PUBLIC 50: The Retreat

P U B L I C ART

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C U LT U R E

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50

I D EAS

THE RETREAT Edited by SARAH BLACKER, IMRE SZEMAN, and HEATHER ZWICKER

A Note on the Insert…

NANOTECHNOLOGY GOES PUBLIC

THE INSERT INCLUDED in this issue of PUBLIC is the first of its kind.1 Created with nanosized pixels, it is the product of a collaboration between engineers at Simon Fraser University’s Ciber Lab and the artists Christine Davis and Scott Lyall.2 Emerging from technologies originally developed for security and authentication applications, the goals of the project were to produce innovative nano materials and processes,3 to give the creative community access to cutting-edge nanotechnologies, but also for the scientists to benefit from the particular material and historical knowledge, lines of inquiry, and methodologies that come from art practice and humanities scholarship. In the course of this partnership the scientists learned about colour, light and emulsions, about mezzo-tinting and jacquard weaving, about publishing and printing processes, in a way that not only accelerated their research and innovation, but also provided new ways of conceiving, building, and applying their technology. On the other side, coming to grips with the jaw-dropping scale of the nano4 and the very possibilities of this technology opened the door to a new range of creative possibility and material engagement for the artist. In the process the translation between fields was ongoing, some stumbling blocks more unpredictable than others: how do scientists respond to conceptual art practices? How do the production processes of nano-media correlate to an artist’s (and Adobe’s!) understanding of the colour spectrum? The questions that emerged are the fuel for further research on the limits of perception and visibility in the realm of nano innovation; on the relationship between the frontiers of invention and the modes of engagement of the artist; and on the comparative histories of the tools and methods of art and media production. What you have here then is the first result of this work, built with the materials of the scientist and the questions of the artist, an achievement not only in nano-fabrication and manufacturing, but in interdisciplinary collaboration. Stay tuned for more.

—Aleksandra Kaminska TEAM SCIENTISTS: Bozena Kaminska, Hao Jiang, Reza Qarehbaghi, Mohamad Rezaei, Mohammad Naghshineh ARTIST: Christine Davis PRODUCER: Aleksandra Kaminska NOTES 1

This project was made possible by a GRAND NCE Media Artist and Scientist Collaboration grant, and the generous support of ITW Covid Security Group Inc.

2

Christine Davis would also like to thank Vlad Lunin and Polina Teif for their assistance.

3

The team is calling this technology nano-media, which has a range of possible applications, such as the storage of information. See nanomediasolutions.com for more information.

4

The world of nanotechnology, where things are being built at the nanoscale, is generally understood to take place at scales less than 100 nanometres (with ‘nano’ referring to one billionth of a metre). The threshold of visible light, or what the unassisted human eye can see, is 400 nanometers.

CONTENTS

“Between the Exception and the Rule�

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Imre Szeman and Sarah Blacker

INTRODUCTION:

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Carrie Smith-Prei

A Figure of Ambivalent Retreat: The Case of Gisela Elsner

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Raymond Boisjoly

..., ..., ..., ..., ..., ..., (Exile)

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Catherine Malabou

Is Retreat a Metaphor?

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Emma Waltraud Howes

Ankyloglossia (n. Tongue-tie)

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Heather Anderson

Retreating in/from Art Institutions

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Franziska von Stenglin

Doors Open, Doors Closed

80

Franco Berardi

The Conspiracy Called Movement

88

Joanne Bristol

The Daily Sleeper

94

Bruno Bosteels

In Praise of Discrepancy? Art and Ideology Revisited

104

David Butler

The Dead Man Drifted Along in the Breeze.

113

Kate Lawless

Down the Rabbit Hole: Five Theses on the Subject of Retreat in the Time of Global Capital

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Nico Dockx

Retreat/ No Retreat

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Jason Gomez

Finding a Fire Before it Flames

145

Andrew Pendakis 146 Maria Whiteman

The Spectre of Form: Letters from an Absent Sovereign Desert of Exchange/Garden of Sovereignty

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Ivan Jurakic and Tor Lukasik-Foss, TH&B (Splinter-Cell)

Beacon

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Imre Szeman

Ownership in Retreat?

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Alice Ming Wai Jim

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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CONTRIBUTORS

Afterword

COLUMN 182

Ian Balfour

Walter Benjamin: Retreat/Attack

ART REVIEWS 184

Jill Glessing

Kara Walker, A Subtlety Domino Sugar Factory, Brooklyn

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Catalina Gonzalez

Humboldt Magnussen, Viking Blood Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto

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Caoimhe Morgan-Feir

Coming to Terms Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto

BOOK REVIEWS 192

Ray Ellenwood

CE QUI SERA What will be LO QUE SERÁ: Almanac of the International Surrealist Movement edited by Her de Vries and Laurens Vancrevel

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Jim Feast

Assault on the Impossible: Dutch Collective Imagination in the Sixties and Seventies by Markolijn Van Riemsijk with Jordan Zinovich, editor.

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Lewis Kaye

On the Threshold of Beauty: Philips and the Origins of Electronic Music in the Netherlands, 1925–1965 by Kees Tazelaar

Byron Harmon, “Lake Louise, Winter,” 1908.

INTRODUCTION:

“Between the Exception and the Rule” IMRE SZEMAN AND SARAH BLACKER

Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down; we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

—Jeffrey Eugenides1 If the enemy has occupied them before you, do not follow him, but retreat and try to entice him away.

—Sun Tzu, The Art of War The promising political aspects of the Temporary Autonomous Zone did not, however, survive the rapid expansion of the Internet in the mid-1990s…

—François Cusset2

The Retreat at Banff The contributions to this anniversary issue of PUBLIC are pieces developed during the second iteration of Banff Research in Culture (BRiC) in August 2012. BRiC brings together senior doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows, junior faculty, independent scholars, visual/sound/performance artists, filmmakers, curators, and cultural critics who collectively undertake an investigation of topics of pressing social, political, and cultural relevance to communities around the globe. BRiC emerged from our strong sense that Canada was in need of a space in which academics and artists could work side-by-side, focusing on their own work while simultaneously building a community with others trying to address the political and cultural challenges that we collectively face this century— a century in which artistic activity and theoretical reflection are increasingly frustrated by the reduction of state and private funding for any endeavour that doesn’t immediately speak to the values of the market.

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A Figure of Ambivalent Retreat: The Case of Gisela Elsner CARRIE SMITH-PREI

TO RETREAT COMMUNICATES agency through radical refusal; retreating is a powerful act of turning away from, refusing to engage in, and expressing ambivalence toward the status quo.

Understood as such, retreat is a highly personal, individual form of negativity. The subject in retreat enacts a motion that breaks with dominant modes of thinking and redirects energies toward the messy, diffuse, or unpopular. The moment of retreat is thus a political and an aesthetic act, for that motion gives body to a negative emotion that is critically productive. Reading that negative emotion illuminates how “sociohistorical and ideological dilemmas, in particular, produce formal or representational ones.”1 The negative impulse coming from the subject in retreat produces its own figuration that is highly ambivalent. The power in the act of retreating is located in the retreat’s indeterminacy, in its neither nor, which forces critical engagement.

The following sketches how German author Gisela Elsner (1937–1992) acts as a case study for the aesthetic and political possibilities of the negative emotion produced by the ambivalence of retreat, both in terms of the self as a figure enacting retreat and in the retreat of her writing.2 Elsner wrote primarily satirical novels that are bitingly critical of society, and particularly of the normalizing force of middle-class consumerism, including consumption of goods and services but also cooption of radical ideals such as free love, which enabled West Germany to bury its violent past.

