A=Ajax

Ajax means nearby.
This is an essay about encounter and loneliness; about communicating desire and ambiguity; about secret and access.
The purpose of this work is to create an encounter between subject. The medium is video installation. The set is just a circular platform that goes around (there is a structure that hangs the platform) with two benches. Two same sex individuals are taking those places. What they create among themselves, their relationship, is a endless spiral of mystery and secrecy. This perpetual movement marks the impossibility of an exit: the communication is built up/imprisoned by its own laws/nature.
There isn’t a word spoken in between the individuals. What raises from their situation marks a relation of presence and desire (sometimes they look each other, or show to know someone is there). The communication they establish is never coming to form, not in words, not in structure.
The visual encounter of the subject (following the visual central field of the set up) is sided by multiple sound projection (which in fact are several words in Polari - 12 - each through different speaker). This blast of words are hidden ideas; hidden devices for expression and for circumscribing meaning. The words overlay reveals something strange: words are said in Polari and so, an inherent problem for interpretation (or perhaps not...).
It become important then, to "build up" what you want to hear by choosing the speaker you want to listen to. The choice move us through what is unknown (either you don’t know the code or you can predict the following word).

ABC...Dictiopolari

The vanishing of an culture, by the overlap of another is always marked by the attempt of eliminate its legacy (in order to establish a new order), and at the same time an integration of elements that mingle with the new implemented structure, both as folkloric and pragmatic interference.
The Dictiopolari project is born from an archaeological look on the formation of specific knowledge.
There is a relation of knowledge with Polari that marks its background and specificity: i know it because i need/want o know it; i own it an it defines me. For there as an relation of master and servant in some way: you cannot live without knowledge, but knowledge itself cannot live just in itself, without you.
Polari by giving meaning to a certain desire, creates (represents in words) an certain truth about an certain reality. A seek for truth that tries to detour and overcome the distortion of appearances that exist to mask and deny access to the real. This is precisely the bias for knowledge elaboration. And in fact, also one of the reasons for the emergence of a dictionary (to avoid misinterpretations).
The Dictiopolari is based on this need to communicate and recognition of a similar language. According to lacanian point of view, the subject (when trying to bring up its existence) is obliged to request the recognition of it to someone else; to approach others makes me identify with him (and by doing so dividing my true me). The language (the basis for this relation) is real but structures itself in the place of the other, and because of that we are able to communicate. That's the reason why the place of the other is the place of desire. Because he defines the limit that gives meaning to my action/desire.
A dictionary is an structure that defines a limit of interpretation: Dictiopolari is an interpretation of that limit. What limit? Based on what? Which relation exists between realities and communication? Is there a axis/context of relation among owner's of power? Why is there the need to form a word, to define it in sound and moreover in meaning? A dictionary reveals the existence of a structure of thought that defines a closure, a limit that safeguards the interpretation and alterity. A dictionary is like censure: reveals/creates at the same time that misprisions.

C(r)oquette

[photo: courtesy Maria Sottomayor]



C(r)oquette
Short notes on desire, representation and language.


Deep changes on the communitarian bourgeois logic brought the differentiation of numerous distinctive groups, reinscribing /institutionalizing a new class – the middle class. The former century was marked by disrupters with cannons and institutions that hold onto power (at the same time others reinforced new bodies and spirit). This confrontation logic frames an experience of the will for representing and creating new forms of speeches: alternative models of meaning and figuration. In fact, the aim for the power of represent marks one of the main conquests of the so called first wave of modern political movements. The changes on the cultural sphere (the emergency of a new social consciousness) were quite commonly linked to political agendas and organizations as the result of changes demanded on the level of economic system’s structure[1].

The logic of representation (despite it’s not a rule) is bond to the economic skeleton and to the (semantic) operations that occur among it. New figures of representation emerge in firs place when there is the common sense of desire under the cooperative cultural level (meant as more than a seldom individual desire). That is, a wish to become a figure (se camper[2]) tied to a political stand-point[3]. As the figuration is assured the recognition of the possibility for political right over the Law, the overlapping of schematic figuration (as such stereotypes and colonial points of view)… Obviously the ground yielded for the constitution of representation last for decades and in fact may not be achieved (I don’t think they ever will) the full political or social recognition/liberation[4]. For as much as it is possible for representing and enlarging new categories, fresh formulas will born in a way to fulfil and constraint the schemes that led to new identification. The diametric example that Foucault refers to in relation to the constitution of sexualities is an example of this condition[5]. The past was therefore marked by a struggle for materialization as subjects of history: the right to act over the world.

“To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic response is to demand the liberation rights of the subject.[6]”



Polari and discursive resistance.

There is a problem when eschewing resistance and representation: the fact that both constitute diametrical valences – the resistance factor and the culture emergent factor. I take for example Polari[7], that in one hand manifests itself as secret (resistance to identification) and on the other hand as (semantic) place for identification (representation).

“Individual liberation is all we can hope for and that is what you must challenge yourself to pursue.[8]”

Polari shapes the constitutiveness of a pre political communitarian ethos[9]. The group identity resistance of London’s queer subculture scene raised new alternative forms for those actual systems of signification and representation. These didn’t intent in changing the physical structure of the economic system since the concern was connected with the search for a specificity that expresses a close relation to life’s camouflage experience [10]. There isn’t an invitation to inclusiveness/openness (fear of lost of intimacy, authenticity and control) necessary for a democratic culture (since it reflects the fragmentation of society as a smaller culture). “Born” within this honesty and organic (the authentic) premises, on grammatical and intentional exclusivity, Polari wouldn’t have many chances in terms of implementation of power, since the discursive aim doesn’t leap from the personal communication to the real political effect[11]. Engaged on a bohemian tradition, sodomit underground is born and confronts its own flaw: Polari is born from a ghetto context and there finds its remarkable cultural hesitation[12].

