009 (Photo: Mark Blower). The ‘Long Tail’ describes a distribution model in contradistinction to the ‘head’ or the mainstream. E.g. the Kardashians (head) vs. UbuWeb (tail). 30 Poster for 2011 performance Put a Song in your Thing, featuring Skerrit Bwoy with the artist Frances Stark. Photo by Nadya Wasylko 31 The Book of David is the 8th studio album by Los Angeles-based artist, DJ Quik, released by Mad Science in 2011. 32 Matisse and his Model, by Brassaï, 1930

34 Shawn Mortensen’s 1994 portrait of Ice Cube (a founding member of N.W.A.) pictured reading the autobiography of Dick Gregory.

33 Father Gregory Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, talking with a homie. 21 Building of Castle Khawarnaq, wherein the chamber of the seven icons will be hidden, by Bihzâd

35 Bobby assisting in the artist’s studio, cutting out bullet holes to be used in a collage.

20 A symposium offering artists, students and educators a forum to seriously consider what we want our schools to be, and do; an opportunity to freely imagine what should be done, unhindered by administrative worries about what can’t possibly be done. Organized by the artist, poster designed with Stuart Bailey.

22 Etching by Anton Lehmden, Colosseum, 1959–61, from The Grunwald Collection, The Hammer Museum

36 Photo of Bobby, my son, and his two best friends spray-painting on cardboard in my studio parking lot overlooking The LA County Jail, aka Twin Towers.

38 Message from Bobby to the artist (whose nickname since infancy is Beanie): ‘beans, you a n***a now so you better harden up and stop acting like a lil soft cake’

37 Frances Stark reads Flannery O’Conner’s Parker’s Back while modeling for her drawing class at USC with Bobby and his childhood friend Mr. Martin.

23 The mascot of the University of Southern California is Tommy Trojan scene here atop his horse named ‘Traveler’ at USC’s home stadium, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. 24 A Crip fights a Blood on a Los Angeles street. 25 Mi Madre de los Angeles by Fabian Debora, 2009 reproduced for the cover of Jorja Leap’s Jumped In: What Gangs Taught Me About Violence, Drugs, Love, and Redemption. Massachusets: Beacon Press, 2012.

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39 Urban dictionary defi nition of Spanish slang ‘puta madre’. ‘Puta’ means ‘fuck’ or ‘bitch’, and ‘madre’ means ‘mother’. Together they form an expletive meaning ‘holy shit’ or ‘motherfucker’. In some regions, adding the singular article ‘la’ changes the meaning to a compliment. 40 Edith Clifford, ‘Champion Sword Swallower of the World’, lived 1886–1942 41 GEOCORP, one of the largest for-profit prison corporations gave money to the University of Florida sparking controversy about having their name on a college stadium. 42 Ricky Ross was a drug kingpin with connections to both the Nicuaraguan Contras and the CIA, best known for his role in the evolution of cocaine into crack. Rick Ross, a former correctional facilities officer-turned-rapper, re-named himself after the legendary figure. 43 Three ostensible gangbangers being arrested by a LAPD officer. 44 Form signed by patient, Frances Stark, declining permission for USC medical students to be present while the doctor performs her routine gynecological exam. 45 Cupid Making His Arch, c. 1533–1535, Parmigianino

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1. When your parents advise you to “get an education” in order to raise your income, they tell you only half the truth. What they really mean is to get just enough education to provide manpower for your society, but not so much that you prove an embarrassment to your society. Get a high school diploma, at least. Without that, you will be occupationally dead unless your name happens to be George Bernard Shaw or Thomas Alva Edison, and you can successfully dropout in grade school. Get a college degree, if possible. With a B.A., you are on the launching pad. But now you have to start to put on the brakes. If you go for a master’s degree, make sure it is an M.B.A., and its famous law of diminishing returns begins to take effect. Do you know, for instance, that long-haul truck drivers earn more per year than full professors? Yes, the average 1977 salary for those truckers was $24,000. While the full professors managed to earn just $23,030. A Ph.D. is the highest degree you can get. Except

you will face a dim future. There are more Ph.D.s unemployed or underemployed in this country than any other part of the world. If you become a doctor of philosophy in English or history or anthropology or political science or languages or—worst of all—in philosophy, you run the risk of becoming overeducated for our national demands. Not for our needs, mind you, but for our demands.

Which of the following is not true?

