crime museum

i think i want to make one of these

http://hyperallergic.com/172154/secret-london-crime-museum-may-open-for-first-time-in-150-years/

human rights as ritual

http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=2660

only gets going at 8 min

anderson interview about zwiegg

ive been a little down on wes for a the last little while, but the budapest hotel has been growing on me more more and more, especially as i am increasingly interested in pre-war europe, and also from hearing your stories of switzerland

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10684250/I-stole-from-Stefan-Zweig-Wes-Anderson-on-the-author-who-inspired-his-latest-movie.html

Hong Sang Soo

So now I've watched every single Rohmer film and have to wait till I am old before I can watch them again, I just watch Hong Sang Soo movies and which are a one-for-one Korean take on Rohmer and I get a hit of Korean daily life to boot as well. 

https://bayproxy.uk/torrent/8549651/korean-our-sunhi-2013-dvdrip-x264-ac3-kg/

updated parables

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/world/asia/beijing-updates-parables-the-24-paragons-of-filial-piety.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

camels in the outback

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeraworld/2012/12/20121226115848287535.html

nutmeg trade

nutmeg trade

The Only Jew in the Village

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/26/pakistan-last-jewish-cemetery-campaign

xmas

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/pictured-awful-christmas-attraction-closes-4796021

Tinbergen's four questions

i like this model

		Diachronic versus synchronic perspective
		Dynamic view Explanation of current form in terms of a historical sequence	Static view Explanation of the current form of species
How vs. why questions	Proximate view How an individual organism's structures function	Ontogeny Developmental explanations for changes in individuals, from DNA to their current form	Mechanism (causation) Mechanistic explanations for how an organism's structures work
	Evolutionary (ultimate) view Why a species evolved the structures (adaptations) it has	Phylogeny The history of the evolution of sequential changes in a species over many generations	Adaptation (function) A species trait that evolved to solve a reproductive or survival problem in the ancestral environment

Yp

I think in all seriousness that any account of Australian contemporary art has to begin and end with the yellow peril

post script - if i ever get a commission to make a public sculpture in australia i will remake the yellow peril
actually i would do it abroad too

Human rights critique review

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/dec/04/-sp-case-against-human-rights

Interesting article on Foucault and Neo-liberalism

here

also interesting re welfare state as an institutionalisation of emergent mutual (aid) societies / insurance networks

"These institutions were the result of the strong position held by the workers' movement after the Liberation. They were invented by the workers' movement itself. From the nineteenth century onward, workers and unions had established mutual societies, for example, to pay benefits to those unable to work. It was the very logic of the market and the enormous risks it imposed on the lives of workers that pushed them to develop mechanisms for the partial socialization of income.

In the early phase of the industrial revolution, only property owners were full citizens, and as the sociologist Robert Castel emphasizes, it was only with social security that the "social rehabilitation of non-property-owners" really took place. It was social security that established, alongside private property, a social property, intended to usher the popular classes into citizenship. This is the idea Karl Polanyi advances in The Great Transformation, which sees in the principle of social protection the aim of withdrawing the individual out of the laws of the market and thus reconfiguring relations of power between capital and labor."

GPI instead of GDP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genuine_progress_indicator

wheat growers vs rice growers

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opinion/why-are-some-cultures-more-individualistic-than-others.html

metamodernist structure of feeling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH6zJULTVgQ

this concept is like "really? you are saying that that is a thing?!", 

i think it is a perfect example of some sort of saturation point i am reaching. 

 everything is like watching that letterman segment "is this a thing?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG-4p4Er3VY

Poland

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30214204

Stealing Oil

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/29/359624435/episode-578-how-to-steal-a-million-barrels-of-oil

Matthew Nathan

Matthew Nathan was an English Jew , who served as governor of Sierra Leone in 1899 and then Gold Coast, before becoming Governor of Hong Kong and later Queensland where he set up the Great Barrier Reef Committee. Interesting to look further to see if he brought any practices along with him in his travels. I wonder if there was some experience in West Africa that found its formalisation in Hong Kong.