She made her 1964 award-winning debut in West Germany to high praise from the literary establishment, however she never achieved this acclaim again and by the mid-1980s, her publishing house had cancelled her contract and auctioned off the remainders of her works. While her choice of topics as well as her angular prose most likely led to Elsner’s fall from favour, a good part of this marginalization was due to her concrete political impulses. Timed with her debut, Elsner went into a seven-year retreat from the Federal Republic, returning only after the government lifted their ban on the German Communist Party (DKP) in 1970. But after finally joining the party in the late 1970s, Elsner repeatedly criticized its leadership and management, marginalizing herself from its ranks. She withdrew from the party in June 1989 only to request renewed membership in October of that same year, when it was clear that the Soviet Bloc was crumbling and one month before the fall of the Berlin Wall. By the time of her suicide in 1992, Elsner was destitute. Her work for the DKP did not improve her financial situation, and indeed might have—at least she suggests—harmed it, for she was never again nominated for literary prizes after winning the Prix Formentor for her

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Gisela Elsner, 1964. Photo: Renate von Mangoldt.

debut novel. As a figure, Elsner enacted her own form of retreat; she enveloped her body in a selfimposed mask by adding thicker black circles of eye make-up and teasing her hair to greater heights with each passing year.

Throughout her public and political life, Elsner consistently refused to participate in all forms of status quo, whether dominant or oppositional, preferring instead to speak from an ambivalent position at the margins. This position is also seen in her writing. Starting with her debut in 1964, Elsner was regularly criticized for those aspects of her work for which she was originally praised: her dark satirical wit, sharp criticism of society, and negative characters all compounded by her status as a female author.3 In her essays, Elsner repeatedly emphasizes that literature must be political. But to access the politics in and of Elsner’s literary writing requires an engagement with ambivalence. Her novels withdraw from aestheticization, representation, pleasure, and meaningmaking as they, in form and content, intentionally go limp in a Bartelby-like refusal to communicate with the reader. Elsner’s figure and her writing subvert any positive coding of the identity-political possibilities contained in the concept of retreat, and instead expose the political possibilities in the negative ambivalence of retreating.

In the post-1945 German context, negativity carries nationally laden historical, cultural, and moral weight; negation always also denotes a break from the legacies of fascism. Positivity, affirmation,

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THE RETREAT

CARRIE SMITH-PREI

R AY M O N D B O I S J O LY

..., ..., ..., ..., ..., ..., (Exile)

Byron Harmon, “Lake Louise,” 1908.

Is Retreat a Metaphor?

C AT H E R I N E M A L A B O U

This lecture was presented by C atherine Malabou during the 2012 Banff Research in C ulture research residency. In this talk, Malabou takes head on the significance of the concept of ‘retreat’ and the theoretical operations it performs, by probing what retreat and withdrawal tells us about our ontological and epistemological condition. The performance of these words is significant to their meaning: by telling us what she was planning, intending, or hoping to do, Malabou reveals her own ideas about retreat as she retreats from them, making them available to us even as she refuses to affirm them, or does so only with suspicion at her motives. And as she interrogates the metaphysics of retreat, we are reminded repeatedly of the significance of the physical and neurobiological in the philosophical, an area of research in which Malabou has played a critical framing role, and which is represented here in the form of italicized asides (from A. R. Luria and Antonio Damasio, amongst others). The double voice of Malabou’s talk both repeats and challenges the double character of retreat, while Malabou’s own struggle with retreat alerts us to the difficulty of thinking—and performing—it. Malabou’s drift towards indifference is a productive ruse that challenges the reader to think the Being of philosophy alongside the very different Being of the brain. –Imre Szeman

I INITIALLY INTENDED to talk about Martin Heidegger. I wanted to explain the reason why, according to him, there can be no retreat without a retreat of the retreat itself, no retreat without a re-doubling, to the extent that the only gesture or move retreating can perform is to perform nothing, that is, to retreat. The only thing which retreating can do, and mean, is to retreat. Retreat retreats. I would have liked to explain that this sentence, retreat retreats, can also be formulated as “retreat is,” and recall that, for Heidegger, Being originarily coincides with its own retreat or withdrawal (Entziehung). For this very reason, retreating is a synonym to being. Every time we say something like s is p, it means s retreats from p, as well as p retreats from s, because the copula is is nothing but its own withdrawal.

Being, affirms Heidegger, has always already retreated, has always meant its own withdrawal in withdrawing, but has also hidden this retreat, it has always retreated from its retreat. It has retreated a first time from its own retreat to give way to metaphysics. Metaphysics is this long tradition, also called philosophy, through which, or within which Being hides itself under beings, and appears as what it is not, that is as a form of presence, be it God, substance, or reality—as some-

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E M M A WA LT R A U D H O W E S

Ankyloglossia (n. tongue-tie)

PHOTOGRAPHER: KAI WIDO MEYER

Beckett’s Tree

Retreating in/from Art Institutions H E AT H E R A N D E R S O N

ALTHOUGH MANY ART institutions foreground the importance of research, close collaboration with artists, experimentation, and innovation as integral to their mission, in my experience working as a curator in both large and small institutions, research, writing, and these other “slow time” aspects of working with art are all too often impeded by urgent and day-to-day “fast time”1 demands. The diverse range of responsibilities and succession of deadlines that are part of realizing exhibitions and events, in tandem with publications, grant applications and reports, collectionrelated activities, meetings, responding to exterior requests, and staying (relatively) on top of e-mail correspondence, in addition to attending events at one’s own institution and in the community, leave little time for work that requires sustained focus and reflection. These excessive workloads are of course not unique to art institutions. Rather, they are all too familiar across various fields as many jobs are characterized by “…the need to resolve more and more tasks in ever-decreasing temporal increments” such that “coinciding deadlines simply mean working overtime.” As theorist Annette Kamp outlines, this multi-tasking, or the “stacking” of activities required in many jobs, creates the sense of a temporal regime of “fast time” which is killing the “slow time” or “timeless time” that workers need in order to read, think, and write.2 Indeed, all too frequently individuals working in art institutions are faced with the frustrating contradiction that the quality engagement with art and ideas that are the institution’s raison d’être, and the concentrated research and writing that are a vital part of, for instance, curatorial work, are pushed aside by competing demands. For many working in art institutions, this means that slow-time tasks have to be eked out in less-thanefficient spurts, fit in after regular working hours, or postponed altogether.

Ambivalent Retreat For this special issue of PUBLIC I proposed to write an exploration and analysis of how various smaller art institutions have strategically deployed the notion of retreat, withdrawal, or opacity—a line of inquiry that presents certain challenges given that institutions operating in opaque or marginally public ways are by nature tricky to research. I struggled to find the time to tackle this project.

Changes in my personal life—particularly becoming a parent and the new level of accountability to others and diminished flexibility as to how I use my time that it entails—have further highlighted

Ladies’ Invitational Deadbeat Society, studio residency shot at John Snow House, The New Gallery, 2012.

Photo: Stacey Watson.

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FRANZISKA VON STENGLIN

Doors Open, Doors Closed

The Conspiracy Called Movement FRANCO BERARDI

1 As I’m not an economist, some of the things that I’m going to say may sound naïve. However the subject that I’m going to talk about is currently the object of a wide discussion among people who are not economists, but rather, if I can say, victims of the economy. So I’ll try to talk about an economic subject from the point of view of the victims of the economic science—which probably is not a science at all.

Do you really think that Economics is a science? Well, I do not have a final answer, but I would say that a science should be able to predict something about the future developments of its objects.

And economists (with few exceptions) have been notoriously unable to predict anything about the financial collapses and so on. Secondly: science is supposed to describe an object that exists outside and before the scientific description, and independently from it. And this is not the case of Economics, which is continuously trying to impose norms and rules and adjustments on its object, which is the social life of human beings. I would say that Economics is not a science, rather a technology, or maybe a dogmatic religion that is routinely preaching and lecturing, and recommending and finally reproaching and punishing indolent sinners.

