#I also just need to work on historical magda again in general

[porcileorg]

A conversation about Kunstverein München’s group show ‘Not Working – Artistic production and matters of class’ (2020-09-12 – 2020-11-01)

Conversants: The Bensplainer, Magda Wisniowska, and Victor Sternweiler [talking on Skype, in the evening of Nov 11, 2020.]

Victor: We should start our conversation about Kunstverein München’s show ‘Not Working – Artistic production and matters of class,’ [online through 2020-11-22] curated by Maurin Dietrich and Gloria Hasnay, while making clear that we were not able to attend the parallel program, consisting of tours, lectures, performances, and video screenings, which were partially screened online, and an extensive reader was published too. This will simply be a conversation about the actual show. One could claim that such a review can’t do justice to the whole project, but I claim that nobody was able to attend everything, except for the makers, so one can only have a fragmented take on it, and therefore it is legitimate to, mainly or solely, talk about the work installed in the space. 

Exhibition consisted work by Angharad Williams, Annette Wehrmann, Gili Tal, Guillaume Maraud, Josef Kramhöller, Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky, Lise Soskolne, Matt Hilvers, Stephen Willats.

A film screening series selected by Nadja Abt, showing work by Adrian Paci, Agnès Varda, Ayo Akingbade, Barbara Kopple, Berwick St Collective, Laura Poitras and Linda Goode Bryant, Max Göran.

A single event screening with films selected by Simon Lässig.

Accompanying program consisting of a book presentation (Düşler Ülkesi) by Cana Bilir-Meier (in conversation with Gürsoy Doğtaş), lectures by NewFutures, Ramaya Tegegne, Tirdad Zolghadr and a publication presentation (Phasenweise nicht produktiv) from a collaboration by Carolin Meunier and Maximiliane Baumgartner.

The reader containing contributions by Annette Wehrmann, Dung Tien Thi Phuong, Josef Kramhöller, Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky, Leander Scholz, Lise Soskolne, Mahan Moalemi, Marina Vishmidt and Melanie Gilligan, Steven Warwick.

Exhibition documentation: https://artviewer.org/not-working-artistic-production-and-matters-of-class/

Magda: To help, I was rereading today the booklet accompanying the exhibition, although I don’t see how the text is really going to address what we see in the actual Kunstverein space. For example, I quote, “The works on view are characterized by a consciousness of how background, socialization, education, and artistic practice are inevitably entangled. They hence allow for a consideration of these categories in relation to the actual lived realities of their producers.” Does it mean that the artists somehow reflect their own social background? Autobiographically on their own lived reality? Well, by large, they don’t. We don’t know what social background these artists are coming from.

Victor: How would you know anyhow?

Magda: Instead, the coherency of the exhibition relies on going through all the positions which were outlined in the booklet’s introduction. So, Stephen Willats investigates the historical aspect of class, Annette Wehrmann performs the interrogation of the economic model, Josef Kramhöller’s is a more personal approach to consumerism, Gili Tal tackles gentrification and cosmopolitanism, and Angharad Williams addresses the performative and fashion , and so on. And at least two of the artists are no longer alive.

Victor: In the time of Covid, where you try to make ends meet, how can you say no? What I’m trying to say is that the precariousness of their class is testified also by artists not being able to nowadays refuse to participate in an exhibition in which they potentially don’t think they fit in. They do it, plain and simple.

The Bensplainer: I don’t think it is due to Covid. It’s a general trend. If you're invited by the artistic director of the Venice Biennale, whatever their exhibition idea is, you participate, as an artist. It’s not anymore the time when an Alighiero Boetti could angrily refuse an invitation by Harald Szeemann.

Magda: Is that really the central problem of this exhibition? There are a lot of problematic issues, and I am now again looking at the text, especially at the end, where it states that “today the question of class is not addressed anymore.” That is completely untrue. Much of postmodernism consisted precisely of the critical inquiry into questions of class. I don’t know about you, Bensplainer, but in my time in London we had to read a lot of Bourdieu, especially his idea concerning cultural capital.

The Bensplainer: Jameson was my lighthouse at that time!

Magda: It was a big thing! You can’t say really the topic had been ignored since then.

The Bensplainer: Especially after the last Documenta in 2017. 

Magda: I acknowledge that the question of class is no longer about a white male perspective, defined by simple economics. But really? What does this exhibition add to this conversation? 

The Bensplainer: I think that the main problem here is when you set up a thematic exhibition. If you, as a curator, have some aprioristic ideas about the specific interpretations on cultural work, then you tend to apply them to your own exhibition making. Although, you tend to lose contact with the works themselves. You tend to look more at the anecdotal parts of the work and at its processes. Let’s be honest, there are no great works in the exhibition, the ones being able to question your own vision of forms and of the world in which these forms happen.

Magda: I think the older works displayed here, as Stephen Willats’ ones, from the 1980s, present some problems: they are, in fact, historical, and at that time had a certain currency, whereas they seem today …

The Bensplainer: … nostalgic.

Magda: And dry as well: this kind of class idea, of people living in a housing block – like he documented and interviewed – it doesn’t seem relevant anymore. The other thing is that it seems so British, so entwined in that specific culture. We know this Monty Python sketch, right? This kind of satire, for example, wouldn’t fit German society at that time, I think.

Magda: The other thing I was thinking of, while walking through the exhibition, was Pulp’s ‘Common People.’ (1995) Did anyone think of that? The song is about a girl from the upper classes, who wants to behave as being from the lower. But she never achieves that, because she always has her rich daddy in the background. I think that a potential problem this exhibition faces is of glamorizing this kind of a working-class cliché.

