Hélio Oiticica with Bólides and Parangolés at his studio, Engenheiro Alfredo Duarte Street, Rio de Janeiro, ca. 1965. Photo: © Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

The Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main (MMK) is presenting the biggest European retrospective exhibition of the work of the Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica, running until the 12th January 2014. You will know Oiticica, perhaps without realising, because in 1968 Caetano Veloso used the title of one of his artworks for a music album which would make it world famous: Tropicalia. Oiticica’s Tropicalia was an installation inspired by the favelas of Brazil, with it’s own beach hut, sand, real plants and living parrots. Every contemporary art museum wants to have its own Tropicalia now, and yet the work of Oiticica, more metabolic than object based, more affective than retinal, is still to be discovered.

I am not interested in Oiticica’s parrots (now swooning absurdly under the artificial light of the museum) or in the Tropicalia cool revival in the world of fashion. I’m interested in Oiticica as a figure that condenses and anticipates the becoming of the 21st century artist: migrant, precarious, intern, temporary artist in resident, pansexual, visionary, vulnerable, sick, prematurely dead. Cognitive bio-political worker.

In 1971 Oiticica, 35 years old, would travel from Brazil to New York with a Guggenheim grant for artists. Before arriving in New York, Oiticica had already developed an immense and incredibly innovative body of work that would herald the paradigm shift that would transform future curators and cultural managers —who at this time were still disconnected from the kinds of social and political practices that enriched the work of Oiticica. His work anticipated the move from work to relation, from the individual to the interpersonal, from visual reception to a multi-sensory experience, from object to subject and from art as sort of clinical diagnosis to art as universal shamanism.

Hélio Oiticica, Parangolés, 1965-1979. Installation view, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst. Photo: Axel Schneider © MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst.

Before arriving in New York, Oiticica had already elaborated not only his Tropicalia but also the notion of “environmental art” and “metaphysical colours”, the “Bolides” (mouldable structures that could be manipulated by the public) and the “Parangoles” (pieces of material that served as improvised outfits for starting a social ritual of dance and creation)… His arrival in New York and the securing of the Guggenheim grant do not serve as ‘recognition’ for Oiticica but rather as metamorphosis: just as Gregory transformed into an insect, Oiticica transforms into a migrant from the South without resources and wandering the streets of downtown Manhattan. When the grant finishes in 1972, Oiticica begins working odd jobs, including a trafficker of cocaine, pills and hash. Oiticica died in 1980 of a cardiac arrest.

It was during this period of bare survival in New York, in which the identity of the precarious migrant and drug dealer was threatening to devour the artist, when his artistic collaboration with Nelville D’Almeida occurred. They made a work together entitled Block-Experiment in Cosmococa: a combination of installations verging on the cinematic, the architectural and the performative which took place in Oiticica’s apartment on the Lower East Side. There is no visual documentation of the installations but Oiticica’s innovative texts that reconstruct the installations (protocals of the work, conversations, letters, reflections), could be found today in an anthology of the best literary experiments of the 20th Century.

Hélio Oiticica, Bloco-Experiências in Cosmococa – programa in progress, CC2 Onobject. Installation view, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst. Photo: Axel Schneider © MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst.

Each Block-Experiment in Cosmococa was an installation that assembled at least four elements: an interior design of the space that marked out the conditions of reception with a series of objects (hammocks, sofas, balloons…); the projection of a series of slides (popular images of cultural icons: Marilyn, Hendrix, ect.) onto the surfaces of the 6 sides of the room (including the ceiling and the floor); the design of a sound environment; and finally a performative protocol in which instructions are presented that immediately establish certain relations between vistor-participants and the work. A substance similar to cocaine (who knows if it was actually the real cocaine that Oiticica was trafficking to live off) appears in lines across the faces of Marilyn or Hendrix.

Once again Oiticica, like a clairvoyant or a lookout, points out the track that would follow: in the 1970’s the relations between the North and the South would be regulated and mediated by the production and trafficking of drugs. The United States were entirely tied up in Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, Chile, Columbia, Cuba… by huge lines of coke. In the “war against drugs” that Nixon declared in 1971, cocaine would become the “scapegoat” that would allow the US to acquire a moral advantage over its political adversaries. Used legally in many pharmacological compounds and trafficked illegally to the USA through trade routes from the Caribbean and South America, cocaine is in the 1970’s the prime object of mass consumption, as distributed as Warhol’s Campbell soup. The difference between Campbell soup and cocaine (a difference which also distinguishes the publicist work of Warhol and the shamanic rituals of Oiticica) is of course that the latter is a powerful technology for the modification of consciousness.