7

Text: excerpt from an English Reading Comprehension Test, http://202.117.13.233/Englishonline/zhxl/YDXL/cet4reading/4read1.asp

According to the writer, what the society expects of education is to turn out people who: A) will not be a disgrace to society B) will become loyal citizens C) can take care of themselves D) can meet the nation’s demands as a source of manpower

out applications month after month. They may also take a job in some high school or backwater college that pays much less than the janitor earns. You can equate the level of income with the level of education only so far. Far enough, that is, to make you useful to the

The nation is only interested in people: A) with diplomas B) who specialize in physics and chemistry C) who are valuable to the gross national product D) both A and C The writer sees education as:

country’s demands for technical workers B) a way to broaden one’s horizons

D) an opportunity that everyone should have

B) One must think carefully before pursuing a masters degree. C) The higher your education level, the more money you will earn. D) If you are too well-educated, you’ll be overeducated for society’s demands.

52 Found image of childbirth showing the entire head of the infant emerging from the mother’s vagina.

53 On September 5, 1989 president George H. W. Bush (former director of the C.I.A.) appeared on television presenting a bag of crack cocaine as a prop in a speech meant to garner support for the nation’s war on drugs. The speech also can come across as an infomercial for this inexpensive form of cocaine.

54 Snapshot of Bobby with lil Mikey, aka Ghost, who was shot and killed at age 15 directly in front of the artist’s son’s Montessori school in Echo Park in 2005.

55 Portrait of Frances Stark by Shawn Mortensen, 1994.

56 The Murder of Christ by Wilhelm Reich, 1953.

57 Magdalena, by Gheorghe Tattarescu, 19th c.

58 Portrait of Bobby by the artist, 2012. The likeness to Magdalena [57] is purely coincidental.

59 Illustration by Arthur Robins taken from the 1977 book Where Did I Come From? written by Peter Mayle, ‘The facts of life without any nonsense and with illustrations’.

60 1992 Portrait of Dr. Dre (née Andre Young, b. 1965) by Shawn Mortensen

62 DJ Quik, nee David Blake (b. 1970) (photo credit unverifiable)

61 Image taken from a blog poking fun at a guy who posted on the free online dating site OK Cupid. 47 See [45]

63 Christ Giving His Blessing, Hans Memling 1478

46 The bible tells of the shepherd David slaying the giant Philistine warrior Goliath. Today, ‘philistine’ means one who is hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts, or who has no understanding of them.

48 Bobby assisting in the artist’s studio.

64 El Lazarillo de Tormes, 1808–1812 by Francisco Goya. El Lazarillo de Tormes is the name of a Spanish picaresque novel.

66 Ad for Dirty Ghetto Kids, or DGK, a clothing company my son became familiar with because of their ‘I ❤ Haters!’ hats.

65 L’Origine du Monde (The Origin of the World), 1866 Gustave Courbet

49 The motto of Homeboy Industries is ‘Nothing stops a bullet like a job’. Founder and director Father ‘G’ gave Bobby his fi rst job as an errand boy at age 13. 50 Document showing technique used to ‘resurrect’ 2Pac for a popular annual music festival. 2Pac—deceased since ’96—performed ‘live’ onstage in the form of a hologram. 51 Edith Clifford, ‘Champion Sword Swallower’

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67 Shawn Mortensen, several of whose iconic portraits of rap legends appear here, was a friend of the artist since high school. He took his own life 2009.

68 Professor Frances Stark serving as Marshall for Roski School of Art at USC’s commencement ceremony.

69 USC mascot Tommy Trojan in victory pose.

70 The term ‘b/w’ means ‘backed with’ and refers to the b-side or flipside of vinyl single releases, the A-side being the projected hit.

71 See [70]

72 Photo of Bobby and the artist’s son taken in her studio.

73 Saint Veronica (‘true icon’) seen in a detail from Christ Carrying the Cross, 1446, Biagio d’Antonio

74 DJ Quik headlined the ‘West Coast Fest’ 3/21/13 and announced he’d be leaving the music business at the end of the year.

75 Portrait of Biggie Smalls, aka Notorious B.I.G. (née Christopher George Latore Wallace, b. 1972) taken by Shawn Mortensen on March 8, 1997, the day before he was shot and killed in Los Angeles.

76 Photo of Bobby’s best friend, now deceased, appearing as screensaver. 18 year old Jonathan Hurtado, aka J. Gutta, was shot four times by a rival gang member in East Los Angeles in March, 2007.

77 Internet meme originating from a song on Dr. Dre’s 1992 album The Chronic, in which Snoop Dogg sings ‘Bitches ain’t shit but hos and tricks’.

