Retina Allamoda

Yorgos Sapountzis / Textilität

A Decorative Cosmology Bridging Heaven and Earth

In her new exhibition, Tamara Gonzales continues to mine our material culture to chart the world all around.


A view of Tamara Gonzeles’s Ometeotl exhibition (all images by the author for Hyperallergic)

At the heart of Tamara Gonzales‘s new body of work at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery is a room of tapestries woven by artisans in the Peruvian towns of Písac and Ayacucho. They are vibrant interpretations of the artist’s drawings and they add yet another layer to the decorative language she continues to mine from the material world around her.

Gonzales is known for incorporating visual culture that has traditionally been more associated with lived culture — lace, graffiti, embroidery, textiles — rather than the world of art galleries. A large functional maraca is propped up by the entrance, which signals the inclusive and non-hierarchal attitude towards influence she celebrates in her work.A large maraca sculpture near the entrance of the exhibition, “Maraca más grande con plumas” (2016)

Past the over-sized maraca, there is a corridor of small drawings dominated by a curvilinear window motif that offers her a compositional frame to puncture, cover, and react to. But even with this structure, the drawings have an experimental energy that pokes and pushes, often jostling forms that resemble easter eggs, stick figures, plants, or the scribblings of a rudimentary language.

Her true subject matter is the material world. She has an indiscriminate appetite for cross-cultural pollination and distills the dissonance of contemporary life into these objects that can seem as jarring as they are soothing.

The title of the exhibition, Ometeotl, refers to a nebulous concept of spirituality that some scholars of Mesoamerican culture dispute, but it is commonly believed to refer to the “creator of all creation” for the Anawak people and a compound of “dual” and “cosmic energy” in the native language of Nahuatl. That ambiguity of the term perfectly reflects the primordial soup that has spawned these works, at once mythic, while relishing their connection to earthly forms.

Looking at her paintings, you can feel unmoored from the boundaries of form as they swim in waves of moody azure, crimson, and the muddy waters of darker hues. The paintings vibrate and ripple in your mind’s eye as they play with proportion — always challenging the relationship of ground and subject — to settle visually like a shaken snow globe. Many of the large paintings, like “Two Moons” (2016), feel contradictory, contrasting the washes of violet paint against the frenzy of patterns that form the sky and ground for a setting Mesoamerican roundel.

The showstoppers, though, are the tapestries. Gonzales’s starry fields and human-like forms are translated into undulating visions of horror vacui. They are her best works yet, offering us a unique synthesis of the world around her but allowing it to develop into these intensely colored objects (she says the women doing the embroidery were given free reign to translate her drawings, based on patterns they normally embroider). The works, which are all untitled and made of alpaca and wool, convey a sense of cosmic cartography. If anything, the embroideries make the paintings seem more conventional, showing how her many bodies of work may overlap but travel in different directions.

The paintings are declarations of the known, the drawings are suggestions of what can be known, while the woven works are proposals for what we may never ever truly know.Tamara Gonzales, “Two Moons” (2016)Tamara Gonzales, “I Am the Hummingbird” (2016)The room of embroidered worksTamara Gonzales’s untitled drawing (2015) and the related untitled tapestry (2016)
Untitled tapestry (2016)

Histoire des Robes , 1990

Annette Messager (French, born 1943) Title:
Histoire des Robes , 1990 Medium: dress and photographs Size: 99 x 156 cm. (39 x 61.4 in.)

Anna Baumann - Kienast

Lygia Clark (String Figures)

Ann Hamilton Pays Tribute to Philadelphia’s Frayed Textile Industry

Ann Hamilton, ‘habitus’ (2016), installation view at Municipal Pier 9 (all photos by Thibault Jeanson, courtesy the Fabric Workshop and Museum)

PHILADELPHIA — Started around 1907, Municipal Pier 9was built as part of a comprehensive plan to upgrade the Delaware River as a shipping channel. Intended to resemble (and rival) Chelsea Piers in New York City, these buildings were designed to accommodate larger cargo ships and it was hoped that they would help rejuvenate the waterfront area, making it once again a competitive port for international trade and commerce. From roughly 1880 to 1920, Philadelphia’s industrial district supported an array of mills and plants and no other city produced a wider range of textile products. At the turn of the 20th century, there were close to 700 textile companies operating in the area, creating everything from yarn, rope, ribbons, and lace to silk stockings, upholstery, and military cloths. Yet the area’s textile industry declined after the 1920s, and the trade activities at the ports began to suffer in turn. While other similar building sites have been turned into condos, Pier 9 was until recently used as a storage facility and it retains vestiges of its previous life: a railway track bisects the interior and metal covers lift to reveal large portals that open directly onto the river — it is as if the space was patiently waiting, still ready to receive cargo.