Oiticica was looking for a kind of artistic experience that could be “sniffed” like a line of cocaine. In the Cosmococas, Oiticica and Nelville use cocaine as a kind of cognitive “readymade”: they displace cocaine from the networks of trafficking and consumption and they integrate it into a system of signification in which it can function as a dispositive for producing dissident forms of subjectification.

Each Cosmococa is a multimedia texture that, Oiticica states, “functions as an open program for random operations” capable of enacting a series of tools for cognitive, corporeal and sensory de-habituation. Here Oiticica is investing in the organic materiality of processes of subjectification which art proposes and the possibility to create a bio-public: a living spectator whose metabolism is open to the mutation.

Portrait Hélio Oiticica, 1979. Photo : Ivan Cardoso © Ivan Cardoso. Courtesy Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main.

L’article Oiticica: Pharmacofictions est apparu en premier sur Peau de Rat.

Cover of the Exhibition Catalogue Womanhouse (showing Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro). Design by Sheila de Bretteville. (Feminist Art Program, California Institute of the Arts, 1972). Photo © Donald Woodman. Courtesy of “Through the Flower” archive

In October the curatorial and activist collective a people is missing will republish and distribute a video documentary by Johanna Demetrakas entitled Womanhouse (1974, 47 min.) for this first time in France. I still remember when I first saw the documentary; an afternoon in New York in Laura Cottingham’s house. Laura had undertaken an expansive investigation about feminist artistic practices in North America in the 1970’s in order to make Not For Sale (1998), which is without doubt the best documentary about the theme to date.  In her personal archive was the Demetrakas video.  At the time I situated myself as queer, while Laura continued to position herself as a radical feminist. Watching the documentary about Womanhouse together, we reconciled each other and managed not to get trapped in the indeterminable debate between post-structural criticism and socialist feminism.  After all we have the same history in common. On the pretext that she had a double copy of everything, Laura filled my backpack up with videos with the frenzy of a bootlegger or somebody who had been holding a message that had waited years to be told.  Still inexpert, I went back to my apartment in Brooklyn and spent a week working through the videos (by Demetrakas, Martha Rosler, Ilene Segalove, Faith Ringgold, Adrian Piper, Ana Mendieta…and a copy of Not for Sale) as if they had been made only for me, taking notes that would constitute my first classes in gender and performance in the University of Paris VIII at the beginning of the year 2000.  Feminist art in the 1970’s was neither a style nor a movement, but rather a set of heterogeneous operations of the denaturalization of the relations between sex, gender, visuality and power. The documentary Womanhouse changed my way of thinking about artistic practice and helped me to understand that it was possible to transform the university and the museum into spaces of sexual and political emancipation.

Ignored for years by the hegemonic narratives of art history, the project “Womanhouse” emerges today as an indispensable work for understanding artistic practices of the 1970’s as well as for rethinking the future of art pedagogies and the relationships between architecture, performance and social activism. The documentary invites us to approach the first feminist pedagogical project initiated at the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts) by Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro and a group of students at the beginning of the 1970’s. In the autumn of 1971, Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro inaugurated the Feminist Art Program. With the school under construction and a lack of space, Chicago and Shapiro took on an idea proposed by Paula Harper: rent a space and transform it into a feminist project.  They found an abandoned house on a waiting list to be destroyed on Mariposa Street in a residential neighbourhood in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Despite the derelict state of the house, Judy Chicago decided that the “mariposa” (butterfly in Spanish; her lucky animal) was a good sign. During the following six weeks a group of 25 women would study, work and perform inside of the house, transforming each of the spaces and the 17 bedrooms into places of work and study. Demetrakas films the collective work sessions in Womanhouse and shows how the space transformed from a house to a place of exhibition between 30^th of January and 28^th of February in 1972. As if it were political allegory (or history’s bad joke), the first exhibition of feminist art would take place in an abandoned house: a domestic space about to be demolished, transformed first into a collaborative and environmental artwork and later into an ephemeral gallery.

Vickie Hodgetts, Robin Weltsch, and Susan Frazier.
Nurturant Kitchen at Womanhouse, 1972.