I want to talk about the European crisis, a subject that sometimes I think economists should be forbidden to talk about. I’m joking, of course, but not so much. How can they decide and enforce social behaviour, and financial cuts, when they have been absolutely unable to predict (except for one or two exceptions) what happened in September 2008, and the subprime crisis, and the following European collapse? Those people who are saying something interesting about the present crisis are not economists. I think of David Graeber, who is an anthropologist and has just published a book titled Debt. I think of Maurizio Lazzarato who is not an economist but a philosopher who published a book titled The Making of the Indebted Man. Why do they say interesting things that economists ignore? Because they are not speaking from the point of view of the religious dogma called Economy—they speak of the daily life of society. The stubbornness in reaffirming economic dogmas is the problem, not the solution.

Before saying something about the European crisis, I want to say something about the meaning of the European project. Europe has been attempting to go beyond the history of the wars of the last two centuries. The war between France and Germany, but also between different cultural

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FRANCO BERARDI

prospects: on one hand, the Romantic sense of belonging and the cult of memory and of identity rooted in the past. On the other hand, there is the enlightened affirmation of law and human rights.

This is a project that goes very deep in reshaping the basic motivations of modern social life.

Therefore it is stupid and dangerous to reduce such a project to the Maastricht Treaty, and to the imposition of the neoliberal agenda embodied in the monetarist regulation of the European Central Bank. The essential mark of this stupidity can be found in the obsession of debt, which has been poisoning social behaviour and is destroying the very foundations of social life in many parts of the European continent.

You may remember what happened in 1919 in Versailles. After the end of the World War, the winners—the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and France—organized the first global event in human history: the Congress of Versailles. Every country, every political group striving to become a national state was invited to that meeting, and everybody was there except the Koreans who apparently did not manage to get to Versailles in time. I’m returning to the Versailles Congress because the consequences of the main decision of that meeting have something to teach us nowadays. The main decision was the imposition of a huge punishment on the losers, the Germans. The consequences were the rise of Nazism, and the following Second World War. German guilt—the German word for guilt is Schuld, and is also translated into English as “debt”—was punished through the imposition of huge monetary fines. Ill-informed people (or people who want deliberately to dupe you) often say that the main cause of the rise of Nazism was inflation. This is false, because the Germans were pushed towards Nazism by the humiliation of the Versailles deliberations, and by the unbearable heaviness of the debt that France and Britain enforced upon them.

Inflation ensued from the debt. But the origin of the collapse of democracy in Germany and of peace in the world should be located in the decision made at Versailles to impose a debt so heavy that inflation would follow. Lord Maynard Keynes was fully aware of this danger, when he wrote The Economic C onsequences of Peace, in the very year 1919, trying to persuade the winners not to push Germany into the abyss.

Well, we should remember what happened in Versailles, because the European Union—under the influence of the financial savvy—is repeating the same error today. European financial authorities (and political authorities who follow the financial dictates) are pushing Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and tomorrow also France towards the abyss of humiliation, misery, unemployment, then of hatred, and revenge, and aggressiveness. Are aggressiveness and war going to be revived in the European continent as revenge against the arrogance of the financial class? Yes, they are; this is my sad prediction.

If you want to be an economist you have to ignore historical events, you have to forget what has happened yesterday, because the economic technology (or Theology) is based on the repetition of ahistorical dogmas. So the financial class doesn’t want to know what happened after 1919.

The financial class is a difficult concept to grasp. In the first years of the past century, Rudolf Hilferding wrote a book titled Financial C apitalism—but if you read that book you understand nothing of what finance is today. He said that finance is essentially an affair of the nation-state, and that there is nothing more essentially linked to the national identity than the control of financial affairs.

Since the 1970s, when Richard Nixon broke the Bretton Woods framework for currency convertibility, a huge process of deterritorialization was started, and the networking revolution of the 1990s transformed finance into the essential factor of permanent deterritorialization of capital and power

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10/08/12 (postcard) Joanne Bristol, 10/08/12 (excerpt) (2012).

Courtesy of the artist.

The Daily Sleeper JOANNE BRISTOL

1. The Daily Sleeper (excerpts) The Daily Sleeper is a “newspaper” that was produced throughout The Retreat residency. Created in relation to Sleeping Buffalo (Tunnel) mountain, each issue is a two-sided, hand-written and drawn report on the human and nonhuman beings living on, in, and beside the mountain. The front page of each issue features commentary made in response to residency discourse and daily mountain walks. The back pages report on practices of retreating through sleep, manifested via accounts of fugitively remembered dreams encountered nightly.

Sleeping Buffalo (Tunnel) mountain sits at the eastern edge of the Banff townsite and of The Banff Center. Precarious habitat to numerous flora and fauna, it is traversed by a series of paths, popular with locals and tourists. The multiple names of the mountain give an indication of its contested history. Sleeping Buffalo is an English version of iniskim, a Siksika name for a mountain which physically resembles, from several angles, a sleeping bison.1 Tunnel refers to an 1882 plan by the Canadian Pacific Railway, as part of its westward expansion, to blast a tunnel through the mountain.

This project responds to The Retreat residency’s call for an engagement in the possibility of nurturing “more radical possibilities of human communality”2 by considering ways in which human experience might be contingent on the agencies and co-communalities of nonhuman beings. By considering the precarities and entanglements of multispecies life in the context of “retreating” within the specific location known by some today as Banff National Park, The Daily Sleeper aims to unsettle anthropocentric perspectives in the production of geopolitical and historical knowledge.

2. 10/08/12 (postcard) Produced during The Retreat residency, 10/08/12 photographically documented a daily walking practice that attended to observing how human-built environments interface with those of the nonhuman. As such, it could be described as documenting a multispecies event involving Richardson ground squirrels, flora, rocks, soil, humans and Modernist steel sculpture (John Nugent, C anadian Brass [1978]). The temporal and material dynamics of this event include adestined calls-and-

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In Praise of Discrepancy? Art and Ideology Revisited BRUNO BOSTEELS

1 What does “retreat” have to do with the fundamental ways in which we understand art and ideology? How can certain modes of retreat—those which speak of failure, distancing, withdrawal—constitute the very opposite: the act, the space, the discrepancy in and out of which the political is born, enabled, and sustained? This is the map I want to draw here. But like the movement through any new territory, it is best to proceed step by step with a careful elaboration of the role of ideology in relation to art, and of art in relation to ideology, too.

2 The topic of the relations between art and ideology has long been out of fashion. Several decades have passed since the “end” or “death” of ideology was declared. Even now saying that this declaration was in and of itself a supreme example of ideology may not be sufficient to bring the concept back from the dead. Instead of desperately trying to catch up with the fashions of our time, however, we should take a closer look at the reasons behind this unspoken consensus that renders the subject of ideology today, if not completely obsolete, then at least extremely untimely. How can we explain this nearly complete vanishing of a topic that once stood at the forefront of debates in arts, politics, and the humanities? Why is it that at a time when we are hotly debating topics as divergent as language, affect, discourse, relationality, or object-oriented ontology, the sheer mention of ideology today makes people yawn with boredom, if not turn away in irritation?

One possible answer to this conundrum paradoxically could be the effect of the very success of ideology itself—or at least of a certain ideology, the dominant one which we now wear as though it were a second skin. Ideology—like capitalism, until very recently—is no longer debated because the ideology of capital has become naturalized to the point of becoming unquestionable. Or, to put this differently, ideology becomes the topic of debate only at times of ideological conflict: Destutt de Tracy’s five-volume Elements of Ideology that laid the foundations for the study of ideology in the wake of the radical social and political upheaval of the French Revolution, Marx’s return to the notion in the midst of social unrest in the 1840s, all the way to the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s, which forced even Louis Althusser to address the subject in his disproportionately famous

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BRUNO BOSTEELS

essay on ideological state apparatuses. By contrast, when the dominant ideology no longer seems contradicted by any outside—when its imposition becomes ubiquitous in space and seemingly eternal in time—its very existence becomes nearly impossible to thematize.