Ann Hamilton, ‘habitus’ (2016), installation view at Municipal Pier 9

This pier is the setting for Ann Hamilton’s latest installation, habitus, made in collaboration with Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, where a companion display fills three floors of exhibition space. Cloth and the history of textile production in the city form the foundation of both parts of Hamilton’s project. At Pier 9, the former space of bustling trade is filled with 12 spectral, spinning curtains that hang from the steel beams and girders that crisscross the ceiling. Next to each curtain are two thick ropes — made from a twist of linen and wool — that are attached to a pulley system. These ropes activate the installation when the visitor pulls them: the fabric forms begin to spin, slowly, and some emit the humming wheeze of an accordion or the ringing of bells. Made from Tyvek, the curtains have been dyed, as the artist says, to match the atmosphere, in shades of soft gray-blue. Gathered and draped in billowing furls, the fabric falls some 30 to 40 feet from the steel beams to just above the compact and uneven dirt floor. The draped fabric looks somewhat like the over-fussy curtains of a stately home, the kind you would like to hide behind, or even the full dress of a fine lady, who has gathered up her skirts and lifted them, too high to be dainty.

Ann Hamilton, ‘habitus’ (2016), installation view at Municipal Pier 9

Yorgos Sapountzis

Invisible Presence: Bling Memories at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center

On May 8, 2001, the funeral of William Moore, aka Willie Haggart, was a raucous affair. Abandoning the somber mood of a typical funeral, the ceremony was a giant party at the National Arena in Kingston, Jamaica. Labeling it a “celebrity event,” Donna P. Hope writes that the style of Haggart’s funeral “ruptured the sobriety and mourning associated with traditional funeral rites.”[1] With this, the term bling funeral entered the mainstream, and such ceremonies—and the ruptures they instigate—are the subject of Ebony G. Patterson’s exhibition, Invisible Presence: Bling Memories, at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.



Ebony G. Patterson. Invisible Presence: Bling Memories, 2014; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, Georgia. Courtesy of the Artist and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

The exhibition consists of twenty elaborately decorated coffins mounted on tall wooden poles, objects that originated from a performance conceived by Patterson for the 2014 Carnival in Kingston, Jamaica.[2] On April 27 of that year, Patterson carried fifty ostentatious coffins on poles with the help of local Jamaicans; accompanying them were several dancers and a drum line from the St. Michael’s Steppers community marching band. Evoking a bling funeral, the procession matched the boisterous and celebratory tone of Carnival.

Patterson’s decision to stage the performance during Carnival is a comment on the deep divide between social classes in Jamaica, as the Carnival celebrations are designed for the island’s upper and middle classes. The performance attempts to provide the working poor not only access to the ceremonies but also an unmistakable presence by using the spectacle of bling funerals. In such celebrations, closely linked to the underclass, the dead are remembered through raucous dancing parties featuring erotic costumes and dancehall music.




Ebony G. Patterson. Invisible Presence: Bling Memories, 2014; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, Georgia. Courtesy of the Artist and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

The elaborately adorned coffins in the exhibition are the only remaining trace of this performance, and they offer insight into the opulent displays of bling funerals. In contrast to typical coffins of black and other somber colors, these coffins feature vivid fabrics with bold patterns, rhinestones, lace, tassels, and plastic foliage, among other materials. The fabric patterns range from bright colors with polka dots to elaborate floral and animal prints. Each coffin features multiple swatches of cloth—usually with a different pattern on each face—and is trimmed with rhinestones and lace.

The construction of the coffins also relates to Jamaica’s working class. Upon close examination, the seams between the fabric swatches are not perfect; on some, strips of ribbon or lace are falling off or running haphazardly through the cloth. Many also show signs of wear, reinforcing the idea that these were integral components of a performance. Such qualities emphasize the handmade aesthetics of the coffins, linking them to the textile industry of Jamaica. While some fabric patterns feature the colors of the nation’s flag—black, green, and yellow—most were chosen for their brilliant designs, linking them culturally to bling funerals rather than a national identity.



Ebony G. Patterson. Invisible Presence: Bling Memories, 2014; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, Georgia. Courtesy of the Artist and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

The installation of these objects in the exhibition is particularly noteworthy, with twenty of them densely arranged in a relatively small gallery. Viewers are invited to walk among them. The bottom of each coffin is about sixty inches from the ground, forcing the viewer’s gaze upward and restricting one’s ability to see the upper portions of the coffins. The resulting mass resembles the earlier performance; the coffins are not presented didactically as individual objects for visual consumption. Instead, the installation beckons viewers to participate, envisioning themselves as part of the procession during Carnival. Additionally, though each coffin is individually decorated, the dense grouping of the installation prevents any one from being viewed on its own. The show eschews object labels or any other classification system that would denote them as works of art. They simply are what they are: markers of the performance in Kingston.