As part of that communitarian identity ethos, Polari is born as lifestyle politics, as surface that poses itself to inform desire (and not to address it with a political agenda). The problem of the efficiency of Polari points to the fact when it isn’t vital anymore as form of secret communication. Also due to social taboos embed on the political level of discourse of homosexuality, has infantilised it into a folkloric epigraphy relegated from any possibility of progressive consequence.

Code incomprehensibility serves defensive communicative functions being the most important the reinforcement of group unity nature and reflects common interests, problems and necessities of a population. And if in one hand Polari is linked to identification it is clearly preoccupied with sexual reification. As function Polari protects sodomites from public identification and on the second hand expresses largely the ambit of distinct roles on the gay sub world. The danger of identifying an ethos as the key for authenticity tell us that such language is gay since is talked by gays and keeps a close connection with the experience of being gay. It’s clearly a dangerous thought since talks about uncontrollable variables[13].
The definition of a physical community is dangerous. It is better to assume an imaginary communitarian discourse were the analytical emphasis is set on the way linguistic elements of queer speech overlap any other characteristics[14].

Starting with Foucault notions of historical and cultural specific stages - categories aren’t significant outside their contextual source – only a notion of performativity guarantees the construction of identity according to a process of pronouncement. This is how a process of reception and production of language is installed. It is according to this understanding of language – community as performativity – that elements are found to allow the discussion about possession and foundation of cultural production logic; since the linguistic process is passable of quote/citation (hence value/rating or “appropriation”). In fact this approaches what is pointed out as Camp: confront with the dominant culture (without presenting binary values) confronting it with its wastes, revealing how any concept is historical. That it can be repeated to become recognizable r and therefore quoted – the iterability[15] - corresponds to a limit that defines a similar exteriorization in terms of analyses to what happens with censure and its withdrawing. I recall the image the uncultivated grounds leftover from the lost of censorship positioning: there is an ambiguous space leftover where representation can emerge without implicating much of a conflict. Mostly since censure was exhaustive in defining the limits of the censured object. In this way, censorship builds more than destroys. Language iterability helps to reflect the specificity of sexual discourse in which is played the nature of reception and trade. That is, what is exteriorised can only be understood within the reference to what is limited by performance – alterity.


When constituting a representation stops at a certain time, that occurrence is for sure, due to non necessity of them. The conflict either is resolved or refused. Polari as figure of representation is materialized or non viable since the logic of production-reception is stopped. The question is: if the figure of representation vanishes since the logic of need is lost why aren’t the political implications referent to dissident groups visible? In fact thus become unpractical or useless, where a dominant absorption or a dominant absence should (according to the logics of capitalism, happen).

The polemic involving need for political affirmation and identification refusal has always more to do with the fear of metanarrative’s endorsement: queer theory refuses the political concept of identity that defines a communitarian entity losing the implications of the specific individual (repetition taken as open and confused or fragmented and hard to categorize is aggressive to the notion of ideology).

Speaking about an end always implies a negotiation of needs that are born from a principle. To think in Polari as eschatological axis of “the closet” as something that is self-defined and created isn’t enough, especially confronting it with the socio-institutional processes that long those stigmatic processes. Hence a critical political overview cannot depend of its supposed relation with necessity with political categories per se since it needs to involve the speech on a mutual and contradictory dependence of categories – Polari as a semiotic place of sexual desire surrounds gender as an artificial whole and unnatural construction existing throughout repeated performance. This way, figures of representation are constituted first as figures of speech, receiving meaning on the institutional social practice and become (and always at the same time) self defined and self consumed.


A central problem when formulating figures of representation of something is placed on the frequent reduction of sexuality to sexual identity, imposing this factor as a linguistic text that is available to anyone, not stressing their own particularities. But how to relate the production of figures of representation (concepts, stereotypes and taxonomic images) to the production sphere; not on the economic level (on its relation with technique) but situating the value that she aids as a revolutionary transformation of its epoch? Are we facing the inefficiency of figures of representation (Polari as figure) towards a rescue of ancient models of rhetoric? Attempting to release the common use of the objects and speech figures of fashionable figures (the present parasite publicity presence) presenting them a revolutionary sense?

It is impossible to analyse Polari without contextualize it within the indifferent nature of proto and capitalist society where it is recognized a sort of sense of satiety and stagnation. The process of communitarian formation, by the time it loses the original communitarian marginal component (gay marginal subculture) towards a growing specular individualism, moves symbolic implications of underground culture into pastiche rhetoric. In fact pastiche is something that always has been connected to aggressive folklore of queer semiotics as camp. And in this way (incongruent for sure) the scheme of production and value (use-trade) is interrupted by the problem of a dead end rhetoric. This situation is some degree, is approachable to philosophy expansive field beyond aesthetics: into the very own field of artistic production[16]: the prolix imagination urges the necessity of interest – the work presents itself as problematic place.
The certain of neo avantgarde art bring up similar premises to queer intention: the more is expressed the less is revealed: more questions are raised and in this way detour from the increasing (dis)communicated void of contemporary individual expression[17].
Polari’s primacy may in fact lose its marginal intention becoming strongly folkloric; however its place as problematic in language itself still stands: in what circumstances a language gives place to an anti-language that resists and escapes its birthplace? What sort of production-reception logic is established on the use level?