International Development

This is a great article Raf posted this on his facebook

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120178/problem-international-development-and-plan-fix-it

Anonymous ferguson

http://mic.com/articles/95930/anonymous-just-released-this-powerful-video-statement-on-the-michael-brown-shooting

Laziness

Why cannot art exist any more in the West? The answer is simple. Artists in the West are not lazy. Artists from the East are lazy; whether they will stay lazy now when they are no longer Eastern artists remains to be seen. Laziness is the absence of movement and thought, dumb time – total amnesia. It is also indifference, staring at nothing, non-activity, impotence. It is sheer stupidity, a time of pain, futile concentration. Those virtues of laziness are important factors in art. Knowing about laziness is not enough, it must be practiced and perfected.

Artists in the West are not lazy and therefore not artists but rather producers of something … Their involvement with matters of no importance, such as production, promotion, gallery system, museum system, competition system (who is first), their preoccupation with objects, all that drives them away from laziness, from art.

Mladen Stilinović – excerpt from The Praise of Laziness, 1993

Essay Films

'Sans Soleil was the first time I'd seen someone make a work out of the struggle to make the work...it suddenly crystalized all my anxieties...I realized you could make the image out of the struggle, for me this is the essayistic mode'

Kodwo Eschun

27:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQ_pr8ndN2I

The Red and the Black

This split is sometimes called the "red" and "black" divide, red referring to the Marxists and black referring to the anarchists. Otto von Bismarck remarked, upon hearing of the split at the First International, "Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!"

copying / piracy and development

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/08/26/a_nation_of_outlaws/?page=full

TTIP and TPP: harnessing the anger of the people [feedly]

 
 

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TTIP and TPP: harnessing the anger of the people

In parallel to the EU-US trade deal currently under way, the US is negotiating a similar agreement with 11 countries of the Asia Pacific: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Walden Bello, leading critic of neoliberal and corporate globalisation, identifies the global strategy underpinning the two agreements. Interview.

Protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1999. Steve Kaiser/Wikimedia Commons. Some rights reserved.Thomas Fazi: Today bilateral and regional 'free trade agreements' – or better, mega-regional agreements, such as the TTIP and TPP – have effectively replaced negotiations within the WTO. Have we entered a new phase of globalisation?  

Walden Bello: Yes. I think the triumphalist phase of globalisation, which peaked in the 1990s and then started to decline after the 1999 Seattle mobilisations, is definitely over. Today we are in a situation where corporate-driven globalisation and neoliberalism have led to a major crisis, and are on the defensive. We could say that the very concept of corporate-driven globalisation is in crisis. Its credibility has been severely damaged. But of course there are still very strong interests – supported by technocratic elites and most of academia – that continue to push for neoliberal solutions, such as the TTIP and the TPP. 

TF: How much did the anti-globalisation and anti-free trade movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s help undermine the paradigm of corporate-driven globalisation?

WB: I think the movement's most important achievement was that it really shocked the triumphalism and the credibility of the whole project of corporate-driven globalisation. Seattle was a very historic event, in which the action of the people in the streets finally revealed that the emperor had no clothes. Even prior to Seattle it was already clear in so many statistics that globalisation was leading to greater poverty and inequality and was creating all sorts of inefficiencies, but somehow that truth was not getting through. In Seattle the paradigm was definitely shattered. What we witnessed wasn't just the collapse of the WTO ministerial – it was the collapse of the whole paradigm. I think this was the clear achievement of the anti-globalisation movement: that it really showed that there was a dark side to globalisation, that it was creating the opposite of what it promised.

The erosion of the WTO has been very critical, because this was supposed to be the prime instrument of globalisation. We are talking of the most ambitious commercial legal code ever created, and this architecture is now at a standstill.

This is why in recent years they have begun to move back into bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements (FTAs). But FTAs – pushed primarily by the EU, the US and Japan – are seen by these countries as a second-best arrangement, resulting from the failure to reach the sort of universal consensus that they had tried to work out within the WTO. This is not to underestimate the very deleterious impact of agreements such as the TTIP and TPP. But I think they are also very fragile. Just look at the growing opposition of civil society to the TTIP in Europe, or the resistance of agribusiness interests to the TPP in a number of Asian countries. 