Ebony G. Patterson. Invisible Presence: Bling Memories, 2014; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, Georgia. Courtesy of the Artist and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

Writing about bling funerals, Hope asserts that they “temporarily suspend social boundaries and momentarily rotate the distinctions between those defined as heroes and anti-heroes in Jamaican culture.”[3] The blinged-out coffins in this installation demand attention, and they point to a group of people normally operating at the margins of society. Stretching up toward the sky, the coffins on display in the gallery—as well as during the performance—reinforce Patterson’s motivation to dissolve such social barriers, to include Jamaica’s underclass not only in a typically restricted event such as Carnival but also in the larger society.
Invisible Presence: Bling Memories is on view at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center through April 21, 2016.

[1] Donna P. Hope, “From the Stage to the Grave: Exploring Celebrity Funerals in Dancehall Culture,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 13 (3): 260.

[2] The performance was one of several commissions realized during the 2014 Carnival season in conjunction with the exhibition EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean, curated by Claire Tancons and Krista Thompson, organized by and on view at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, March 7–June 7, 2015, and co-organized as a traveling exhibition by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York.

[3] Hope, 265.

A Multisensory Trip to Cuba’s Dark, Sugar-Filled Past

by Debbie Hagan on March 25, 2016

Installation view, ‘Alchemy of the Soul: María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ at the Peabody Essex Museum (photo by the author for Hyperallergic) (click to enlarge)

SALEM, Mass. — When Europeans first tasted sugar during the Crusades, they immediately begged for more. However, it wasn’t until Columbus brought sugar cane to the Caribbean to be cultivated that this exotic luxury grew into a hotly traded world commodity, akin to petroleum today. Such sweetness had a price, and Cuba met international demands by bringing enslaved Africans across the Middle Passage and subjecting them to a lifetime of brutal labor. By the mid-19th century, Cuba produced a third of the world’s sugar.
Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir of the Spirits, a large-scale, blown-glass sculptural installation on view at the Peabody Essex Museum, takes visitors on a trip to Cuba to explore its sounds, smells, tastes, and sights, all through this rather dark historical lens. Afro-Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons created the complex, multipart exhibit with her husband and collaborator, musician and composer Neil Leonard.

Neil Leonard and María Magdalena Campos-Pons (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

“It is a multilayered experience that combines visual imagery with sound elements that engage the viewer in more than one sensorial experience — more than just look and see and move quickly,” says Campos-Pons, who has been dreaming about this project for 28 years.
Campos-Pons grew up in former slave barracks in Cuba and played in the shadows of what were once sugar cane factories. She’s of Yoruba descent — seven of her grandfathers were enslaved in Nigeria and taken to Cuba between 1838–66 to work the sugar cane.
Visitors begin their journey to Campos-Pons’s Cuba by entering the museum’s freight elevator, loaded with burlap sugar sacks and a vintage record player. The elevator operator cues up a 45 rpm record, from which a lone voice sings in Spanish about the beauty of his country and how proud he is to be from Matanzas, Cuba’s main port. Campos-Pons spent much of her childhood there.

Exhibition entrance, ‘Alchemy of the Soul: María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ (photo by Kathy Tarantola/PEM, © 2016 Peabody Essex Museum)

Those who know rumba music, its urgent drumbeats and African roots, will recognize the voice as belonging to Rafael “El Niño” Navarro Pujada: the Frank Sinatra of the form. Leonard recorded him in his home as he reminisced about the docks, where he sang during breaks from loading sugar. Between his sweet, solitary voice and the lumbering motions of the elevator, visitors can imagine a ferry voyage, cresting the waves and heading toward the port city.
“I’ve been working with Cuban musicians since 1986, since before I met Magda,” says Leonard, who wanted to meet and record musicians who’d worked in the ports and sang songs reflecting rumba’s roots. “They let me record them in their homes without the drums, without their producers, just telling their stories and singing songs they learned,” says Leonard. “This sound of the port is a very iconic sound of Cuba. That’s an aspect of the work that is Magda’s entire life. It’s about what I am seeing in the sugar trade, distilling it, and bringing it back to the work.”
Arriving on the third floor, visitors enter an ethereal, multisensory dreamscape made up of six 10- to 12-foot blown-glass sculptures. Glass piping connects the bulbous vessels, so the gallery looks a bit like a science lab. One unit is filled with amber fluid that bubbles, flows, and pools in glass bowls and kicks up the sweet scent of rum. This is a surreal, skeletal landscape — an artistic interpretation of the ruins left by the 1,000 or so sugar and rum factories that once flourished in Cuba.
“The presence of smell and temperature in the room, combined with the moisture of the fountain and the distillery bring together this experiential idea,” says Campos-Pons.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, ‘Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir for the Spirits’ (detail, 2015), blown glass, steel, cast resin, silicone, and acrylic, at the Peabody Essex Museum (photo by Peter Vanderwarker, © 2016 Peabody Essex Museum) (click to enlarge)