Being desire a transitive factor, the appeal to codes in which is manifested and revealed-hidden, translates the problematic of the world/context that surrounds the subject (that inverts the logic of interest). Repression emancipates from language revealing the real limits of a representation where the analysis of desire direct us in the frontier between what can and cannot be on the locus of a subject on a specific epoch.




Footnotes

1 - As example regard the position held by women within the economic frame of late XVIII century. If the logics of reception change, that is, if the receptor changes, so the logic of production will have to.
2 - (from the French) To show up on the set/scene; appear to the public.
3 - For Sartre this figuration reflects the inextricable condition of existence according to the logic I am being later posed under the claim that The personal is political.
4 - By mean of censure devices that aren’t merely a regulation operation but an inner element of the own definition of new representations we should look at the language as limit that redefine itself. The language, that is, as language the censorship process and the representation process are symbiotic realities that never vanish or overlap one another. I rather prefer to think that it’s not the seeking for defining representations itself that defines a site for political representation, but in fact the progressive lost of censorship’s determination (as axis for political discursive connexion) on defining its own limits, since social, political and legal limits have themselves transformed. And by retrieving from those limits, reveals an uncultivated amorphous territory that allows for new occupation.
5 - See references to homossexuality in History of Sexuality I, Michel Foucault, 1994, pp.46-47.
6 - Baudrilard, Jean – The masses: the implosion of the social in the Media in “Notes from underground: zines and the politics of alternative culture” ed. Stephen Durcombe (2001).
7 - Polari (also named Palari, Palare and Parlaree) constitutes a complex index which main influences income from rhyming slang, backslang, Italian, French, Lingua Franca and Cant (criminal slang popular at the beginning of the XX century). Its structural rules are based on the grammatical rules of English but bringing itself up as antilanguage.
Mostly used by homosexual male, female impersonators, theatre agents, prostitutes and sea queens (homosexual marines), Polari constitutes an ideal platform for code communication, and specially one connected with sex acts and cruising. Its lexical structure is largely referential to professional, clothes, body parts and daily objects.
The use of Polari became mainly used by London homosexual community (one can point out the genesis of this slang to London) in between the decade of 30 and 70 of the XX century, mostly as reaction to strict anti sodomy laws (as a way to protect and camouflage or simply as form of attack, instinct or humour). I see it as an initiation model to what would be called the gay subculture (term that becomes universal in this temporal context).
8 - Mickey Z, The Reality Manifesto; Baltimore: Apathy Press Poets, 1983
9 - According Hobsbawn, there are to models of interventions that produces culture:
- political (organization, ideology and will to effectuate political changes);
- proto-political (research of an specific language that expresses common political aspirations about the world).
10 - Polari doesn’t fits on the daily demands of political strategy but as experience of the secret.
11 - Gramsci (sic) Power’s Structure: political anxiety cannot be resolved throughout Culture, as the real resolution of these problems can only happen when confronting the power on the political realm. There is, effectuate political consequences implies political programs.
12 - Awhile the legalization of sodomy and the non necessity of Polari as resistance model, the Polari is faced with its tanathian desire. According to Lacanian model of paranoid real, Polari can be thought as form of hiding an order behind a speech.
Paranoia (regarding Lacan) is the search for truth. The search that despite the occultation of appearance) insists on an order beyond things that are masquerade to denying the access to a certain reality. On the reach for its structural forms (the correspondence of the meaning of its lexicon) is established a locus for knowledge search and symbolic maintenance for a specific real. The will to know hidden things (ascetics) and our whish to know has for basis the delirium, paranoia. Our search for knowledge is delirious.
The extension of Polaris’s vitality is less centred on its folk character that on the scatological rereading of its profound sense of reality: revaluation of this (historicist notion) non category as fiction.
13 - It is better to autonomize this speech as tradition dissidence. Tradition that speecks a language that for being understood and making sense for the I as gay (being I a revelation of what I am and being where I am; the knowledge that I possess reveal my context and not some other essentialist nature).
14 - Withdrawing the marks raised around specific identity (mostly defined by binary logics) introducing a new direction/speech contamination: gender performativity.
15 - Derrida, 1995 (sic): performative aspects and linguistic processes generally work because they are passable of quote. As the signature (than demands the repetition itself) enters the structure of iterability (mutation/repetition). Repetition allows signification; to be recognized, the mark has to be repeatable. However if anything is repeatable it becomes simultaneously passable of failing, or not being well used or being forged. Therefore, signification cannot be localized on the intention of the speaker but on economy of the difference that characterizes language itself. Hence any attempt for defining a language appealing to intentionality is invalid.
16 - Parallel to the destitution of mimesis by sublime aesthetics, is also posed the destitution of the objectivity since the object hood is strongly influenced by an inquisitive philosophical nature.
17 - The compilation in index of Polari and its extension thought media dissolves its marginal intent and its enigmatic presence in discourse, mainly oral.

David Wojnarowicz
Untitled
1993




The studies stimulated from feminist (art history) discussions have provoked a deep rethinking of what could be counted as appropriated or at least, to consider the reasons why such enquiries were being addressed.

The lack of explanation on why the desire of females was neglected due since the articulation of speech of eroticism was uttered on behalf of male heterosexual gaze, prompted out an attempt to create a new imagery. As a representation of the female desire (whether straight or homosexual) efforts to emerge as a female gaze over the feminine tries to bring up a female lingo (essentialism).

The spinal nerve of the question lays on how to make historical constraints visible.
For the contemporary (thinker) artist to give use of the historical tradition of art isn’t enough. It is crucial to endorse a reflection on what perverts representation as much as what allows it.