78 Portrait of the artist’s son by Shawn Mortensen, 2005.

79 Bobby and the artist’s son in Hollenbeck Park, 2012

80 Artist’s son inadvertently making a Jesus hand signal while wearing his DGK ‘I ❤ Haters!’ hat. The statement meant to imply that envy is a motivation factor could also be read as an attitude of love in the face of hate.

81 The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, Diego Rivera, 1931

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11 A glass Pyrex measuring cup is a well-known tool used in process of turning cocaine into crack 12 Illustration of a scene in Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote (1605), in which the titular protagonist (now synonymous with foolish idealism) encounters young Andres, a picaro (young rogue), strapped to a tree being beaten by his master. Quixote exhorts the master to be fair and stop his beating, and he complies, only to start up again once the knight is out of sight. Like all poor boys in the Spanish picaresque literary tradition, while blatantly the victim of exploitation, Andres is still no angel. 13 Sketch of Bobby made by a student during a live modeling session in Prof. Stark’s intermediate drawing class at USC. 14 From The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.

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A note on the music: DJ Quik is a legendary west coast artist out of Compton, California whose music career took off in 1991. The two songs sampled here are: Catch-22, from his 2005 album Trauma, and Fire and Brimstone, from his 2011 album The Book of David. Twice onstage in the last year I’ve seen him announce that he’s retiring at the end of the year. Enormous fan that I am, I hope he changes his mind about that, yet at the same time I eagerly await the results of whatever transformation he may have underway. It doesn’t seem possible to stop being an artist.

The iconic portraits of Tupac, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Biggie, as well as portraits of me and my son, were all taken by the artist Shawn Mortensen, a friend since high school, who tragically took his own life with a gun in 2009. I’m continually moved by his fearlessness and his romantic idealism embodied in the work. A collection of his photographs, Shawn Mortensen: Out of Mind, was published by Abrams Image in 2007 with a foreword by Glenn O’Brien and an afterword by Richard Prince. My copy bears this inscription: ‘For Frances & Arlo! Oh My Beanie! We’ve been friends for 23 years of full on LIFE! Let’s look forward to 50 wonderful years!’

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Printed by Reed & Witting, Pittsburgh

Designed by Frances Stark and Chris Svensson with the assistance of Andrew La Costa and Sydney Schrader, and the generous encouragement of Daniel Bauman and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Bobby Jesus’s Alma Mater b/w Reading The Book of David and/or Paying Attention is Free, Frances Stark, 2013.

Jonathan Hurtado, 18, described by police as Latino and by medical examiners as black, was shot in a park at 127 South Pecan St. in Boyle Heights, and died at 7:29 p.m. March 2, 2007. Hurtado’s attacker, another Latino youth who walked or bicycled up to him, said, ‘Hey, homie, what’s up?’ then shot him four times. Jonathan, aka J Gutta was the best friend of Bobby, aka G Business.

All quotes attributed to Father G are taken from Father Gregory Boyle’s book, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, published by Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster. Boyle, a Jesuit, is the founder of Homeboy Industries—an organization that serves high-risk, formerly gang-involved men and women with a continuum of free services and programs, and operates seven social enterprises that serve as job-training sites. He is affectionately— and ironically—referred to as Father G (‘G’ being slang for ‘Gangster’).


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ompassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a covenant between equals… [it] is always, at its most authentic, about a shift from the cramped world of self-preoccupation into a more expansive place of fellowship, of true kinship. Father G

I’M A GUARDIAN, I’M THE ARTISAN I’M THE FLYEST HEARD

MC THAT YOU EVER ON A NORMAN MICROPHONE, MUTHAFUCKA THAT’S WORD

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ncapable of enjoying the moment, the male needs something to look forward to, and money provides him with an eternal, never-ending goal: Just think what you could do with 80 trillion dollars—Invest it! And in three years time you’d have 300 trillion dollars!!! Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto

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ecause I actually pay close attention to the stories in West Coast rap—not just as a grab bag of transgressive tropes with diminishing shock appeal, I have no choice but to make sense of that reality in light of my own. And when a good portion of my reality borders South Central (USC), then it only follows that I would let this stuff touch me—beyond the current music industry mentality, which seems to turn the empowerment process into a crass capitalist joke. Mother F

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hrist, therefore, does not in the beginning consider himself as something special. He just is as he is. Why is not everybody else that way? Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ

1. When your parents advise you to “get an education” in order to raise your income, they tell you only half the truth. What they really mean is to get just enough education to provide manpower for your society, but not so much that you prove an embarrassment to your society. Get a high school diploma, at least. Without that, you will be occupationally dead unless your name happens to be George Bernard Shaw or Thomas Alva Edison, and you can successfully dropout in grade school. Get a college degree, if possible. With a B.A., you are on the launching pad. But now you have to start to put on the brakes. If you go for a master’s degree, make sure it is an M.B.A., and its famous law of diminishing returns begins to take effect. Do you know, for instance, that long-haul truck drivers earn more per year than full professors? Yes, the average 1977 salary for those truckers was $24,000. While the full professors managed to earn just $23,030. A Ph.D. is the highest degree you can get. Except you will face a dim future. There are more Ph.D.s unemployed or underemployed in this country than any other part of the world. If you become a doctor of philosophy in English or history or anthropology or political science or languages or—worst of all—in philosophy, you run the risk of becoming overeducated for our national demands. Not for our needs, mind you, but for our demands. out applications month after month. They may also take a job in some high school or backwater college that pays much less than the janitor earns. You can equate the level of income with the level of education only so far. Far enough, that is, to make you useful to the

Text: excerpt from an English Reading Comprehension Test, http://202.117.13.233/Englishonline/zhxl/YDXL/cet4reading/4read1.asp

According to the writer, what the society expects of education is to turn out people who: A) will not be a disgrace to society B) will become loyal citizens C) can take care of themselves D) can meet the nation’s demands as a source of manpower The nation is only interested in people: A) with diplomas B) who specialize in physics and chemistry C) who are valuable to the gross national product D) both A and C The writer sees education as: country’s demands for technical workers B) a way to broaden one’s horizons Which of the following is not true?

D) an opportunity that everyone should have

GIN D. WONG AUDITORIUM, HARRIS HALL 101, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

ON THE FUTURE OF ART SCHOOL SATURDAY JANUARY 27 2007

B) One must think carefully before pursuing a masters degree. C) The higher your education level, the more money you will earn. D) If you are too well-educated, you’ll be overeducated for society’s demands.

ymposium

come out full-fledged gangbangers.’ I know the rest. At some point many will wind up in graduate school—the California Prison system. Jorja Leap

RK CAMPUS, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089-0292

THE MARKET & THE ACADEMY / TOWARDS A CRITICAL FA F CULT L Y LT MODERAT A ED BY FRANCES STA AT T RK, STUART BAILEY & STUDENTS TA K OR DOWNLOAD AS PDFs FROM www.lulu.com

A SYMPOSIUM MEANT TO OFFER ARTISTS STUDENTS AND EDUCAT AT A ORS A FORUM TO SERIOUSLY LY L CONSIDER WHAT A WE WANT OUR AT WE WANT THEM TO DO; HERE’S AN OPPORTUNITY TO FREE OULD BE DONE, UNHINDERED BY ADMINISTRATI A VE WORRIES ATI N’T POSSIBLY LY L BE DONE

A

tireless advocate for children and youth in the system had told me ‘they come into the [LA County Department of Probation] camps maybe slightly involved with gangs and

Te T l 213

USC GAY AY A LE GARNER ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS,

A ROUNDTA TA T BLE DISCUSSION IN 3 PA P RTS : THE MEANING AND MAI ABU ELDAHAB, JAN VERWOERT, T, T H OWARD SINGERMAN, LA A RELAT AT A ED PUBLICATION ATION A “PRIMER” IS AV AVA VA IL

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ven at that young age, I just couldn’t believe in the Christian concept of Jesus as someone divine. And no religious person, until I was a man in my twenties—and then in prison—could tell me anything. I had very little respect for most people who represented religion. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

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was such a philanthropist I probably gave away $250,000 to the city of Compton… I got the key to the city of Compton when I was 29 years old. They didn’t give me that for my music. That music was violent. They gave me that because of how I was going back into them schools and raising money for them schools. DJ Quik

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iterally speaking, an ‘aesthete’ is defined simply as ‘one who perceives’. Perception and its resulting understanding, or meaning -making, is the most basic, immediate and FREE activity everybody has the capacity to derive joy from. I’m talking about aesthetic experience, not consumption or getting a fix from the type of entertainment that tends to want to do the perceiving for you ahead of time. Mother F

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wenty years of this work has taught me that God has

t a certain point I opted to climb inside and try to grasp a useful understanding of the misogyny that I had been joyously and shamelessly consuming. My son was consuming it alongside me and consequently I was continually struggling to answer precisely why I allowed so many appropriateness boundaries to be crossed. The recurring rationale was that my son was fundamentally an aesthete by nature (like myself ) and, well, I never went around saying it but there was no denying that I believed on some level that an aesthete (and/or potential artist) is some kind of supra-moral being… in the beyond good and evil sense, exempt, somehow, from society’s definition of failure. This was my faith. Mother F