At special events, visitors can try quarter-sized slices of sugar cane. In one bite, the juicy liquid explodes in the mouth. That’s it. Then the sweetness is gone and what’s left is a straw-like, tasteless wad that one can’t wait to spit out. The sweetness and bitterness present an uncomfortable dichotomy.
“Sugar is bittersweet,” says Campos-Pons, referring not just to the cane’s taste but also the harshness involved in the harvest. The plant’s razor-sharp leaves slice workers arms and faces, sometimes blinding them.
“What has been beautiful is that the Peabody commissioned this piece, so it really allowed us to be ambitious,” says Campos-Pons. “This idea has been in my mind since 1988. I was just waiting for the proper place and moment.”

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, ‘Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir for the Spirits’ (detail, 2015), blown glass, steel, cast resin, silicone, and acrylic, at the Peabody Essex Museum (photo by Peter Vanderwarker, © 2016 Peabody Essex Museum) (click to enlarge)

The artists worked with two glass factories — one in Boston, the other in San Francisco — to create blown vessels that fit together like Lego parts. “When you’re making a process that is new, there’s not a notebook for it,” says Campos-Pons. “It’s all about taking risks, and you may fail. Glass is fragile. It could break. This is about process. One of the things that I’m excited and happy about is that [the museum] allowed us to go forward with the process and make ourselves vulnerable.”
Leonard digitally manipulated several sources — saxophone, singing voices, and waves — to compose a sound collage that echoes throughout the exhibit. “My concern for the work is that glass is shiny, precious, beautiful, but glass is also cold and Matanzas is not cold,” says the musician. “How can I put something of the warmth, spirit, and rustic quality of Matanzas into the work in the gallery?”
He takes a single note from his saxophone, cuts off the end sound, and digitally manipulates and curves it as one imagines a glassmaker does with molten liquid. “You hear the saxophone after I’ve stopped playing. It’s ringing into space, a reverberation, very much like reflection — like the beauty of Magda’s glasswork, like what you see through the glass and what you see from the shadows on the floor,” says Leonard.
Life also emerges through the songs sung by male and female voices and the sounds of water. They wash back and forth through the installation like a tide.
“One of the things the piece was intended to evoke, which sort of came out intuitively, was how sounds migrated from Africa,” says Leonard. “In Cuba, [the songs] are transformed, some sung in Spanish, some are secular, sacred things that happened in Cuba that didn’t happen in Africa. They migrate like a spirit in one direction.”
In “Agridulce,” one of a couple of performances held in the museum’s atrium in January, Campos-Pons entered the upper bridge above the audience’s heads, wearing a 19th-century slave dress. A machete in hand, she made swift, violent motions as she hacked at a row of sugar cane. Minutes later, she approached the audience and extended her fresh-cut cane: “Try it. It is sweet.”
The crowd pushed forward, gravitating to the artist, wanting see her up close and receive this gift. I felt honored as she paused before me and looked me in the eye. I took the cane, and my heart ached a little, feeling transported back to a 19th plantation, receiving this humble but weighty gift. “I was trying to juxtapose the brutality of that with the taste [of sugar],” says Campos-Pons. “What I say in the performance is, how could anyone find energy to go home and love a close one after 12 hours of this? What love is left over? What energy is left to breastfeed your baby?”

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, ‘Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir for the Spirits’ (detail, 2015), blown glass, steel, cast resin, silicone, and acrylic, at the Peabody Essex Museum (photo by Peter Vanderwarker, © 2016 Peabody Essex Museum)

Such history may be skimmed over by Cuba travel guides, especially as they’re being updated for a new era of tourism, but those in the know will find traces remaining in the country’s people, culture, and landscape.
“Contemporary art is about daring to make an experiment, daring to try something new, daring to fail, daring to try to go to a place where no one has entered,” says Campos-Pons.
Alchemy of the Soul dares to tell the truth about a beautiful county with a greedy past, desperate to satisfy the world’s craving for sugar.
Alchemy of the Soul: María Magdalena Campos-Pons continues at the Peabody Essex Museum (161 Essex Street, Salem, MA) through April 3. Neil Leonard and Rudresh Mahanthappa will perform an experimental saxophone concert with projected images by Campos-Pons at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (25 Evans Way, Boston) on April 7.