Victor: That song is especially ironic, as it was brought to my attention by a friend that Danae Stratou, the artist, industrialist heir and wife of Yannis Varoufakis, is the subject of that song. 

Magda: Yes, that’s why I mention it. 

Victor: I had a chat with The Bensplainer at some point and we had concerns about the installing too. It seemed, we agreed, like an art fair show display. The question is: how do you display all these works like a survey of an idea?

Magda: It is about all the artistic positions that the text referred to. As I said before.

The Bensplainer: If you see such an exhibition, you might consider how it fits a piece of writing, it being a master or a PhD thesis. On the other hand, it really lacks the viewer’s possibility to freely interact with the works. In other terms: how could you translate an idea for an exhibition, if the exhibition itself follows a logocentric and rational process? There is no surprise, indeed: I wanna see something, I don’t wanna learn something. 

Victor: This is a kind of philosophy made clear by the exhibition makers: what can art do and how it can utilize itself, in order to convey politics?

The Bensplainer: Do you mean how art can be utilitarian?

Victor: Let’s say you have a curatorial agenda, or an hypothesis: art-making as a precarious condition. And then you, as an exhibition maker, attempt to visualize that. In this sense, these works witness this very aspect, like art illustrating an intellectual point of view.

Magda: Otherwise said, either it is the work that is convincing, or the hypothesis. Right now, it doesn’t seem to be either. About the works I don’t wanna say much, but the text, its arguments can be easily dismantled. In many places, it is simply not coherent. For example, why do you state in the exhibition text that the coronavirus pandemic is what makes visible the rise of social inequalities the exhibition addresses, and then you show works from the 1980s? It makes no sense.

The Bensplainer: Works from the 1980s which recall works from the 1960s.

Magda: Exactly! If you were really consistent with your method, you would research the topic, then find out who’s working with it now. Not the artists who kind of work with the idea… just a little bit, so that they can fit your curatorial idea.

Victor: On the behalf of the curators: why should you do a show like that? What are their motivations?

Magda: Of course, you can do a show addressing the notion of class. There’s nothing wrong about that. Even if it were an illustration of ideas, it could work. But you need a good thesis first, while here the positions that are supposed to illustrate it, are weak. Who liked Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky’s installations?

Victor: As a person who attended some performances by Ziegler and Janitzky previous to the KM show, but not to the last one actually at KM, I would say I see their sculptures as stage props. These performances enchanted or activated their sculptures. So, I’m quite neutral about their works in the show, but at the same time I’m neutral about all the works featured. It seems to me that the show has an agenda in representing all kinds of mediums. Photography, video … like a checklist.

The Bensplainer: Maybe old-fashioned?

Magda: It is a safe agenda. If you take Mark Fisher’s ‘Capitalist Realism,’ he states that museums and related institutions are safe spaces where we can make criticism of capitalism, while capitalism itself allows it.

Victor: Yeah, Roland Barthes already said that. On my part, I am totally opposed to the idea of ‘making art’ as a profession, in the capitalist sense. When paying your rent depends on the money from selling your art, then soon you’ll be under pressure to produce, and that in return, I think, ultimately leads to overproduction and junk.

Magda: Then we ought to know more about the artists and how they position themselves to the capitalist model. 

The Bensplainer: I think we are derailing the conversation. I mean, after 1989, there is only one religion, which is capitalism, and you hardly can escape this fact (I agree with Giorgio Agamben on this). Insisting on this leftist nostalgia is counterproductive. Art is luxury. Some artists are fighting against this mindset, but we are still in such a system.

Magda: Indeed – and yet the exhibition promotes an anti-capitalist position. For example, The Coop Fund’s aim is to provide an alternative funding, so that is very clear. Guillaume Maraud is also doing a standard institutional critique by creating an alternative fund. 

The Bensplainer: At the same time, these practices are canonized. When KM showed Andrea Fraser in 1993, the questions she raised were novel and on the point. The visuals in this present show are canonized. Stephen Willats repeats a visual language of more established artists, as Hans Haacke for instance. 

Magda: Yes, maybe the only thing Willats adds is a British perspective on the problem.

The Bensplainer: Victor, you said on the occasion of our NS-Dokumentationszentrum conversation [link]: „Preaching to the converted.“ Basically, we find here the same pattern. So, you can argue with a lot of reasoning about a motivation for an exhibition – in this case an anti-capitalist agenda – but what I expect is to see works and practices which change the way I see. Sorry if I repeat myself, but seeing works which repeat, without a difference, canonized visual experiences from the past gives me such a kind of déjà vu effect. What is this exhibition about? What are the politics that motivated it? From the point of view of the exhibition making, it is in itself a sort of repetition. In the last Documenta, the assumptions were similar: a lot of nostalgic Marxism and related leftist theoretical positions, which are good, but at the end of the day, the works become an illustration sketched aprioristically by the curators and the artistic director. Here lays the critical point which we really have to address. Paradoxically, if the works are repeating themselves, aren’t also the politics of exhibition making repeating themselves? 

Magda: Yes and no. My question is: why are you repeating these positions? You can repeat a practice under the change of circumstances: the pandemic has changed the parameters. 

The Bensplainer: I agree: the pandemic has unveiled changes which were not so clear before that. 

Magda: So, does the repetition offered in this exhibition reflect that? Does our present context require repetition? How are the works from the 1980s and 1990s relevant now?