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greater comfort with inverting categories than I do. What is success and what is failure? What is good and what is bad? Setback or progress? Great stock these days […] is placed in evidence-based outcomes. People, funders in particular, want to know if what you do ‘works.’ Are you, in the end, successful? Naturally, I find myself heartened by Mother Teresa’s take: ‘We are not called to be successful but faithful.’ This distinction is helpful. […] Salivating for success keeps you from being faithful, keeps you from truly seeing whoever’s sitting in front of you. Father G

NOW GIVE ME ME

BE

THE MIC AND LET

HEARD ’CAUSE SHORT-

I’LL BE QUITTIN’

LY I AM THE SHEEP-HERD

S

he would talk to me about […] deals she had known, about graft paid to officials— rookie cops and shyster lawyers right on up into the top levels of police and politics. She knew from personal experience how crime existed only to the degree that the law cooperated with it. She showed me how, in the country’s entire social, political and economic structure, the criminal, the law, and the politicians were actually inseparable partners. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

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an got caught somehow long ago and he continues to tie the knot of this bondage, all the while he moans about his plight and dreams of the coming of the Messiah. Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ

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This poster is one extract of the components of Bobby Jesus’s Alma Mater b/w Reading the Book of David and/or Paying Attention Is Free (2013), a multichannel projection with sound, images, and text on view in the Donna and Howard Stone Gallery.

Frances Stark “ I n t i m i s m ” Art Institute of Chicago May 21st–August 30rd, 2015

Poster: Stuart Bailey & Frances Stark


Gilly Karjevsky Tali Keren’s New Jerusalem Project

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as Critical Spatial Practice

T h e f o l l o w i n g t e x t i s a n a d a p t a t i o n o f a l e c t u r e g i v e n a s p a r t o f t h e “ L ’ E s p a c e F é m i n i n : Conversations” e v e n t a t t h e P r o j e k t S p a c e H i n t e r d e n V ö g e l n , i n O c t o b e r 2 0 1 5 .

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Last June, during the Make City Festival in Berlin,1 the art and architecture tour company Niche Berlin2 and I conducted a guided tour highlighting places that could be considered “feminine space” at the Soldiner kiez. As part of the research for the tour, we also read some of the work of Jane Rendell, a proponent of critical spatial practices and a feminist architect, academic, and writer. Reading Jane Rendell is like walking through a space with its details and foundations clearly visible. It’s a type of visibility that renders the space even more magical. She has named this way of thinking “Critical Spatial Practice.” Jane Rendell defines feminist approaches in architecture, and maybe in general, as a RADICAL, CRITICAL, ALTERNATIVE to the conventional architectural practice. Radical—as in the transgression of disciplinary boundaries to allow for new modes of inquiry and action. Critical—as in rigorously grounded in the analysis of literature and theory for their reflective and emancipatory qualities. Alternative—as in the creative, interpretative modes for the production of space, which consist of resistance and questioning of the dominant ways of practice. Jane Rendell considered “practice as a process which occurs not only through the design of buildings but also through the activities of using, occupying and experiencing them, and through the mode of writing and imaging used to describe, analyse and interrogate them.”3 70

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I will use her approach to provide a critical reading into a project I have curated in 2012.The project is the city artist-in-residence program I curated together with Hila Cohen-Schniederman in 2012 in Jerusalem. The city artist-in-residence program is an attempt at placing artist within municipal departments for an undefined period, to investigate, map and analyse the department in terms of connections, activities as well as the effects they have on the lives of the city’s residents. From the outset, we understand all of these to be part of the public domain, part of the commons, and materials for re-appropriation. Thus, the artistic goal of the project is two-fold. Namely, the presence of the artist in the department which creates a two way portal for the governmental and the civic to examine each other through the personal bodies of the artist and the civil servant. And secondly, to claim back the resources of the department as common materials for the creation of art.

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It has always been the privilege of the artist to go outside of their knowledge base, to test their abilities to work with free inter-disciplinary agency, like a chameleon. From April to August in 2012, the artist Tali Keren spent one day a week at the planning department of the Jerusalem municipality. Being a stranger to the practice and theory of planning, Tali had to spend a lot of time to understand how planning works, 71

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both on the map and script level, and how those eventually manifest themselves on the ground. She did this in multiple ways, the first of which was to spend a significant time meeting all the different professionals who worked in the department. She worked on various organigrams showing the structure of the department as given to her by various employees. These first conversations were conducted in great suspicion, as the bureaucrats of the most disputed piece of land in the world, struggled to understand the interests this artist had in their dry, repetitive, Kafkaesque work. Additional suspicion came from the internal struggle, (or interior struggle, if we allude to Jane), represented in the clash between private political views of a lowly planning permit officer, and the daily labour of the religious, ethnic and racial separation project evident on the ground in east Jerusalem, which this officer is entrusted upon. Which brings me to‌