At the same time, perhaps we also need to look elsewhere for an explanation of the planned obsolescence of ideology. Perhaps this notion has become invisible or unspeakable due to the success not of the dominant ideology of capital, but thanks to the long-term effects of the critique of ideology. In other words, we should not be too quick to invoke the crisis of Marxism and other “grand narratives” (e.g., of metaphysics, revolution, enlightenment, hegemony) as an explanation for the disappearance of the debate regarding art and ideology. These paradigms to a large extent were actually successful in unmasking the basic ideological operations without which our societies simply do not cohere into any meaningful totality. As a result of this unmasking, or deconstruction, often summarized as the legacy bequeathed to us by the three masters behind the “hermeneutics of suspicion”—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—everything seemingly natural and unmediated has been unveiled as second nature, that is, the result of a whole web of mediations. As a result of this critique of ideology, everything, then, becomes ideological with the result that, as an unwanted sideeffect, there is a waning of interest in the notion of the ideological as such and a collapse of the specific differences between any one ideology and all others. The ideological specificities of Left or Right, capitalist or socialist, and so on, seem today to have lost out against the vague awareness that in the end ideology as such knows no outside.

3 As for how this critical situation affects the realms of art and literature, broadly speaking we can distinguish two ways of approaching the question of the relationship of art and ideology. There is first of all the approach through what we might call the political ideology, or political consciousness, of artists, writers, and their work; and then, secondly, the question of aesthetic ideology more properly speaking, or what we might also call, following Fredric Jameson, the political unconscious embedded in the works themselves.

In the first case, it would be a question of sketching out the history of the alliances, sympathies, or dissidences of a writer, artist, or group of artists with regard to this or that political platform or set of ideas. Whether militant or quietist, outspoken or hushed, progressive or retrograde, such positions are always overdetermined by a complex ensemble of factors, ranging from matters of class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion, all the way to the personal trajectories of individuals with their unique sentimental, familial, and institutional education. The fact of speaking about artists or writers in this case might actually be superfluous, since the investigation of political ideologies applies equally to any subject as a private or public figure, always situated in the social space at large. The specificity of the artistic or aesthetic fact properly speaking comes into play only when we assume the second approach, whereby the focus of the analysis shifts to the material and discursive operations under whose effects the political or ideological unconscious makes itself tangible in the artwork itself. Finally, much ink has been spilled ever since Marx and Engels discussed Balzac, and Lenin read Tolstoy, about the compatibility or tensions between a writer or artist’s political consciousness and the political unconscious, or aesthetic ideology, on display in their works.

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The Dead Man Drifted Along in the Breeze.

D AV I D B U T L E R

“PHOTOGRAPHING IT WITH my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a series of ‘stills’ through my Instamatic into my eye.”1 In 1967 Artforum published “The Monuments of Passaic,”2 an account by Robert Smithson of a walk he took in a New Jersey suburb through the worksite of Highway 21 as it was then being constructed, along the banks of the Passaic River, and into the centre of town.

The Dead Man Drifted Along in the Breeze. is a ten-minute, single-take screen-capture, recorded at the Banff Centre in the summer of 2012, in which I attempted to retrace Smithson’s route using Google Earth Street View. The viewer is drawn through a jarring landscape of stitched and stretched images, flattened scenery, and time run amok, scenes which bear an uncanny resemblance to the observations made by Smithson four-and-a-half decades earlier. For PUBLIC I have re-photographed the project, presenting a series of screen-shot stills from the video.

The piece was developed in August 2012 at the Banff Centre, and first shown in May 2013 at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Montreal.

NOTES 1

Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey. 1967” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 70.

2

Smithson, Robert. “The Monuments of Passaic,” Artforum 6.4 (December 1967): 48-51.

3

Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments,” 70.

4

Ibid, 74.

“The bus passed over the first monument. I pulled the buzzer-cord and got off at the corner of Union Avenue and River Drive.�3

Edmund Weiß, “Leonid Meteor Storm, 1833,” 1888.

Down the Rabbit Hole: Five Theses on the Subject of Retreat in the Time of Global Capital 1 K AT E L AW L E S S

IN HIS ARTIST TALK at the Banff Centre on the last day of The Retreat, Pierre Huyghe briefly introduces a white rabbit, the absent protagonist of his experimental anti-narrative, The Host and the C loud (2009–2010). The white rabbit exists only cinematically, a quietly antagonistic figure, cocking its head and proclaiming silently, “I don’t want to save them.”2 As this character appears onscreen behind him, the artist unintentionally but fittingly assumes the language of Lewis Carroll’s famous white rabbit, and, looking suddenly to his audience, transforms the rabbit’s anxious exclamation into a question posed to his spectators: “am I late?”3 Huyghe smiles coyly and takes a sip of water before continuing: “Mmmm,” he says, “I better speed up then.”4 This image of the artist and his work in a moment of relative banality emerges from the scene of retreat itself during the last day of the residency, which took place at the only position of the world’s largest contemporary art exhibition dOC UMENTA (13) for which there was no physical exhibition.

The question “am I late?”—which temporarily broke the spell of Huyghe’s enchanting speculative exploration of the concept of exhibition in itself—exposes the paradoxical incapacity for a subject of retreat to escape the conventional time of (re)presentation; but what is this time of representation? What is retreat if not a retreat from the hegemonic temporality of representation? Who is the subject of this retreat? The artist? The artwork? The character? The spectator?

The exhibition? And what does this subject desire? In beginning to address these questions, my essay speculates on the contemporary condition of retreat through an exploration of five of the main themes that emerged during the Banff Research in Culture (BRiC) residency, or The Retreat: A Position of dOC UMENTA (13).

Thesis one: The contemporary condition of retreat is characterized by a retreat of agency, of mastery, of intentionality.

According to a review by the Marian Goodman Gallery, “The Host and the C loud is a journey in the mind of an absent subject.”5 Let us first of all call this absent subject the retreat of the artist, though we could also call it the retreat of an image. The artist retreats from the restrictive format of the exhibition, from the “cult of celebrity”6 that fashions the imperative to entertain, from the time of representation in which the artist is a player in the culture of free time. Who, then, is the host?

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Retreat/ No Retreat

Nico Dockx, Retreat/No Retreat, Els De bruyn 1/26, Banff 2012.

Finding a Fire Before it Flames JASON GOMEZ

1944

The United States Forest Service uses the image of “Bambi” in a fire prevention advertisement

1918

U.S. Army III Corps, also known as Phantom Corps, begins using an image of an area denial weapon (or caltrop) for their shoulder sleeve insignia

1952

Gene Autry popularizes the song “Smokey the Bear,” instigating the Smokey Bear Act of 1952 (16 U.S.C. 580 (p-2); 18 U.S.C. 711) which mandates the name “Smokey Bear” as opposed to “Smokey the Bear”

1981

Earth First! initiates the first “Ecotricks” contest, encouraging environmentalists to use illegal and potentially violent tactics to perform ecotage

1981

The FBI interprets radical environmentalists as “…harbingers of domestic terrorism”

1947

The phrase “Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires” is put into circulation by the Ad Council

1943

World War II and Japanese incendiary devices in the Pacific Northwest prompt anti-forest fire propaganda in the US depicting caricatures of Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo

1914

“American democracy was born of no theorist’s dream; it was not carried in the Susan Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came stark and strong and full of life out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier.” Frederick Jackson Turner, “An Address delivered at the University of Washington, June 17, 1914,” cited in Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), 253

1793

Louis XVI of France is decapitated

Smokey Bear (2012), screenprint on archival digital print.

