Folly /or a Metabolic Monument

Folly / or a Metabolic Monument

Oskar Rosa 1

Acknowledgment This project s produced on the stolen lands and waterways of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. Sovereignty was never ceded.

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Table Of Contents

4>

Wayfinding Plans

10 >

Prologue

12 >

Q &A

16 >

Archive

24 >

Works

54 >

Curated Dyslexia

56 >

Appendix i, Steps 1 & 2

86 >

Appendix ii, Notes

126 >

Appendix iii, Knowledge Bank

146 >

Appendix iv. Reconstructing the Stairs

3

Wayfinding

Ground Floor 4

Exhibition Suite 1a

Folly G

Exhibition Suite 1b

Folly N

Coffe Bar a

Coffe Bar b

Folly F/H

Reception a Folly H

Auditorium b

Reception b

Auditorium a Folly C

Folly A

Shop

Entrance Hall

Temporary Exhibition a

Follies

Grafhic Collection

Folly B

Temporary Exhibition b

Amenities 5

Exhibition Suite 2a

First Floor 6

Folly G

Exhibition Suite 2b

Exhibition Suite 3a

Folly N

Exhibition Suite 2b

Exhibition Suite 3b

Exhibition Suite 4a

Folly F/H Folly H

Exhibition Suite 3a

Exhibition Suite 4b

Folly C

Folly A

Entrance Hall

Exhibition Suite 4b

Follies

Folly B Auditorium a

Amenities 7

Auditorium a

Second Floor 8

Folly N Exhibition Suite 5b Exhibtion Suite 5b

Folly F/H Folly H

Exhibition Suite 3a

Folly C

Exhibition Suite 3b

Folly A Entrance Hall

Follies Folly B

Amenities 9

Prologue

Aldo Rossi, a phenomenal figure whose “legacy� is hard to break. As Pippo Ciorra said, the formal simplicity makes Rossi one of the easiest to imitate. But his rhetorical inconsistency and complexity makes a formal replication a shallow exercise.

His rhetoric of the monument however intrigues me, an architectural receptacle with the ability to hold the collective memory of a city. It’s a nice idea for the architect, it gives them a lot of power, of deciding on the aesthetic or ritual of how a city remembers. I think the days of this singular authority on memory are gone, it hardly seems appropriate now given the level of prohibition on meaning, truth and context needed to retain the definition of the monument. But perhaps this is a chance to move past Rossi, we are no longer looking for receptacle of and authority that defines what is, rather a site for contesting such memory, a receptacle that is metabolic in its construction and intent, one that memorialises its own fallibility and that of its context for materialisation.

There are hints of this in his work, a seed of an idea that never moved beyond his time. However the fragmentation of his graphics via the shadow sit perhaps as a precedent. A moment of metabolic redaction of the ideal in his pure monuments. This is where I think Rossi could be developed into the 21st century. This is what I find compelling.

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How to present these ideas within the museum? How to exhibit them? The museum of course is one of the traditional seats of prohibitive power, the power of official “collective� histories, making the museum the perfect testing ground for a new monument sensibility. To engage the museum and develop a discourse of its inconsistencies errors and omissions.

In this sense we can deploy Rossi as a technique for engaging a more complex system of display within the museum. The museum reappropriated and memorialised as a way of displaying those inconsistencies, without negating the cultural value that those institutions can provide. All the while still remaining housed within the museum, bringing a sense of competition directly to its seat.

These are the ambitions of the project and its development.

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Q&A

On Rossi 1. Do you think that you have moved out of Rossi’s shadow? How have you embraced him but also managed to move away from him?

O - I don’t think my project in particular has moved out of Rossi’s shadow. I think that’s where it’s trying to sit, firmly within the shadow trying to erode Rossi from within. In the sense that it’s applying a very Rossian idea to prove a different point to Rossi, trying to move away from that kind of singular absolute architecture Rossi tries to produce, and towards a much more multiplicitous version of Rossi.

2. Do you think Rossi is still relevant for contemporary discourse? If yes, why? If no, why?

O - Not really, to be honest. I think his ideas are very top down, a kind of imposition into place. I think he has some nuance towards individuality in terms of the city. He accepts the multiple differences within the city, but these differences fall under a singular version of architecture that applies to all. He’s still very much of that generation of top down, this is what’s best. I have done the research on the plan, I’ve done the architectural research, I know what’s 12

best, I think that’s just not relevant anymore, for that reason I would say no, overall On Exhibition 3. What is the challenge of exhibiting architecture?

What is exhibited and what does the exhibiting in your project? Is it that simple?

O - I think one of the biggest challenge is scale and what of the architecture you are exhibiting. In the sense that are you exhibiting building? If you are there is the challenge of what scale you are trying to exhibit at. Full scale? Half scale? Fragments, you need a lot of space to exhibit building. Or if it’s the drawing does it change the scale of how you see things? Are you showing a drawing of something that would “exist” as something larger in which you can imagine oneself inside? In my project I think each of the interventions, the follies are exhibited, and they try in their method of design, to manifest in the exhibition of the MAXXI’s flaws in themselves, I think it’s a bit of doubling to that effect.

4. How would you describe an architecture that exists solely inside the museum? How is that architecture different to architecture that exists outside the museum?

O - I think one of the main difference, for me it would be architecture that exist solely inside the museum has that kind of redundancy due to the power the museum holds. It doesn’t need to do anything, besides from exits and be there to be viewed, experienced, and be amongst. Differently to the architecture outside the museum, there’s more of a perception of an architecture that serves a function, whereas as soon you put it in the museum, it can just be like an art object, or painting as such, where it doesn’t have to do anything besides from be viewed.

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On the Project of Architecture 5. Can you identify a moment of crisis in the development of your project or your thinking about your project – for example a particular problem that couldn’t be resolved, or the idea that took-over your project...? Is it an architectural problem that will continue to haunt your project even after its completion?

O - I think that moment of crisis was at the very beginning where I sat down to look at the MAXXI plans and worked myself up a little bit. Because I was looking at these plans for so long, counting all the stairs and I couldn’t figure them out. I couldn’t figure out how the stairs worked. And I thought that’s a great project, so I worked through it. Then a couple of days later, I was talking with a friend, and I showed him the plans, and he said very simply “oh yeah they do this.” I was just like, “oh no,” It really threw me out, apparently I didn’t have a project anymore. It really threw into contention what I had thought was written in the plans was incorrect and what I assumed was incorrect. But I was also vindicated later on when more of the stairs were also incorrectly drawn so I had a bit of a win down the track.

6. Has your project for an architecture exhibition changed your position or attitude to architecture more generally? If yes, how?

O - Not really to put it simply. I would say as someone who has never been particularly interested in architecture for its building capacity, or capacity to be building. The architecture exhibition really sits neatly into my current position or interest in architecture as almost like more of an art object, more of an installation, that interact with building and become part of building but not necessarily in that same functional sense. It doesn’t have to do anything, but be there, be an imposition or an added or subtracted event.

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15

Archive

Proposal for a residential complex in Setubal, Portugal, 1975

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17

18

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Proposal for Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Platz in Berlin, 1990

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Memory and Monument - Diane Ghirardo

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23

Works

Folly / or Monument

a

Metabolic

The project begins with Rossi’s Proposal for a residential complex in Setubal, Portugal, 1975.