In Womanhouse, it is domestic space itself, historically naturalized as “feminine”, that is transformed into an object of critique and artistic experimentation. The heterosexual home, a privatized and disciplinary site, is politicized and denaturalized through language, painting, installation and performance. This process of investigation began in 1969 at Fresno State College (now California State University) when, in response to the exclusion of women in the university and the circuits of production and display of art, Judy Chicago began to distance herself from abstract art and organized the first course of “art and feminism” outside of the art school building. In the “Kitchen Consciousness Group”, Judy Chicago and her colleague Kathie Sarachild put in motion an experimental method of collective learning through speech and through the dramatization of exclusion.  Language displaces painting and performance takes the place once held by sculpture in traditional art training.  Chicago groundbreaking idea was that art could transform consciousness and therefore become also a tool of political emancipation. On the other hand, empowerment techniques and consciousness-raising sessions became tools to produce art. Breaking the hierarchy of teacher-student, the participants constructed collective autobiographical narrations of their political experiences of being artists and women. Rape, discrimination, abortion, maternity, lesbianism, masturbation, divorce, contraception… appear now as spaces of not only political but artistic intervention. In a process of dematerialisation of art and intensification of critical practice, learning in the context of artistic practice shifts from forms of material production towards an art understood as a process of cognitive and somatic emancipation.

The aim of art is no longer to produce an “object” but rather to invent an apparatus of re-subjectification that is capable of producing a “subject”: another conscience, another body.

Sandy Orgel, Linen Closet, 1972, Womanhouse project

It is both motivating and moving today to revisit the interior of Womanhouse through Demetrakas’ documentary: to attend the conscious-raising conversations, to enter into the kitchen transformed by Vicki Hodgetts into an entirely pink space in which fried eggs invade the walls as breasts, or Judy Chicago’s “Menstruation Bathroom” which was full of red tampons that would later be unfairly denounced as a cliché of feminist art (Chicago’s was just underlying the power of new biopolitical and hygienic techniques over the body), or to see the linen closet transformed into the body of a woman by Sandy Orgel, or watch Chris Rush performing the work “Scrubbing” in which she performs the act of cleaning the floor in real time before an audience as uncomfortable as they are surprised, or Faith Wilding (today known internationally for her cyberfeminist work) in her performance “Waiting” in which she narrates female existence as an indeterminate process of moments of waiting, or again Faith Wilding and Janice Lester dressed up as a penis and vagina performing Judy Chicago’s “Cock and Cunt Play”.

Screenshot of Womanhouse by Johanna Demetrakas (1974). Faith Wilding and Janice Lester, The Cock and Cunt Play, performance. “Womanhouse” Project, 1972

Womanhouse produced a critical intervention of denaturalization that also brought into focus the interrelations between 4 supposedly distinct institutions: the university, the museum, the domestic space and the body. Womanhouse posed a critique of domestic space as a technology of production and domination of the feminine body while highlighting the institution of marriage and sex as a regime of enclosement and discipline. The displacement of these first feminist art pedagogies to domestic space (to Judy Chicago’s kitchen and to Womanhouse), which were located outside of the university and museum, is a sign of the epistemological limits of educational institutions of the 1970’s. Feminist critique put in question the architectures of knowledge and its epistemological frontiers. It is possible now to understand Womanhouse as part of the work of Institutional Critique that other artists (Michael Asher, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, Hans Haake, Marcel Broodthaers…) were carrying out at the same time, and yet they extended the critique further: to the institution of domesticity and its relations with art education and the museum.

Institutional contempt directed towards the artistic practices and criticisms of feminism would cause the forgetting and even the total destruction of the archive of feminist art from the 70’s: the house in which the Womanhouse experiment took place, the installations, the murals, the architectural transformations, were all destroyed during Roland Reagan’s government. However, the images captured by Demetrakas return to us today, to put it in the words of Georges Didi-Huberman and Warburg, as a kind of ‘ghost’ or ‘survivor’ so that it is still possible to dream our own history and imagine other possible mutations of the institutions of the school and museum.

Curatorial and activist collective a people is missing
Womanhouse, a film by Johanna Demetrakas (1974 VOSTF)

L’article Revisiting Womanhouse est apparu en premier sur Peau de Rat.