The Spectre of Form: Letters from an Absent Sovereign ANDREW PENDAKIS

THE PHOTOS APPEAR to mouth a question. In a first diptych we are confronted with a stark desert vista. At first glance vast, it is in fact no more than a tiny excerpt from the unprecedented experiment in scale that is the Alberta oil sands. In a second diptych we are presented with two images from Louis XIV’s consummately absolutist garden at Versailles. A fifth image, de-linked from the rhythm of diptychs, reveals an unfinished road, a key piece of Alberta’s future oil infrastructure stretching off into a toneless horizon. This series of photographs, entitled Desert of Exchange/Garden of Sovereignty by Edmonton-based artist Maria Whiteman, functions as an effectively ambiguous intervention into the political economy of global petro-capitalism. This is an ambiguity, however, which self-consciously separates itself from an aesthetics of confusion (one familiar since Shklovsky) in which the most that can be asked of art is a tired injunction to disrupt or re-arrange ordinary vision. Instead, the viewer is located at an intersection of precise formulations—each charged with clear social, philosophical, and political opportunity costs. This is, of course, the very essence of the dialectic: a thinking that suspends in tension a finite number of charged, distinct interpretations rather than dispersing thought emptily into a universe of monotonous difference or sameness. The dialectic always unfolds out of a present that is shaped in advance, a world that is not—at least in the domain of the symbolic—infinite and in which every thought carries with it social possibilities and risks. In this sense, there is something (almost anachronistically) polemical about Whiteman’s work, the gravity of an interlocution with stakes beyond the mere play of signs and speech.

*

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PHOTO SERIES: MARIA WHITEMAN DESERT OF EXCHANGE/GARDEN OF SOVEREIGNTY

TH&B, Beacon (2012), packing cardboard, two-ply cardboard, adhesive, fasteners, approx. 260 x 275 x 122 cm.

Current whereabouts unknown. Photo: Carol Sawyer.

Ownership in Retreat?

IMRE SZEMAN

‘FOR ‘FOR ‘FOR ‘FOR ‘FOR ‘FOR ‘FOR ‘FOR

PROPERTY’ THE EXPLOITATION OF OTHERS’ THE JUST DIVISION OF SPIRITUAL GOODS’ THE UNJUST DIVISION OF TEMPORAL GOODS’ LOVE’ THE BUYING AND SELLING OF LOVE’ THE NATURAL DISORDER OF THINGS’ THE PROLONGATION OF THE GOLDEN AGE’

—Bertolt Brecht, The Rise and Fall of the C ity of Mahagonny1

EVEN IN AN ERA when images have become omnipresent, and the collapse of the divide between art and life once imagined by radical avant-gardes seems to have become more threat than political possibility, art practices continue to carry out critique of a kind that is invaluable to our comprehension of our social and political condition. One of the most significant issues art and critical cultural production today draw attention to is the operations of ownership, especially in connection to culture. Despite the new significance of knowledge and cultural production in today’s economy, despite the varied experiments in new economic formations and other forms of social innovation, and despite attempts to engender modes of communal knowledge sharing, ownership today remains configured in relation to property, just as it has since the origins of capitalism. Property continues to name a limit and blockage in our current social configuration; in the words of Ernst Bloch, “there is a very clear interest that has prevented the world from being changed into the possible”2— those who control and benefit from property relations and the global politico-economic system that supports it. How, why, and what are the consequences of property today? A look at struggles over the demands made by property as a result of shifts and changes in how it has come to be imagined might give us some sense of how we can make the forces of ownership retreat, and in so doing, at long last, change the possible into the actual.

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1. Property In his 2004 essay “The Politics of Utopia,” the cultural critic Fredric Jameson puts forward what he takes to be “the most radical demand to make on our own system… the demand for full employment, universal full employment around the globe.”3 What such a demand reveals starkly is the shape and character of the political and economic structures in which we live today, which render such a demand unrealizable. The possibility for all individuals to engage in productive work cannot happen under capitalism, in part because of the structural need for a reserve army of labour—a need that takes distinct forms in different parts of the world. This is the point of the direct, utopian demand that Jameson makes here: to break us out of fictions about the possibility, on some distant horizon, that within our governing political and economic logics, that eventually everyone will have a job, be able to feed themselves, and feel as if they are participating in the social alongside their fellow citizens. By showing how so basic a right cannot be realized in the present system, the political returns in the form not of a hope for this or that change of policy or implementation of some new law. Rather, what cannot help but emerge is the need, if we are to achieve certain basic elements of just and equitable society, for a “society structurally distinct from this one in every conceivable way, from the psychological to the sociological, from the cultural to the political.”4 Let’s try this same utopian formula with a different content. What would it mean to demand that intellectual and creative production be, first, accessible to everyone, and, second, belong to everyone (since ideas always emerge out of the fertile soil of society and not, as we tend to think, from some mysterious place inside an individual’s head?) In a phrase: what would it mean to insist that there would no longer be such a thing as intellectual property—ownership of ideas, images, words, concepts? Is this a demand that could ever be realized within existing social and political structures? By, for instance, appropriate changes to national and international laws addressed to the ownership of intellectual property? Of course not. As numerous critics have pointed out— everyone from Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Paolo Virno on the Left, to more establishment figures such as Richard Florida, Robert Reich, or The Economist magazine on the Right—the contemporary economic system is heavily dependent on the fruits of cognitive and creative labour.

Intellectual property in all its various forms have some of the highest available margins; major manufacturers long ago moved out of production and reconfigured themselves as purveyors of sign-systems (such as brand-names) that can be attached to any object whatsoever. For a system that thrives on the consumption of “newness,” the production of endless amounts of new cultural content is essential, whether in the form of experiences (tourism, theme parks, style, shopping malls, Las Vegas) or physical or cultural goods (three-blade shaving systems! Breaking Bad! valueadded coffee drinks!). If the cognitive labour that produces and manages ideas within contemporary capitalism is by no means the dominant form of labour in the world, it is hegemonic in terms of its role in structuring the direction of economies, and so, life on the planet: even those who eke out a bare existence in factories located in Third World “free trade” zones are pulled into its guiding orbit. The ownership of the products of creative and cognitive labour is increasingly important for companies intent on generating as large a profit as possible; it should come as no surprise that there is little desire or interest in a social and political system organized around economic growth and profit—that is, capitalism—to set ideas free in the world.

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Afterword A L I C E M I N G WA I J I M

The following reflects on The Retreat: A Position of dOC UMENTA (13) through personal vignettes, episodes, untrammeled colophons, and mesh writing (the use of keywords to connect essays in this issue). The first half focuses on the time of retreat in the world. The second half examines Yam Lau’s recent projection-based art installation to consider contemporary implications for retreat as model in relation to the historic literati retreat of seventeenth century C hina and the Buddhist metaphor of Indra’s Net. I am going to end when I have argued that we can no more actually profoundly withdraw than we can retreat into indifference. As an afterword, it will read afterwards as having utterly failed no less for its residing in the future perfect.

IT WAS A TUMULTUOUS time of world events leading up to and following The Retreat that took place early August 2012 in the mountain resort town of Banff, Alberta. Almost one year since its first demonstration on Wall Street, the Occupy movement was reservedly organizing for anniversary rallies in more than thirty cities around the world, although with much less momentum and publicity than in 2011. In Egypt, the 25 January revolution, a.k.a. the 18-day revolt centred in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in early 2011, saw the ousting of long-ruling dictator Hosni Mubarak and the first democratically-elected president, Mohammed Morsi, sworn in on 30 June 2012. Within five months, mass protests had begun to criticize Morsi’s giving a monopoly on power to his Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist allies, polarizing the country, and running affairs similarly to the autocrat the protesters had deposed 31 months before; the 30 June 2013 revolution witnessed Morsi dramatically removed by the military after only one year in office following mass demonstrations for his resignation, larger than those of the Arab Spring.

Meanwhile, the US continued to complete its withdrawal of allied combat troops from Afghanistan with an end date in 2014 when NATO-trained Afghan National Security Forces assumed responsibility of the country’s security in time for the election of Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi as Egypt’s new president, with Hamid Karzai, leader of the Kabul government since 2001, required to step down under the constitution. Uncertainty and violent religious extremism continue to escalate. On 4 November 2013, five months after Occupy Gezi in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, Turkish president Abdullah Gul warned that bordering Syria could become the “Mediterranean Afghanistan” if the international community did not act to end the bloody civil war that has seen President Bashar al-Assad and his allies fighting against the Free Syrian Army and rebel forces since the first leadership protests began in March 2011, spurring the largest refugee crisis in a generation.