Lost and Invisible Bodies, Enshrined in Glitter and Bling

by Jillian Steinhauer on March 30, 2016

Installation view, ‘Ebony G. Patterson: Dead Treez’ at the Museum of Arts and Design; in foreground: “root and shrubz” (2014), mixed-media jacquard photo tapestry with embroidery, glitter, toy gun, shoe, lace, glasses, toys, silk flowers, embellishments (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic) (click to enlarge)

I am struggling to photograph a tapestry. It’s patterned and glittered all over — pink sparkles clashing with red flowers that rub up against three-dimensional objects like toy trucks. My camera and eye don’t know where to focus. The gallery is dark, dramatically lit, but the tapestry is a haze of sparkles and shimmers. I make out a zigzag, a line of fringe cutting its way through the clamor. I train my lens upon it and wait for the image to resolve. As it does, I realize I’m looking at not just a line but a leg. The fringe belongs to a pair of geometric patterned pants. I trace them up to where they meet a gold torso, but the body stops there.
“In order to force one’s way out of invisibility one has to create a reason to be seen,” says Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson.
I walk around the tapestry, which rests on the floor, in an attempt to see its contents more clearly. There are two toy guns covered in floral prints; flowers everywhere, embedded in glitter and sitting atop the surface in silk; a miniature lace skirt; two toy trucks. There is another body, much smaller than the first, represented by a camouflage outfit. This one, like the first, is a body only by virtue of its clothing: shirt, pants, shoes. There is no head to speak of, no arms or flesh.
“There is a challenge being made about seeing and looking. The seeing is what happens on social media, but the looking is what I’m asking you to do,” says Patterson.
What is the relationship between these two sets of clothing without bodies? Am I looking at a mother and her son — or the remains of them? Where were they going? Were the guns only toys? How did the mother’s right shoe — a dazzling boot, a glittering, embroidered articulation of turquoise and white set atop a thick black heel — end up so far from her leg? Whose shoe is the other one — a three-dimensional red and black slipper — that sits near it?
Where are the bodies?

Detail of Ebony G. Patterson, “wilted rosez” (2014), mixed-media jacquard tapestry, with embroidery, glitter, caftan, costume jewelry, glass, eighty black crocheted flowers, embellishments

“Gardening in the Tropics, you never know
what you’ll turn up. Quite often, bones,” writes Jamaican poet Olive Senior.
In the other tapestries, it’s the same story. I go looking for bodies but all I find are clothes. Brilliant, beautiful ones, but the bodies they’re meant to hold have vanished. Decomposed, maybe. Broken back down into the thickets of flowers and jewels, objects and ornament that envelop them. I train my eyes to trace the outlines of the blinged-out outfits. I recondition them so that they can see. I don’t see the bodies, but I know they are here.

*   *   *

On the other side of the space, there are 10 bodies, all made of plastic and covered in floral and arabesque patterns — dots and stripes, plants and curlicues enveloping both their outfits and every inch of their fake skin.

Ebony G. Patterson, “Swag Swag Krew” (from the ‘Out and Bad’ series) (2011–14), ten embellished mannequins with custom-made clothing, including an adorned umbrella, alcohol, shoes, costume jewelry, toys, cell phones, silk flowers, cinder blocks, hats, backpacks, accessories, cotton textile–covered plinth (click to enlarge)

Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte

Helen Harris und Dr. Spunk Seipel kuratieren eine Ausstellung, die unter dem Titel „1884 to 1915- an artistic position“ bis zum 12. März 2016 in der National Art Gallery of Namibia in Windhoek zu sehen ist. Künstler aus Namibia und aus Deutschland zeigen Arbeiten, „wie man mit dem deutschen Kolonialismus, seine Verbrechen und die Verletzungen, die er bis heute hinterlassen hat, umgehen kann.“ 1868 hatte zwar der spätere Reichskanzler Bismarck in einem Brief an den preußischen König den Erwerb von Übersee-Kolonien abgelehnt, doch nach 1870 gewann in der deutschen Politik die Kolonialpropaganda die Oberhand. 1884 beginnt schließlich eine systematisch angelegte Kolonialpolitik, als die vom Bremer Kaufmann Adolf Lüderitz erworbenen Besitzungen als „Deutsch-Südwestafrika“ unter den Schutz des Reiches gestellt wurden. 1914 war Deutschland schließlich nach England, Frankreich, Russland und den Niederlanden die fünftgrößte Kolonialmacht. Das deutsche Kolonialregime im heutigen Namibia war durch Grausamkeit gekennzeichnet: nach einer Viehseuche beanspruchten Großgrundbesitzer die überlebenden Viehbestände der Herero für sich. Den Aufstand der Herero schlug eine 15.000 Mann starke deutsche Kolonialarmee 1904 blutig nieder, die Überlebenden ließ die deutsche Militärführung in der Wüste verdursten. Bis 1908 kamen durch diesen Völkermord ca. 90.000 Herero und Nama ums Leben. In der öffentlichen gesellschaftlichen Diskussion spielte die deutsche Kolonialgeschichte mit solchen kriegsverbrecherischen Begleitumständen gegenüber anderen Themen keine größere Rolle; die Ausstellung betritt damit Neuland: bisher gab es in Deutschland kaum künstlerische Arbeiten, die sich mit diesem Teil der politischen Geschichte befassten. „Es ist eine Ausstellung, die keine definitive Aussage über dieses schwierige Kapitel der Geschichte geben kann, aber aufzeigt, wie wir alle damit umgehen können.“ Künstlerliste: Diana Arce, Matthias Beckmann, Berlin Postkolonial, Tahir Della, Melody Laverne Bettencourt , Nicola Brandt , Ondrej Brody & Kristofer Paetau, Judith Egger, Thomas Eller, Abrie Fourie, Tim Huepschle, Phillip Luhl, Nicky Marais, Philip Kojo Metz, Moholi Ndikung, Veico Ponofi & Nambahu Karina, Oliver Ressler, Spunk Seipel, Eric Schnak, Papa Shikongeni, Andrew van Wyk, Ella Ziegler.