TF: What are the similarities between the TTIP and the TPP? 

WB: The two treaties are very similar. Firstly, they are both being negotiated in secret; as the former US trade representative Ron Kirk said, if they were negotiated openly they wouldn't stand a chance of being approved by people. Secondly, they are not so much about trade, although there are trade aspects to them (such as further reductions of tariffs); they are really about asserting corporate control over every aspect of our lives, through intellectual property rights and investor-state arrangements (the infamous ISDS), in which basically the sovereign rights of states are curtailed by the ability of corporations to sue them.

Thirdly, they both have a geopolitical component: the TTIP is really the economic arm of NATO and is clearly aimed at containing Russia; the TTP, on the other hand, is obviously a very strong attempt to contain China, and to create an opposite economic bloc in Asia.

More in general, I think it's very clear that among the targets of both projects is the emergence of the BRICS and the efforts underway to create an alternative economic bloc to the western one. Finally, I think that both the TTIP and the TPP have an ideological component to them, in that they are being asserted as representing the 'good' western values – free trade, civilization, rule of law, etc. – as opposed to the alien values of 'the other'.

This also underscores the hypocrisy of the 'free trade' narrative: in a consistently free trade framework, these agreements should be extended also to countries like Russia and China. But that is clearly not the case. 

TF: Would it be correct to view these agreements – and especially the TPP – as forms of neocolonialism or neoimperialism, in the same vein as the FTAs imposed by hegemonic nations to developing countries in the past? 

WB: Considering that the geopolitical aspect is so prominent to both – in both cases we are not dealing with 'simple' trade agreements but with treaties where the political and security aspects are at least as prominent as the economic aspects – one could in fact say that there is an element of neoimperialism at play. There is a clear effort on the part of the hegemonic powers (the US and Europe), through these treaties, to strengthen and enlarge their sphere of influence and stem the threat posed by those forces that have the potential to displace the prominence of the west.

TF: Is the TPP linked to US military expansion in the Pacific? 

WB: Yes, absolutely. Just like the TTIP can be considered the economic arm of NATO, the TTP is definitely linked to US military expansion in the Pacific and the whole 'pivot to Asia' strategy, which is fundamentally aimed at containing China. In this sense, these agreements risk having a serious destabilising effect in geopolitical terms.

TF: You mentioned the issue of secrecy, which is one of the most controversial aspects of the TTIP negotiations. We know that in the case of Europe even the national parliaments are often unaware of what is being discussed, as the whole thing is very much negotiated at the Commission level. How are the negotiations taking place in the Asia Pacific, where the US does not have such a 'privileged' counterpart?

WB: What's happening is that the deal is basically being negotiated by top trade negotiators. And corporations are being given special access to them, but not the general citizens and not even the national parliaments. So basically the big business groups in these countries are the ones that have access. This is totally anti-democratic. Parliaments should have this access. I'm really quite puzzled as to why this is not being challenged, why parliaments are not making a stronger challenge to this non-transparency, or making use of the various freedom of information laws in these countries.

I think part of the problem is that parliaments in most countries that are covered by these agreements are dominated by conservative parties that are ideologically partial to neoliberalism and are linked to corporate capital, and do not prize transparency. The same, of course, applies to Europe.

TF: In recent years a number of Asian countries – such as the former 'Asian Tigers' – have reacted to the disastrous effects of the IMF- and World Bank-imposed 'structural reforms' by pursuing more protectionist policies and partly 'rolling back' the process of globalisation. How is this influencing the negotiations over the TTP, which goes in the opposite direction?

WB: Globalisation has always strongly emphasised export-oriented production, but the downturn and long-term depression in the US and Europe, which were central key markets for Asian exports, has forced many Asian countries to re-examine the political economy models that they were pursuing.

I think that in many countries there has been a realisation that they had to move back into domestic demand-oriented growth, and what that means of course is that among other things you really need to pay attention to your internal market, and to a more equal distribution of income.

