Dear Director Fusco, “Is anyone in an Art School imagining its Future? Or are we all trying not to think about it. When I summon it up, it seems to come furnished with ‘hot-desks’, to be comprised of seamless, temperature-controlled scenarios for ‘knowledge transfers’, generating ‘learning outcomes’. Even within the province of the imagination, on a hot afternoon, this imagery of heat, material extrusion and contract-residue gets nowhere near the sensual. No. Although something is clearly being exchanged, in those corporate, carpeted spaces. But this terminology does take me as far as the comic, with its scatological productivity rhetoric. And maybe there is hope in that. In the future Art School we will still laugh.” [1] But is laughter enough? Is the comic enough? Here I think even the author of the above passage would answer – no, it is not nearly enough. What exactly is it that the laughter conceals? What does the comic portend? Enter Slavoj Zizek: “there [are situations where] a horror [is] so deep that it can no longer be ‘sublimated’ into tragic dignity, and is for that reason approachable only through an eerie [laughter]… the passage from tragique to moque-comic… every dignified, ‘noble’ position turns into its opposite – the truth of the ‘noble consciousness’ dedicated to its sublime ethical task of serving the Good is the manipulative, servile, exploitative ‘base (knavish) consciousness’”. [2] Think of Heath Ledger as The Joker. And Harvey Dent’s passage from noble civil servant to the corrupted, monstrous Two Face. Is not art school in a similar predicament today? The degree to which we cling on to French Theory for the goal of ‘knowledge transfers’ and the aim of ‘learning outcomes’ – is indeed comic. No? I’d cry if I could only stop laughing. Whatever dignity Deleuze and Guattari once conjured, the emerging artist’s widespread idealization of the dynamic duo has put out, stamped out any inkling or trace of ‘the sensual.’ For shame. But how can we snap our emerging artists’ out of the Deleuzian siren song? Guattari’s mirage? Enter Chris Kraus. Her book Torpor pushes French theoreticians off their pedestals, drags them down the ivory tower, to reveal them for what they are, “that the sublime Grail will reveal itself to be nothing but a piece of shit.” [3] “When Felix [Guattari] throws back his head and laughs, which something that he does quite often, his wire-rimmed John Lennon glasses slide down off his nose. He is so comfortable within his tubby skin, with nothing but contempt for the young… He goes to cocktail parties with the president… No one expects Felix to be anything but what he is: a great philosopher and clinician; a 1960s guy with lots of influence and money. Sylvie isn’t bothered by the conversation in the loft. She knows that she’s invisible to Jerome’s French friends. She knows that even if she spoke the language perfectly, they wouldn’t speak to her because she isn’t anyone to them. Her opinions wouldn’t matter.” [4] Hopefully they will matter now. As the new Director of MFA Art Writing at Goldsmiths College, I hope you consider Torpor as one of the first mature examples of Art Writing in the short twenty-first century. Perhaps it is about time to finally throw out our copies of A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus and Soft Subversions. And clear out some shelf space for Aliens & Anorexia, I Love Dick, and Video Green. Here may reside the future of Art Writing – but what about our original query? Is anyone in an Art School imagining its Future? Exit Thomas Hirschorn, exit relational aesthetics. Enter Gina Clark, enter utopic performativity. Imagine Clark’s July 18, 2008 Betalevel, Chinatown performance for the Los Angeles book launch of One Break, A Thousand Blows (BookWorks 2008). She is literally inside the proverbial cardboard box. The intimate crowd watches as every puncture and cut from within emphasizes the manual nature of the artist’s work. A pause, an injunction: out of every slit, orifice – a dozen fish of every size and wet variety pour out, hitting the floor of the artist-run space. The smell of day old cod and flounder permeates Betalevel. A flood of associations: Viennesse Actionism? English Neoism? An authentic act in between Time and Eternity? Laughter. Admiration. And suddenly – an explorsion! “[T]he prisoners have seen a ghost – neither the resuscitated obscene ghost of the past, not the spectral ghost of the capitalist present, but the brief apparition of a future utopian Otherness to which every authentic revolutionary stance should cling.” Hope resides here, I think. Yours sincerely, Maxi Kim
[1] Elizabeth Price, Goldsmiths BA Fine Art 2008 Catalogue, London: MacDonald Egan.
[2] Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, London: Verso 2000, p. 44.
Ibid., p. 26.
[3] Chris Kraus, Torpor, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) 2006, p. 103.
[4] The Fragile Absolute, pp. 159-160.
by Maxi Kim
Photo by Gerard Olson and Daiana Feuer
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