There is a large spectrum of artists dealing with the subject of homosexuality on arts. Few do so in a way that you have to proceed to a wider re-evaluation not strictly of the elements that have no language in a way that can be expressed, but of the invisible elements of the repressed. In fact there is this clear connection with gender/desire representation and censure - as part of a (locus-tempo) context and mark-point of wider connections that encompass the social spectrum. I guess I am trying to pull out this notion of the invisible which has become farther more interesting than what is being revealed. While there’s censure there’s a manifestation which implies a relation with un autre that feels in some way the need to seduce the other by denying his position. The principle of alterity responds at first at a level of the desire. The evidence of censure is therefore the authoritarian evidence of simultaneously desire and suppression.

«Communication isn’t what you came for»

The next fanzine from Senhorio will be named Mister and is related with the artist business. I attempted to eschew the common stand points used as representation of what the task of creating should or not be.
Following the ideas on the problem of political representation I articulate the results towards the desire to propose a kind of illustration of a narrative which in some manner is describing a political image. Political since involves the pervasion of the constitutive right of an-other; political since written word is more than a quote more a statement.
The core of a statement against the facade of communication. Not against dialogue: against pervasive and omnipresence of the playful nature of image nowadays.
The process of creating an image tends quite often to illustrate some point of view and therefore establishes itself as a citation. More than image, by bringing up text as the included reason d´etre of the image, there’s an emerging question that has always haunted me: when does a text explain what an image shows?
An aspect of this problem: the text isn’t here to explain anything. As part of the image, the text brings up a context in symbiosis. That’s why the image produced by the artist if wanting to get outside the nature of media communication has to neglect the need for becoming illustrative. To reveal in some way isn’t enough anymore. Sometimes you need to make it harder to get, or even impossible.
A work of art must keep the willing to get in touch and create strategies to appeal the presence of an-other into her. But by refusing the task of keeping itself different from the demand for communication it refuses aside the very limits of art creation.

«Help me out here»

Rules for political art practice:
• the personal is political
• the politics of authenticity
• manufactured selves
• I’m against it
• a club of your own
• club house
• the scene
• no rules
• sabotage
• for love, not money
• participatory culture
• do it yourself
• the politics of form
• discovery

please add your rules

Nanti Parrarly

The following pictures are examples of the drawing intervention at Laboratorio das Artes in Guimarães.

This set is an example of the investigation I’m starting at the moment on Figures of Representation and Queer (I)Logic. Begun as a conversation on some topics with F.V. when he pointed me the fact that perhaps we have to get ride of representation and its vicious nature (at least as a contemporary element), and so should go back to direct speech.

Representing and presenting a dialogue situation as if some parts of the dialogue were already taking place (since I present a lot of text on the surface of the walls) the exhibition opens and the work-word is already there. There is the possibility to read or to ignore. Or since I left chalk there, to write, to answer back, to erase and correct whatever you feel to. This way people aren’t threatened by my presence.

This is a political manifesto. But the message is not clear and it doesn’t aim be that. The use of Polari still reinforces the appeal of a specific context and a communitarian ethos, specifically the queer (dis)culture. This was the first experience at this level. Time will bring better and more valuable solutions… I hope.

Fairy Tales

The exhibition All my Independent Women was also presented at the library 100º página in Braga, being exhibited from the 26th till the 5th of November. Sorry, i haven´t been able to update the news so often, but please check out all the info and more images following the link.

LABORATÓRIO DAS ARTES

INAUGURA 11 NOVEMBRO 2005 22H00

'27 ARTISTAS, UMA CASA A DEMOLIR'


Max Fernandes
Paulo D' Alva
Carla Cruz
Eduardo Matos
João Marçal
André Alves
Joana da Conceição
André Sousa
António de Sousa
António Gonçalves
Luís Godinho
Isabel Carvalho
Luís Ribeiro
João Giz
Nuno Machado
Jorge Fernandes
Renato Ferrão
Ângela Mendes Ferreira
Nuno Florêncio
Emília Martins
José Emílio Barbosa
Aurora Brochado
João Teixeira
Mauro Cerqueira
Manuel Santos Maia
João Beira
Miguel Carneiro


23H
MÚSICA RUI TORRINHA RÁDIO UNIVERSITÁRIA DO MINHO


A casa nº 62 da rua de Camões onde o Laboratório das Artes habita desde Fevereiro de 2004 vai entrar em obras e, consequentemente, o projecto fica sem espaço físico.

O colectivo LAB é constituído por José Emílio Barbosa, Jorge Fernandes, Luís Ribeiro, Max Fernandes e Nuno Florêncio.

Esta exposição reúne todos os artistas que passaram pelo Laboratório das Artes desde o início do projecto.

O objectivo é que cada artista intervenha no espaço de forma a que cada trabalho seja destruído juntamente com a casa.


916294120 (Luís) ou 933309166 (Jorge)


Horário:
dias 12, 13, 18 e 19 de Novembro
das 15h às 18h e todos os dias das 00h às 02h


laboratoriodasartes@hotmail.com
Laboratório das Artes rua de Camões nº 62
4810-442 Guimarães

The crisis of art as political statement... theme for an discussion.


should probably devote some words to it.



What do you think about this?


When artists decide to make action leaving
behind consideration on about art

what consequences happen at the
level of communication/receiving message?
Does that action last or it just becomes part of
an absurd noisy world?...

On Camp aesthetics

The dissolution on apparent aesthetical symbiosis with the real changed the status of the new, the original and the relation with authorship as a superimposition to spectator. As this reference to the new can sustain an authoritarian position - which critical devices expanding from poststructuralist practices tried to (de)contextualize – it has become clear the necessity of a positioning facing the original positioning or at least questioning authenticity in art practices.