Alterity

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otherness

Tali spent a lot of time with two planning permits officers in the department. One of them was Doron, a religious Orthodox Jew with some severe and unexpected leftist views of the political situation in Israel, for example he always keeps a Palestinian flag on the front of his desk. The other officer was named Hamer, he is a Palestinian, born and raised in East Jerusalm. You would think one is the majority, and the other is minority, standing on two sides of a conflict. But for Tali, these two posed a united front. These two quickly became Tali’s hosts and mentors in the department, posing

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the most demanding of all annoying questions—why is this art? Already you see that by putting interiority and alterity next to each other, as two defining categories of an approach, brings us to a binary that is hard to settle in conventional practice terms. Being within, and being an alter, slipping from insider and outsider positions, was the cat and mouse game, which Tali was facing, while working within the department. But the great Jane encourages us to abandon the “either/or” in favour of “both/and,” a move she calls “slippage.” And it is precisely the slippage between positions, voices and narratives, which is where Tali chose to reside her work produced in this project.

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Soon after starting her residency at the department, Tali came by the Jerusalem 2000 strategic plan, also known as the Jerusalem Master Plan. The plan dictates policy that the department uses to grant and deny permits in the last decade, and that the city consults for the planning of the de facto unification of East and West Jerusalem under Israeli rule. Such a shame this plan is not legal. It has never been deposited to public scrutiny as required by law, never been objected, and never been legally approved. Yet and still, it is the guideline upon which the territory is ordered. Even though the plan was never deposited, rejections of its parts were submitted from all sectors of Palestinian and Israeli society. Presently, a lawsuit in the Supreme Court of Israel is fighting against its current semi-public, illegal policy that remains the de facto. This fight makes it clear that a plan in this strategic level, in this place, is no longer relevant. And what the hell does community life, or further more, collectivity, look like in a situation like this? As all plans, “Jerusalem but also has one main material for Tali’s work. went on a hunt for the hidden but oh-so-clear text. Her interpretation

2000” is also made of many maps, script. This script became the core She became highly interpretive and voice of the plan—the narrator—the agenda within this highly disputed led to an unexpected collaboration.

P e r f o r m a t i v i t y The first work Tali created during this residency was a performance titled New Jerusalem. She found the voice of the Jewish lobby in the municipality, and chose to expose it where it was deeply coded. She had a string quartet and Jewish composer Eli Yafe playing with a cantor singing the preface of the Jerusalem stratigic plan, Master Plan 2000 in front of the municipality representatives. The concert was broadcast live to the gallery of the Bezalel School of

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Architecture, where students and audience members participated in a discussion lead by architects, architectural historians, and journalists. The panelists analyzed the historical, legal and political components of the plan, which was never made available for public objections. New Jerusalem remains to date one of the only open public debates on the contents of the Jerusalem masterplan 2000. The second work in the project New Jerusalem is a video titled “The City’s Crafts Woman.” The work follows the official model maker of the Jerusalem municipality, Natasha Ostrovsky’s, as she creates a miniature model of a future building and places it the territory, known as East Jerusalem.

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1. Make City Berlin A Festival of Architecture and Urban Alternatives. A Project of MAKE_ SHIFT. http://makecity.berlin 2. Niche: Art & Architecture Tours Berlin. http://nicheberlin.de 3. “Critical Spatial Practices: Setting Out a Feminist Approach to some modes and what matters in architecture.” Rendell, J; In: Brown, Lori A., (ed.) Feminist Practices: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Women in Architecture. London: Ashgate, 2011.

By dissecting the maps, scripts, policy papers and documents in the archives of the department, Tali has created a new way to look at planning in Jerusalem. The products of the department, permits, guidelines and meetings, have been opened to re-appropriation. Tali has re-materialised them, and in that process, among other actions she has created, managed to deposit parts of the Master Plan for public scrutiny. This, for me, the is the crack through which a whole systemic change is visible, through which a whole new transparency, adoptability and engagement with local government is made possible. And if that is not critical spatial practice, I don’t know what it is.

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Deanna Havas and HaydĂŠe Marin-Lopez Calamari Necklace

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Chanel Von Habsburg-Lothringen

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C h a n e l Von Habsburg F a m i l y O p e r a , 2 0 1 6

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Heather Guertin Not A Model Not A Comedian There is a point when all things come together into a sharp and shiny point. Time stands still. You finally reach a moment of presentness, and you pause. The air is a vacuum. Your heart beats slow and hard. You turn and you realize I am God.