Bruno Gironcoli, Untitled (détail), 1995/96. License Creative Commons

A few days ago the Constitutional Court of Germany made a surprising announcement: an “undetermined sex” will be legalized, active from November 2013, as an option to mark on the birth certificate of those born within federal territory. Germany has thus become the first country in the European Union to recognize the administrative status of a third sex.  Although according to the German government, the “undetermined sex” will serve only as a temporal label (allowing the parents to designate their baby’s gender until the child is able to make the choice alone), the existence of an administrative alternative to the established binary represents a line of flight from the dominant sex/gender model – according to which there exist only two natural, healthy sexes that correspond to two psychological and social genders. In the last couple of years Australia and Argentina have also modified the administrative requisites through which sex is assigned. These changes are not random.  We find ourselves in the midst of an epistemic crisis in the system of representation of sex similar to the crisis that, in the sixteenth century, saw a radical shift from the Ptolemic representation of the movement of the planets to the helio-centric picture.  The system of representation of sex awaits a Copernican revolution that appears to frustrate those who, up until now, have benefited from the political-sexual hegemony.

The assignation of a baby’s sex is a highly regulated social and political process.  The sex of a body can only be determined from within what we could call, following Michel Foucault, an “apparatus of verification”— that is, in accordance with a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble of institutional, administrative mechanisms, discursive practices and techniques of visual representation that make possible to separate false statements from true statements. Capitalist and colonial discourses in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, which were centered around maximizing the reproduction of the nation, functioned through an apparatus of verification of the sex binary: bodies were organized and managed depending on whether they were considered potentially functional uteruses or producers of sperm. The cracks in this system of representation had already begun to show at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the violent management of the so-called “hermaphrodites”; bodies whose genital anatomy couldn’t be classified as either feminine or masculine. From this moment on, the medical and legal discourse was faced with the existence of a multiplicity of bodies that escape the binary form of the apparatus of verification of sex. The conventions of sexual assignation that operate today in the West emerged from a response that a group of child psychologists from the John Hopkins University in Baltimore gave in the 1950’s to this epistemic crisis.  Psychologist John Money and his team decided that it was politically more ‘profitable’ to modify the body of hermaphrodite babies (referred to as Intersex) with the help of a series of violent surgical interventions and hormones than to modify the apparatus of verification of the sex binary.

Today we still function under the Money conventions, yet the new tools of chromosomal reading, either genetic of biochemical, in the last couple of years has further put in question the validity of the sex binary.  Within scientific discourse and debate, we talk today of 5, 6, 7, or even n+1 sexes. Intersex, queer, transfeminist and disability activists have demanded recognition of a multiplicity of somatic, psychological and political bodies, soliciting an urgent change to the way in which sex is assigned. However, the modification of the apparatus’ of verification through which a body is socialized and recognized as human are today hijacked by a new emergent group of experts: not only biologists and doctors but also social engineers, religious representatives, lobbies for the pharmaceutical, textile and health industry…this is a deterritorialized and diverse group of organizations and social managers.  My hypothesis is that a society cannot affirm itself as democratic if its citizens can’t access the production and the modification of the apparatuses of verification through which they are governed.  Effective democratization of a society could measure itself in the following way: the participation in and access to the terms of the apparatus of verification and classification systems that govern the distribution of life and death chances— through which normality and pathology, health and illness are defined.

To confront a society in which only experts (scientists, industrialists, professionals of governmental practices) have access to the modification of the apparatuses of verification is precisely to defend a society in which the apparatuses of verification are spaces open to social creativity. And here is where art practices and cultural criticism become indispensable: to imagine other possible apparatuses of verification. The artist and critic are, following Douglas Crimp,  “cultural activists” to the extent to which they invent and experiment with alternative systems of verification and new techniques of dissident subjectification.

In the foreground : Louise Bourgeois, Arched Figure, 1993.
Courtesy Belvedere, Vienna. Photo: Gregor Titze

I’ll give an example of the capacity of artistic practice to function as a dissident technique of verification that produces alternative regimes of truth in which the body is no longer identified as normal or pathological nor adheres to the political-visual paradigms of masculinity and femininity.  In the exhibition that is taking place these days at the Galerie Belvedere in Vienna (and that can be visited until October 27^th), the work of sculptor Bruno Gironcoli (1962-2010) is re-contextualised in a way that forwards these strategies. A network of artistic practices from the 20^th and 21^st century are re-articulated through the work of Gironcoli: from the sculptures of Carl Andre, Louise Bourgeois or Franz West, the performances and installations of Joseph Beuys or Jürgen Klauke to the paintings of Francis Bacon and the videos of Mathew Barney.  The practices that form “Gironcoli’s context” could be understood as a dissident apparatus of verification that allows for the development of what Charles Taylor called a “new social imaginary” or what Michael Warner would label a “counter-public” sex.