In the two grounds it develops according to the natural slope of the landscape in which it sits, and the new terrace it creates on top. These grounds are mediated by the stair, an important theme for Rossi as well as a defining aspect of the MAXXI museum and the focus of this project. The project then extends itself from the step 2 cururotial strategy “Premonitions and Contradictions,” building on themes of an archive, an archeology and sites for a contested collective memory.

The methodology deployed throughout the project takes note of Fred Wilson’s 1992 exhibition “Mining the Museum.” In which he reorganised and reappropriated artifacts from the Maryland Historical Society’s archive in order to contest the mainstream stories those artifacts were employed to tell. The project considers the detail set of drawings provided by Zaha Hadid Architects as the ‘archived’ figure of the MAXXI, under scrutiny these documents were shown to have errors and inconsistencies which existed in concentration 24

within the marginal staircases of the MAXXI. These instances were capitalised on as moments to discuss the slippages and disparities between a drawn, archived historical account of the architecture and its materialised other. These staircases, extracted and reassembled according to their archival manifestation are then reinserted back into the MAXXI as seven follies, their presence acting as monuments to the disjunction between drawn and constructed, their insertion inviting the eye to dig and explore the plans for their MAXXI double.

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Overall Isometric

26

2m 1m 4m 27

8m

N

‘The Cornice Runs Triple’

Face We begin with a face, a facade that presents an identity out to the urban field beyond that of the follies MAXXI context. Appropriating the materiality of Rossi’s Monument to Sandro Pertini in Milan these faces provide each folly with a sense of a front and back, the stage and behind the scenes. We are given an added sense of interiority within the project, an additional threshold condition between the street and the interior of the museum. These faces also act as the presentation of the folly as an object for display, contrasted against a white stucco rendering projected against the rest of the folly. This material treatment and its sense of display is continued into the condition of the staircase. Situating the folly as both object and receptacle for display, allowing the MAXXI to take up its opposing role depending on the viewers orientation against the folly’s face.

2m 1m

28

4m

N

8m

29

6a

Program The follies are curated through the MAXXI to provide a programmatic doubling of the museum, of diverging storylines of the MAXXI as it begins to take on moments of Rossi, to move within or around, left or right, into a newly anointed exhibition suite 4 or into the previously marked space set against a backdrop of its duplicity. The follies act as disruptors, splitting function without the definitive act of negation. MAXXI program can remain and function however the follies impose themselves as a stage to a newly developed other.

Ground Floor Plan 1. Landscape 2. Entrance Hall 3. Reception 4.Temporary Exhibition 5. Grafhic Collection 6. Exhibition Suite 1 7. Auditorium 8. Shop 9. Coffee-Bar 30

6b

9a

9b

3a 7b 7a

3b

1

2

8

4a 5 4b

2m 1m 31

8m 2m 1m

8m 4m

N

N

32

33

2a

First Floor Plan 1. Entrance Hall 2. Exhibition Suite 2 3. Exhibition Suite 3 4. Exhibition Suite 4 5. Auditorium 34

2b

3a

2b 3b

4a

3a 4b

1

1

5b

100.0

4b

5a

5b

2m 1m 35

8m

2m 1m

4m

8m

N

N

36

37

Second Floor Plan 1. Entrance Hall 2. Exhibition Suite 3 3. Exhibition Suite 5 38

3a 3b

2a 2b

1

2m 1m 39

8m

2m 1m

4m

8m

N

N

40

41

‘A Performance, Against or To?’

Program Program becomes directional, situated against the face. Which stage does one stand on and which audience do they present to? The auditorium is the poster child of the follies programmatic intent.

Does one present to or against the folly?

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‘A Ramp and a Stair Sit Side by Side’

Form Misstep Internally the follies develop three distinct formal constructions in response to the inconsistencies of their documentation. The Misstep, the void, and the double. The misstep is a moment of not quite, of varying accounts of ramps and stairs, that miss their mark. A staircase whose rise and staircount are insufficient to reach the next platform, or an instance of varying staircouts provided resulting in extra or omitted stairs.

2m 1m

44

4m

8m

N 45

‘Redaction, Omission, Intervention’

Form Void The misstep becomes the premonition of the void, which develops as the misstep becomes consistent through the folly. Creating internal shafts of redaction and omission.

2m 1m

46

8m 4m

N 47

‘An Elevator Core’

Form Double The double is developed from moments unseen by the archive, the staircase whose exact levels are not documented. These manifest as the double, two possibilities that stitch together either end and attempt to fill in the gaps according to the logic of moving up or moving down.

2m 1m

48

4m

N

8m

49

‘The Competition’

Confluence and Flow The stair acts as the confluence between Rossi and Zaha, an important theme within Rossi’s monuments and the original archived residence, as well as a defining characteristic of the MAXXI museum. Within the MAXXI the follies provide additional conduits of movement via the stair through the museum. A way to short circuit and circumvent the predescribed tracks of the MAXXI. These paths at points intermingle and interact with their MAXXI constituents, aligning themselves, revealing their duplicity before fading away as the MAXXI takes over. They provide a choice, between the traditional movements and the imposition that may lead to nowhere.

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51

‘Leftover’

Contradiction The follies are not to be read as consistent moments. We finish on a folly that for me seems to fall outside the other implications of program, identity and movement. Its imposition somewhat terminal, at the end of the line. It becomes the folly to a ground up methodology that doesn’t necessarily have a clean overall logic. Of individual contextual moments that develop but never define a whole.

This is the monument to a contested memory of the project itself. It works to unravel a singular counter memory, the follies as a collection contest the memory of the MAXXI, this folly in particular seems to contest the memory of its others.

The project considered memory, its fallibility and metabolic nature to question the museum’s modes of display. The follies act as receptacles and objects. Displaying themselves as well as the slippages of the MAXXI and its archived other, questioning the line between construction and drawing and providing a contested site for a collective counter memory of the museum and its meanings.

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53

Curated Dyslexia

The new museum curated by Oskar Alexander Rosa explores a formal re-reading of the Maxxi archive, which builds on the misrepresentations drawn into the memory of the Maxxi, where they are installed as follies to act as a collective countermemory of the Maxxi context.

The follies (seen in the Isometric view) are the funhouse mirror reflection of their Maxxi counterparts and communicate together on their own accord.

Their collective presence makes it seem they don’t even need the Maxxi anymore, as if the Maxxi evaporates around them and it becomes a distant memory. The follies aren’t parasitical; they stand as a constituent but alone. Forming a distorted memory, a lie of what the Maxxi museum was if it was never there. Does that mean that the Maxxi Museum never needed to be there?

The curator uses the staircase not to disorient the patron but to portray a wicked reflection of the Maxxi, where the original Maxxi communicates horizontal circulation, the fun-house mirror twin communicates its story through vertical circulation. While walking through the stairs of the “Face”, the old Maxxi behaves like it needs the new folly, not that the new folly needed it; a great paradox has been created.

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When walking through these staircases, foreign memories started to flash in my mind, memories older than Maxxi’s memory. The curator is taking us on a journey, reminiscent of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin, a journey that keeps revealing itself through stairs and passages.These passages and stairs look wild but are a curated dyslexia meant to counter the rigid, machine-like circulation of the original Maxxi. Like Ricardo Bofill La Muralla, each Folly’s circulation leads to a different section of the new museum with a different narrative. The curator is designing follies as a misrepresentation of the Maxxi’s memory by distorting it, blurring it with forefather and foreign memories.