Unter den Commons

Strategische Rahmenbedingungen und taktische Manöver, die durch logistische Netze miteinander verbunden sind, finden sich – mit Konrads treffenden Worten – zu einer „unendlichen Spirale wechselseitiger Antizipation“[17] verflochten. Oder in autonomen Begriffen gesprochen: Kapital und Staat arbeiten an der Antizipation neuer Formen der Subversion, damit deren Energien in neue Mechanismen übersetzt werden können, die der Kapitalakkumulation und Regierung dienen. Diejenigen, die diesen Prozess sabotieren möchten, müssen in gleicher Weise den künftigen Auflösungs- und Vereinnahmungsprozess antizipieren, um ihn umzulenken und zu verhindern. Diese Abschirmung und Verschleierung herleitbarer Entscheidungsfindung, die Schichtung und Codierung strategischer Operationen und Erscheinungen bedeutet die Entwicklung einer Kunst der Undercommons. Es handelt sich um eine Kunst, die nicht ihr ganzes subversives Wissen öffentlich deklariert und preisgibt oder ein neues Regime des Sinnlichen verkündet, wie dies in der Geschichte von Avantgarde-Deklarationen der Fall war. Wenn also Brian Holmes sagt, dass, wer über Politik in einem künstlerischen Rahmen redet, lügt[18], so ist das in gewisser Weise keine Kritik, sondern auch eine Einführung in das Potenzial einer künstlerischen Politik, die sich um diese Dynamiken der Täuschung herum ausbildet.