In the foreground : Bruno Gironcoli, Stimmungsmacher, 1965-69
In the background : Jürgen Klauke, Self-Performances (1972-73)
Courtesy Belvedere, Vienna. Photo: Gregor Titze, 2013

Francis Bacon’s Lying Figure (1969) distorts the apparatus of verification through which the feminine body is made visible as an object of desire for the male gaze; in Louise Bourgeoise’ Cell (1992-1993) the spectator finds themselves face to face with the body de-subjectified by the system of representation of hysteria; in Adaptive Franz West transforms a series of portable sculptures into prostheses that reconfigure a new social body; in Self Performances (1972-1973), Jürgen Klauke creates a material corporeality that displaces and elides the gender binary regime of truth. It is no coincidence that sculpture and its relationship to the history of technology are at the centre of Gironcoli’s work: here the artist invents a new series of codes through which material is converted into bodily matter.

Bruno Gironcoli, Mutter Vater, 1967/1978.
Courtesy Belvedere, Vienna. Photo: Gregor Titze, 2013

The work of Gironcoli functions as an abstract system of representation of the body that opposes not only the conventions of the traditional, classic human, but also Money’s protocols:  “Gironcoli is a “morphologist of machines,” a Dadaist of the age of biotechnological reproduction, a Burroughs of technical systems and volumes, a hip-hop sampler working with chunks of political anatomy and the history of design. Living bodies, furniture, sculpture and architecture belong to the same biotech production system. Gironcoli’s sculptures are neither anthropomorphic nor zoomorphic forms, neither male nor female, but rather systemic assemblages of a multiplicity of interrelated bodies and technical devices. Gironcoli’s sculptures are cut-ups and fold-ins with the techno-living material text of the history of biopolitics…The sculpture Ohne Title (1995-1996/2004) is to the biopolitical production of the 21^st Century what Michelangelo’s Pietà was to the theological representation of maternity in the Renaissance, and what Rodin’s Eternal Idol was to Romantic heterosexual intercourse in the late nineteenth century. Taking into account the multi-species result, we could venture that Ford and Monsanto have taken the place of Dad and Mum and are having “hypersex” with Ikea. From the savage intercourse of corporations, human-crocodile-missile fetuses are being born.” * The work of Gironcoli allows a glimpse of other ways of being a body, of existing materially, offering us an invitation to imagine other modes of governing and being governed, other means to collectively manage difference.

The Pieta by Michelangelo, St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome. Photo: Jean-Christophe Benoist. Creative Commons License.

L’article Gironcoli Vs. Money. Art as a dissident apparatus of verification est apparu en premier sur Peau de Rat.

La Manif pour Tous, Facebook post.

As you may have guessed from my absence from the blog in the last couple of weeks, I have been voluntarily disconnected from the Internet, enjoying a detox, getting used to nourishing myself with water, sun and passing the time accompanied by dogs and goats; materials and presences which are decidedly less volatile that the signs of the screen. Before switching on the computer I had plans to talk about the new cycle of revolutions currently being announced, about transfeminist indigenism in Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Brazil…, about the history of colonization, about those that resisted slavery and the plantation economy, about the necessity to re-edit the work of Eric Williams and Herbert Aptheker in French and Spanish and about the histories still to be written…in the end, I’m going to talk about the first image I received in my inbox. This was a photograph sent by Manif pour Tous (a French group who fight against homosexual marriage and gay and lesbian parenting). Four young guys bare-chested in pink shorts use their bodies to make a tower, intertwining their legs and straining to form the shape of a cross, under a flag which portrays a symbolic heterosexual family (unit of four, holding hands) all against a mountain range and blue sky background. I had to look twice at the origin of this image (my first thought was that this was the “Holidays in the Mountains” cover of the gay magazine Têtu) to make sure that this was in fact an ‘action’ by an anti-homosexual militant group. A similar disconcerting effect occurred while observing the images and actions of the fundamentalist catholic and French far right-wing groups Les Antigones or the masculinist collective Homen. Les Antigones dress up as good “Mariannes” (long white dresses, ribbons the colors of the French flag and traditional bonnets) carrying “bread and salt” to the Russian embassy “to show their solidarity with a friendly ally outraged by Femen.” Meanwhile, Homen restore masculine sovereignty by showing their bare chests (like Femen, but with masks) outside the Hotel de Ville.

Homen Collective (screenshot, YouTube)

Les Femen © Alvaro Canovas

If I’m talking about these images in the context of a Blog dedicated to artistic practice it’s because I would argue that there is, behind these new reactionary activisms of the extreme right, a problem (call it a confusion of..) the aesthetic and performative order. My humble hypothesis is that the awakening of the new civil rights movements of the extreme right is accompanied by the consistent and paradoxical referencing of the forms of performative actions invented by the radical left: black civil rights movements, feminisms, sexual dissidence and AIDS activism.