Original’s aesthetics endorse thinking the new as an aesthetical condition. One of the constitutive principles of humanity is set upon the improvement of tools. The search of new in art embodies this search for improvement. Thus if this quest for new is inextricable to our condition in aesthetics she’s emphasized beyond comparison transforming that mediation in purpose: a goal itself as quasi-imperative formalism[1]. But the danger of this aesthetical focusing may incur on its hermetic bias over the observer and the historical artistic imperialism. These are the main reasons that lead this reflection on the status of the object as characteristically element and portrait of art.

The problem within authenticity and all the positions on the axis of the representation of truth is: authentic according to what?

Defending authenticity of an object as revealing the authentic value of its maker embodies the shadow of essentialism, in a way that its not reduced to a nominal entity – bond to possession, bond to object – but as expressive authenticity sense: the focal point of an object as legitimate expression of an individual, society and its values. In Heidegger authenticity reports the straight expression given by a genuine voice that truly belongs to the universe that’s being described (sic Adorno, 1973).

Common (sense) speech opposes authenticity to falseness. We shall not ignore that “truth” doesn’t correspond merely to facts but also to what is mistrustful and that “fiction” relates itself with its dynamic nature and formatted (from Latin fingere). Art always intended (assuming it or not) on a spectrum clearly bond to fiction of reality (the ideal reality, mimesis of reality, symbolic or allegoric reality,…) and it’s this reading that makes us go along an understanding that art proposes a movement in the direction of change: less connected to what is than to what can eventually be, without a loss of truly or authentic value.

Artifice as arts sine qua non condition emphasizes individual position. As much different they are, modernist concepts are set as “authoritarian” artistic text: artist never assume their perception of reality as something contingent. What we can do on the side of the reader is to accept or not this proposal at the same time we redraw from the art maker the valence of truth, installing in turn the speech of artificiality as the core bias of art. Heidegger presents us the object production as the materialization of truth (regarding Plato’s Theory of Ideas) and which according to the principle that we refuse or accept that imposition, we distance ourselves from an authoritarian realist reflexive plural position that explain the status of construction: aesthetics of self-consciousness construction.

The nominalists (meant as historicist) of art reveals a research that cannot be ignored. Nominal authenticity (object historicism) has origins in semantics of the creator and it is bond to the cannon of criticism (what does the author want to say?), but we should resist to the reading in which nominal authenticity will inevitably favor the old/original in despite the new.

“Working with a pre established plan it’s a way to prevent subjectivity (…) form itself lacks importance it becomes grammar of the whole work.[2]”

Establishing nominal authenticity locus lets us understand art history and its practices as intelligible history of experience of artists and its audience and if works of art embody, characterizes situation, publics, author, then cannot be consider as merely experience objects (or would stand on mere solipsism). The “need” of holding on to extreme abstraction as the tellus on a never lost possession…

The alternative of authenticity and inauthenticity directs itself
according to whether someone decides for himself or not. It takes
its directive, beyond real states of affairs, from the highly formal
sense of belonging to oneself ... Such a philosophy need no longer
be concerned with how far society and psychology allow a man to
be himself or become himself ... The societal relation ... is
desocietalised into an in-itself. The individual ... holds on to
himself in his extreme abstractness as the last, the supposedly
unlosable possession.[3]

Framing Adorno no longer seems valuable the exclusiveness proposed by Heidegger (the deepness of a speaking object[4]). Even because in practice an abstract element can eventually be a mistake or a absolute nonsense. As a consequence, if the authentic reifies the subject (through true work) and if truth corresponds to it, we are towards the articulation of a speech that places the revelation of truth or realizations/making real (once more it becomes clear the concentration of attention that hangs on the empiric aspect, object and place of art. So the criteria of authenticity that emphasizes the value as subjective stand point must be abandoned within the exercise of critical analysis. We need existentialist restructures that proposes an expressive authenticity as a cognitive conquest and morally complex – according to the comprehension of the complexity of existential condition of each one, reintroducing the problematic of complexity of the world without compromising it.

“Men creates forms all of them fake (products) and all of them inevitable once created toward the other. As soon I show up the other has me, I’m his prisoner if I don’t impose the best way to stop him on his turn to me on its absolute right of solipsist consciousness[5]”.

Authenticity has an intense bond to the issue of territory specificity. There was always a problem focusing the core nature of art objects produced: topic of “sensibility” cannot be able to explain. Art proposals are not facts but put themselves in the realm of linguistic, express in their turn definitions on art or formal consequences of definitions of art. The work is incapable of defining itself as art from self-reference to its internal structure.

Foucault entails the subject as locus for empiric knowledge addressed to detour the fundaments that legitimates him – the agents of culture, the deviants that extend the rhetoric’s of sign systems (Foucault, 1978)[6]. The speech that involves the subject generates his appearance. On the work the corporal bias intensifies the illusion that it’s substance of something, hence nothing exists in fact outside its own existence logic but strictly on this reading.

This ambiguity between realism and illusionism of art objects questions the connection of image and its referential, its iconography and the relation with real world objects and the codes of representation. Denying works referenciality, the specificity of its speech we compromise art practices and knowledge as superficial vulgarity: the coincidence of image with work; the superficiality of communication; the coincidence of work with author and his emotion; mundane spooks… Pop art is one exemplar that intends to merge the gap between superficiality and deepness as locus of projection. This excessive emphasis reveals the nihilist nature of capitalism and the intriguing position of technique as language that replaces discursivity specific place.

This are the starting point that lead my artistic concerns, the definition of a space which matrix enables us to think the relationship between codes of signification and articulation and by extend its politic implications.

