Above Ground

Project Plan for the Doctoral Studies in Visual Arts at Malmö Art Academy, Malmö, 2012 – 2016

Above Ground | Alex Villar

There is an often quoted story told by John Cage during a lecture he gave at Juilliard in the fifties.1 He referred to a changed state of being in which everything remained the same as before, except for one’s feet, which were found to be slightly off the ground. I will leave aside Cage’s source for this idea in Eastern Philosophy and concentrate solely on the notion of a change in subjectivity that correlates to a physical shift.2 But I will reverse this relation and look at it from the point of view of the physical shift as opposed to considering the subjective change to be primary. By that I mean that I will focus on how a physical shift may effect a change in subjectivity. I will also increase the size of the shift mentioned by Cage who seems to imply only a couple of inches; the character in my project will be displaced vertically several feet above ground. But, rather than floating the body as in Cage’s story, my character will be placed onto an existing structure that will be appropriated and put through a different use.3 What I have in mind is to start my commuting narrative at the rooftop of a bus stop, which means that I will be displacing the straphanger from below to above the roof. This vertical physical shift will be the premise for the actions that will follow.

The motivation for this character remain the same as for those who remain under the bus stop’s roof. My dislocated straphanger still needs to commute to work by public transportation. But his typical trajectory will be complicated by his displaced point of departure. Boarding the bus by its door from the standpoint of the top of the bus stop is no longer the most logical way to gain access to the bus.

Above Ground, location research, Lublin, 2009

The situation requires rethinking. The most immediate solution may be to board via the window, especially aboard tall buses. But in some cases, the window is not an available alternative, particularly in air-conditioned or heated buses since they tend to seal off their windows. In such cases, it might make more sense to attempt to enter via the bus’ own rooftop ventilation window. But there are also cases in which there are no ventilation points or none that can be used as an entry point, in which case the straphanger will need to remain on top of the bus during his journey. A supporting apparatus of harnesses, hooks and rope will be required to sustain the straphanger in place.

What used to be an unassuming experience will turn into considerable struggle.4 This aspect in particular will change everything for the straphanger, who may now come to reevaluate prior motivations. The struggle occasioned by the initial displacement will have undoubtedly exacerbated already existent but unaccounted for difficulties involved in the journey to work.5 What may have been before a dormant insatisfaction due to a non-compensated portion of the contracted labor relation has now become rather expressive in its outwardly presentation of unabashed behavior. The pacification of resistance to an imposed condition which is customarily accomplished through the naturalization of a situation as being external to the specific locality of the labor contract, has become unsustainable. The appearance of normality on which the stability of an exploitative relation depends has been drasticaly disrupted. That is to say that normalcy has been dispelled and the conditions of possibility for the given situation may have become available for reformulation.

The straphanger might have reached a point of no return. In the process of enduring the struggle to reach diverse work sites in the variety of localities that now constitute the typically fragmented labor landscape,6 the straphanger has disconnected from a lifetime of aquiescent gestures that had, prior to our incidental physical shift, sedimented a thoroughly compliant behavior.7 The

experiential changes instituted in the renewed journey have set in motion the tipping points for a metamorphosis in what used to be see as the tranquil objectivity of the straphanger.

A more vital, pressing, if not urgent, demeanor has replaced his prior lassitude. He will thrive at confronting new obstacles and even enjoy the new scenary that has open up and connected him to the city around, while before he merely resisted the disconnected and asfixiating enclosure of his commute.8 A critical situation demands more assertiveness and command of the multiple elements involved in attaining one’s goals in spite of obvious risks.

To cope with the requirements of the new task, the straphanger will invest its role with competencies from different fields. In order to be secure in place atop the bus, the straphanger will make use of tools used by scaffold workers.And, in order to climb on taller buses and descend to windows, the straphanger will use the tools from the alpinist. He will need to appropriate these tools but will also need to amalgamate them into a renewed toolset since the original use case will forcibly transform the manner in which those borrowed experiences are to be used.9 He will have become a straphanger-scaffold worker-alpinist composite that is not simply the result of accretion of these varied competences but a whole new assemblage,10 contrived to confront an entirely new event.

This event, which is new simply because it didn’t manifest itself before our initial displacement, already existed in a state of potentiality. Our incidental premise merely unhinged it from its dormant state and seized the opportunity that have opened up during its wakening.11 It is unclear whether the straphanger will ever reach his destination and if that really matters anymore. His journey has unfolded

Above Ground, location research, Lublin, 2009

into a multifaceted array of situations that somehow seems to have multiplied his options. It is as if his trajectory, after having modified a pattern in his daily life, has unleashed an entirely new horizon. Why should he still wish to reach his destination if that destination was unrewarding predicated on an unavailable discussion over its conditions of possibility? Why should he still comply if his prior choices were largely predetermined because contained within a narrow range of possibilities disguised as representative of an wider spectrum.12 Everything seems much clearer to him now. For instance, it is clear to him that things are not about to get any easier; in fact his challenges may become harder to overcome. But he is no longer in it simply to go from point A to point B. He now wants to reach both point A and point B as well as all the other points beyond those; he wants to have access to the entire territory. For he will no longer be contained within the narrow parameters that used to circumscribe his life to an asphyxiating degree.

It is an exhilarating moment for him. For the first time in ages he comprehends what freedom means because he feels it in his gut.

It is not just an intangible idea anymore but something that trusts through his body in such a vigorous way that he feels as if there is more blood being pumped in. Surely, Adrenaline has been shot through his system as to set in motion a frenetic sense of ecstasy.

And he had experienced euphoria before when confronting moments of danger.

But this time it is different. It is not just his self-protective instinct that came forward to help him cope with a bad situation. An entire apparatus came forth for him. It is his body with all his instinctual force but also his intelligence which translates into an ability to transubstantiate the established reality of the elements around him into a distinctively reconfigured actuality. That is the point where he is at now, a point that may lead to unlimited possibilities.