The reasons for this aesthetic displacement are difficult to elucidate: perhaps the right have forgotten their cultural inheritance. When the homophobic right has claimed as their ancestor the gay and communist Jean Moulin, are we facing a form of oblivion, a negation or simply a banal lack of knowledge of history? How can we understand in alternative ways the recuperation of Antigone as a hero dressed in white bringing bread and salt to the embassy of Putin? Perhaps it’s just that the new right movements don’t dare to assume their true authentic visual-political references: futurism, fascist aesthetics, naturalism…

The right envy the emancipatory potential, the social creativity and the aesthetics of the left: they envy our protests and our bodies, they envy the ways in which we show our skin, they envy the sexual energy of our public actions, they envy our style of revolt. They are jealous of the way our desire leaves domestic space to invade the public square converting assemblies into celebrations, they are jealous of the insolence of our banners. They are jealous of the violent intelligence of ActUp, the post-porn furor of Pussy Riot, the pop efficiency of Femen. They are jealous of our music and our signs. Semiotic jealousy, somatic envy. Aesthetic jealousy, performative envy.

Historically, the actions of blacks, feminists and homosexuals have been characterized through the dissident use of the body in public space. In the 60’s in the geo-political context of the wars of de-colonization, the minorities (of class, race, sex, disability…) invented new forms of political intervention: African Americans refused to be an invisible and segregated workforce; heterosexual women refused to carry out the work of reproduction enclosed by domesticity; homosexuals, transvestites, transexuals and disabled people rejected the condition of ‘illness’, the exclusion from public life and they defended their right to full citizenship. The insistent presence of women, black, homosexual, transsexual and disabled bodies in public space is an answer to specific forms of biopolitical oppression and control. As Dick Hebdige argues in Subculture- The Meaning of Style (1979), the social and political minorities use corporal style (whether this be in the nude or with a veil) as a strategy that allows for an interruption of the processes of normalization, thus re-appropriating a body-code that has been confiscated or resignifying an object or space with which they are associated in normative ways. This process of reapropriation, “détournement” and semiotic resistence plays again the corporal style of the dominant semiotic community.

And here is where the actions of Manif pour Tous, Les Antigones and Homen start to loose the plot. Playing with the signs and codes of subaltern groups, our fellow citizens of the right (who are also representatives of the dominant majority) just end up making a mess. The white dresses of Les Antigones only frighten fashion lovers and the bare chests of Homen (if it weren’t for the masks) looks more like a group of bears off to the Marais. Deleuze has already stated that the fundamental difference between the right and the left is that on the left you have to think. Oh, and happy holidays!

Dona Ann McAdams, Carnival Knowledge, New York City, 1984. ©Dona Ann McAdams

Les Antigones Collective , Paris, 2013. screenshot, Youtube.

L’article Lessons in Style est apparu en premier sur Peau de Rat.

Ecosexual Performance, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, SF MOMA, June 2, 2013.

Last weekend we organised an ecosex workshop and conference in the Reina Sofia Museum with artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stevens. It makes me happy to think that while fundamentalist catholic groups and the French extreme right were protesting against same-sex marriage and parenting in the streets of Paris, a group of 40 people were getting married to the Earth in the Retiro Park in Madrid under the auspices of Stephens and Sprinkle.  These were our vows: “Earth, we promise to be your lovers. Don’t let us get too far from you. We promise to love you until death do us part.” An army of lovers unite against the empire of war.

While we were collectively marrying the Earth, the anti same-sex marriage protestors were invoking “nature” to secure the heterosexual-human hegemony. The vanguard of their protest was composed of two donkeys on whose backs were hung the slogan “I’m an ass, I voted for Hollande.” In the procession there were also banners that criticised same-sex marriage as a form of “natural revisionism” (in a perverse twist of the rhetoric of anti-Nazism), as wells as photographs of a chimpanzee that read: “Why not get married to him as well?”

We find ourselves in a shifting historical moment in which new technologies and new relations of power are re-codifying immaterial labour (the production of signs) and biopolitical production (social relations, reproduction of life, affective work). Against the background of the economic crisis, the tensions between the “conservative naturalists” and those who are fighting to invent practices for social emancipation are exasperated further.