-Christopher Filippidis

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Appendix i.

Steps 1 & 2

Step 1.1 Leipziger and Potsdamer Platz.

“A city bounded and crossed by walls” The city project explores the wall as an organisational structure for the division of the neighbourhood. The linearity of the residential project is adopted as the moment of the wall.

The peripheries become the infil of the leftover spaces, reading as generic and incomplete against the detail of the wall while the streets align as to always orient parallel and perpendicular. The formal procession of columns as well as the terracing caused by the strong diagonal line of the ground evident within the residential project is engaged to provide a sequence ‘up’ to the top of the hill, or the central monument of Leipziger Platz.

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City Perspective 57

City Axonometric 58

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Step 1.2 The Monument The project begins to think about the relationship between the age/historical value of the monument and the effect (if any) of Rossi’s style of shadowing has on those hierarchies. Formally the monument again plays on the procession of columns and the effect of the diagonal ground line within the original project on the proportions of the columns.

Impressions within the monument index the patternation of windows yet are revealed as such by the solid shadow left by the wall. The shadow detail and material progression across the piazza indicate a fragmentation of the ground surfaces unity. The impossible view is employed (axo 2) to think about the fragmentary effect of the shadows in the space of displayed architecture, providing a tension between the formal purity of the perceived object and the fragmentation of the drawn object via the shadow

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Axonometric 1 61

Axonometric 2 62

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Step 1.3 Analogous Architecture The objects begin to think about a ritualistic procession of objects that follow the formal procession of the residential project. The champagne glass before dinner, wine during and sherry afterwards. The formal and material aspirations of the project sit within the tension between the pure Rossian form of the residential project and the curves synonymous with the object’s type. The materiality brings this tension to the forefront utilising the disjunction between phenomenal and literal transparency blurring the formal purity brought over from the residential project with reflections and refractions caused by the embedded curves of the type.

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Dinner Set 1 65

Dinner Set 2 66

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Step 2.1 The Stage and Frame Moving from the image of the ‘Bahia at Ibirapuera’ curated by Lina Bo Bardi and Martim Goncalves.

The exhibition seeks to evoke a sense of the city through the display of the primary formal motifs of Rossi’s residential project as well as the domestic objects that would be contained within.

The display considers the stage as an instance of interiority of the displayed city, providing a moment to be within and to look out onto the procession of columns framed by the display boards and staged against the curtain. The floor condition is developed to reinforce this boundary condition with the materiality of the piazza providing an exterior ground, while stepping up and inside the floor of the gallery onto the level of the displayed work provides a contrasting condition in which the work can be viewed/read.

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69

Room 1 70

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Step 2.2 Expansion | Contraction The Archaeology of the City curated by Francois Mathey The exhibition curates a very simple yet powerful spatial condition. A juxtaposition and contrast of scale with each moment providing a glimpse and a reading of it’s other. This sense of scale is translated over to the two objects on display, A full scale tower from the city project and a glass from the analogous architecture project. Room one provides a moment of expansion in which the tower and the plinth holding the glass are dwarfed by their container. Room 2 provides a moment of compaction within the expanse of room 1, positing the plinth and glass as the moment of the figure within the original image. Finally room 3 provides another moment of compaction in which the monumentality of the tower begins to intrude into the space of room 3.

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73

Room 1 74

Room 2 75

Room 3 76

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Step 2.3 Premonitions and Contradictions Everything is Architecture curated by Hans Hollein The exhibition contests where value lies within the Rossi monument, seeking to unpack and destroy readings of Riegl’s age and historical value through the apparatus of the rod as an index of reconstruction, building on thematics developed within Lachie’s monument project.

The exhibition follows the sequence of decay through the idea of the archeology read from the precedent material. Moving from complete, to ruin, to collection, to display and ending within the archive. The rod is employed to confuse the sequence of decay, presenting as an object of reconstruction within the archive and display however also presented as a moment within the ruin as well as a historical historical object for display.

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79

Room 1 80

Room 2 81

Room 3 82

Room 4 83

Room 5 84

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Appendix ii.

Notes

Notes on the residence

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87

Notes on the city

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89

Notes on the Monument

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91

Notes on the Object

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93

Notes on the “The Stage and Frame”

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95

96

97

Notes on “Expansion|Contraction

98

99

Iteration 1 100

101

Notes on “Premonitions and Contradictions”

Iteration 1 102

103

104

105

Notes on The Museum In Chronological Order

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107

108

109

110

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112

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114

115

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Appendix iii.

Knowledge Bank

Foster, Hal. “An Archival Impulse.”

October 110 (2004): 3-22 4

OCTOBER

In the first instance archival artists seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present. To this end they elaborate on the found image, object , and text , and favor the inst allat ion format as they do so.

(Frequently they use its nonhierarchical spatiality to advantage—which is rather rare in contemporary art.) Some practitioners, such as Douglas Gordon, gravitate toward “time readymades,” that is, visual narratives that are sampled in imageprojections, as in his extreme versions of films by Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, and others.2 These sources are familiar, drawn from the archives of mass culture, to ensure a legibility that can then be disturbed or detourné; but they can also be obscure, retrieved in a gesture of alternative knowledge or countermemory. Such work will be my focus here.

Sometimes archival samplings push the postmodernist complications of originality and authorship to an extreme. Consider a collaborative project like No Ghost Just a Shell (1999–2002), led by Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno: when a Japanese animation company offered to sell some of its minor manga characters, they bought one such person-sign, a girl named “AnnLee,” elaborated this glyph in various pieces, and invited other artists to do the same. Here the project became a “chain” of projects, “a dynamic structure that produce[d] forms that are part of it”; it also became “the story of a community that finds itself in an image”—in an image archive in the making.3 French critic Nicolas Bourriaud has championed such art under the rubric of “post-production,” which underscores the secondary manipulations often constitutive of it. Yet the term also suggests a changed status in the work of art in an age of digital information, which is said to follow those of industrial production and mass consumption.4 That such a new age exists as such is an ideological assumption; today, however, information does often appear as a virtual readymade, as so much data to be reprocessed and sent on, and many artists do “inventory,” “sample,” and “share” as ways of working.

This last point might imply that the ideal medium of archival art is the megaarchive of the Internet, and over the last decade terms that evoke the electronic network, such as “platforms” and “stations,” have appeared in art parlance, as has the Internet rhetoric of “interactivity.” But in most archival art the actual means applied to these “relational” ends are far more tactile and face-to-face than any Web interdisconnection from the present might be a distinctive mode of connection to it: a “whatever” artistic culture in keeping with a “whatever” political culture.

My title echoes Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Notes toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 and 13 (Spring and Summer 1980), as well as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (Spring 1999). Yet the archival impulse here is not quite allegorical à la Owens or anomic à la Buchloh; in some respects it assumes both conditions (more on which below). I want to thank the research group on archives convened by the Getty and the Clark Institutes in 2003–04, as well as audiences in Mexico City, Stanford, Berkeley, and London.

2.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Interviews, vol. 1 (Milan: Charta, 2003), p. 322.

3.

Philippe Parreno in Obrist, Interviews, p. 701. See the discussion of this project by Tom McDonough, as well as the interview with Huyghe by George Baker, in this volume.

4.

See Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, trans.

Jeanine Herman (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002).

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An Archival Impulse

5

face.5 The archives at issue here are not databases in this sense; they are recalcitrantly material, fragmentary rather than fungible, and as such they call out for human interpretation, not machinic reprocessing.6 Although the contents of this art are hardly indiscriminant, they remain indeterminant like the contents of any archive, and often they are presented in this fashion—as so many promissory notes for further elaboration or enigmatic prompts for future scenarios.7 In this regard archival art is as much preproduction as it is postproduction: concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces (perhaps “anarchival impulse” is the more appropriate phrase), these artists are often drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects—in art and in history alike—that might offer points of departure again.

If archival art differs from database art, it is also distinct from art focused on the museum. Certainly the figure of the artist-as-archivist follows that of the artistas-curator, and some archival artists continue to play on the category of the collection. Yet they are not as concerned with critiques of representational totality and institutional integrity: that the museum has been ruined as a coherent system in a public sphere is generally assumed, not triumphally proclaimed or melancholically pondered, and some of these artists suggest other kinds of ordering—within the museum and without. In this respect the orientation of archival art is often more “institutive” than “destructive,” more “legislative” than “transgressive.”8 Finally, the work in question is archival since it not only draws on informal archives but produces them as well, and does so in a way that underscores the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private.

Further, it often arranges these materials according to a quasi-archival logic, a matrix of citation and juxtaposition, and presents them in a quasi-archival architecture, a complex of texts and objects (again, platforms, stations, kiosks . . . ). Thus Dean speaks of her method as “collection,” Durant of his as “combination,” Hirschhorn of his as “ramification”—and much archival art does appear to ramify like a weed or a 5.

To take two prominent examples: the 2002 Documenta, directed by Okwui Enwezor, was conceived in terms of “platforms” of discussion, scattered around the world (the exhibition in Kassel was only the final such platform). And the 2003 Venice Biennale, directed by Francesco Bonami, featured such sections as “Utopia Station,” which exemplified the archival discursivity of much recent art.

“Interactivity” is an aim of “relational aesthetics” as propounded by Bourriaud in his 1998 text of that title. See my “Arty Party,” London Review of Books, December 4, 2003, as well as Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” in this volume.

6.

Lev Manovich discusses the tension between database and narrative in The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 233–36.

7.

I owe the notion of “promissory notes” to Malcolm Bull. Liam Gillick describes his work as “scenario-based”; positioned in “the gap between presentation and narration,” it might also be called archival. See Gillick, The Woodway (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2002).

8.

Jacques Derrida uses the first pair of terms to describe opposed drives at work in the concept of the archive in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), and Jeff Wall uses the second pair to describe opposed imperatives at work in the history of the avant-garde, in Jeff Wall (London: Phaidon Press, 1996). How does the archival impulse relate to “archive fever”? Perhaps, like the Library of Alexandria, any archive is founded on disaster (or its threat), pledged against a ruin that it cannot forestall. Yet for Derrida archive fever is more profound, bound up with repetition-compulsion and a death drive. And sometimes this paradoxical energy of destruction can also be sensed in the work at issue here.

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6

OCTOBER

“rhizome” (a Deleuzean trope that others employ as well).9 Perhaps all archives develop in this way, through mutations of connection and disconnection, a process that this art also serves to disclose. “Laboratory, storage, studio space, yes,” Hirschhorn remarks, “I want to use these forms in my work to make spaces for the movement and endlessness of thinking. . . . ”10 Such is artistic practice in an archival field.

Archive as Capitalist Garbage Bucket Sometimes strained in effect, archival art is rarely cynical in intent (another welcome change); on the contrary, these artists often aim to fashion distracted viewers into engaged discussants (here there is nothing passive about the word “archival”).11 In this regard Hirschhorn, who once worked in a Communist collective of graphic designers, sees his makeshift dedications to artists, writers, and philosophers—which partake equally of the obsessive-compulsive Merzbau of Kurt Schwitters and the agitprop kiosks of Gustav Klucis—as a species of passionate pedagogy in which the lessons on offer concern love as much as knowledge.12 Hirschhorn 9.

Dean discusses “collect ion” in Tacit a Dean (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2001), and “bad combination” is the title of a 1995 work by Durant. The classic text on “the rhizome” is, of course, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), where they underscore its “principles of connection and heterogeneity”: “Any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order” (p. 7).

10.

Thomas Hirschhorn, “Interview with Okwui Enwezor,” in James Rondeau and Suzanne Ghez, eds., Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2000), p. 32. Again, many other artists could be considered here as well, and the archival is only one aspect of the work that I do discuss.

11.

Indeed, its lively motivation of sources contrasts with the morbid citationality of much postmodern pastiche. See Mario Perniola, Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art, trans.

Christopher Woodall (London: Verso, 1995).

12.

“I can say that I love them and their work unconditionally,” Hirschhorn says of his commemorated figures (Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake, p. 30). Benjamin Buchloh provides an incisive genealogy of his work in “Cargo and Cult: The Displays of Thomas Hirschhorn,” Artforum (November 2001). Bice Curinger, Short Guide: Into the Work of Thomas Hirschhorn (New York: Barbara Gladstone Gallery, 2002), is also helpful.

Thomas Hirschhorn. Tränetisch.

Kunstmuseum, Luzern, 1996.

Courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York.

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An Archival Impulse

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seeks to “distribute ideas,” “liberate activity,” and “radiate energy” all at once: he wants to expose different audiences to alternative archives of public culture, and to charge this relationship with affect.13 In this way his work is not only institutive but also libidinal; at the same time the subject-object relations of advanced capitalism have transformed whatever counts as libido today, and Hirschhorn works to register this transformation too and where possible to reimagine these relations as well.

Hirschhorn produces interventions in “public space” that question how this category might still function today. Most of his projects play on vernacular forms of marginal barter and incidental exchange, such as the street display, the market stall, and the information booth—arrangements that typically feature homemade offerings, refashioned products, improvised pamphlets, and so on.14 As is well known, he has divided much of his practice into four categories—“direct sculptures,” “altars,” “kiosks,” and “monuments”—all of which manifest an eccentric yet exoteric engagement with archival materials.

The direct sculptures tend to be models placed in interiors, frequently in exhibitions. The first piece was inspired by the spontaneous shrine produced at the spot in Paris where Princess Diana died: as her mourners recoded the monument to liberty already at the site, they transformed an official structure into a “just monument,” according to Hirschhorn, precisely because it “issue[d] from below.” His direct sculptures aim for a related effect: designed for “messages that have nothing to do with the original purpose of the actual support,” they are offered as provisional mediums of détournement, for acts of reinscription “signed by the community” (this is one meaning of “direct” here).15 The altars seem to stem from the direct sculptures. At once modest and outlandish, these motley displays of images and texts commemorate cultural figures of special importance to Hirschhorn; he has dedicated four such pieces—to artists Otto 13.

Hirschhorn in Obrist, Interviews, pp. 396–99.

14.

Of course Hirschhorn is not the only artist to work with these formats: David Hammons, Jimmie Durham, Gabriel Orozco, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, among others, do so as well.

15.

Hirschhorn in Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake, p. 31.

Hirschhorn. Otto Freundlich altar.

Berlin Biennale, 1998. Courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York.