And that has meant using whatever little space is left to impose restrictions on trade, through sanitary and safety standards, as well as on financial flows, through capital controls (which even the IMF has recently acknowledged as being effective in preventing destabilising crises). In this sense, agreements such as the TTIP and TPP, which are an attempt to stop this process of de-globalisation, are riding against the tide of history. The same can be said for the German-led, neomercantilist strategy pursued by Europe. 

TF: Speaking of Europe, social movements in the late 1990s and early 2000s were successful in rallying hundreds of thousands of people against neoliberal globalisation. Today this seems like an impossible feat, even though the agreement currently being negotiated, the TTIP, concerns European and US citizens much more directly than past FTAs.

WB: The dynamics of movements are closely linked to the contradictory dynamics of crisis. For example, we should ask ourselves why, in the midst of the crisis, so many European countries swung to the right.

I think this shows that crisis brings about its own dimensions, that often take away from the energy of political movements. Nevertheless, the devastating social effects of four years of austerity programmes in Europe are creating the conditions for the re-emergence of a strong anti-neoliberal and anti-corporate movement.

The question is: who will be able to harness the anger of the people, will it be the radical left or the populist right? Regrettably, the latter seems to be gaining the upper hand at this point in time. I think the left really has to move very quickly.

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Eat the Rich

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2gO4DKVpa8

Occupy Central Day 3 2014

thiel and graeber?

two ends of the anarchist spectrum

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/arts/peter-thiel-and-david-graeber-debate-technologys-future.html?_r=1

Warwick Anderson

http://youtu.be/SouH7f7nug0

Deleuze's Migrants and Nomads

http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=2544

Pre-Colonization Map of Africa

Pretty amazing. Check out the size of Ethiopia!

Corruption lecture

I often think about what I could do a Phd on that would suit my background and corruption definitely seems right up there.

Old school journos are much cooler than the ones our age.

baby metal

Over identification as a great subversive strategy

Weizman

Been a Weizman fan for some time. Interested to watch some of these films he has done.

Sebald writing tips

pretty good

Moving Beyond Art as an Artistic Strategy

From this quote, I get a better sense of what RMB is pushing us to do and why he's supporting us. I think its the first time I've heard him speak of artistic autonomy. Of course, this is from 10 years ago.

'Think of Alexandra Exter's work . You have some examples of in the show. But at some point she decided to give up art, at least in the classical sense of 

the production of artworks. She started to manufacture things 

for workers, creating textiles and so on. That's not in the show. 

How do you represent such a move by an artist? She is not 

giving up art, but has transformed aesthetic practice. Her action 

was not exactly restrained. 

You can see similar moves in the ExArgentina-project. These 

moves, I would argue, partake of art's autonomy. They wouldn't 

make much sense beyond an aesthetic perspective. I'd say that 

How do we want to be governed? starts at that point; that threshold, 

where it's not necessary to say no to conventional modes of 

artistic production, which you also have in ExArgentina, but 

where you have to notice art's trespasses of institutional and 

ontological boundaries. I'm interested in what happens beyond 

this threshold, in that which cannot be contained, so to speak. 

Text

Cross-Cultural Filmmaking-Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor

So maybe reading this will be enough, written by the filmmakers who made Leviathan for the Sensory Ethnography Lab 

Cross-Cultural Filmmaking

image fulgurator

this is cool

 

migration mapping

slightly interesting, but probably exemplifies that culture actually moves at critical instances rather than general mass?

nomads

 i just watched herzog's Herdsmen of the Sun and ended up finding this BBC doco on American Nomads. Pretty fun to watch them back to back

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/_QKbIb8wcz0?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Gunmen threaten to assassinate leading Amazon shaman

http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/10367

Dsmv

This is really funny

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/book-of-lamentations/

zizeks trick

In addition to being Zizek's teacher, adviser, and sponsor, Jacques-Alain Miller became his analyst as well. While familiarity between analyst and analysand is discouraged by Freudians, it was not unusual for Lacanians to socialize with their patients. Lacan's most controversial psychoanalytic innovation, however, was the variable, or "short," session through which he tried to combat a patient's resistance by introducing an element of discontinuity into the therapeutic process. In contrast to Freud's f ifty-minute "hour," Lacan's sessions ended the moment he sensed the patient had uttered an important word or phrase--a break that might occur in fifteen minutes or less. Miller had fine-tuned the logic of therapy to the point that few sessions lasted more than ten minutes. "To be in analysis with Miller was to step into a divine, predestined universe," says Zizek. "He was a totally arbitrary despot. He would say, come back tomorrow at exactly 4:55, but this didn't mean anything! I would arrive at 4:55 and would find a dozen people waiting."

