modes of being dispossessed

today / this week i'm thinking a lot about boundaries, the self, (im)permeability, relationships.

i have been wanting for a couple of weeks to write about art and specifically interactions with art, and interactive art – following on both from my thoughts on dust and the two pieces i linked to in that newsletter, to which i will link again here for convenience: Ava; Jen.

specifically, what jen wrote about "talk[ing] in a language that is less definitive, not to carve out meaning on the side of my sculpture, but to sit next to it with people and talk, no – to sit on it, to bring your coffee and your woes of the day and be enfolded by the work of art, That’s Crazy". Initially this made me think of the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe) in Berlin, which I first encountered in 2013 on a guided tour of Berlin; the guide told us that the monument was specifically designed to be interacted with, to become a part of the city that was used, sat on, walked through, a reminder of the city’s / Germany’s past that was adopted into its present. Not something sombre and silent and depressing, but a fact of life that people would make their peace with and interact with in different ways; quiet contemplation, wandering through the stones, throwing parties, playing hide and seek, whatever appealed to them about the space.

the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

although I have not been able to find any evidence that this is actually true, what the guide said always stuck with me, and is why I like the memorial so much as a piece of architecture. It encpasulates lots of different things, and is different things to different people – or different things to the same person at different times, or even at the same time, or the same thing to different people. The blocks in the middle tower high above you; they are threatening, they block out the light and noise of the city. They remind you of gravestones, concrete slabs not yet put together into their final shape; they’re also a place to sit, to host barbecues, to do yoga. the way they are absorbed into the life of the city, rather than being walled off (like many monuments metaphorically are, and like the book burning memorial in Berlin’s Bebelplatz literally is). The slabs of the Denkmal are both art and architecture, symbolic and material; they are a place to sit on it, to bring your coffee and your woes of the day and be enfolded by the work of art.

the Bebelplatz book burning memorial

jen’s piece also made me think of anthea hamilton’s The Squash, an installation art piece that inhabited (semi-literally) the Tate’s Duveen Galleries this summer and with which everyone on twitter was obsessed. I liked the squash primarily because it was very gentle, but I was fascinated by the idea of it as much as the reality – the questions it raises about performance art, individuality, audience interaction; how the art changes for every person who comes into contact with it, because it is inherently dialogic; how the piece of art interacts with its context, the space of the gallery.

The Squash

I have been thinking a lot recently about context, about the ways in which context changes our reading of something; if I had been introduced to the Denkmal differently then I would interact with it differently now, five years on. The perennial argument about modern art and whether it is “really art” is all tied up with the question of context, it seems, because the context of the art gallery or the museum bestows the title of Art to something which otherwise would not be Art (cf. Duchamp’s Fountain (1917)).

from John Frow, ‘The Literary Frame’, Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure and Frames

another piece of art that invites you to sit on it – literally – is jenny holzer’s benches, which I saw yesterday at the Tate Modern. Her work has always been interested in context, in the public dimension, in being seen outside of the artistic context: large-scale installations from the benches, to advertising billboards, to LED signs and projections on buildings.

other works include bronze plaques – again a manipulation of context and significance, taking something which implies a certain weight and altering it; in this case appropriating the form of the plaque, conveying historical / cultural worth, and replacing its content with something else.

not to be eric langley, but this holzer plaque about tenderness made me think about derrida:

from Jacques Derrida, The Post Card

to switch tacks a little (I promise this will loop back round to the main point, tho; it is a productive digression), I have been thinking a lot specifically about the (im)permeability of the self. Objectivity vs. subjectivity in art and criticism – how do we respond to things on a critical / academic level as distinct from a personal level? Should those things be separated? I have had the fight about objectivity many times, and while I basically think that objectivity is a sensible thing to aim for, I think assuming that you can or have achieve(d) it is folly (hmm interesting that the most vocal oponent to this idea is my cishet white male friend hmm). I think the only way to progress towards objectivity – something that u may possibly never reach – is to unpick your subjectivity first, to identify and acknowledge and remove your biases. It is basically impossible to come into contact with something that is completely fresh, with no preconceptions; that is the curse of the information age, I guess. We all have so many biases and pre-judgements that we don’t even notice we’re carrying around with us; I think for us to be able to pick up the work of art and get close to it, we have to put those things down.

Also, when I try to be objective, I feel bad; dull. I feel like a stone that isn’t having any kind of organic emotional response to something, which is surely the entire point of art in the first place. I don’t see why we would bother trying to perform e.g. literary criticism if we don’t accept and endorse the idea that books are important and artistically valuable and life-changing because of their effects on people. It’s fine and fun to analyse things just for the sake of it, just because it is intellectually satisfying to do so; but also surely it only matters taken in the context that art matters. So I am trying to be more permeable, which is very hard because I Don’t Like It At All and letting things in and letting things out is uncomfortable. I am reading Brennan’s Transmission of Affect at the moment for an essay, which is thus far completely irrelevant to the essay but very interesting.

from Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect

This idea that boundaries are (a) completely healthy and (b) completely static is of course problematique, and I assume that Brennan will go on to critique it (I am only on p.24). For one thing, boundaries are evidently not static; they are mutable, and often permeable in themselves, dependent on context (e.g. the kind of treatment you accept from one person is unacceptable from another, because of your different relationships with them both). For another, having boundaries which are too inflexible or too many leads to this kind of dullness I was just talking about, a state of being where nothing goes in or out, where you don’t interact with things; they might impact you, or you them, but you are inflexible and they either ricochet off or destroy you. You have to be open, to transmit and receive.

The danger of not being open to others is that of becoming entirely self-sufficient; I would say narcissistic, although not in the sense that Brennan is using it above. In the sense of the myth of Narcissus, that you are too bound up in yourself to worry about other people, to the point where that becomes deadly. (wow: again, very eric langley. Feel like I should throw in an individual, indivisible for good measure.) anyway, the fear is one of becoming entirely self-contained, closed-off; but there is also the opposite fear, of becoming entirely permeable, entirely immaterial. If you are too receptive, you risk taking on others’ feelings, thoughts, personalities, whatever as though they are your own; you lose whatever self you had to start with; you cannot usefully interact with people because you have nothing to give, you are just an absence that relies on others for everything. Obviously the ideal middle ground is somewhere in-between: that we are mutually co-constitutive, that we make and unmake each other in our relationships. We all want to be seen; to be heard when we speak, and spoken back to.

This morning I have been listening to “Me and My Dog” by Julien Baker / Phoebe Bridgers / Lucy Dacus on repeat, and I noticed that even in that song there is a preoccupation with selfhood in relation to the other; with self-sufficiency and a kind of core identity that fears being corrupted: “just thought I could hold myself together”. Ideas of emotional integrity or unspooling are often figured as bodily or dynamic: holding oneself together, coming apart, breaking down. Obviously there is a parallel concern between emotional vulnerability and bodily vulnerability in romantic relationships, whereby your emotional interactions with someone are mirrored in physical intimacy, sex as a crossing of bodily boundaries, breaking down what it means to be you or me. But I think that good relationships, and good art, allow you to experience this breaking-down without it being total and irreparable; they break you down but also give you the tools with which to build yourself back up, incorporating some of that experience into the new you. We only exist in relation to one another, after all (or if you think that isn’t true, then fine, but surely you must admit that the only point to existence is in our relations with one another).

from Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

Ecstasy: from Greek ekstasis ‘standing outside oneself’, based on ek- ‘out’ + histanai ‘to place’.