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Wilson, Fred, and Howard Halle. “Mining the Museum.” Grand Street, no. 44 (1993): 151-72.

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02/11

Doreen Mende, “The Undutiful Daughter’s Concept of Archival Metabolism” EFlux Journal, vol 93, 2018,

Ken Lum, Melly Shum hates her job, 1990. Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 1992.đPhoto: Aad Hoogendoorn

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The Undutiful Daughter’s Concept of Archival Metabolism

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There is something monstrous, hybrid, and vibrant in the air; dear readers, I feel new ideas coming our way. We just do not know yet what this corpus can do.

– Rosi Braidotti1 The problem with formative twentieth-century theories of the archive is their monocultural commitment to “the law” as if it was naturally given: “The archive is first the law of what can be said,” wrote Michel Foucault already in 1969.

What if that which refuses to be forgotten escapes language? Or what if she speaks a language that the law’s system fails to recognize? What if she has been outlawed? It does not take much to realize that “the law of what can be said,” structurally speaking, is the law of the father. Only recently, it seems, psychosocial studies have revealed pitfalls in feminist theories that analyze the motherdaughter relation as a symptom of the patriarchal order rather than a structural possibility in its own right: “She is condemned to memory while he is given access to desire,” is the formulation Amber Jacobs proposes to conceptualize the absent, or untheorized, maternal law.2 In other words, the “law of what can be said” situates the archive in a dominant order of paternal control. đđđđđđđđđđSuch an order does not make sense in the twenty-first century. It never made sense.

Needless to say, it represses, neglects, and disregards pretty much everything and everyone who does not fit into the law of what can be said: the asylum seeker, the no-body, the depressed, the burned out, speakers of non-imperial languages, etc. Those who have been overlooked by this law seem to require preparation or education in order to satisfy juridical norms, which themselves follow patriarchal, or at least paternal, rules. The archive’s old capacity is defined by those who have access to the law and who (have learned to) speak its language. In the face of this situation, why on earth should a daughter – or someone otherwise inhabiting the life of a daughter – submit to a language that forces everyone who is non-father-like to rehearse a vocabulary that imposes, a priori, a set of principles that are not hers? Twenty-first century archive-theory-without-Theory reformulates the potential of speculation as an epistemological drive. It is an uncategorized or deschooled theory that emerges below the calculating faculties of capital-T Theory, because the daughter does not want to limit her knowledge by subscribing to the prescription, description, and inscription of regulative systems that would contain her monstrous unpredictability of thought. The commitment to

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her own voice, which the law cannot (or does not want to) recognize, has a reward: not only does she need to find her own voice to speak her own language, but she must also continuously perfect her capacity to learn the dominant language. We would do well to listen to the daughter’s speechin-tongues, because she can teach us the practice of rehearsing the “xeno-epistemic” engine. This concept borrows from Sarat Maharaj’s strong proposal to seek forms of knowledge outside the normative spheres of reason, i.e., outside the law but inside (non)knowing.3 It helps us understand that little-t theory might not be found in libraries or inside the law. đđđđđđđđđđThe xeno-epistemic approach demands that the undutiful daughter learns a language she does (not) want to learn, but has to. It is a forced learning, perhaps similar to forced labor, but different insofar as once she has learned the dominant language, she is free to do what she wants. However, we know how much effort it takes to maintain our second or third languages, i.e., languages different than our mother tongue.

Each of these multiple pedagogical projects consumes time and energy. They train the daughter to recognize her “double consciousness,” which, before the law’s gaze, provokes feelings of both achievement and failure, along with vivid dreams and nightmares.4 The experience is marked by pain, struggle, and exhaustion. At the same time, it builds community, hybridity, and articulation that moves below the possession of the law. What will this “monstrous, hybrid, and vibrant … corpus” be able to do? We feel it, but cannot speak it or spell it out. đđđđđđđđđđThe following is an attempt to think the archival condition from the place of the daughter – more precisely, the undutiful daughter who refuses the paternal law but who also believes in the archive’s futuristic power. She cannot (not) participate in the language “of what can be said,” but she does so in accordance with her own learning processes, vocabularies, and pathways.

She is already two: a daughter and an undutiful.

To occupy the perspective of the daughter, the first task is not to change the law – while this is urgently necessary, we are not there yet. Rather, we would do better to listen to the undutiful daughter who has not been born as such.

Inhabiting the place of the daughter is not a matter of biological essentialism or of provided subjectivity; instead, we become an undutiful daughter through, as Rosi Braidotti suggests, a process of “conceptual disobedience.”5 (Anyone can become an undutiful daughter.) In other words, she does not struggle for representation and recognition within the logic of the law; rather, she continuously rehearses the 09.18.18 / 18:52:20 EDT

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actualization of intensities and forces (Deleuze) by radically challenging the archive’s mind-set. đđđđđđđđđđ*** đđđđđđđđđđLet us begin before the beginning – before the arrival of the “archon,” that is, the guardian of documents, the gatekeeper, the patriarch and the matriarch.6 When the undutiful daughter occupied the front room of the family home. The undutiful daughter, full of vibrant ideas not yet articulated fully, wants to provide shelter for Melly Shum, the undutiful daughter’s friend and loving aunt, who publicly declared in 1990 that she hates her job.7 It’s been everywhere. In the newspapers. Reporters in front of the house. On television in Teen Species. LinkedIn. Facebook.

Flickr. Instagram. It’s gone viral. “Melly Shum hates her job.” On a billboard. For decades. Melly Shum. A woman of East Asian descent. Large white glasses. In her thirties. Working in an office. On her own. In Rotterdam. Pictured at work by Ken Lum. Another worker. In the picture Melly, it seems, is performing abstract labor, operating a machine to her right, maybe doing some calculations. Since 1990!8 Goodness. If only Melly’s abstract labor was recognized, even in retrospect – like the women trained in mathematics for the US Army’s ENIAC Project who, in the 1940s, were initially called “computers” – then she might speak again.9 She could speak of and against “the law of what can be said.” đđđđđđđđđđThe archon’s arrival will never be delayed in the architecture of commencement that constrains, ties, and binds the archive to a building, a place, an address, a location from which the archon supports “the law of what can be said.”10 This law exists even absent the struggle for a body but is secured by property.

This law is neither nature’s given nor God’s trick, but rather power’s ontological principle for structuring narrative, history, and privilege. For more than twenty years, Melly Shum has been unable to speak more than a single sentence.