Our contemporary flaunts itself as the time of the new as always equal (culture tourism that offers a traditional and modernist glimpse). Art cannot dismiss its responsibilities as knowledge producer. This implicates it on the traditional economy of the producer; to reveal works production as to offer interferences reflects by its turn the possession of knowledge, a kind of altruist socialism of individual knowledge (sic Goffman, 1993).

As analyzing production and its symbolic implications (regard the reproductive works example) there must be an effort to understand to which degree this practices that enables recognition that solve the deferend through subjective implications. How can it interfere specially through the visual plasticity (undo the logic of consuming through a visual produced uncanny) generating instruments, resiliencies, obstacles that in first instance challenge the intimate norms of production? This deferend implies a constant renegotiation of the past symbolic representation (opposed to production logic of the obsolete) on a speech that rewrites it as imagetic narrative achieving experience of art and knowledge production in the relation with artistic objecthood. It’s necessary therefore to articulate the symbolic that approaching empiric experiences solves the deferred subjective object with its historical materialization, escaping its abstraction but enacting a link to dramatic realization of knowledge and real[7].

What seems for granted is the fact that works cannot be otherwise but the impossibility of transparence because says something at the same time it hides (Prada, 2003). By not being constitutional in the order of speech (its truth it’s not the objecthood mirror) the artistic proposal must reflect the problematic nature of thinking and knowing.

The definition of art shall be that task of understanding the (uncanny) unreachable real trying to decipher art configurations as a riddle (and not the dissolution of the new) – crypt according to Perniola. This site of art as knowledge flatters the opinion as starting point (denying the utopia value of apparatus) denying as same the absolute nature. In a certain sense retaking reversibility and plurality – modern premises – status of an art that insights repressed social consciousness. That same social consciousness is implicated at the process of production of visually in art: it’s imperative to position art as medium using image. This visually-knowledge rehabilitation process recalls Benjamin and its effort to position the artist intellectual among the process of “revelation” (production) through which occurs a fundamental transformation of the oeuvre. And if Greenberg affirmed art as a strict effort of experiences – and not principles – there’s the obligation of criticizing that focus on experience. (De) intensify the experience by building up a resistance platform as object. Art as object-site of enigma-real.

Hence shall use a concept placed on the analysis of imagehood and the mechanisms of culture - Camp as a consideration focusing specially the authenticity of the real and the artificiality discourse as object-knowledge of real at the (re)placement of the production axis (new visualities axis).

“You are not free if you can do everything, but only if you are set to fight against who/what limit your freedom[…] The same way in which [...] freedom of people is essentially a fight, then we should now affirm that freedom of thought is fight itself too: fight against prejudices, against superstitions, against "cultural trends.[8]”

Camp’s core based about the translation of an inner value –based on the stigmatic experience of homosexuality – and as evidence of authenticity (of that stigma) which is to pass by as. Gay stigma is singular on the sense that is not immediately apparent – there is the possibility of avoiding sanctioning since its information flux is liable of being controlled. This inherits the problematic of a common link with an inner value – we use life we are not aspects of it. The most relevant aspect on Camp pops from the deconstruction on the notions of authenticity and cultural production: ego production as merchant on a world of indistinctive images of reality. Plurality of (every) things implemented itself on a subtle way reducing all to matters of mere style: on a single move incites the construction of other and alienates him.

“Fiction (…) is beautiful, false and useless, a profoundly unnatural art, conceived strictly to pleasure.

(…) No one can be blamed (…) to be unnatural, I said its to be civilized, to vindicate the right to intellectual self consciousness that is the only genesis of art. [9]”

Camp aims to inscribe itself as element of aesthetical domain, the ephemeral abs superfluous a sort of manière that favors the exaggeration, artificial and the extreme between popular and commercial cultural and cultural consuming. Primordially on camp there’s the concern to increase a permanent state of doubt, a sensation of wondering throughout different sensations: the hesitation that signals the “horror” that arises from not being able to explain that uncertainty. On this unsettling certainty is set the political tool. Even its political aesthetic constitution marks an oxymoron[10] since the refusal of essentialism as identity engendering speeches of the constitutive experience of signification.

Etymologically Camp is the mise en scene that isn’t se camper (posture) anymore, campeggiare (to show up on set), K.A.M.P. (known as male prostitute) or campus (from Latin battle field, and Greek garden). Definition of Camp matches the element that distinguishes original from copy. And that element as Queer is a process that in terms of social construction endorses signals – an ontological challenge that breaks up bourgeois notions of a unique and continuous self – replacing instead a performative improvised self, discontinuous and edified by stylized and repeated acts[11].

“It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence (…) Wilde’s epigram points to a crucial aspect of camp aestheticism: its opposition to puritan morality” (Babuscio, 1977, Cap. 7)^[12].

Queer investment doesn’t centre itself on gender but on the semiotic structures, and that reversal on the axis of the power of representation attempt to restore originality to Camp as a specific discourse. Transgression on Camp is set upon the privilege of the secondary, derivative, matching kitsch to Pop, serial reproduction over the original. Camp as vision of the world in terms of style (we may consider it as concept defining dandyism on the mass-mediated/late modernist cultural panorama), the love for the exaggeration and out – a mannerism for the things that are what they are not (incongruence and paradox – resembles Lord Alfred on “the love that dare not to speak its name”). But setting apart morality from tradition, the profound vanguard believe on the moral passion (that art can produce an independent reality) and aesthetics (the believe on the presentification of art as truth – note the North American formalists believe through Greenberg’s voice) lead onto an unquestionable victory of style over content, aesthetics over morality, irony over tragedy. Camp is set upon those premises of aesthetical understanding.