This is also the point at which I chose to interrupt the narrative in my project. I don’t wish to provide a conclusion for the story, but instead focus on the span of time during which a transformation in the subjectivity of the straphanger is set in motion, once propelled by an initial contingency.

I plan to develop this project alongside a sustained critical scrutiny of the ideas that inform its making as they relate to my work as a whole as well as to the broader context of theoretical production that has shaped my ideas, similarly, while more thoroughly, to what I began to do in this short project description and what I have done, in a briefer manner, elsewhere.13

As the end result of my proposed plan the 4 years that comprise the Doctoral Studies in Visual Arts I see both the completion and presentation of a comprehensive video that would encompass the shooting and editing of performative actions in several cities as well as the publication of a book documenting the research, production process and reflections on methodology as discussed above.

Above Ground, location research, Lublin, 2009

1

This story is mentioned by Benjamin H. buchloh in Neo-Avant Garde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000) p. 552.

2

The correlation between space and subjectivity is a recurring concern in my work. It is present in many pieces but it is most clearly articulated in Temporary Occupations, a video that shows a jogger running on the sidewalk in New York city. From scene to scene, a gradual shift takes place in the degree of difficulty posed by the obstacles the jogger finds on his way. Not only do fences and other types of spatial demarcation cause the jogger to over exert himself in order to overcome them, the predicament also instantiates a shift in the jogger’s subjectivity. As the jogger proceeds to cross certain boundaries, he ends up trespassing on private property. The shift is subtle, gradual and certainly provisional, but sufficient to register a potential transformation.

3

I have often misused public spaces in my work by subjecting their use to a misaligned logic. A case in point is Other Ways, a video from 2000, that showcases a series of actions in subway stations in New York. In that piece, I walked continuously, in similar matter-of-fact manner of other commuters. A subtle shift, what I am calling misalignment, pushed my movements into a dead end. For instance, by pursuing spaces normally avoided, like the staircase steps that fall beyond the handrail, I would meet the wall at the end of my trajectory. In other cases, my steps would be contained within negative spaces fenced out by handrails, causing my movements to result into a loop. But while the notion of appropriating and subjecting an existing structure to a new use in not new in my work, the prosthetic character that certain structures can offer is something that begins to occur in my more recent work. I am thinking for example of Breaking into Business, in which the scaffolding on wheels I used throughout the video became an extension of my body, enhancing its abilities to pursue a kind of misuse that would not be possible for my body alone to attain.

4

For a factual counterpart struggle, see the auto-reduction tactics used by autonomists workers in Italy while confronting arbitrary hike increase by bus companies, in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents (Los Angeles: Semiotext(E), 2007), p.73.

5

Reflections about the potentiality of resistance and subversion in the field of labor, although handled with considerable subtlety are incisevely present in my work. A case in point is a piece from 2004 which I called Overtime, in which rather than portraying an oppressive subjection of bodies during the extended work journey, I chose to focus on the small opportunities that open up when one’s body is faced with exhaustion.

From the playful gestures that naturally follow from tedium all the way to a blunt refusal of work by hiding from sight in order to rest.

6

This condition is widely documented by many researchers and theorists from Saskia Sassen to Maurizio Lazzaratto; the following study provides a comprehensive overview: Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

7

The notion of sedimentation, or in other works, the cummulative result of repetitious gestures, is based on the concept of reiteration in theories of performativity, as articulated by Judith Butler in several books, but most clearly in Bodies that Matter: on the discursive limits of “sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).

8

The commuter’s journey has interested me for quite some time given how it exists outside of the working experience while at the same time supplementing it. I had the opportunity to explore its alternate possibilities in a concise manner in a piece I called Splitting Image, in which I created a two-channel video, each simultaneously registering the experience of a character crossing the East River by ferry from Wall Street on the Manhattan end to Williamsburg on the Brooklyn side of the river. In this project, I splitted the commuting subject into two characters to force them into a meticulous comparison.

9

A project I shot last year in Lublin, Poland, provides a good example of appropriating tools and skills and putting them to new use. I made use of a scaffolding-on-wheels to roll it to different parts of the city in search of opportunities to ascend and gain access to businesses via their windows, therefore bypassing the typical route via the door, which is where access is more thoroughly controlled. I used a lanyard with a hook attached on one side to a harness I wore and on the other side with an articulate hook that I was able to engage to available connecting points

Above Ground, location research, London, 2011

on the building, therefore helping me move from the scaffolding onto the building more securely.

10

In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary provided a synthetic definition of assemblage as a ‘site in which a discursive formation intersects with material practices’, that can help understand Deleuze and Guattari’s more elaborate thoughts on the subject. Also, see Manuel De Landa’s use of the concept of assemblage in his A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2009).

11

I am deriving this sense of an opportunity that opens up, not in the future but, in the very time of the here and now of immediate experience, first from Antonio Negri’s discussion of Kairos in Time for Revolution. (New York: Continuum, 2005) but also from Giorgio Agamben,The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2005).

12

There is a very clear example of this reduction of spectrum of alternatives to applied to the analysis of news reportage in Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 2002). In a more complex but also significantly more comprehensive manner, the notion that a restrictive set of parameters can determine what is available for intelligibility is found in Michel Foucault’s notion of epistemic conditions of possibility, which is present throughout his work, but as a central concept in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1971).

13

I customarily develop work alongside a self-reflexive, discoursive, often dialogical, text. See Simon Sheikh and Alex Villar, A Conversation

about Alex Villar’s work (New York: Danger Museum/Apexart, 2003), available online at http://bit.ly/GOSHOT

Cover images: Above Ground, location research, London, 2011