The Witte de With Center is in an area of Rotterdam that, around the time of the institution’s founding in 1990, was known for accommodating the local economy of international sex workers and coffee shops, which was supported by the nearby harbor and its liquid/fluid business of globalization. Was something missing? Or did the laws of administration and self-organization give rise to a mutant whose speaking, whose language, results from metabolized and continuously metabolizing processes that the archive cannot recognize according to its outdated law? Melly Shum might not have received a job promotion either. Rather, the exceptional appearance of an international artist reads the residents’ participation into “statements as unique events”

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contemporary architecture of computation:17 not only is the household of the archon turned inside out into the agora, but it is also made to disseminate the archive, ramified as digitized materiality, spreading, travelling, and reaching beyond the “law of what can be said.” The metabolic agora empowers and animates that which exists as a materialization of energy – a potency we need in order to process history into the future as a work of differentiation: the metabolic agora respects the existing. At the same time, it operates a platform that enables a transgenerational transmission, one that becomes visible through format changes: from paper to .pdf to email attachment to Xerox copy, even if those formats are “only” the means of production in the framework of a research project. The metabolic agora supports the political work of de-privatizing, defamiliarizing, and de-hierarchizing the narrations of history, towards the articulation and actualization of differences and intensities. Thus, this gatheringbut-changing-place which is the arena for spiritual, political, and cultural life, and which is no longer confined to one location like the twentieth-century archive used to be, seems to provide some of the instruments the daughter needs for processing knowledge otherwise. đđđđđđđđđđTo better understand the metabolic agora for our politics of the archive in the twenty-first century, we need to shift perspectives on the materiality of the archive itself. Under conditions of uncontrolled sprawl, decentralization, and dissemination, the archive in the twenty-first century is in need not only of a statement but a concept. It is not that the statement has disappeared but rather that the concept allows that which cannot be said according to the archon to persist by different means. Elizabeth Grosz helpfully proposes that concepts “are the production of immaterial forces that line materiality with incorporeals, potentials, latencies: concepts are the virtualities of matter, the ways in which matter can come to be otherwise, the promise of a future different from the present.”18 This is what counts: the undutiful daughter always dreams of a location that is deterritorialized in the world, searching and finding a language that allows one to think towards “a future different from the present.” đđđđđđđđđđ*** đđđđđđđđđđLet’s try the impossible and begin before the beginning. The undutiful daughter speaks truth to “the law of what can be said.” Such a truth is neither given, inherited, nor a unitary subject. It emerges from the complexity of life, which cannot be specialized into one discipline of knowledge. The undutiful daughter speaks as an amateur.19 She speaks while the father sleeps.

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speaks on her own, with her own voice. For us, here, she has learned to listen, and sometimes to translate, the bubble dome of voices – not only Dutch, French, or English, but also the voice of the artist, the traveler, the migrant, the director, the neighbor, the drug addict, the sex worker. In other words, she has trained herself to speak several languages. If she encounters languages she cannot speak, she insists on listening to what she cannot decipher (yet), while also listening to her friend translate into her ear. What she hears is not a mishmash of voices or approaches, but the articulation of the polyphonic existence of different languages, practices, and readings of the archive. đđđđđđđđđđShe continuously rehearses the politics of polyphony, as exemplified by Eleanor Bond’s Witte de With exhibition “Cosmoville” (1995), described by the artist as a “landscape/territory that was being continuously constructed and extended.”20 She asks questions. Many questions: Who is Witte de With, the “naval hero” in one of Bik Van der Pol’s scripted texts?21 What does de With’s heroism hide? The fact that “the Witte de With street had a terrible reputation”?22 Or that Witte de With, the naval dominator, fought in wars in Brazil on behalf of Dutch colonialism? She tours around on the bike that Eleanor Bond used for six months in 1995; she rides through Rotterdam’s liminal zones and areas of transition, including the inner harbor of Maasvlakte, to recreate a fictitious history of “Cosmoville” that includes unrecorded and undocumented conversations with artists and historians Harry Sengers and Willem Oorebeek.23 She speaks nearby. Eschewing a microphone.

Eschewing statements. The opposite of direct action. But cycling. Listening. Touring. Thinking.

Aiming to unearth and separate several pastlayers impregnated by opposing narratives of “hero” and “junky,” urging us to approach the exhibition and institution through a practice of what Boris Buden calls, in his analysis of the museum, “post-historical sociality,” which insists on the contemporary need to rethink the art-institutional space and its social function of narrating the present.24 In light of the urgent need for a new social imaginary and a more complex archive, the material traces of past events – here, the exhibition history of Witte de With – cannot be tied to “history a priori” alone.

These traces call for a would-be historian, one who does not want to become a specialist or an official historian, but rather an “accidental archivist,” as described by filmmaker Didi Cheeka.25 The accidental archivist speaks from below to the law of what can be said; this remains a speaking with the archon because there is no other choice, and there is no choice other than to find a form of speaking from

Karl Halliday and Matt Siddall, “Silences between ticks of a clock” Exhibition held at George Paton Gallery, 17-28 Feb, 2020

silencesͳ betweenͳ ticksͳ ofͳͳ aͳ clockͳ

Curated by Karl Halliday and Matt Siddall 17-28 February 2020 George Paton Gallery, Union House

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ͳ ͳ rosanna blacketͳ madeleine lesjak-attonͳ nina sanadzeͳ gail smithͳ tina stefanouͳ mimmalisa trifilòͳ ͳ ͳ ͳ ͳ ͳ ͳ