One goal of the variable session is to keep a patient from preparing material ahead of time. In this respect, Lacanian psychoanalysis met its match in Zizek. "It was my strict rule, my sole ethical principle, to lie consistently: to invent all symptoms , fabricate all dreams," he reports of his treatment. "It was obsessional neurosis in its absolute purest form. Because you never knew how long it would last, I was always prepared for at least two sessions. I have this incredible fear of what I might dis cover if I really went into analysis. What if I lost my frenetic theoretical desire? What if I turned into a common person?" Eventually, Zizek claims, he had Miller completely taken in by his charade: "Once I knew what aroused his interest, I invented eve n more complicated scenarios and dreams. One involved the Bette Davis movie All About Eve.Miller's daughter is named Eve, so I told him that I had dreamed about going to a movie with Bette Davis in it. I planned every detail so that when I finishe d he announced grandly, 'This was your revenge against me!'"

"cross-cultural" music

really interesting wfmu episode showing approaches to cross cultural transposition in music

Perestroika Movement

Perestroika Movement

The poli-sci analog of the Post Autistic Economics Movement

Koan 47: Autonomy - an old question

 47.   The Stingy Artist

Gessen was an artist monk. Before he would start a drawing or painting he always insisted upon being paid in advance, and his fees were high. He was known as the "Stingy Artist."

A geisha once gave him a commission for a painting. "How much can you pay?" inquired Gessen.

"Whatever you charge," replied the girl, "but I want you to do the work in front of me."

So on a certain day Gessen was called by the geisha. She was holding a feast for her patron.

Gessen with fine brush work did the painting. When it was completed he asked the highest sum of his time.

He received his pay. Then the geisha turned to her patron, saying: "All this artist wants is money. His paintings are fine but his mind is dirty; money has caused it to become muddy. Drawn by such a filthy mind, his work is not fit to exhibit. It is just about good enough for one of my petticoats."

Removing her skirt, she then asked Gessen to do another picture on the back of her petticoat.

"How much will you pay?" asked Gessen.

"Oh, any amount," answered the girl.

Gessen named a fancy price, painted the picture in the manner requested, and went away.

It was learned later that Gessen had these reasons for desiring money:

A ravaging famine often visited his province. The rich would not help the poor, so Gessen had a secret warehouse, unknown to anyone, which he kept filled with grain, prepared for those emergencies.

From his village to the National Shrine the road was in very poor condition and many travellers suffered while traversing it. He desired to build a better road.

His teacher had passed away without realizing his wish to build a temple, and Gessen wished to complete this temple for him.

After Gessen had accomplished his three wishes he threw away his brushes and artist's materials and, retiring to the mountains, never painted again.

Kafka was a writer of Comedies

 "When Kafka read aloud himself, this humor became perfectly clear. Thus,for example, 

we friends of his laughed quite immoderately when he first let us hear the first chapter 

of The Trial. And he himself laughed so muchthat there were moments when he couldn't 

read any further. Astonishing enough, when you think of the fearful earnestness…"

Interview with Creisher and Siekmann

Here

Weber's Reading of Confucianism and Judaism

Never knew about these, interesting counterpoint to his reading of Protestantism and Capitalism.