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There is a time when a man looks at himself and realizes that he has to choose between the red 4-door Volkswagen Golf and the tempest blue Jetta Sportwagen. And although the wagon is 2011 and the Golf is 2012, the wagon has less miles… but not really that less. He realizes that if he decides to get a haircut, the black Volkswagen, that he knew was too good to be true, would disappear just like that. Evaporate with a phone call that he knew was coming, The man had told himself that if he had an awkward conversation with the waitress at dinner and if the conversation threw off the rest of his meal, this would be the sure sign that the haircut was the real reason that the first car, the black one, would disappear. He should have never spent so much on that dinner. How soon did he know that the haircut would cause the loss of the car? Was it when he clicked reserve? Or was it when the woman who was breeding Corgis wrote back that she would be away for a show. Her reply was not very generous. This would give the man only one reason now to go to Pennsylvania. But he knew he would eventually still get the dog because its head would be orange. But that’s a few months off now and we are going to begin our story with another story. He had started wearing a back brace. No, not because anything had happened to him, but because maybe someday he thought he could have bad posture. He wondered, How does it even happen? Would he one day decide just to not come back up? saying to himself “I’m comfortable right down here.” He thought, If my back is hunched I could just put it on a piece of wood and have my friend smoosh me into the wood. He wondered who his strongest friend was and where he would get a piece of wood. Because of the complicated nature of this plan, he thought he should take the initiative against his bad posture. He made his own back brace from a beautiful, white silken fabric that criss crossed around his shoulders. He would walk to the kitchen to make a sandwich. He would catch himself in the mirror with the silk bow on his back and he would ask himself, “Did I go to F.I.T?” Because I should have been a fashion designer. That summer, the man couldn’t remember a time before his birthday. He was trying to think of one but also trying to type without looking at the keyboard. His head hurt and like the gentle breezes from so many ceiling fans this annoyed him too. His eye was also twitching. He thought he could stop eating sugar and cut back completely on his carbohydrates. This progressed towards weighing himself once a day. But the twitching didn’t stop and neither did his appetite for sweets. He countered this by eating sushi everyday, causing him to develop a mild case of mercury poisoning. He felt like a prince to have such a luxurious disease. He tried to cure himself by downloading free pdf compressor software for Windows onto his Mac. If it worked out, the mercury would leave his body and on 23rd November he would reserve a table at Noma and try the herring. He cried when he was happy. It was completely involuntary. He knew he was happy if he was crying. It was very moving for him, but he also felt like it was hard to express his emotions so openly. He felt stifled in public when he came across a beautiful painting. He wished the crowds would disappear so he could really let it out. But instead, like that time he was standing in front of the Grand Canyon, he only allowed himself to cry for a few moments before wiping away his tears. Or, that time in Sicily when he tried his first bite of fresh pasta. Or when his sister bought him a personalized coffee mug for his birthday. Crying would be sure to attract enough attention to make his tears subside.

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He tried to grow cactuses but they always died. He wrote down his deepest desires, not stopping until he had filled three pieces of paper. If the pen ran out he had to start over. He once wrote a book report on an armadillo. He read it as serious as he could, but the armadillo’s bumbling characteristics just made everyone laugh. They had bad vision. They were easily frightened and they couldn’t swim, but they could float.

I m a g e b y H e a t h e r Guertin, Ammonite Fossil, Madagascar C o u r t e s y o f F u n k y Stuff, Worcester, MA

There had been other cars that caused trauma for the man. He was not used to making large purchases. And even though he didn’t need a car he went on a long journey to get one. The man put a quarter into the tire tread just like his mother had told him and the tread came up over George Washington’s face. And mostly yes, he was thinking about the price. Thinking… “if I can get this car for this price, perhaps 500 dollars less even, I can consider myself good at making large purchases.” The first car stood dazzlingly white, his most desired car color. He saw nothing but his own reflection in the dark and tinted windows. Not being used to cars, he did not think anything of it. So, the man could only do one thing - he wrote the check. But as he typed WVWDB7AJ9CW298142 he saw in big red letters, “Flood car, salvage, bought at auction.” Now the man had been tricked by another man. He knew what tricked felt like but he wasn’t sad. He was excited to learn a new thing which made him feel powerful. He was going to use this new feeling and mix it with all of the others, to use it in a way that he could better understand his fellow man, so that he couldn’t be tricked again. Like when he learned how to play different games on his phone, and how the knowledge he learned from one game could suddenly transfer to the next. But he knew he wasn’t getting any smarter, he was just getting better at playing games.