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silences between ticks of a clockͳ Absence and Erasure in an Age of Cultural Palimpsestͳ Co-curated by Karl Halliday and Matt Siddallͳ ͳ Asͳ weͳ enterͳ theͳ thirdͳ decadeͳ ofͳ theͳ 21stͳ century,ͳ weͳ findͳ ourselvesͳ anxiouslyͳ situatedͳ uponͳ theͳ precipiceͳ ofͳ anͳ unprecedentedͳ setͳ ofͳ culturalͳ conditions.ͳ Theͳ once-clearlyͳ definedͳ parametersͳ distinguishingͳ ‘theͳ real’ͳ fromͳ ‘theͳ virtual’ͳ areͳ continuallyͳ unsettled,ͳ asͳ ourͳ socialͳ relations,ͳ economicͳ structuresͳ andͳ industrialͳ programsͳ areͳ everͳ moreͳ mediatedͳ byͳ digitalͳ networks,ͳ ensuringͳ ourͳlivesͳareͳconstantlyͳsurveilled,ͳourͳcommunicationsͳrecorded,ͳandͳourͳ behaviourͳ trackedͳ andͳ analysed.ͳ Andͳ yet,ͳ beneathͳ theͳ relentlesslyͳ acceleratingͳ humͳ ofͳ theͳ production,ͳ preservationͳ andͳ consumptionͳ ofͳ informationͳ viaͳ Bigͳ Data,ͳ onlineͳ socialͳ media,ͳ cloud-basedͳ storage,ͳ GPSͳ trackingͳ andͳ theͳ like,ͳ theͳ totalisingͳ archivalͳ conditionͳ weͳ seeͳ unfoldingͳ todayͳ hasͳ unexpectedlyͳ manifestedͳ whatͳ mediaͳ theoristͳ Andreasͳ Huyssenͳ diagnosesͳ asͳ aͳ shiftͳ inͳ “theͳ experienceͳ andͳ sensibilityͳ ofͳ time”1.ͳ Asͳ anͳincreasinglyͳglobalisedͳ economyͳ seesͳ digitalͳ networksͳ expandͳ atͳ anͳ exponentialͳ pace,ͳ theͳ marginsͳ ofͳ spaceͳ andͳ time that once defined the new and the now are shrinking unlike ever before.ͳͳ ͳ Underͳ theseͳ elevatedͳ conditions,ͳ memoryͳ takesͳ onͳ aͳ newͳ roleͳ asͳ aͳkindͳofͳcounterweightͳtoͳ whatͳ Fredricͳ Jamesonͳ callsͳ aͳ ‘lossͳ ofͳ bearings’2.ͳ Inͳ responseͳtoͳourͳgrowingͳuncertainties,ͳweͳ haveͳ nowͳ becomeͳ accustomedͳ toͳ participatingͳ inͳ practicesͳ ofͳ memorialisationͳ enͳ masse.ͳ Thisͳ isͳ evidencedͳ byͳ suchͳ mountingͳ phenomenaͳ asͳ theͳ popularͳ revivalͳ ofͳretroͳclothingͳandͳ vinylͳ records;ͳ theͳ commercialͳ marketingͳ ofͳ nostalgia;ͳ theͳ inventionͳ ofͳ personalͳ ‘profiles’ͳ online;ͳ theͳ proliferationͳ ofͳ privateͳmuseumsͳandͳheritageͳsites;ͳtheͳemergenceͳofͳco-existentͳ feministͳ histories,ͳ queerͳ histories,ͳ Indigenousͳ histories,ͳ historiesͳ ofͳ peopleͳ ofͳ colour,ͳ andͳ otherͳ counter-narratives;ͳ theͳ upsurgeͳ ofͳ visualͳ artͳ practicesͳ dealingͳ withͳ foundͳ objects,ͳ archivalͳ materialͳ andͳ documentaryͳ practices;ͳ theͳ repatriationͳ ofͳ culturalͳ artefactsͳ andͳ theͳ riseͳ ofͳ publicͳ commemorations,ͳ anniversaries,ͳ monumentsͳ andͳ reconciliationsͳ byͳ politicalͳ andͳ religiousͳ leadersͳ redressingͳtheͳfailuresͳofͳpreviousͳadministrationsͳinͳanͳattemptͳtoͳhealͳ theͳ woundsͳ fromͳ theͳ past.ͳ Asͳ subjectsͳ inͳ searchͳ ofͳ selfͳ withinͳ aͳ landscapeͳ thatͳ deniesͳ stability,ͳ weͳ haveͳ symptomaticallyͳ comeͳ toͳ locateͳ andͳ generateͳ identityͳ withinͳ collectiveͳ histories,ͳ withͳmemoryͳservingͳasͳbothͳwatchͳandͳcompass,ͳprovidingͳusͳwithͳbriefͳmomentsͳ of orientation as we navigate through a forest of ceaseless movement and change.ͳ ͳ Ofͳ course,ͳ theͳ ubiquitousͳ integrationͳ ofͳ digitalͳ networksͳ inͳ ourͳ livesͳ isͳ notͳ withoutͳ itsͳ benefits.ͳ Unlikeͳ everͳ before,ͳ theͳ Internetͳ grantsͳ allͳ connectedͳ aͳ platformͳ toͳ record,ͳ toͳspeakͳ andͳ toͳ actͳ inͳ aͳ diverse,ͳ democratic,ͳ decentralisedͳ publicͳ space.ͳ Digitalͳ networksͳ transcendͳ theͳ confinesͳ ofͳ borders,ͳ class,ͳ andͳ language.ͳ Theyͳ haveͳ beenͳ responsibleͳ forͳ unitingͳ communities,ͳ forͳ mobilisingͳ revolutions,ͳ forͳ exposingͳ hiddenͳ truthsͳ andͳ forͳ amplifyingͳ theͳ voice,ͳ suffrageͳ andͳ presenceͳ ofͳ theͳ marginalised.ͳ Consequently,ͳwhatͳweͳareͳexperiencingͳisͳ aͳ completeͳ uprootingͳ ofͳ theͳ edificesͳofͳfixity,ͳlinearity,ͳcentringͳandͳhierarchyͳthatͳforͳsoͳlongͳ sustainedͳ systemsͳ ofͳ powerͳ andͳ exchange.ͳ Instead,ͳ digitalͳ networksͳ haveͳ introducedͳ theͳ 1 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia’ in Public Culture, Vol. 12, No. 1ͳ (Winter 2000), 28.ͳ 2 Geoff Eley, ‘The Past Under Erasure? History, Memory, and the Contemporary’ in Journal ofͳ Contemporary History 46, no. 3 (2011), 556.ͳ

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potentialͳ forͳ aͳ heterogeneous,ͳ complex,ͳ multi-directionalͳ setͳ ofͳ relationsͳ composedͳ ofͳ links,ͳ layers,ͳ networksͳ andͳ rhizomes.3ͳ Putͳ intoͳ metaphor,ͳ weͳ haveͳ enteredͳ anͳ ageͳ ofͳ culturalͳ palimpsest.ͳ ͳͳ Accordingͳ toͳ theͳ Oxfordͳ Englishͳ Dictionary,ͳ aͳ palimpsestͳ isͳ “aͳ parchmentͳ orͳ otherͳ writingͳ surfaceͳ onͳ whichͳ theͳ originalͳ textͳ hasͳ beenͳ effacedͳ orͳ partiallyͳ erased,ͳ andͳthenͳoverwrittenͳ byͳ another.”4ͳ Itͳ isͳ aͳ modelͳ fosteredͳ fromͳ theͳ layeringͳ ofͳ multipleͳ recordsͳ thatͳ perpetuallyͳ emergeͳ andͳ eraseͳ andͳ re-emergeͳ inͳ aͳ complexͳ intertextualͳ structureͳ ofͳ mutualͳ traces.5ͳ Amidstͳ itsͳ violentͳ entanglementͳ ofͳ co-inhabitingͳ texts,ͳ records,ͳ historiesͳ andͳ authors,ͳ theͳ palimpsestͳ generatesͳ manifoldͳ meanings,ͳ fracturingͳ theͳ possibilityͳ ofͳ aͳ singularͳ interpretationͳ intoͳ aͳ chorusͳ ofͳ perspectives.ͳ Theͳ Internetͳ mayͳ wellͳ beͳ theͳ ultimateͳ exampleͳ ofͳ aͳ palimpsest,ͳ eternallyͳ contractedͳ byͳitsͳemphasisͳonͳimmediacyͳtoͳbeͳinͳaͳtirelessͳstateͳofͳ refreshing,ͳ reproducingͳ andͳ renewal.ͳ Meanwhile,ͳ theͳ digitalͳ network’sͳ falseͳ guaranteeͳ ofͳ permanenceͳ hasͳ triggeredͳ widespreadͳ fearsͳ ofͳ inevitableͳ materialͳ lossͳ inͳtheͳphysicalͳworld,ͳ inͳ whichͳ everything,ͳ valuableͳ orͳ not,ͳ mustͳ beͳ digitised,ͳ storedͳ andͳ immortalisedͳ intoͳ virtualͳ systemsͳ ofͳ memory.ͳ Theͳ outcomeͳ ofͳ thisͳ excess,ͳ asͳ Brianͳ Dillonͳ asserts,ͳ isͳ opacity,ͳ toͳ whichͳ “nothingͳ isͳ erased,ͳ butͳ overlaidͳ toͳ theͳ pointͳ ofͳ illegibility.”6ͳ Simplyͳ put,ͳ ifͳ everyoneͳ speaks,ͳ then nobody hears.ͳ ͳͳ Inͳ theͳ wakeͳ ofͳ ourͳ currentͳ preoccupationͳ withͳ archiving,ͳ performanceͳ andͳ productivity,ͳ doͳ actsͳ ofͳ forgetting,ͳ disappearanceͳ andͳ silenceͳ becomeͳ formsͳ ofͳ politicalͳ resistance?ͳ silencesͳ betweenͳ ticksͳ ofͳ aͳclockͳinvitesͳtheͳcriticalͳinsightͳofͳsixͳgraduateͳFineͳArtsͳstudentsͳfromͳtheͳ Victorianͳ Collegeͳ ofͳ theͳ Artsͳ toͳ meditateͳ uponͳ conceptsͳ ofͳ absence,ͳ erasureͳ andͳ mortalityͳ throughͳ sixͳ diverseͳ approachesͳ toͳ contemporaryͳ artͳ practice.ͳ Engagingͳ withͳ themesͳ ofͳ historicalͳ remembranceͳ andͳ amnesia,ͳ publicͳ andͳ privateͳ memory,ͳ ageingͳ andͳ death,ͳ andͳ institutionalͳ inclusionͳ andͳ exclusion,ͳ silencesͳ betweenͳ ticksͳ ofͳ aͳ clockͳ considersͳ andͳ challengesͳ theͳrolesͳthatͳmemorialisationͳperformsͳinͳshapingͳcontemporaryͳexperienceͳandͳ theͳ publicͳ consciousness,ͳ bringingͳ aboutͳ newͳ understandingsͳ ofͳ whatͳ itͳ meansͳ toͳ actͳ andͳ not act today.ͳ Karl Hallidayͳͳ Co-curator We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which this exhibition takes place, theͳ Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We acknowledge that this is stolen land andͳ that sovereignty was never ceded.ͳ ͳͳ We would like to give special thanks to Dave Attwood, Sandra Bridie, Martin Wills, Henry King, Eliasͳ Redstone, Brendan McCleary, Rachel Ciesla, Jack Burton & Julia Suddenly. Without your guidance andͳ support, this exhibition would not have been possible.ͳ