Ecosex, Madrid

These public actions (the anti same-sex marriage and parenting protests and the Sprinkle and Stephens wedding with the Earth) make explicit two ways of understanding nature and the realm of the political, as well as two diverging agendas for organising the fields of production and of reproduction of life.  On the one hand, the heterosexual anthropocentric tradition, (the epistemological and political model central to colonial capitalism) according to which the heterosexual human is “by nature” the only subject who must have access to the technologies of government. For the biopolitical lumpenproletariat –unmarried and single women, animals, non-heterosexuals, the sick, the disabled, the Earth-…we have to be governed (when we’re not being exploited or devoured). On the other hand, there is the working out of a dissident political project that seeks to redistribute access to the technologies of government between all those who together form a living eco-system.

Inspired by the work of Linda Montano, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stevens initiated a seven-year project of public wedding rituals in 2005. Since then they have married the Earth, the mountains, the forest, water, the sea, the moon, rocks, the sun…over 50 times and with more than 3,000 people. 

Beth Stephens y Annie Sprinkle, Museo Reina Sofía de Madrid

Sprinkle and Stephens individual backgrounds, before their artistic collaboration, reflects two lines of force within, following the denomination chosen by Lucy Lippard and Laura Cottingham, “Feminist Art.”  While Stephens was intervening within the codes of the gallery space and video art, introducing representations of lesbian and queer culture, Annie Sprinkle, porn actress and activist, began with the task of analysing and critiquing the dominant codes of representation in pornography as well as campaigning to defend the rights of sex workers.  Annie Sprinkle appears as a key figure for understanding the debates surrounding pornography that characterise the 80’s and 90’s in North America. Against a pro-censure feminism, articulated by authors such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, Sprinkle (anticipating Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler’s de-ontologisation of gender) unveils the performative technologies that produce a sexualised femininity and masculinity within the dominant regimes of representation of pornography, using the term “post-porn” to refer to this critical turn and the strategies of agency which derive from it.  The work Post-Porn Modernist, choreographed by Annie Sprinkle and Emilio Cubeiro (a collaborator of artists such as Richard Kern, David Wojnarowicz and Rosa von Praunheim) and the performance The Public Cervix Announcement, in which Sprinkle proposes the public observation of her uterus with the help of a speculum, are some of the most significant articulations in the development of this critical process.

While the 80’s were marked by the tensions between pro-censure feminisms and pro-sex feminisms, the first decade of the current century is characterised by the emergence of a network of political and aesthetic strategies of de-identification with the category of woman (drag king culture, the intersexual movement, transgender movement, functional diversity movement, crip-queer, indigenism…). These practices come to destabilise colonial conventions and the biopolitical norms for the production of the body, gender, race and sexuality. Here the term “post-pornography” becomes a concept-map which, rather than determining a fixed theory or a particular aesthetic, allows connections to be made between a plurality of strategies of intervention and representations of dissident sexualities. The weddings with the Earth show a step further from the post-porn work of Sprinkle and Stephens towards ecosexuality, and announce the widening of a “relational aesthetics” to a political sexecology.

The ecosexual weddings are laboratories for the transformation of subjectivity in which the participants modify their perceptions and feelings, construct relations and affiliations that go further than the binary alliances of two human bodies of a different sex (or even of the same sex). Ecosexual practices attempt, as Félix Guattari wanted, to provoke a revolution of “the molecular dominion of the sensible, intelligence and desire.”

Sprinkle and Stephens exceed the sexual medico-judicial categories (homosexuality/heterosexuality) and they affirm themselves as “lovers of the Earth”, “aquaphiles, teraphiles, pirophiles, aerophiles,” starting a process of re-eroticisation of the world which puts into question the hierarchy of the species, the reproductive definition of sexuality and the political stratification of the body:

We caress the rocks, and pleasure the waterfalls, and admire Earth’s curves often. We make love with the Earth through our senses. We are very dirty.

This affective proliferation that extends to everything and everybody, is not only an exercise in de-heterosexualising relations, but also in de-humanising social links. As opposed to defining love within the languages of romance, religion or institutions, it seeks instead a definition in ecological and artistic terms.

If Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stevens propose to get married with the Earth, it is, among other things, to give it the same rights that a partner acquires before the law in a ‘humanist’ marriage.  This action is similar to what the indigenous Bolivian or Amazonian activists do when they recognise Water and the Earth as “subjects before the law” in the Constitución del Buen Vivir. Bruno Latour suggests something similar when, appealing to “Gaia”, he invites us to extend our political theory beyond the human. Like Sprinkle and Stephens, Latour calls for a “parliament of things” that includes not only human subjects but all those who participate in the global techno-living system.