The Bensplainer: Let’s be clear: I don’t consider repetition with a negative value. I remember a wonderful group show at KW, Berlin, in 2007, titled ‘History Will Repeat Itself.’ Precisely, it was interesting because it focused on repetition as a visual device, that’s to say how artists and works dealt with the notion of repetition, be it of other works or of overarching experiences. I remember this great video by Jeremy Deller, ‘The Battle of Orgreave’ (2001), directed by Mike Figgis, in which the artist reenacted the famous 1984 clash between workers and police in Orgreave, South Yorkshire, England, and interviewed some participants from both sides too. By the way, it was a ground breaking show, but if you now repeat because it is fashion, a canon, then repeating loses its critical charge. Moreover, works become simply an illustration of the curator’s idea. It seems to me so frustrating now, especially when Anton Vidokle already addressed the question in his seminal and controversial article ‘Art Without Artists?’ on e-flux already in 2010. [link]

Victor: Yeah, that’s what I find problematic with this show: in this time of existential precariousness, how can an artist be critical or be able to question the politics of an exhibition? You’re invited, you get attention and funds, you simply go along with it. The institutions are creating ideological precariousness by wagging with the money. Nonetheless, I see that an artist needs the money. I think it is an inherent issue of institutional exhibition making, but I can’t see an immediate way out of it. It is a trap. The people in the institutions are also paid to play their role, and if they refuse to, replacement will be found quickly.

The Bensplainer: I don’t think that it is the main point here.

Magda: I recognize that there are many artists that suffer contemporary financial precariousness, but there are equally many who do not. Let’s be honest, how many artists, or student artists, may claim that they are coming from working class families? I mean, many are playing the role, but really?

The Bensplainer: I have to check it again, but there is a statistic in Bavaria that states that families on the edge of or below existential and financial poverty who are able to send their kids to higher education are 6 or 7%. That’s a ridiculous percentage, especially because these underprivileged students or artists have then a structural difficulty in order to enter the so-called art system.

Magda: Mid- or upper-class people study art. They come from that comfortable background. At any given time, they may or may not have money, but they indeed have a safety net. 

Victor: People that I talked to were missing a critical view on the institution itself and how this show sits within its history and why they did the show there, since the Kunstverein was developed specifically to cultivate an image and space for the bourgeoisie, the middle class, by propagating aesthetic values from the upper class. It was the beginning of the ‘public sphere’ separate from the court, but also was the image of upward mobility and how its members today, generally upper middle class, use the space as a form of patronage and charity as an additive to their cultural capital. So, one might interpret this show as cynical, but I personally think that there is also the possibility of freeing yourself up from that tradition and subverting or bastardizing that project of that middle class of 200 years ago. However, I think that the show is too conventional and there is an opportunity missed here. 

The Bensplainer: Sorry if I always bring up my PhD topic about the Russian so-called Avant-Garde. If you analyze it socially, the Avant-Garde cloud was also animated by class and social warfare. Practitioners from the periphery came to the capitals, Moscow and St. Petersburg, and they had to fight with their contemporaries belonging to the urban mid- or upper-class world. For instance, you have Malevich who needs to rent a big apartment for him and his family, in order to sub-let and make a little profit from other people. But he also has to provide meals for them and he can paint only when he has some spare time. You still have today this romantic idea of the Avant-Garde, forgetting that it was also a very hard social situation.

Magda: But, the thing is that the economic or even its symbolic model, doesn’t seem to be really relevant. Class as it was in the 1970s, 1980s or even 1990s doesn’t exist anymore. What about class and technology? You can’t apply for jobs because you don’t have easy access to the Internet, because you don’t own a laptop or a smartphone. You can’t have a flat because you don’t get the notification on time. And flexibility changed the notion of work. There are a lot of structural changes in our societies, which the show’s accompanying text acknowledges clearly, but they are not examined in the work, or at least only in the orthodox leftist way. These positions are repeated nostalgically in the art. To me, the working class today is exemplified by DHL delivery workers.

The Bensplainer: I would add this. Today's working class might also be embodied by wannabe successful TikTok accounts! You may immediately perceive the fakeness in appropriating models from the supposed upper class in order to convey a different idea about yourself.

Magda: Fake it until you make it! TikTok responds to an already established model.

The Bensplainer: The novel level conveyed by TikTok is that it is not about hustling or conning anymore. Everybody knows everything is fake, so everybody accepts the coded rules.

Victor: That’s the classic definition of Žižek’s ‘ideology.’

Magda: Coming back to the show, I was surprised that urgent political issues were not questioned. I mean, the rise of populism is an issue, and it is class oriented. I don’t know much about Berlusconi and his years in power, but he did address the narrative of his politics to a certain class and set up a model for the recent years, didn’t he?

The Bensplainer: We Italians are not recognized in such a way anymore, but we’re still at the verge of the Avant-Garde! If history repeats itself as a farce, after Berlusconi everything is a farce. He had – and to some extent still has – an appeal to the working class, in the sense that he sold a narrative through which you can change your life only by willing it. At his first election run in 1994 he won in working class’ bastions, where traditionally the former Communist Party won with ease, efficiently selling his abstract ideas on liberty through his glittering television sets. So, already then, you might perceive that categories such as the Left and the Right were structurally changing. And this historical and epochal shift, so charged with ideological questions, is totally forgotten in this exhibition. 

Magda: Thus, I could have accepted as legitimate the exhibition’s assumptions, even if illustrational, if they would have addressed the ongoing complexity of the topic of populism, digitalization, 0-hours contracts, and so on, all related to an idea of the working class. Then it would have been fair enough!