The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism

Ancient Judaism

Comment on 'Amateurism'

I think that the shifting fashion for the amateur aesthetic in American art is perhaps symptomatic and cyclical. To start with my formulation of the difference between American and European social/relational art is that American social practice, to me, always seemed rooted in a DIY punk/hardcore aesthetic. A part of Nato Thompson’s mythology has always been that he started as a Bay area punk/political activist, and following from the argument that I always use in respect to myself its simply that everything I learnt about self-organization was learnt from the years with BSR. (Or in other words, the punks all had to grow up and get jobs and art was the place where their specific skill set became valuable)

It’s a natural progression from making cd’s, posters, zines, organizing shows to social practice and the art world. In a similar vein are the Chicago collective Temporary Services who were one of the earliest practitioners of a socially engaged art practice in the States who were all West Coast punks in the 80's and early 90's. Then there is the director of the first Social Practice MFA in the US, Ted Purves, whose book ‘What We Want Is Free’ (with its title taken from a hardcore punk song) seems to contextualize the social practices within a DIY, grassroots aesthetic.  I think you can track a seminal moment in the history of social practice in the US with the ascendancy of the career of Nato Thompson, and he acknowledged it himself when he moved from MASSMoca to Creative Time, that it was a shift of the cultural capital accrued over two decades of DIY production, to the hegemonic capital of New York to be co-opted, hollowed out and commodified with big budgets. 

In an interview, he doesn’t like to talk about his own politics much, but he acknowledges that there is an anarchic, D.I.Y. aesthetic to most of the artists that he shows, one that dovetails with the all-hands-on-deck ethos of big-box movie production.

As you say, there is no place for the amateur or DIY in the specific conditions of capitalism where the entrepreneur rather than the engineer or scientist is the locus of innovation. I guess we need to go back to the earliest theorization of a ‘bricoleur’ aesthetic it is a direct response to conditions of scarcity and is rooted in the engineer rather than the entrepreneur. I like to formulate it as if Schumpteter is the economist who represents the entrepreneur as the engine of innovation in dynamic capitalist economies then I think Schumacher is the economist who could represent the DIY amateur aesthetic with his positioning of ‘appropriate technology’, and grassroots, indigenous knowledge as an equally important economic driver to offset capitalist centralization. In Melbourne it is simply the case that there is not enough money circulating within its micro-art scene so artists respond accordingly, and over time it gets fetishized as an aesthetic in itself.

ny shadow vans

informal economy

 

Investigative journalism tips

ICIJ -  Really good resource 

funeral photos

ny times

_________________

Liam Gillick Uses Blender

In Joanna Hogg's 'Exhibition' there are scenes where Gillick's character 'H' is shown using Blender. This is amazing because it completely justifies all I really can be bothered doing these days in terms of real art making outside of fieldwork and research, which is sitting at home making Blender models and getting them built by others commercially. The fact that I have the exact same process as him and gets away with it is totally validating.

There's even a scene of him with an open book counting the number of shelves on some piece of Modernist architecture and replicating it in the program, which is exactly what I do.

Gillick

Uses

Blender

Amateurism

One thing I've noticed is that amateurism is distinctly not an American aesthetic. I think this is the flip-side that informs American taste for Formalism (professionalism), and I think it relates to the distinctly American distaste for central planning.

I think the bottom up anti-centralism of the US casts everyone a priori as an entrepreneur, and likewise "skill" and legitimacy is not associated with public institutions per se but rather with the successful entrepreneur. If we were to take art for example, then the MOMA, Guggenheim etc exist as private non-profit organisations with a board of trustees. It is ultimately a creation of successful industry.

On the other hand, this constructs the amateur as a failed entrepreneur, which is to say merely unskilled or inferior. That is, if everyone is constructed as an entrepreneur, the distinction between the amateur and the professional is only quantitative ie in terms of skill and talent and how much money you make, rather than qualitative. Here Mike Smith is probably a good case, representing the entrepreneur as amateur, and especially since his work was neglected for too long and dismissed as amateurish.

In cultural contrast, we might take the English amateur (the hobbyist) who represents the idiosyncratic over the socialised / normalised / public sphere. Here the amateur represents the inner private life of the domestic as against public life (not the market), which is the personal and the biographical ie what is not fit for "public" consumption. Grayson Perry being a good example. 

Perhaps this isn't borne out by the facts? - particularly with reference to Institutional Critique and how it regards institutions. But to me the collector, a figure steeped within 19th C naturalism and the European public institution, makes Mark Dion's work seem very British. Perhaps I'm wrong.