Unter den Commons
 „Der erste Akt der Selbstorganisierung in den Undercommons ist eine Subjektivierungsverweigerung durch – und nur durch – Selbstorganisierung. Für uns ist diese Desidentifikation durch Selbstorganisierung auch nicht eine Grundvoraussetzung für das, was Toni Negri die gemeinsame Gestaltung [gestione] der Commons nennt, sondern sie ist das Potenzial dieser Organisierung.“[19]
Es ist diese strategische Notwendigkeit, die Intentionen sowie die Formen des Wissens und Verstehens subversiver Tätigkeit zu verschleiern, auf die eine Herangehensweise an Strategie als Klugheit hindeutet. Es handelt sich um eine Notwendigkeit insbesondere für künstlerisch-politisch-mediale Interventionen, die – wie wir nur zu gut und paradoxerweise doch nicht gut genug gelernt haben – entscheidende Arenen für die Auflösung und Vereinnahmung subversiver Energien sind. Es ginge nicht um eine Kunst der Öffentlichkeit, das heißt eines angenommenen oder vorgegebenen Publikums, sondern um eine Kunst der Undercommons: eine strategische Neufassung künstlerisch-politischer Interventionen, die sich um die sehr ernst genommene Frage herum entfaltet, mit wem man kommuniziert und warum. Es ließe sich darüber im Sinne einer relationaler Ästhetik nachdenken, die – anstatt auf den Raum der Galerie eingegrenzt zu sein – durch einen infrapolitischen und alltäglichen Bereich hindurch operiert und dabei durch die Gestaltung von Beziehungen in diesem Raum immanente Punkte der strategischen Konvergenz ausbildet. Oder noch besser: Es handelt sich um die Formierung des Raumes selbst.
Der Begriff der Undercommons rührt aus den Schriften von Fred Moten und Stefano Harney, die Theoretisierungen von Leuten wie Robin D. G. Kelley und James Scott aufgreifen; diese beziehen sich auf Fragen der Codierung, der Täuschung und der Ausweichbewegungen, welche zu den Widerstandsformen von LandarbeiterInnen, entlaufenen SklavInnen und anderen Bevölkerungen gehörten, die das mit einer offenen Äußerung ihrer Absichten oder Ideen verbundene Risiko nicht auf sich nehmen konnten.[20] Dies ist in der Tat eine Position, die von der Arbeitsverortung vieler politischer KünstlerInnen und MedienproduzentInnen (wenn auch nicht aller) sehr verschieden ist. Und doch kann von diesem Ansatz etwas gelernt werden. Wenn das Problem autonomer kultureller und künstlerischer Produktion darin besteht, dass sie zu viel preisgibt und sich so unbeabsichtigterweise dem Prozess der Vereinnahmung und Auflösung öffnet, dann könnte eine strategische Orientierung, die einen Umgang mit dieser Dynamik sucht, vielleicht von den codierenden und verschleiernden Dynamiken infrapolitischer Intervention und der Ausformung der Undercommons lernen. Und während die Undercommons in der Perspektive des Kapitals die nicht anerkannte Selbstorganisierung der Verachteten, Abgeschriebenen und Asozialen darstellen, sind sie in einer autonomen Perspektive etwas ganz und gar anderes: die Selbstorganisierung der Unvereinbaren. Sie verkörpern einen Prozess der selbstorganisierten Desidentifikation, in dem das Wissen der Subversion innerhalb des parallelen, unterirdischen Terrains gehalten wird, anstatt zum Teil aufgezwungener halluzinatorischer Muster des Staates zu werden.
Konrads Zugang zur Strategie arbeitet in dieser Richtung und gegen sie, und er opfert dabei einige tote Säulenheilige seiner eigenen Durchkreuzung der Pfade der gegenwärtigen europäischen Wüste. Diese Analyse selbst ist durch den sich ausbreitenden Strom seiner Prosa hindurch verstreut, aber sie tritt in bestimmten Momenten deutlich hervor; etwa wenn er den preußischen Soldaten und Militärstrategen Dietrich Heinrich von Bülow zitiert mit der Aussage: „Eine Strategie ist die Wissenschaft von Militärbewegungen außerhalb des Gesichtsfelds des Feindes; Taktik spielt sich innerhalb dieses Feldes ab.“ In der Tat – und damit taucht die Frage der Strategie wieder auf, und zwar buchstäblich, und nicht als eine Frage, in der Taktiken Bestandteile in der Ausbildung einer überwölbenden Strategie sind (was sie in gewisser Weise sind) oder Bestandteile, die wesenhaft mit der Dynamik von Herrschaft oder Widerstand (je nach dominanter Charakteristik) verbunden sind, sondern als eine Unterscheidung, die eher auf Sichtbarkeitsfeldern und Fassungskraft basiert. Ein strategischer Ansatz, der sich über eine Logik der (Un-)Sichtbarkeit definiert, ist die Bedingung der Klugheit, wenn – wie Konrad argumentiert – die Macht, die gerade durch ihre Sichtbarkeit gebunden ist, den Bedingungen der Fähigkeit, unsichtbar zu bleiben, taktische Vorteile bietet. Es handelt sich, wie Roger Farr anhand ihrer Erscheinungsformen in der anarchistischen Poetik erkundet hat, um eine Strategie der Verbergung.[21]
Es ist somit nicht notwendig, dass Strategie direkt mit der Anwendung von Kraft beschäftigt ist; sie ist vielmehr ein Verstehen der Kräftedynamik in Bewegung, der Bewegung des Werdens und Entwerdens, die im Spiel sind, sowie die Anwendung dieser Dynamiken in der immanenten Komposition einer politischen Möglichkeit. Konrads Arbeit zeigt, dass die strategische Operation des Infrapolitischen auch im Herzen des Staates und innerhalb der Logik des Regierens am Werk ist, in den anhaltenden Versuchen, die infopolitischen und medienspektakulären Mechanismen zu stützen, durch die fortdauernde Formen der Herrschaft zusammengehalten werden. Aber diese strategischen Formen der Staatskunst sind selbst ephemer und prekär, sie bedürfen der ständigen Aufrechterhaltung und Stützung durch kulturelles Engineering. Staats- und Regierungskunst müssen ihren eigenen Raum ständig neu erschaffen (und in diesem Sinn hat de Certeau bezüglich des Verhältnisses zwischen Strategie und Raum vielleicht recht). Das Regieren ist mithin stets auf eine neue Lösung im Hinblick auf dieses Problem angewiesen, mag es dabei von Giordano Brunos Techniken der libidinösen Bindung und Informationsmodulation oder von antagonistischen sozialen Bewegungen und Energien lernen oder auch neue Verschwörungsängste heraufbeschwören, die gegen jene gerichtet sind, die den Bereich der Undercommons bewohnen.