The Bensplainer: I would add another topic to this. If you consider the state of satire, especially from the US, comedy is way ahead of visual art. It addresses those topics in a much more effective and creative way than visual art is actually doing. Only because they’re really reaching millions of people.

Magda: Yes, John Oliver, for instance.

The Bensplainer: I became a huge fan of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night monologues in the last two years, because he and his authors adapted his style of comedy shifting from weird Hollywood absurdities to overall US social and political issues. So, his and his authors’ craft reached a new level of satire, and the audience’s awareness. What can visual art do, as powerful as it might be, in comparison to mainstream satire? Let’s simply think about how Kimmel dealt with the topic Obamacare and how he related to – his personal history.

Magda: This is important, as access to healthcare in the US especially, is a class issue. But then, yeah, why don’t you simply invite a comedian to KM, then? Ok, you could never afford that, but who knows?

The Bensplainer: It would be so wonderful! But this idea should also be declined in a weirder approach. 

Magda: For sure, a comedian in an art space could have more freedom compared to the one he could have on national television. 

The Bensplainer: Victor, do you remember Olof Olsson’s performance at Lothringer 13’s cafe in Munich in 2017? 

Victor: Yes.

The Bensplainer I found it brilliant, mixing visual and comedy devices, and very generous, because it lasted so long! This kind of transdisciplinary performance says more about social, political and economic issues, than a conventional show, like this one at KM. If I had to make a single critical statement about this show at KM is that it doesn’t move our present cultural perception to a different plane, as satire does.

Magda: My impression is that a student went through their assigned reading list, without going to the library. Everything which was required was read, but no insight was then further researched. 

#flaschendrehen #magdawisniowska #thebensplainer #victorsternweiler #kunstvereinmünchen #kunstvereinmuenchen #munich #maurindietrich #gloriahasnay #art #class #stephenwillats #annettewehrmann #josefkramhöller #gilital #angharadwilliams #lauraziegler #stephanjanitzky #coopfund #markfisher #pulp #montypython #johnoliver #jimmykimmel #berlusconi #covid #coronavirus #culturalcapital #culturalwork #capitalism

[reconditarmonia]

Dear Yuletide Writer

Hello, lovely writer!

I’m reconditarmonia here and on AO3 (and have been since LJ days, but my LJ is locked down and I only have a DW to see locked things).

General likes:

-- Relationships that aren’t built on romance or attraction. They can be romantic or sexual as well, but my favorite ships are all ones where it would still be interesting or compelling if the romantic component never materialized.

-- Loyalty kink, whether commander-subordinate or comrades-in-arms, and the trust associated with it. Sometimes-but-not-always relatedly, idealism. I guess the two combined might be, in general, the idea of nobility of character and what that means.

-- Heists, or other stories where there’s a lot of planning and then we see how the plan goes.

-- Femslash, complicated or intense relationships between women, and female-centric gen. Women doing “male” stuff.

-- Stories whose emotional climax or resolution isn’t the sex scene, if there is one.

-- Uniforms/costumes/clothing.

-- Stories, history, and performance. What gets told and how, what doesn’t get told or written down, behavior in a society where everyone’s consuming media and aware of its tropes, how people create their personas and script their own lines.

-- Eucatastrophe.

General DNW: rape/dubcon, torture, other creative gore; Christmas/Christian themes; unrequested AUs, including “same setting, different rules” AUs such as soulmates/soulbonds; PWP; food sex.

Fandom: Dòu Máah Dáan | Peking Opera Blues (1986) 

Characters: Tsao Wan

This film is so much MORE than I ever dreamed. More hilarious, more shippy, more dramatic. I think what I want most from this fandom is something on a similar emotional scale - not necessarily something where the plot itself has a national or international scope, but something that has room for opera slapstick, corpse puppetry, and torture; material concerns, and high aspirations; saving each other’s lives, and having sleepovers. Thematically, I’m really interested in the way the film shows friendship and familial love sometimes dovetailing with ethics and ideological goals and sometimes conflicting with them, and in the various ways women can find, or seek, their own independence.

Tsao Wan is the only character I’ve put in my request. I was fully expecting to come out of the film with femslash ships, and instead I have a big OT5 and a huge crush on Brigitte Lin (okay, that part I could see coming), so I’d be happy with any combination of the main five, including the two men, who were not nominated, as long as Tsao Wan is there. Some combination possibilities: how do any of them meet up again after the events of the film, whether by chance - do Bai Niu and/or Sheung Hung happen to be making a tour stop somewhere Tsao Wan has a mission? does Tsao Wan and Ling’s work take them near Tung’s village farm? - or intentionally - how would a new opera about Tsao Wan and Ling’s exciting adventures be created by Bai Niu and/or Sheung Hung, in terms of research and role creation? Or maybe Tsao Wan needs Bai Niu’s skills for a mission. In fact, maybe she needs everyone’s skills for a mission. Recruitment road trip! Some solo possibilities: what was Tsao Wan’s time in Europe like? Was she involved in any political activity there? What does she do post-film as History continues? In anything set post-film, I’d like to know that all five characters are important to each other, even if they’re not actually in the fic and/or sexually involved.

If you want to get really plotty, I love heist and con stuff like Leverage, Ocean’s Eleven (remake), and The Italian Job (original), where there’s a Plan with steps and roles, and then it plays out. If straight-up casefic isn’t your style, it could be fun to throw some shippy tropes at this canon (fake marriage where Tsao Wan is pretending to be the husband? hurt/comfort or sickfic? hell, I’d read accidental baby acquisition), but tropey stuff is not necessary - I’m just trying to throw out some ideas to get things moving. Ideally there’d be at least a figleaf of plot in the background, even if it’s not casefic.