The Australian amateur is probably related to the Australian artist which I long argued comes out of the DIY man in the shed. Here the amateur is opposed to the consumer (why buy something when I can make a perfectly good (imprecise and wonky) version myself?!) Perhaps this relates to a historically ingrained respect for labour, and has persisted in an amateurish maker culture. So does this make the Australian amateur primarily opposed to industrial production?

I started thinking of this because of some lukewarm responses by music writers here to BSR releases, particularly those releases with an interesting sociological context. Here, where everyone is expected to have a jazzed up personal narrative (..and from that day on I knew I was born to X) and be an a priori producer of sorts (I'm a singer/ novelist / artist, yes can I take your order?) any interesting conditions of production are levelled out. The idiosyncrasies in the music don't come across as formalising and illuminating a particular context in which it was produced, rather, it just comes across as another amateur  who can't make to spec. Here spec not being mass expectations, but niche, being an equally formalised domain. 

 

The Void

So I finally got around to reading the McGowan piece you recommended, and like you I got a lot out of it. I think my thoughts over the past 6 months have circulated around a very simple binary to do with politics and art centering on the relationship between autonomy and engagement. I really like it when writers apply theory to really simple, pop cultural examples because it helps me understand them in very simple terms, which is probably why Zizek is so popular.

So, the concept of the void, or missing signifier or the absent female binary didn’t make terribly much sense to me in the way McGowan and Roger spoke of it until he applied it in his reading of the DaVinci Code showing how the missing signifier of the female in Western culture proposed in the suppressed figure of Mary Magdalen in Christianty refers to two approaches to dealing with the void, one is to repress it and deny the existence of a void at the center of culture, thus creating a totalizing master signifier or trying to restore or fill the void and thereby suggesting that the fundamental lack is something that can be filled the result of which will be a restoration of a perfect order of things and again denying the limits of symbolic representation.

I wasn’t entirely sure of his assessment of the agonistic politics and radical democracy of Laclau and Mouffe. Presumably, their argument that the heart of politics and democracy is a constant agonistic push and pull between left and right, in that sense preserving the void by suggesting the gulf between the two poles cannot be overcome and that, contrary to a radical Marxist politics, in a radical democracy the goal is simply to exist to be antagonistic against the Right rather than to become a dominant, totalizing system in itself (which presumably would lead to a dictatorship of the proletariat a la Leninist-Marxism). Yet McGowan’s reading of them is negative, though I kind of see agonistic politics as an acknowledgement of the productive possibilities of the void in politics.

In relation to autonomy versus engagement vis a vis politics in art, McGowan’s argument is useful for me in not conceiving of the tension as a problem to be overcome. In other words, I was consumed with the question of whether its better to sit in a studio divorced from reality and produce autonomous utopias as alternatives to the real world, or to go out and apply aesthetic practice to the world as a form of direct political action. In these terms, conceiving of autonomy and engagement figuratively as two opposing poles, with a tight rope stretched across the void which one traverses every so carefully back and forth as the spectacle itself. The balancing act between autonomy and engagement is the dialectical productive potential of the void in art. One must pull the rope tight between these poles to produce enough tension which allows one to be productive and it is not ones purpose to bring those poles together. So this all also relates back to that old Gillick chestnut of looking at the gaps in culture, which now reconceived as the void, can be interpreted as looking at the ways in which the void is variously repressed or filled in culture to create false totality. When artists look at and become attracted by these points, they are interested in showing how these are the voids in culture which the culture itself attempts to ‘paper over’ because they point directly to how the entire system functions at, which is as a construct. Again, I guess it totally comes down to the void being the idea that everything is constructed, but looking at it from the point of view of artists, we are attracted to the void not only because it pulls away the shroud to reveal how everything is false, but because the void is the space around which we begin to build symbolic systems (which is all art is), in other words become creative and construct reality in the productive, positive sense of the word. I’ll rewatch Roger’s talk and write some more and revise my opinions no doubt, but this is what I’ve got out of it so far.