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In any era of world-wide assaults on humanity and of appeals to humanity, it’s a wonder the world isn’t in retreat. But in this “age of capitalist agony, that so far seems to be the agony of the world itself,” people do retreat, of course.1 In fact, far from any pullback, there is an entire cottage industry of weekend, backyard, spa, yoga, and Buddhist, spiritual, or secular retreats, boot camps, and communes, along with the requisite tonics, detoxes, and cleanses to ensure the lead time from request to delivery of your gear-shifting package appears as smooth as your time away is relaxing, meditative, and regenerative, or at least productive in one way or another, if not to repay your debt to society than at least to optimize on that obligatory capacity-building “company retreat.”

Not thinking about retreat and hermitage is even more difficult when you are on an academic sabbatical leave, even though you know that this coveted time off is not “free time” and it certainly isn’t “idle mode.” The only way it can pay for itself (and thankfully, quite frankly, it is privileged “paid work time” in light of the global unrest and the tireless world of work to which most are subject) is if tangible, approved, “striver” scholarly or creative outputs result—published books, journal articles, exhibitions. Time compression sets in, personal standards and expectations—whether set too high or too low—and life in general come into play, and, before you know it, you’re working harder than ever to make the most of your hard-earned leave. The sabbatical as a prolonged respite from one’s regular labours (in biblical times every seventh year) to rest, recuperate, and focus on moral cleansing, professional and spiritual renewal, and calling, is no more. Gruelling, yet (it must be said) at times enjoyable travel and research schedules, or, more accurately, research travel, to increase and disseminate knowledge, strengthen networks, generate synergies, and create collaborations with scholars near and far, in no way resembles “rest.” Even if your sabbatical work happens to afford an amortized stint at a slick resort town albeit former colonial outpost founded on the traditional territories of the Stoney Nakoda First Nations peoples.

The Time of Retreat The Retreat, in the form of a two-week research residency, was the last held of the four positions of dOC UMENTA (13), or d(13). The other positions, clearly catalysed by the Arab Spring, were “Under Siege” in Kabul and Bamiyan in Afghanistan, “In a State of Hope” in Cairo (but mostly in Alexandria) in Egypt, and, of course, “On Stage” in Kassel, Germany, home of the prestigious quinquennial art exhibition since 1955. Significantly, d(13)’s artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev describes the positions “corresponding to four possible conditions in which people, in particular artists and thinkers, find themselves acting in the present” in relation to time: Each position is a condition, a state of mind, and relates to time in a specific way: while the retreat suspends time, being on stage produces a vivid and lively time of the here and now, the continuous present; while hope releases time through the sense of a promise, of time opening up and being unending, the sense of being under siege compresses time, to the degree that there is no space beyond the elements of life that are tightly bound around us.2

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CONTRIBUTORS

HEATHER ANDERSON is curator at the Carleton University Art Gallery. Previously an assistant curator at the National Gallery of Canada (2005– 2012), Anderson chose contemporary art curating as a field within which to work as a result of a yearlong (paid) curatorial apprenticeship at the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery (2000– 2001) and volunteering in artist-run centres in Halifax. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University (1998) and MA in Women’s Studies from Dalhousie University, having completed a thesis C ontemporary C anadian Women’s Performance Art: Reading Third-Wave Feminism and Postfeminism (2003).

FRANCO “BIFO” BERARDI is a writer, media theorist, and media activist. Involved in the political movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970s, Berardi fled to Paris, where he worked with Félix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis.

Berardi is the author of After the Future (2011), The Soul at Work (2009), C ibernauti (1995), and Mutazione e Cyberpunk (1993), among other titles.

Coordinator of the European School for Social Imagination (SCEPSI), Berardi teaches at Ashkal Alwan in Beirouth, PEI-Macba in Barcelona, Accademia di Brera in Milano, and lectures in social centres and universities worldwide.

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CONTRIBUTORS

SARAH BLACKER is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, currently completing a dissertation on the politics of personalized medicine.

Her work has appeared in parallax, ESC : English Studies in C anada, TOPIA, and The Johns Hopkins Guide to C ontemporary Literary and Cultural Theory.

She is co-editor of the journal Reviews in C ultural Theory and the edited volume A C ompanion to C ritical and C ultural Theory (forthcoming 2015).

RAYMOND BOISJOLY is an Indigenous artist of Haida and Québécois descent based in Vancouver, Canada. He has presented work in numerous exhibitions and projects including Unsettled Landscapes at SITE Santa Fe, Fiction/ Non-fiction at Esker Foundation, Tools for Conviviality at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and Phantasmagoria at Presentation House Gallery. Boisjoly is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery.

BRUNO BOSTEELS is Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University.

He is the author, among others, of Badiou and Politics, Marx and Freud in Latin America, and The Actuality of C ommunism. He is currently at work on two new books, Philosophies of Defeat and The Mexican C ommune.

JOANNE BRISTOL trained as an artist and has an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Halifax, Canada). She is pursuing a PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture (London, UK), using performance and writing to study multispecies spaces in urban contexts.

DAVID BUTLER is a Canadian artist based in Montreal where he has been living, studying, and working, since 1992. He obtained both his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Concordia University, completing his MFA in the spring of 2014. His multidisciplinary practice is informed by studies in linguistics, art history, photography, and most recently, sculpture, with a focus on digital technologies.

NICO DOCKX works as a visual artist, curator, publisher, and researcher with a fundamental interest in archives. His interventions, publications, texts, soundscapes, images, installations, performances, and conversations—which are usually the result of collaboration with other artists—embody the relationship between perception and memory, which he interprets differently each time. His work has won him a DAAD grant in Berlin (2005), and the Prix Jeune Peinture Belge - the Emile & Stephy Langui prize (2009, together with Helena Sidiropoulos). He is part of A Dog Republic.

JASON GOMEZ received a BFA from California State University, Long Beach and in 2012 participated in the residency, Studio Time: Work of the Living Watch at the Banff Centre. He is currently an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten.

EMMA WALTRAUD HOWES is influenced by the “Theatre of the Absurd.” Guided by observations on contemporary gestures, her projects manifest as choreographed reconfigurations of the body informed by a background in dance and the

visual arts. She frames these elements towards a reconciliation of mind-body dualisms through performance and interdisciplinary installations.

ALICE MING WAI JIM is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at Concordia University in Montreal. She is founding co-editor of the journal, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (Brill). Jim was curator of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A) from 2003 to 2006. Recent publications include contributions to Third Text, Journal of Curatorial Studies, Journal of Visual Culture, Amerasia Journal, Positions, Yishu Journal of C ontemporary C hinese Art, Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in C anada (2014) and “Ai Weiwei: Love the Future” in Human Rights and the Arts: Essays on Global Asia (forthcoming).

IVAN JURAKIC and TOR LUKASIK-FOSS, along with Simon Frank and Dave Hind, are TH&B, a collaborative partnership operating out of Hamilton, Ontario. Resuscitating the moniker of a defunct railway that once served the Toronto, Hamilton, and Buffalo rail corridor, their work examines the intersection of rural, urban, and industrial environments. They have exhibited in Canada and the United States as part of Alternating C urrents: Beyond/In Western New York (2012), with upcoming projects at the Art Gallery of Windsor and Carlton University Art Gallery.

KATE LAWLESS is a PhD Candidate at Western University in the Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism about to defend her dissertation Preservationist Aesthetics: Memory, Trauma and the New Enclosures, which uses theories of primitive accumulation to read cultures of trauma and memory against the grain and in relation to what Midnight Notes calls the New Enclosures.

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CATHERINE MALABOU is Professor in the Philosophy Department at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University. She is the author of The Future of Hegel: Plastic ity, Temporality, and D ialec tic (2004), C ounterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida (2004), What Should We Do With Our Brain?