Fandom-specific DNW: Explicit references to torture are still a hard DNW (I covered my eyes during the scene in question when watching the film), but I recognize it’s part of canon and consequently might be part of the world of the fic. If someone is tortured or creatively executed in your story, it’s fine to mention it but I do not want to know how.

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Fandom: Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

Characters: Bathsheba Everdene

I didn’t nominate this and it didn’t occur to me that it would be in the tagset, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it! One thing that always sticks in my mind about this novel is the way Hardy calls Bathsheba “the young farmer” just as he refers to the men as farmers - which, just saying, is more than most people writing about this story can do - and so, that being the case, what I’m most interested in is something about Bathsheba as farmer. One day in the life or four seasons in the life or five plantings/harvests in the life, or pseudo-academic fic about a case study of a woman farmer in the Victorian era, or a conflict between the farm and nature that Bathsheba has to decide how to solve.

Feel free to bring in the other nominated characters or other major characters if it suits what you’re trying to do, but what I’m really looking for is a focus on Bathsheba’s work, determination, and process of learning. I’d also love to read something like a merchant ship AU (as the first alternate setting that came to mind where it would be not exactly the done thing for her to captain her inherited ship and make commercial decisions herself - although I do have to point out that contrary to popular belief, there were a lot of women on shipboard in the age of sail, may this be useful - but also where nature and luck/fate are as influential as they are in the original setting), or something in which the land, superstition, and ritual were more overtly magical.

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Fandom: 月刊少女野崎くん | Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun

Characters: Kashima Yuu, Nozaki Umetarou

Pick a trope. Have them fuck it up.

That’s one of the things that makes me love this canon - the simultaneous send-up of and indulgence in tropes, in a very good-natured way. (Another way I’ve described its genre: “nothing happens, but very dramatically.” Everything is shocking or devastating or the pinnacle of bliss.) Kashima and Nozaki are two of the characters whose propensity to do this is most likely to set a story in motion, due to Nozaki’s experimentation/observation for his manga and Kashima’s princely self-fashioning and going 120% on everything; I also love Kashima’s bifauxnen-ness, acting talent, and earnest failboating, and the way that Nozaki could have been written as a tall-dark-handsome-stoic cipher guy and instead is just as quirky as anyone else. That said, this is an OR request, not an AND, and I’d also be happy to read stories about pretty much anyone from the nominated tagset (except Mikoshiba or Mayu; I don’t know Mayu very well because I originally got into this through the anime, and Mikoshiba just isn’t my fave, although I have no objection to his appearing in the story).

There are all sorts of lists out there of common shoujo(/romcom/fanfic) tropes if you’re not sure where to start. And, because Nozaki is all about subverting gendered characterization and role-boxing, and also about people trying to make their lives conform to narrative, go ahead and apply those tropes to whichever characters you feel would be the most interesting or fun. Feel free to pick non-high-school-setting ones, too, if there's magical/historical/high-society shoujo you want to see them tackle, or to take a play that Kashima (and whoever else) is involved in as a jumping-off point.

As you may have gathered, I love the way the canon plays with romance tropes, but I would prefer no overt Shipfic. If you’d like to include a ship, whether slash/femslash or het, I’d like for it to be handled without much seriousness, and for friendship with characters who aren’t part of the ship to be a significant part of the fic, as per canon. I do really like the show’s variety of friendships between characters of different temperaments, interests, and sexes.

If you’re really getting a “why don’t you just rewatch/reread the canon, reconditarmonia” vibe off this, which I’m kind of giving myself, you could try sex comedy future fic? Give them magical powers? What I’m most interested in, wherever you go with this, is the playing-with-tropes thing.

Fandom-specific DNW: I love Hori and Kashima’s relationship, but I’d strongly prefer that her feelings for him not be written as overtly romantic. High levels of ambiguity/intensity/tropey-ness are fine and great.

---

Fandom: Monstrous Regiment - Terry Pratchett

Characters: Any (Alice “Wazzer” Goom, Jack Jackrum, Magda “Tonker” Halter, Maladict, Polly “Ozzer” Perks, Tilda “Lofty” Tewt)

Give me all the loyalty kink for this fandom. Characters rescuing each other from peril, risking their reputation or position or ethics to defend each other, accomplishing the impossible or sacrificing things without even thinking twice because one trusts the other’s orders or judgment. Or A not going off the leash or into danger to defend B because B said not to, to protect A’s conscience or life or reputation. Can be romantic or platonic - I ship Polly/Mal and Tonker/Lofty, but I would also be delighted with Polly&Jackrum, Wazzer&Polly, or other non-romantic twosomes or moresomes in situations of loyalty and trust. Maybe Polly sends Mal on a dangerous mission, or Tonker is captured after she and Lofty burn down another place where women and girls are being abused, or Polly protects Jackrum’s secret/s from someone who could reveal them, or Wazzer ends up in the field again with the general’s retinue and Polly and Mal rescue her from danger (or vice versa!!). What strengths or sacrifices do they have at their disposal for each other?

Pratchett-esque voices would be great. He’s really, really good at sucker-punching the reader with sincerity in an overall satiric mode, and I think that style lends itself well to this sort of thing.