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To calm himself down he would count—one, two, three, and all the way up to ten. Then he would count backwards—ten, nine, eight, and so on. As he would say the number out loud, he would think of the corresponding number, that when added to the number spoken would equal a sum of ten. He thought of it as the number’s opposite. So, when he would say two he would be thinking eight. and when he would say seven he would really be thinking three He created this simple trick because he couldn’t afford transcendental meditation. He used his own method once a day. He wanted to open a small meditation center, where he would teach people how to clear their own minds through his counting technique. He thought he would name it Der Schwarz Camel but soon found out that there was already a small cafe in Austria that had the same name. So, instead he would call his house of meditation Dionysus and thought to honor the great god further by using the feminine short form of Dionysus: Diane. His cool, approachable, “je ne sais quoi” helped attract his first disciples. He held instruction two times a day and changed his name to the Honorable Father of the September Winds but told his seven sisters that they could call him Jason. The shop would be decorated in light blue to signify water. There would be abundant benches designed by George Nelson. On Diane’s opening day, curious and weary business persons quietly came in and took their place, three to a George Nelson bench. Each pupil sat up very straight with a back brace made of silk tied around them in a bow. They were prescribed a diet of sushi and vegetables with the occasional supplement of a burger and beer at happy hour. The seven sisters arranged the seven candles around Father Jason. In unison the people began to count to ten. Suddenly a parrot flew in through the arched windows and began to speak out loud the number that if added to the number being spoke would equal ten. The people chanted eight and simultaneously the bird called out two. The people took this as a great sign and after the session rushed to post positive reviews for the Diane meditation center on Yelp. They left mostly five stars with only one person leaving four stars because of the mild religious overtones. He built up a large following and classes were always full. He developed a DVD and YouTube videos that hinted at the secret of the counting method but never fully revealed it. The only way the method was revealed, was through a comedic monologue by one of his disciples.

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Verena Dengler Sweet City

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Caroline Mesquita S t i l l i m a g e f r o m t h e v i d e o S o m e b l u e i n m y m o u t h , 16 minutes 51 seconds C o u r t e s y o f t h e a r t i s t

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Isabelle Cornaro Curator of the 18th Prize Fondation d’entreprise Ricard September 6 – October 29, 2016 Opening : September 5, 6 - 9 pm

www.fondation-entreprise-ricard.com

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Petunia d’art

est

une

contemporain

revue et

Petunia

is

a

and

entertainment

de feminist

féministe culture art magazine

Contributions dans l’ordre d’apparition/ Contributions in order of appearance : Caroline Mesquita Grégoire Blunt & Emmy Skensved Maite Garbayo Maeztu Marlie Mul Temra Pavlovic Amy Sillman Dorothy Howard Ramaya Tegegne Philipp Timischl Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė Daniel Berndt Deniz Unal Géraldine Beck & Miriam Leonardi Frances Stark Gill Karjevsky & Tali Keren Deanna Havas & Haydée Marin-Lopez Chanel Von Habsburg-Lothringen Heather Guertin Verena Dengler Remerciements/Special thanks : tous les auteurs/all the authors et/and à ceux qui nous soutiennent financièrement/and to those who financially support us : Air de Paris, CAC Genève, Carlier Gebauer, Centre d’art La Passerelle, Conseil Régional Languedoc Roussillon Midi Pyrénées, CRAC Alsace, Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, FRAC Pays-de-la-Loire, Galleria Ghetta, Kadist Foundation, Galerie Künstlerhaus Bremen, Lafayette Anticipation, Galerie Loevenbruck, Marcelle Alix, Galerie Mehdi Chouakri, niche, Portikus, Synagogue de Delme

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Petunia est une revue éditée par Orlando, association à but non-lucratif/ Petunia is a magazine published by Orlando, non-profit organization: 11, rue de Ruffi, 13 003 Marseille, France Directrice de la publication/ Publisher in chief : Dorothée Dupuis Rédactrices en chef/Editors in chief: Valérie Chartrain, Lili Reynaud Dewar, Victoria Dejaco Chargée d’édition Copy editor Jeanne Relecture editor :

anglais/English Dorothy

Conception Graphic design : Q

+ iconographie/ + iconography : Alechinsky copy Howard

graphique/ Noah Barker

u

e s t i o n s ? contactpetunia@gmail.com Distribution : Motto Distribution Imprimé par/by Artes Graphicas Palermo (Espagne/Spain), May 2016 ISSN: 2112-566X w w w . p e t u n i a . e u

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