(2009), The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage (2012), Self and Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (2013), and Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (forthcoming 2014), among other titles.

ANDREW PENDAKIS is an Assistant Professor of Theory and Rhetoric at Brock University and a Research Fellow at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. His research focuses on contemporary political culture, with a special interest in the genealogy of centrist reason in the West. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in C riticism, Imaginations, Politics and C ulture, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Mediations. He is also a co-editor of the forthcoming C ontemporary Marxist Theory: A Reader from Bloomsbury.

CARRIE SMITH-PREI researched and lectured at the University of Potsdam, the Free University Berlin, Trinity College Dublin, and the University of Ireland Maynooth before joining the University of Alberta in 2008. Her research focuses on post1960s German culture, gender, politics, and aesthetics. She is the author of Revolting Families: Toxic Intimacy, Private Politics, and Literary Realism in the German Sixties (2013), co-editor of Bloom and Bust: Urban Landscapes in the East Since German Reunification (2014), and co-founder of the online journal Imaginations: Journal of C ross-C ultural Image Studies. She is currently working on a SSHRCfunded project entitled “Technologies of Popfeminist Activism” (with Maria Stehle).

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CONTRIBUTORS

FRANZISKA VON STENGLIN (1984, Munich) graduated from Städelschule in 2013. Currently based between Tyrol, Austria and Mexico City, her work was recently shown at the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz, Austria in September 2014.

IMRE SZEMAN is Canada Research Chair of Cultural Studies and Professor of English, Film Studies and Sociology at the University of Alberta. Current projects include On Empty: The C ultural Politics of Oil and the collection Fueling C ulture: Politics, History, Energy, both to be published by Fordham University Press.

MARIA WHITEMAN is an independent artist who lives and works in Denver, Colorado. Her art practice explores themes such as art and science, relationships between industry, community and nature, and the place of animals in our cultural and social imaginary. Recent exhibits include the 2013 Alberta Biennial at the Art Gallery of Alberta.

HEATHER ZWICKER is Professor of English at the University of Alberta. A cultural studies professor by trade, her research has brought postcolonial and feminist theories to bear on problems such as stereotypes, universities, classrooms, and cities. She edited Edmonton on Location (NeWest 2005) and co-edited Not Drowning but Waving: Women, Feminism and the Liberal Arts (University of Alberta Press 2011). Her current research, the collaborative project Edmonton Pipelines, uses urban theory to produce digital maps representing citizens’ experience of Edmonton.

Views and Reviews

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C O L U M N : IAN BALFOUR York University Walter Benjamin: Retreat/Attack

ONE TENDS TO think of Walter Benjamin as a denizen of Berlin and Paris, the Berlin of his semi-enchanted childhood and the Paris of his years in forced exile from Nazi Germany where he would spend weeks and months on end in the Bibliotèque Nationale. But he would often go on what might be called retreats from his beloved but vexed cities to out-of-the-way, quiet places to try to think and read and write, as well as a few other, completely different things. Some of the places he would go to now have a ring of glamour in addition to an aura of Mediterranean dolce far niente and eroticism: Ibiza, Capri, and San Remo, to name a few. Or he would to go to visit Brecht in a remote spot in Denmark for three summer stints spread out through the mid-tolate 1930s, trying to make the best of exile. Ibiza, in Benjamin’s day, was not a hub for high-flyers or high-rollers: it was rather non-descript and undeveloped (perhaps preferably so) and so it did the trick in a number of ways. In Capri, Benjamin was in the company of a number of like-minded intellectuals, and there he met Asja Lacis, decisive for his future. In these mildly exotic places Benjamin hardly ever had money to speak of.

Indeed he had gone to these locales partly out of financial necessity, sometimes on the promise of a free room. It was not the easy life. Not fun in the

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AUTHOR

Photos: Jason Wyche, courtesy of Creative Time.

Kara Walker, A Subtlety (2014), installation views.

EXHIBITION REVIEW JILL GLESSING York University

KARA WALKER, A SUBTLETY ORGANIZED BY CREATIVE TIME, DOMINO SUGAR FACTORY, BROOKLYN, 10 MAY–6 JULY, 2014 “Brazil is sugar and sugar is the black man.”

—Father Antônio Vieira, seventeenth century1 Among the confections my father sold in his small town Ontario candy store were “Black Babies.”

Within that fully white town, no racial tensions interfered with my consumption of those tiny, gummy African children. Primarily made of sugar, only my bad teeth appeared then as minor blowback from a sugar industry that was built on the suffering of generations of enslaved Africans.

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REVIEWS

Though it was initially the profits from spices that prompted fifteenth-century European exploration, it was Europe’s sugar craving that ramped it up to what became the triangular traffic in humans, produce and manufactured goods between Europe, African and the Americas. The sugar industry, central to western taste and economy, was supported by generations of African slaves working on Caribbean sugar plantations.

Kara Walker approaches the topic of exploitative sugar production in her installation, A Subtlety

EXHIBITION REVIEW CATALINA GONZALEZ Independent Critic, Toronto

HUMBOLDT MAGNUSSEN, VIKING BLOOD

Humboldt Magnussen, Viking Blood (2014), stills from performance. Photos: courtesy of the artist.

35TH RHUBARB FESTIVAL, BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE, TORONTO, 22 FEBRUARY, 2014

Strewn on the stage in every direction, one saw helmets mounted with plaster horns and football jackets covered in gold and purple. It was as if sports memorabilia had become prehistoric European museum artifacts. Audience members tried on the outfits themselves, as if to prepare for battle in a rugged society or to join the athletic team. In Viking Blood (2014), Humboldt Magnussen presented an elaborate setting that seemed to envision his typical habitat. The space had an air of preservation: it depicted a carnivalesque scene where beads had been draped and added to helmets, and horns broken off and used as both obstacles to overcome and a mask to be worn in the attempt to bolster a hyped-up version of masculinity.

Once the performance started, the queer Canadian artist told the story of his dedication to the Minnesota team and his familial ties to Viking

heritage, while seeking to physically navigate the impediments and play the game he orchestrated for himself. In Magnussen’s practice, he typically invites participation so that the group can collectively rescript and critique gender, sexual and racial representations of power. Urging the audience to consider their multiple roles as witnesses, perpetrators, or opponents of power, Magnussen offers the opportunity for disidentification from white heteronormative ideals and childhood socialization to conceive of a more progressive and tolerant value system.

Viking Blood emphasized the talismanic presence of the objects, amidst an overshadowing doomsday opulence. Magnussen exhibited a kind of memento mori of what existed in his family, where the Viking motif was ritually significant and represented a regal heritage. For the artist, though, he could only be anointed with the title of “true” Viking blood once he had conquered the 187

EXHIBITION REVIEW CAOIMHE MORGAN-FEIR Independent Critic, Toronto

COMING TO TERMS CURATED BY JOHN G. HAMPTON, JACKMAN HUMANITIES INSTITUTE WITH THE JUSTINA M. BARNICKE GALLERY OF ART AT HART HOUSE, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, SEPTEMBER 16, 2013–JUNE 15, 2014 With white walls and cool marble tiles, the hallways and offices of the Jackman Humanities Institute’s tenth floor easily double as a gallery.

Devoted to interdisciplinary research, the Institute typically fosters interaction and collaboration between a variety of humanities scholars by hosting seminars, conferences, fellowships and the like. But every year, as a part of their dedicated art programming, the Institute presents an exhibition that engages their annual theme (which also binds wider research projects and collaborations). For 2013–2014, this theme was “Translation and the Multiplicity of Languages.” In C oming to Terms, the corresponding exhibition, curator John G. Hampton builds from this general topic to investigate three sub-topics: “hegemonic anglophonization and its effects; deconstructionist translation; and intersemiotic translation.”1 Careful to resist applying the notion of “translation” so widely that it loses a clear meaning or weight, Hampton looks to artistic examples or explorations of the practice that are indicative of its ambiguities and nuances. This emphasis on the breadth of translation, its relevance beyond translation amongst languages, widens the exhibition’s focus to look at relationships between disciplines and forms. While the tenth floor houses C oming to Terms, the exhibition relies,

Carl Trahan, Dérangement (2013), detail of installation, chalk, 12' 4" x 5'. Photo: courtesy of John G. Hampton.

quite heavily, on the forms and materials of academic settings (blackboards, television screens, illuminated signs) to intervene within the space, and elaborate on various versions of translation.