I’m not going to lie, Polly is my fave. I like that this could have been a generic coming-of-age or women-in-war story, where the protagonist learns that she’s brave or worthwhile and then the crisis is past, but instead Polly learns that she’s a cunning bastard and a hell of a sergeant, and being a one-off hero in a country that’s at peace and making slow social progress isn’t good enough for her. That said, just because I’m better able to articulate what I like about Polly doesn’t mean I’d be less excited for fic about anyone else! I think that’s something I’d want to explore for any of the characters who enlist in the course of the story - what are these women good at? What lets them fulfill their potential? What do they want when their hand isn’t being forced? Or for Jackrum, who’s already gone through that whole process by the time the story begins, any more backstory would be fabulous.

If you’re going the Polly/Mal route, I also love ludicrous levels of sexual tension in a military context (I think it’s the unavoidable proximity + the presence of others making it hard to act on it).

Fandom-specific DNW: vampire romance tropes (such as turning and/or immortality) as focus; non-female pronouns/headcanons.

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Fandom: Simoun (Anime)

Characters: Any (Aaeru, Dominuura, Halconf, Mamiina, Neviril, Paraietta, Plumbish Priestesses, Rodoreamon)

Simoun somehow ended up being a really weirdly meaningful show to me. I loved how all these women got to be flawed and fucked-up, noble and loyal. How, in the mold of all my favorite epic shoujo anime, it starts off beautiful and fine and then Shit Gets Very Real and that’s actually one of the themes of the show - we had a little debate a few weeks ago on FFA as to whether or not Simoun was a military canon, and the fact that circumstances have remade a team of priestesses in fancy quarters and magic flying machines who are there to pray to God, put off their choice of sex, use their talents, maintain or claw their way into a social position, into a military force involved in a war - that’s an idea that the characters themselves struggle with in the show. (Neviril’s scene in the hearing is one of my favorites.) How everyone gets character development, in the sense of learning and changing, and even what seem like annoying mandatory straight subplots actually end up serving that thematic or character development, to say nothing of the more focal relationships between the leads (not just Neviril and Aeru, but also Mamiina and Rodoreamon, Neviril and Paraietta...)

I’d really like to read a fic where an individual character’s development or two characters’ relationship is similarly tied in to plot developments; it doesn’t have to be a plotty fic as such, but I was very interested in the way the developments of the war and the pilots/priestesses’ actions in it precipitated changes in their relationships. So how might Neviril and Aeru’s relationship develop in the other world (what are they doing?), or Mamiina and Rodoreamon’s on the Messis when they’re not the narrative focus before Mamiina’s last mission and the braid thing? (Or if this is more your speed, dig into that and see how a character grows or the relationship between characters develops when that’s not being moved along by outside events in the same way, especially if they’re aware of that being an issue. When Neviril and Aeru are outside the normal flow of time, or Paraietta and Rodoreamon are civilians, for example.) I’m also interested in all the permutations of loyalty we see in the show - like loyalty to a position over loyalty to a side (as with the Plumbish priestesses’ siding with our Sibyllae), loyalty that develops before liking or friendship, the devoted loyalty to Neviril. I like the show’s military themes despite its magical-girl visuals. I think this is also a canon where it would make sense for sexual first times to be part of a fic - what does that mean for the characters you choose?

I should also say that due to all the magic and timespace warping in the show, I am more than okay with post-canon fic that gets characters back together who were separated by canon, if that’s what you want. You can resurrect Mamiina, or have Neviril and Aeru visit the main reality/timeline again. Or play with timespace even more - time loop fic? (Edit: This didn’t even occur to me until I found out about the IF post, but this fandom might lend itself to interactive fiction, too.)

#yuletide #peking opera blues #far from the madding crowd #gsnk #monstrous regiment #simoun #dear author letters

[porcileorg]

Ambivalent about Realism

Author: Magda Wisniowska - August, 2020.

Questioning the role of aesthetic practices in speculative realist thought, this short essay examines the philosophical concern with realism through the example of a recent installation by Kalas Liebfried, focusing on its use of ambience.

Contemporary art has been quick to take up speculative realist concerns, the first significant exhibition, “The Real Things,” already taking place in Tate Britain in 2010, only three years after the philosophical movement was first named. By 2013, the entire Documenta (13) was dedicated to restoring the significance to the inanimate object, with no less than 400 hundred of Korbinian Aigner’s drawings of apples on display at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum to bear witness to the object’s trauma. The argument, often rehearsed but less frequently examined, is that the object has suffered long enough as the privileged site of human comprehension, its meaning confined to that bestowed by the human subject. Always the political saviour, art is to take up the speculative realist task of thinking the object’s reality outside of this subjective relation, to somehow reproduce a non-relational reality, untainted by our experience of it.

This sort of speculative realist position is problematic and not just because of the anthropomorphism it often unwittingly displays, in the above case, the attribution of human trauma to the nonhuman actor of the apple. As Suhail Malik argues in his essay, “Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art,” to make speculative realist art is the ultimate destructive gesture, for it would destroy all we currently know of art (Realism Materialism Art, 185).

According to Malik, ever since Allan Kaprow’s retrospective affirmation of Duchampian ideas, a certain kind of aesthetic experience has been at the forefront of contemporary art. To the question, “what does the artwork mean?”, contemporary art has no answer. Instead the viewer is left to decide the work’s meaning, constrained to some degree by its subject matter, its material organisation, and background information. The viewer is required to respond to the work of art, with the response producing a shift in their system of ideas or values. This transformative process impacts the work as much as the viewer, the object only “brought to life as an artwork” in the viewer’s confrontation with it (ibid.). That the reality of art can only be apprehended by a thinking consciousness, which then necessarily always accompanies it, affirms and reproduces what speculative realists call correlationism. For the correlationist, any account of reality is an account of how a reality is known. Our experience of reality is what constitutes it as such (ibid.).