Camp semiotics therefore sets on stage a policy of (de) territoryalization and recontextualization through irony, mimicry and parody, invading not only the issue of representation of subject on Camp but the representation of subject on it-itself[13].

Camp’s obsession with images of power or as such the sensuous power of cinema divas (…) may be assumed as mythological parody producing a deviant and negative structure of knowledge.

Sontag refers that the apparent contradiction of Camp might be its more valuable key-work tool since camp implies a profound seriousness (i.e. Baroque was largely Camp with religion, ballet is largely Camp with love – sic Sontag, 1964, Chap. 2).

Throughout a split-up with Culture, Camp aims to enact a key-work tool (not only among the politic sphere) at historical aesthetical categories which had neglected the avant-garde critical (task) recognizing dissident sexuality among the historical project. Not that the notion hadn’t been eschewed. Addressing Camp implies a less evident relation than the mere themetization of a practice.

The avant-garde production may be considered as a radical answer to the reorganization of every day life under capitalism economic policy (latent left wing relation) in order to question and demystifying the reformulation of everyday life under the shadow of capitalism. Therefore the avant-garde cannot uncompromise the relevant role of dissidences as permanent critique to (neo) bourgeois culture. Burger reminds us that the avant-garde has more power if it’s understood as a set of institutions that extend the notion that art is autonomous from capital procedures on contemporary life. Burger poses avant-garde (against pop popular) despite he suggests that the apparent autonomy of avant-garde is an illusion. Regarding Adorno’s demanding that it’s impossible to conceive arts autonomy without shelter the work, Burger suggests that as public sphere art is a bourgeoisie category that simultaneously reveals and obscures an actual historical development.

A specific aspect of some avant-garde projects was to pay attention to the product and social relationships they embodied – a shared point with camp. Attempting to face the exciting experience of having (on capitalist age) Benjamin’s impulse was to consider dream as metaphor for the confusion of products. Here we find a fundamental contradiction of industrial-capitalistic culture. A way of production that privileges private life and is based on isolated individual which has created new ways for social existence, that (en)genders identities and conformities on people’s life but no social solidarity no level of social consciousness of community, and this way, no tools to awaking the dream in which we’re involved. Benjamin alerts us to pay attention to the artificial objects proliferation where we can find the reification of capital historical development. What Benjamin couldn’t preview was that the artifact articulation might insight them at social parameters that could (re)define how and what those artifacts mean.

Camp works inside industry critique as a sort of critical opposition – suppresses and denied – embodied on the practices that constitute (processualy) queer identity. I think Camp explanations are more attached to the productivity ofs from bourgeois representation that built up/forging a new critical episteme. In fact, if camp is strictly instrumental as part of the formation of a new identity, there would be less to say. It´s more relevant to explore ways on Camp where capitalist social organization is criticized on the behalf of a analysis of the work involved on representation productivity that exclude the desire of the same sex subjects, to the fact that energies are devoted to permanent (re) inscription of gay taste on the circulation and consume of imageries.

Warhol i.e. commented the cultural production processes and its dissemination and the processes of cultural appropriation working on both sides of production and critique: but if Warhol uses icons and mainstream methods to explore the margins of its expectation it is a matter not time that inside mass cultural production dynamics his work dissolves itself. Warhol confused image with publicity. Instead of an uncertainty culture – causing an unstable economy - he explores itself as a product for contemporary publicity absorption. Such a set up proximity transforms extreme figuration not in abstraction but as a pastiche surplus. How could Warhol be taken as “cultural subversive” can only be answered by the own changes produced at art world ecosystem: reveals that art is a artistic market article similar to other specializes markets. This way Warhol, destroyed the secular tension between serious/genius artist and majority culture. Any way, Warhol’s premises – on Camp as on art field – reducing to formal apparatus what is not symbolized (and if real as Lacan refers is what is irreductable) Warhol might be involved in the problematic of trying to ironically communicate what is incommensurable. But I believe his work as an attempt to formalize the real emptiness (that is, the incoming real) attempting a rehab of experimental art, might achieve on art and Camp field something that traduced more than an appearance. Duane Michaels always looked for a reflection bond to a common sense vision, intensifying an ambiguous feeling between existence and non existence

“I don't believe in the visible...Truth for me is intuition, imagination[14]”

The consciousness that experience is failing because it’s being restrained on the level of instant (regarding a temporal reading) emerges on Camp as shock absorption on Baudelaire and Benjamin concepts, but perpetrating endlessly that shock.

Subjectivity cannot be a transport (visual and essential presence) but an unavoidable misplacing and locus for incompleteness. The identity of the work – the supposed identity – because it’s an identification process is necessarily incomplete: the perception of the other makes me vulnerable and precarious. Identity on Camp since it’s not based on the authenticity argument – which is suggested as corruption element that interferes in the constitution of the alienated other – is set upon an adverse position to the work identity. But both positions conceive that there isn’t an identity who doesn’t presupposes time and space. There is no identity that isn’t a self narrative mise-en-scene – as personal memory and history.

This incompleteness, this nature of the represented drags it onto the interior of the field of the work (on Camp the interior of the subject). What becomes important is the context and utility of these attempts as refusing autonomy. What’s regressive or progressive is determined by the maker of its reception. And since the signs aren’t steady, the only option for the work is to ground the formation of the speech on the receptor – the “word” – that because of this becomes an undeniable political tool. On Camp there’s an immediate assumption: there’s no thing such as original. An image is a space overlapped by several other images. The aim of it is a starting point where the artificial affirms itself as most natural relation with real.

