By Jelena Vesic and David Riff
The following is a transcript of the third and penultimate discussion of “The Position of the Speaker” workshop. It focused on the work of Graziela Kunsch described in the previous post. We have made this transcript in a collective process of witnessing much like the one that Simon wanted to discuss, and that was thematized in the “Archive of Lost Objects” by Hito Steyrl, and the Nine Scripts of a Nation at War.
Vilensky: I want to talk about Contra Fille. Do you know this turnstile piece? That’s a very different form of intervention that involves the singularity of an artistic gesture.
Graziela: I liked this piece. But it is very different from my work. For me, it is important to participate in the struggles through long work in the community, and the sudden improvisations that come from that work as good ideas.
Ashley: It’s hard to negotiate the position to community that is not your own. It’s constant negotiation of the artist’s position.
Andrea: It’s very imporant to take yourself back...
Ashley: Like something I heard in an activist video about the US jail system, where video artists were told to “sit down, shut the fuck up, and listen.” Then it becomes clear: it’s all about different modes of address.
Irina: I have two questions. Does your work relate to Dziga Vertov’s methodology? His main intention was not authorship, but to let people do something with his archive. He got fired for this practice, actually, but his ideal was endless and neverending horizontal exchange between anonymous people. This was his political program. I like to think that his Sixth Part of the World is a huge filmic squat. The second thing I want to call into question is John Roberts’ idea of the avant-garde as something seeking (either retroactively or in the future) its event. This is not avant-garde, this is modernism. Avant-garde is about politics, and the slow preparation of continual possibilities of events to come (maybe).
Vilensky: But what about the dialectic? What about Brecht?
Ashley: I really like the project’s openess, which introduces the possibility for fiction.
Simon: I think it comes down to a difference between two modern conceptions of the avant-garde. One is the readymade, installed in the institutional context of art. The other is about process and prototypes.
There was a short break for a performance by Yvonne Rainer, moderated by Roger Buergel and his lovely daughter. When we returned to Kabinett 2, Ashley was showing a world map of the prison system, based on the premise that 1960s-70s solidarity politics are still very important but don’t work so well in a new historical context, and need to be expanded out of their national discourse into a supranational field. This work can be found at http://aworldmap.com/
http://www.correctionsproject.com/prisonmaps/intropart_framePIC.htm.
Vilensky: There is a great need for distance and specific artistic positions! Horizontal media are too vague. They’re being captured. Any corporation can do this much better than artist personality. So it’s already under suspicion. Aren’t you working in the media field? Maybe it’s not art...
Graziela: I am an activist, and I work in the media, and I am an artist, and I work with the art space, so I’m just using these different positions at different times. My work is all about the shifts between these different positions.
Katja: For me, it’s senseless to have a discussion on what art is. It’s important to ask what can I use this notion for? Art is connected to uses, and to when which practices are framed as art. It’s not about excluding one practice or another.
Graziela: I am very interested in the different shifting positions between art and non-art. Sometimes, I’m discussing politics with artists, and artistic language with activists.
Simon: Where do these shift occur? Please do tell us more.
Katja: Also, you often appear in your own videos. What is your position? Are you a character? Or is this whole project a self-portrait? Is it all about a woman going through this urban landscape or what?
Graziela: It is about the individual being a part of the collective. It is about the role of the artist, about the investigation of self-organizing space. I rarely film myself, except for during presentations or debates. Most of the time, I am filming the crowd, the people, and not myself. I am filming how the buses and streets are organized.
Katja: I was asking because my position of speaking is not only the position of the artist. It is never singular. I don’t care about all these categories. What’s really important is the relation to the audience and the space. But to be honest, I produce what I would like to see as somebody already mentioned during the magazines discussion, and in that sense, I identify myself with the audience. But at the same time, I make no predictions about the audience.
Vilensky: Are you a creative personality? What do you mean?
Katja: Formats have limitations. People try to locate everything. But I just use institutions that exist. What happens happens in excess of the institutions.
Simon: So, it’s really important to think about the metaphor of language, which precedes and exceeds.
Vilensky: I would like to reframe the discussion of excess into a more Marxist terminology. We talk a lot about use value, but what is the surplus value, the surplus value that the artist should reappropriate?
Simon: Immaterial production is very different from the Marxist scheme. Value, today, is assigned through politics.
Ashley: I agree that we need to think beyond preconceived categories of use value. We need to expand its definition.
Katja: Art is not work. Art is surplus. Art is excess.
Simon: I was attracted to art because it wasn’t work, actually.
Katja: When I talk about surplus, I mean Bataille, not Marx.
Simon: Competition between immaterial producers is very different from that of factory workers...
At this point, the discussion became more and more confused. The point of this post, perhaps, has been to show that fetishization of the discursive format can quickly lead to a mimetic labor that reenacts the very tribunals and accounting-sessions that Katja, Ashley, and Andrea critique. This goes to show that there is no immunity by prolonging an endless discussion, which is why this post now must end. But just one last thing: the reader will note that both of us are absent from the discussion. We are embedded bloggers. This creates a subalternity. We can only shape the content of the seminar-tribunal-trial-debate in retrospect.
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