The correlationism of this kind of aesthetic experience is the reason why contemporary art has to be vague, with artists being described as having an “interest” and exhibitions as “exploring” a topic (ibid. 186); it is also why philosophical accounts, such as those by Rancière, Lyotard, Badiou, or Deleuze, which emphasise the non-conceptual and indeterminate nature of the aesthetic experience, proliferate. The art historical concern with materiality, Krauss’s and Bois’s mobilisation of meaningless matter, would again fall under this correlationist spell. Malik argues that in all these cases, the object is deliberately left obscure in order to make room for the viewer, so that they have sufficient space to be able to construct the work’s meaning. A realism on the other hand, which claims to apprehend the real outside the conditions of subjective experience, must reject the anti-conceptual and experiential. Which leads Malik to conclude that speculative realism, in its rejection of correlationism, indicates the conditions for another, different kind of art. This kind of art cannot be open-ended, questioning and mildly confrontational. It must be an art that apprehends reality rationally, producing a new kind of rational realism.

For Malik, a possible realist art can be found in post-Conceptual instruction pieces by Robert Morris or Sol LeWitt, that despite lending themselves to completion in subjective experience, do not require this experience in order to be known as art. I would like to turn to work by Munich-based artist Kalas Liebfried, whose various installations and performances address speculative realist concerns, especially the need to think outside of correlationism, but also acknowledge the deeply experiential nature of contemporary art and with it, the difficulty of rejecting aesthetic experience. I would like to focus on two recent exhibitions of the artist, the sound piece that was part of the “Iconic Air” installation at Munich’s BBK yearly Tacker event (see installation viewhttps://kalasliebfried.com/iconic-air/), and his performance at the Lenbachhaus, “Ports in Transition.” (see excerpt onhttps://kalasliebfried.com/ports-in-transition/andhttps://vimeo.com/395648614). While the work might seem somewhat familiar in its use of art historical conventions (the installation, the monitor, the projection, the loudspeaker) it is innovative in the way it makes certain philosophical points.

It also must be acknowledged that Tacker, a group exhibition in Munich which includes all the artists shortlisted for the DebütanInnen and Die Ersten Jahre der Professionalität funding programmes is a necessarily flawed exhibition. The artists do not have a choice of space and have only a limited time for set up. Liebfried was assigned a middle room and his installation, “Iconic Air” took up one long wall. It consisted of large video projection, a projector stand, a monitor and a loudspeaker, two theatrically lit canvases, and a number of black rubber exercise balls. Some of the work, such as the paintings, gave a bit of context to the installation; the exercise balls felt like props demarcating the space. Most interesting was the sound piece, experienced across the loudspeaker and a monitor displaying the spoken text.

The text is read aloud by a male voice. The accent is unusual, being British-received pronunciation with an old-fashioned inflection, recalling a BBC newsreader from the 1950s or 60s. The text with its references to space, magnetic fields, and superheated matter, seems scientific, dealing with astrophysics, but there also is a strong human, biological element. The seriousness of voice, as well as its slight pomposity, gives the impression that we are presented with a historical recording from the early days of space exploration. This is further emphasised by the monitor and loudspeaker, which again are old-fashioned, recalling Nam June Paik installations of the same time period. In actuality, the text is far more recent, announcing the first image of a black hole using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the centre of the galaxy M87 in 2019. We do not hear the voice of Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, who was speaking to the press at the time, but that generated by a sophisticated software program. The text is real, the voice is not, but with one other significant modification. Liebfried replaces every single reference to the “black hole” with one to the “self.” So it is not,

If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow.

but instead,

If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect ourselves to create a dark region similar to a spherical shadow.

For Liebfried, this interchangeability between the self and the other, the human and the nonhuman, the terrestrial and the cosmic, is indicative of a common ground. Bringing to mind theories first proposed by Peter Sloterdijk, Liebfried writes of a future in which everything will adopt the dynamic shape of a sphere, the living and non-living fusing together, overcoming the separation of nature and culture. This for him, is an ambient environment in which everything is connected and in constant communication with each other, describing it as a techno-animism or a trans-humanism (see https://kalasliebfried.com/iconic-air/). I however, like to think of his work in more speculative realist terms, as demonstrating the fundamental difficulty of thinking outside of the correlationist bind. In this, the idea of ambience also has a strong part to play.

The image of a black hole lends itself to speculative realist thought. Like Meillassoux’s arche-fossil or Brassier’s death of the sun, it exemplifies a knowledge that we as humans cannot experience. Even the technology used to produce this image only records the effects of the unknown onto the known. Replacing the scientist’s voice with a computer generated one again makes this gesture towards the nonhuman. The other elements of the installation, the video with its clips of fighter jets breaking the sound barrier and beads of sweat gathering on finger tips, the spherical exercise balls dotted around the space, the paintings with their formal abstraction recalling the composite images of telescope and satellite data — all meant to convey this idea of a sphere in which the human and nonhuman merge as one — have speculative realist undertones in that they offer a holistic, planetary perspective. But Liebfried grounds these flights into the cosmic and the digital, firmly within the experiential. By replacing the “black hole” with the “self” he shows that the way science describes the black hole is very much anthropomorphic, its language firmly rooted in the human. Similarly, the most sophisticated and cutting edge digital technology can be used to replicate a historical human voice from the 1950s. Liebfried shows how human history infiltrates technology, the cutting edge becoming first conventional and then very soon outmoded, an object of our nostalgia. And as much as the idea of the sphere is to offer a non-anthropocentric approach, it is one where the non-human merges with the human, as much as the human with the non-human.