In seinem Postskriptum zum Strategic Reality Dictionary weist das Critical Art Ensemble auf folgenden Widerspruch hin: Die Klasse der IngenieurInnen der Wirklichkeit ist gefangen zwischen den Mächten des Messbaren und Physischen und den Techniken der Modulation von Einbildungskraft, Begehren und Kreativität, die stets kontrolliert werden müssen, damit die Regierungsapparate weiterhin funktionieren. Im heutigen kognitiven Kapitalismus, jener Krankheit, die vorgibt, die Therapie zu sein (gewiss die treffendste Charakterisierung, die jemals gegeben wurde), drängen und verlangen diese Mechanismen danach, dass wir alles preisgeben, was wir wissen, ob dies dadurch geschieht, dass man „Spaß an der Arbeit“ hat, durch partizipatorische Arbeitsteams, in Kulturquartieren, durch die früheren Radikalen, die „vernünftig“ geworden sind und den Geist ihrer früheren Subversion aufgegeben haben, oder durch die Einspeisung von Antagonismus in Bildkapital. Eine Kunst der Undercommons gibt den Strategien der medialen und kulturellen Intervention eine neue Orientierung und formiert sich um die Klugheit, nicht zu viel preiszugeben, diese Wissensformen nicht der Ernte zu öffnen. Die Kunst der Undercommons ist die Klugheit, Welten zu erschaffen und dabei subversive Wissensformen gegenüber der Vereinnahmung zu verschleiern. Wenn es darum geht, dass subversive Bewegungen ihr Potenzial bewahren, können wir nur hoffen, dass sie nicht Widerstandsritualen und Unbedenklichkeiten verfallen, durch Gesten, die „mehrdeutige Ströme von sozialen Kontinua in gesonderte und verarbeitbare Kategorien verwandeln“[23]. Wir können nur auf die Entwicklung der Klugheit hoffen, die um den Unterschied weiß.

http://eipcp.net/transversal/0311/shukaitis/de

Coco Fusco: Observations of Predation in Humans

From the Archives
February 12, 2015 Written by admin
From the Archives – Coco Fusco: Observations of Predation in Humans at the Studio Museum in Harlem

Today, from the archives, we bring you Lia Wilson‘s review of Coco Fusco’s Observations of Predation in Humans, originally performed at the Studio Museum of Harlem in December 2013 for Radical Presence, a survey of performance work by black visual artists. This month, Fusco will be resuming her role as the legendary female chimpanzee psychologist Dr. Zira at Participant Inc., as part of the Performing Franklin Furnace exhibition, which showcases the historical import that Franklin Furnace and its founder Martha Wilson played in fostering avant-garde and activist art practices in New York City. This article was originally published on January 7, 2014.

Coco Fusco. Observations of Predation in Humans: A Lecture by Dr. Zira, Animal Psychologist (study), 2013. Photo: Noah Krell.

Critical distance can be an ambitious aspiration for an artist, particularly if her practice strives to directly engage complex economic, environmental, or social justice issues. How can traditionally partisan discourses be avoided? Can a political viewpoint be communicated without merely contributing to a staunchly divisive cultural dialogue that is easy to tune out? There is no single strategy or formula for this challenge. Coco Fusco’s recent performance at the Studio Museum in Harlem deftly employed science fiction to gain some critical space. Her successful approach afforded her a new viewpoint and a platform—from a whole species away.

For Observations of Predation in Humans (2013), her contribution to the exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Fusco revived and fully embodied the character of Dr. Zira, the female chimpanzee animal psychologist from the 1968–71 Planet of the Apes films. With a Skyped-in introduction from Donna Haraway, an esteemed commentator on hominoid interrelations, it was explained that despite the narrative of the third film, Escape from Planet of the Apes, which portrayed the character’s assassination by the U.S. government, Dr. Zira had actually survived and had been in hiding in an isolated cabin in the Midwest for more than twenty years. Over the course of this seclusion, she had been observing human behavior via the Internet and television. It wasn’t until the 2012 Cambridge Declaration, in which brain scientists concluded that non-human animals do have consciousness, that Dr. Zira felt safe enough to resurface as a public intellectual and present her findings on human predation.



Thus a crowd gathered in the basement of the Studio Museum in Harlem to listen to a female chimpanzee psychologist from the future lecture on the destructive and unsustainable human alpha-male proclivity for profit and punishment. Using the classic academic presentation software PowerPoint, Dr. Zira clicked through a multitude of examples of human aggression she collected from our visual culture, from news clips and soap operas to social media and Hollywood films. She discussed her observation of alpha males of the Homo genus as being “overly self-confident,” always “passing off their compulsive behavior as goal oriented.” An initial illustration of this dynamic, paired with the slide title “human alpha male assertion of dominance,” was a snippet from independent trader Alessio Rastani’s 2011 interview with BBC News: “Most traders don’t care about how to fix the economy. They want to know how to make money from it. Personally, I go to bed at night and dream about another recession.”[1]


Coco Fusco. Observations of Predation in Humans: A Lecture by Dr. Zira, Animal Psychologist (study), 2013. Photo: Noah Krell.