Carl Trahan’s Dérangement (2013) features the most characteristic employment of educational materials: chalk writing across a blackboard.

In meticulous, miniature lettering, Dérangement traces the synonyms of its titular word, their synonyms and so on. From one word hundreds more branch out and break off; a lineage of language grows in dendriform fashion. Within the Jackman

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BOOK REVIEW RAY ELLENWOOD York University (Emeritus)

HER DE VRIES and LAURENS VANCREVEL, Eds. CE QUI SERA What will be LO QUE SERA: Almanac of the International Surrealist Movement (Bloemendaal, Holland: Brumes Blondes, 2014), 528 pages Many people in many cultures are familiar with the farmers’ almanacs that, for centuries, have been providing not only calendars of the growing season and advice on planting, but also predictions for weather conditions in the coming year and sometimes more general, fanciful horoscopes—all of this mixed with homespun articles and reminiscences, often involving folk wisdom, remedies, superstitions. These almanacs were cheaply produced, profusely illustrated, and highly popular.

What will be certainly has this ancient tradition in mind, but more specifically it looks back to an earlier Surrealist adaptation of the model, the Almanach surréalist du demi-siècle, published as the March/April issue of the periodical La Nef in 1950.

This special number was edited by French poet André Breton, author of the first Surrealist manifesto and popularly considered as founder and

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major spokesperson of the Surrealist movement.

Breton’s Almanach surréaliste du demi-siècle opened with a calendar, as tradition dictated, but in this case it was an “around-the-world calendar of tolerable inventions,” such as the soap bubble, the sandwich, the balcony. There were four inventions per month, each fancifully described by Breton and Benjamin Péret, another poet from the early days of Surrealism, accompanied by a small black-and-white print with an archaic quality reminiscent of signs of the zodiac. Following this calendar were writings by a “who’s who” of Surrealism at the time (Michel Carrouges, Victor Crastre, Octavio Paz, Henri Pastoureau, Julien Gracque, to name a few), accompanied by works of well-known visual artists (Dorothea Tanning, Jacques Hérold, Marcel Jean, Adrien Dax, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, among others). There were articles on the Marquis de Sade, Surrealism and politics, automatism and abstraction, Marcel Duchamp, and Maurice Heine.

Written in the aftermath of the Second World War, at a time when Breton and Surrealism were faced with the task of rebuilding, this publication situated itself strategically at the middle of the twentieth century with the intention of looking

almanac. Also notable is the essay co-authored

by Laurens Vancrevel from Holland, one of the editors of the almanac, and the French writer and painter Guy Ducornet, entitled “Forgers and Inquisitors of Surrealism,” trying to set the record straight against appropriators and detractors from the beginnings of Surrealism to the days of secondwave feminism.

But the almanac contains more than discursive essays. There are short works of fiction and poetry, along with dozens of contemporary art works which don’t get much help from the small format, exclusively black-and-white reproductions, and lack of information about dimensions and materials. This is not a coffee table book. In appearance it harkens back to the proud tradition of postwar pulp publications. The problem for the poets and visual artists, given the rich history of Surrealism and its impact on popular culture, remains to come up with new images. The artists represented in this book use many of the approaches Surrealism developed—such as automatism, collage and montage, found objects, and collaborative work—resulting in the coveted juxtapositions and metamorphoses that shake our sense of the rational world. But I can’t say I found much startlingly new and unsettling in the imagery here. As England’s Krzysztof Fijalkowski writes in one of the better short essays of the almanac (“Janus Virus”): “It is not merely the problem of the recuperation of surrealism’s poetic and visual imagery discoveries, but that almost every area of contemporary Western discourse has borrowed a tinge of surrealist practice.” He argues that “surrealism’s fascination with the outmoded is in itself a kinship with the creeping mould signalling that the time of bright trinkets is done, and the work of disintegration and re-making is at hand.” He goes on to say that “any future of surrealism will be at its most vital and concrete in a far more diverse set of spaces and social contexts, in forms apt to critique and shift the very notion of surrealism itself, turning it towards new

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destinies.” Not all the work shown in this almanac suggests new destinies, but the project itself is a courageous attempt to bring together distant and disparate voices, to see what might be provoked in the next fifty years.

NOTE 1

Her De Vries and Laurens Vancrevel, eds., CE QUI SERA What will be LO QUE SERA: Almanac of the International Surrealist Movement (Bloemendaal, Holland: Brumes Blondes, 2014), 127.

BOOK REVIEW JIM FEAST Brooklyn

MARJOLIJN VAN RIEMSDIJK with JORDAN ZINOVICH, Ed. Assault on the Impossible: Dutch Collective Imagination in the Sixties and Seventies (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2013), 164 pages Marjolijn van Riemsdijk’s book Assault on the Impossible: Dutch C ollective Imagination in the Sixties and Seventies is both a bracing history and

BOOK REVIEW LEWIS KAYE Toronto

KEES TAZELAAR On the Threshold of Beauty: Philips and the Origins of Electronic Music in the Netherlands, 1925–1965 (Rotterdam: V2_ Publishing, 2013), 316 pages The history of twentieth-century European electronic music can easily be read in terms of national activity and traditions. In Italy, there was the formative work of Futurists Franceso Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo in the 1910s, the development of musique concrète in France by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in the late 1940s, and the advent of serialist-influenced elektronische musik in Germany in the early 1950s. This national emphasis is also evidenced by the institutional support such work eventually received from state broadcasters after the Second World War. For example, French state broadcaster ORTF supported the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), founded by Schaeffer in 1958.

Electronische musik was nurtured in the Cologne studios of West German state radio. In Britain, the experience was similar, with electronic music pioneers Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire both working in the BBC’s famed Radiophonic Workshop.

Given electronic music’s experimental nature and extensive technical demands, such as the need for advanced “new media” like tape recorders, high-end

speakers, electronic tone generators, and custombuilt devices such as filters, large-scale institutional support was pretty much a necessity.

While focusing on national institutions and traditions is no doubt a useful heuristic approach, a potential problem is the tendency to favour larger countries and hence to overlook the unique experiences, cultural approaches, and configurations involved in institutional support for smaller nations.

This is precisely the case with the Netherlands, a small nation that has an extensive tradition of electronic music research and production nurtured by institutional arrangements quite different from those found in other European countries. It is a history that hadn’t yet been told, an absence Tazelaar ably addresses with this book. What makes the Dutch experience so singular in the Western European context is how state support was far less important than that of the Philips Corporation, one of the world’s largest and most innovative electronics companies at the time and to this day one of the Netherlands’s most important manufacturing firms. Such support for electronic music, Tazelaar writes, became an important means for Philips to test new strategies, techniques, and equipment in areas such as film sound, musical recording, and home audio.

On the Threshold of Beauty is divided into three sections, each dealing with a specific set of Philips’s activities supporting electronic music research. In the first part, “Electroacoustics and Electronic Music at Philips Research Laboratories,” Tazelaar documents the company’s in-house support of electronic music research prior to and just after the Second World War with an emphasis on the technological foundations of Philips’s interest in electronic music. Some of these activities are fairly well known, such as Philips’s development of loudspeaker technologies and their pioneering work in sound spatialization and the development of stereophony. Tazelaar also provides a great deal of information that is almost media archaeological, such as descriptions of the celluloid-based optical recording systems Philips tried to develop for the consumer market in the 1940s,

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