His work then, cannot be seen as rejecting contemporary art for its aesthetic qualities in order to pursue an art of rational knowledge. In Malik’s sense, Liebfried’s cannot be described as a realist endeavour. Yet neither does Liebfried’s work seem to demand a return to an aesthetics, which would affirm the position of the viewer, putting the viewer’s conscious experience at the centre of contemporary art. If anything, the interchangeability of the black hole and the self shows the difficulty of making such a rejection, the impossibility of tearing away from the experiential, which will always seek to reassert itself.

What makes Liebfried's work interesting, is his recognition of “ambience” as a means of complicating this perhaps over simplistic opposition between the rational mind and the conscious one. When we listen to Liebfried’s piece, we cannot be unaware of the video projection accompanying it, just at the edge of our peripheral vision. Images of various objects tearing through air — fighter planes, bullets, moths — combined with closeups of spheres — whether of oil droplets penetrating a water meniscus or of loudspeakers vibrating — come and go, without ever fully gaining our attention. The projection’s accompanying sound also invades and interrupts the reading of the text. The words are almost unrecognisable, spilling into one another — “I don’t care” becoming “Iconic air.” Liebfried also uses a similar strategy during his performance at the Lenbachhaus, in which the audience listened to ambient music through headphones, while the performers communicated with each other by walkie-talkie. Static caused by the proximity to a group of loudspeakers further interrupted both the performer’s communications and our experience of listening to the music.

How Leibniz distinguishes between the clear, the confused, the distinct, and the obscure, offers a useful way of thinking this kind of immersive yet peripheral sound. In what seems to the uninitiated as very counter intuitive, Leibniz argues that clear ideas are always also confused, in that ideas are only clear because they are confused (and consequently distinct ones are always obscure). This does not mean that there is some fault on our part, that we do not know the idea adequately and this is why it is confused. To explain, Leibniz gives the example of our perception of the waves at the seashore. The sound we hear is clear — we clearly hear the waves breaking. But obviously we do not hear each individual wave, only the confused noise of one wave merging into another. And yet we also perceive those individual waves, even the sounds of each individual water molecule; we simply do not do so consciously. Those sounds are there, each distinct one, but they are obscure to us. Deleuze would say there is a difference in kind between the clear-confused and obscure-distinct, and it is those little perceptions making up the whole noise that grasp differential relations and singularities. Undifferentiated, they are obscure and not actualised (Difference and Repetition, 213). The threshold of consciousness is determined when these undifferentiated sounds become actualised in apperception (ibid.).

If we return to Liebfried’s work, we can see how ambient sound works in a comparable way to the ocean murmur. By definition, ambient sound is not something we focus on. It is ambient, all around, undifferentiated. We hear a noise, but this noise is confused. It is also a sound which we do not really listen to. It is meant to be there in the background, accompanying us in our daily lives, unobtrusively, in elevators, restaurants, shopping malls. And because it is not consciously experienced, ambient sound takes us outside of ourselves. The self of the ambient sound does not yet have the unity of the conscious subject, but is a collective of any number of passive, fragmentary selves of the sensible body. The same argument can be applied to visual perceptions. In the way the images interact with both us, the viewer, and with the surrounding components of the “Iconic Air” installation, Liebfried’s video could be described as an amalgam of peripheral images, mostly stock footage of waves, spheres, particles moving across the screen. Indeed, the entire logic of Liebfried’s work relies on this ambient quality, one element of the installation always intruding, almost unwanted on another.

The question remains of how we choose to understand this kind of ambience. For the phenomenologist, especially a reader of Merleau-Ponty, it recalls the unity found in the reversible self of sensation, a self understood as a constant passage of sensation, one body always contaminated by another. These selves only find unity insofar they slide outside themselves into one another in the midst of perception (see Jonathan Barker, “Resolving the paradox of phenomenology through Kant’s aesthetics: between Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze”). How Liebfried describes the sphere as a common ground between the self and the other, certainly lends itself to such a phenomenological interpretation.

It could also, however, be read more ontologically, as part of speculative realist strategy, one that utilises rather than rejects the experiential quality of art. In order to think that which cannot be experienced, like in this case, the black hole, one can approach the problem rationally. This would be the approach of the scientists working on the project Event Horizon, who by merging telescopic and satellite data are able to produce an image of something that no human eye can see. Nonetheless, as Liebfried’s work shows, science itself is not immune against the anthropomorphic and anthropocentric. Furthermore, those speculative realist accounts which privilege the rational also tend to neglect the irrational or unconsciousness, assigning it to the all-prevalent correlationism structuring our relation to the world. The use of ambience is not so much about giving the unconscious its due, but about producing non-experience. If speculative realism aims to think rationally about a real that cannot be experienced, Liebfried works with what is not experienced in experience. He recognises that the non-experience of ambient sound can bypass the conscious mind to both take us away from ourselves and bring us closer to the outside world, even if this world of non-experience still succumbs to the structures of our perception. For Liebfried ambience demonstrates the ultimate unity of man and the other, gathered together in the form of the sphere. I like to think that the non-experience evoked by ambient sound demonstrates a lack of continuity, what Deleuze would call a difference in kind, not only between that which is experienced and that known, but between thought, the body, the perceived and the conscious. In this fourfold sense, it points to the non-relational to resonate with speculative realism’s pursuit of realism.

#magdawisniowska #meta review #artreview #materialism #realism #speculativerealism #correlationism #suhailmalik #aesthetics #kalasliebfried #raybrassier #meillassoux