The Chicago School of Media Theory, ‘palimpsest’, available online:ͳ “https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/palimpsest/”, n.p.

“Palimpsest, n and adj.” Oxford English Dictionary 5 Sarah Dillon, The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (London/New York: Continuum,ͳ 2007), 2.

6 Brian Dillon ‘The revelation of Erasure’, Tate Etc. (2006), available online:ͳ “https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-8-autumn-2006/revelation-erasure”, n.p.

3

4

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TJ Demos, “Sites of Collective CounterMemory,” retrieved from: http:// anima t eproj ect sarchi ve.org/wr i t ing/ essays/tj_demos Sites of Collective Counter-Memory by TJ Demos 2012 ‘Counter-memory designates a practice of memory formation that is social and political, one that runs counter to the society of the spectacle.’

‘Collective memory’ designates the shared knowledge of past experience held by the members of a select group. Developed by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in the first half of the twentieth century, the concept stresses the relation between memory and its social context.[1] More than individual memory, collective memory is a key component in the formation of social bonds and community relations, irrespective of whether or not it is later codified, archived, or formalised as history. Of course, collective memory depends on material sites of transmission and sharing, where experience links with technology, urban space, and institutions.

The obvious sites of contemporary collective memory are mass media (television, film, print media), art, culture, and educational discourse, political demonstrations and mass spectacles (sports and music), and, increasingly, social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter). As social 142

forms of being-together are ever more structured by commercial relations, one might say that we’re living through an era of the impoverishment of mass collective memory (one that began with the ‘culture industry’ and advanced capitalism in the early twentieth century[2]).

That impoverishment is defined by the loss of historical experience and the diminishment of political agency, as collective identity is defined more and more by reactionary and intolerant forms such as nationalism, fandom, and consumerism (identified long ago by Guy Debord as the ‘society of the spectacle’—one of general amnesia, capitalist subjection, and social separation[3]).

The problem is acute with social media, which ostensibly answers the desire for connectivity and friendship, but depends on techno-social atomisation mediated by the consumption of computers and mobile phones.

As governments controlled by corporate interests attempt to define the terms of collective memory so that it supports their agenda of ‘sustainable development’, meaning increased economic inequality and environmental destruction, the need to continue the struggle for a model of ‘counter-memory’ - as in Foucault’s historiographic politics[4] - remains imperative.

Counter-memory designates a practice of memory formation that is social and political, one that runs counter to the official histories of governments, mainstream mass media, and the society of the spectacle. It involves the memorialisation—a collective practice of relearning - of forgotten, suppressed, and excluded histories, which then becomes an act of political subjectification.

Recent examples include the Occupy movement’s collective learning around the struggle for anticorporate globalisation, social justice and equality; and the Arab uprising and its reanimation of memories of the unfulfilled promises of past decolonisation struggles.

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The fundamental issue is that when countermemories are produced (of state violence, war, and genocide; of colonial inequalities and atrocities; of embodied experiences that contest official histories; of the heritage and existence of subjugated groups and threatened cultures), then that production works actively toward the positive transformation of social and political reality in the future.

Art is also a privileged site where experimental collective memory can be generated, performed, and archived. Consider the recent turn to documentary practice in film and photography, which mirrors the explosion of politically engaged, independent documentary films that are disseminated freely online. Those films might expose the truths of climate change and environmental destruction, or detail the failures and human costs of neoliberal policy[5].

While ‘truth telling’ is one site of collective counter-memory, it also parallels the artistic experimentation with the notion of ‘documentary’ which can also be understood as the construction of reality through its creative imaging. Rather than resurrecting an outdated belief in documentary’s objective truthful account, artists are widely investigating the ‘politics of truth’ again in Foucault’s words - signifying a form of knowledge that is contingent, subjective, and transformative[6]. Such an investigation might bring to awareness the unrepresentable phantoms of historical experience, the traumatic hauntings of past violence, or the symptoms of psycho-social trauma, in ways that render documentary legibility and historical accuracy in a new light[7].

Increasingly, documentary is seen as a form that cannot but blend fact and fiction, the real and the imaginary—as theorists of film have proposed[8].

Collective counter-memory can be similarly positioned within creative practices that reinvent 144

the political potential of truth, and that define collective struggles committed to the invention of a better world. By remembering forgotten visions of social justice, equality, solidarity and tolerance - they make them all the more possible to be realised in the future.

Footnotes [1]See On Collective Memory, Maurice Halbwachs, Trans.

Lewis A. Coser, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, originally published posthumously in 1950.

[2]See Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Trans. John Cumming, New York: Continuum, 1994.

[3]The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, 1967, Trans.

Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: Zone Books, 1994.

[4]See Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Michel Foucault, Ttrans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Oxford: Blackwell, 1977.

[5]See, for example, Josh Fox’s Gasland, 2010, on hydrofracking in the USA; Jim Keady and Leslie Kretzu’s Behind the Swoosh: Nike’s Sweatshops and Social Justice, 2009; Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s The Take, 2004 on worker self-organization in Argentina; and John Pilger’s The War You Don’t See, 2010, on the problems of ‘embedded’ reporting in contemporary warfare.

[6]See Subjectivity and Truth, in The Politics of Truth, Michel Foucault, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, Trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007.

[7]See my forthcoming book, Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art, Sternberg Press, for further examples of recent film practices and their reinvention of the documentary mode.

[8]See, for example, Cinema 2:TheTime-Image, Gilles Deleuze, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989; and Film Fables, Jacques Rancière, Trans. Emiliano Battista, New York: Berg, 2006, originally published 2001.

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Appendix iv.

Reconstructing the Stairs

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Folly A

147

148

Folly C

149

150

Folly F/H

151

152

Folly H

153

154

Folly G

155

156

Folly N

157

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Folly A

159

160

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