“We point out (…). We can only imitate an interior gesture but never original, since the plagiarists base themselves on the immense encyclopedia of the world they absorb.[15]”

On Camp we assist the violent presence of the subject as a direct attack to ideologies in view of the fact that (tries to) translates an empty representation: what matters it’s the real as a lie. For according to this thought the referent is understood as a problem and not as given. This game reveals the clear position between what you need to reveal and what you need to conceal. Visible and verbal are two connected fields as place for the struggle between image and text –the power of image to resist or incorporate text. It’s not possible to theorize power from outside and because any effort to do it implicates reference to its own images and nature, its effects… and examples of its attempts.

The spectator it’s not supposed to be under the power of representation but using representation in a way to have power over the world. The problem it’s all about when what’s presented is delusive with the purpose of deceiving, impress the spectator, when occurs on them a realism associated to the capability to reveal the truth over things. Then it’s undeniable to speak about a paradox on political identity. A work is a social fact not only on what concerns its material condition but mostly because of the representation it embodies. The category of identity itself implicates the fragile line that distinguishes me from the other. Camp cannot distance itself from political speech (even though main theorists affirm it as strictly aesthetical provocation), cannot refuse a speech which illusive presentation implicates permanent problematization of power and realism relations. On the same way aesthetics cannot refuse this relation when it’s one of the aspects that mark its own temperament.

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Footnotes

1 This framing can be read in different ways: as opposition between old/new, as opposition or as something that lingers from a temporal rout in a way it deviates from the regular (notion of difference), or as something that suspends the typical connections with the world to explore other forms of facing an changing him (Foster, 1996).

2 Sol Lewitt, 1976, Paragraphs on conceptual art, pp.822.

3 Adorno, 1973, cit. pp. 115

4 sic Adorno ibidem

5 Witold Gombrowicz, 1995, [Up]Arte#1, cit. pp. 15

6 On art the new “that deviates of what is usual or familiar” – remissive reading from time to space (Luhmann, 1995, cited on MArte nº1, pp.05.

7 Dramatic realization referred as space of art that proposes to resist homogenization, conformism of contemporary massive production procedures. A hybrid space that adopts the dimension of what blocks reality (counter-cultural techniques) revealing the violent experience of the real (Perniola, 2002).

8 Ludovico Geymonat, 1988, pp.62.

9 Patrícia Duncker, 1998, cit. pp. 31

10 Perhaps it could be useful to regard Kristeva´s concept abjection.

11 One of my references is Glenn Ligon, an artist which makes language a physical aspect seeking a kind of (none) analogy with the real.

12 On the contrary, that sarcasm is a supreme expression of puritan morality. Wilde simply redefines a way out in aesthetical terms.

13 Elmgreen & Dragset question social and architectonic structures reorganized in a way to investigate the Desire underlying daily objects and ideological control mechanisms. Emphasizing (deconstruction and reconstruction) meaning through predetermined institutional spaces, the artists intend on an analogy with societal panoptic control (Foucault).

14 Duane Michal in http://national.gallery.ca/english/default_286.htm

15 Sherrie Levine, 1981, pp. 379.

my own research...

Figures of representation. The truly and the fictional through readings on Queer Art is the provisory topic for a research project that precedes a PHD investigation. Any contribution (essays, info, images of art work, suggestions,…) is welcome.

The Trucker

The Trucker
European university students’ run magazine


The Trucker. European university students’ run magazine wants to be an independent means to exchange thought and researches among students from several European universities in the fields of arts, literature, philosophy, humanities and social sciences.
The student covers a particular position within our economical context: his study and research activity does not produce any plus-value which could be spent in the consumerism society system. The activity of a student is apart from the negotuim dynamics, which obey to the demand of commodity, productivity, and advantage. But the students’ otium is not meant as an aulic unengagement, neither as a detachment from the world and its activity: we should purpose it as an alternative negotiation for a patrimony of free and independent knowledge.
In exchanging this “superfluous” stuff you build a new economy, in which the commanding of profit is replaced by principles of dissemination and dispersion, and wandering thought, that is able to generate expanded and discursive spaces.

The Trucker offers a space of transition to all those researches, essays and texts which usually remains as word files in the folders of one’s own computer, and which could represent the address of one’s own future researches. The practice of translation of a file into an essay to be published amplifies the possibility of a cultural exchange, as well as the confrontation among different researches and didactics experiences all around European universities. The editorial board deals with the chose of the materials to publish and assures the translation. The texts are supposed to be considered as copylefted.

The Trucker tries not to activate any money exchange: for this reason it is distributed by photocopied issues, which can easily be sponsored by copy-centres you can found in the area around the university buildings. Each “national photocopied issue” is differentiated from the others only by the acknowledgement to the sponsoring copy-centre and the national initials (like the sticker on the car). Each national co-editor takes care of photocopies and distribution.

This exchange supposes the availability of each collaborator to translate him/herself, to set him/her comprehensible in a wider and global manner, considering the infinite potentiality of the confrontation with the alterity, but also the proper margins of untranslateability. The intercultural approach joins the cross-cultural practice, since The Trucker is composed by texts which are written in one’s own mother-language with the English translation on the front, as the vehicular language. The babelic image the magazine represents wants to promote the idea of European identity as something that is built on differences – rather than homologations and common roots – in the framework of a geographical area which is supposed to be considered as a territory of translations.

The Trucker goes across these thresholds, trucking cultural stuff and knowledge from one country to another, from city after city. Like a lorry or a T.I.R. moving through local contexts, travelling the streets, mixing geographies and letting the possibility to watch the landscapes flowing along its route. The trucker is for us a sort of mascot, the European icon of a trans-national course, of an “exchange economy” which is quick but not speeded: the trucker represents the idea of the journey, but also the necessity of a pit-stop to face new departures.


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