PS : If you want to become an Earth’s lover, the next ecosex workshops will be taking place at Emmetrop in Bourges (France) July 4-7, and Colchester, Essex (UK), July 20-7.
www.ecosexlab.org

Annie Sprinkle, Beatriz Preciado, Beth Stephens

L’article Ecosexual Marriage with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens est apparu en premier sur Peau de Rat.

Studio de Carol Rama, Turin, 2012, Photo Beatriz Preciado

Teresa Grandes (who is co-curating this exhibition with me) and I went to Turin to see the works. More comfortable moving among the artist’s circuits than those of the gallerists and collectors, I let myself be guided through the twists and turns of the sinuous territories of the commercial art world by the experience and know-how of Teresa Grandes. We have already seen hundreds of reproduced images of Carol Rama’s work but we’ve never seen them face to face. Furthermore, Carol Rama is still alive: born in 1918 she is approaching a hundred.

Everyone has warned us about the difficulties and challenges posed by getting access to Carol Rama’s work. We arrive in Turin as two curators dressed up as tourists. Our contact in Turin is Cristina Mundici, who has organised and curated many of Carol’s exhibitions and is now running the Carol Rama archive with a group of experts and friends. Cristina opened the rest of the doors for us, taking us to see all of the collectors. In four days we saw more than 300 works many of which continue to be unknown after years shut away in garages and basements.

Our hotel in Turin, whose only selling point was perhaps its modest price (European austerity has meant that the museum makes us travel like two candidates of the Peking Express), ends up being right in the middle of the Carol Rama constellation. Cristina Mundici lives just opposite the hotel. Going down from Principe Amedeo, where the hotel is based, towards the Piazza Vittorio Venetto until the Po river, leaving behind the Mole and the museum of cinema in the background, we arrive at the building where Carol Rama lived for the majority of her life on Via Napione.  While we kill time making sure that we don’t arrive too early for our meeting, we find out that the apartment of the architect and friend of Carol, Carlo Mollino, is also on the same street next to the river.

Meret Oppenheim, Le déjeuner en fourrure, 1936

The first thing that surprises us about entering what was Carol Rama’s studio for 70 years, is the darkness: all the windows in the apartment have been blinded with thick black curtains.  Just as Caravaggio, Man Ray or Dan Flavin worked with light, we could say that Carol Rama worked not only in but also with darkness.  The feeling is more haptic than visual: it was as if we had fallen into Meret Oppenheim’s furry cup of Le Déjeuner en Fourrure (1936). It wasn’t about seeing, but rather touching, sensing.  As we moved through this dense blackness we saw progressively more and more yellowing sepia photos; hundreds of images of Carol Rama who transforms herself throughout them as an actress directed by time. Passing over them stage by stage we find a shoemaker’s anvil, dozens of wooden moulds, her own works and those of Man Ray, Picasso and Warhol, an African ritual mask, collections of taxidermy eyes, fingernails and hair, dozens of bicycles tyres (a recurring element of her works made after 1970) hanging flaccidly from hooks and piles of old soap that have degraded over time appearing now as slabs of animal fat. Her apartment is like an organic archive of her own work in the process of decomposition.

Carol Rama, Presagi di Birnam (1970)

The work of Carol Rama is a mine that has laid dormant underground, hidden under the shiny surface of modern art. Encountering just one of her works can implode all of the grand art historiographies. Not only the dominant histories but also those of feminisms. Carol Rama was a contemporary to and in dialogue with (sometimes in person and other times through her work) everything and everyone: Picasso, Duchamp, Luis Brunel, Man Ray, Jean Dubuffet, Orson Wells, Warhol, Sanguinetti, la Ciccoline and Jeff Koons….but she is an invisible contemporary.

Carol Rama’s name doesn’t appear in any history of art. Not even in those which, due to some epistemological and political mishap, have been called the histories of “women artists”. The Italian critic Lea Vergine rescued her for the first time from this historiographic erasure when she included her in the 1980 exhibition “L’Altra Meta dell’ Avanguardia/The Other Half of the Avante-Guarde: 1910-1940”. Vergine is the first person to understand Rama. But this gesture wasn’t enough to make Rama’s unclassifiable work enter into the established international museum circuit. Apart from a few exhibitions in the 90’s (at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which also travelled to Boston), the brief public acknowledgment of her work marked by the 2003 Venice’ Golden Lion and the distribution labour done by gallerist Isabella Bertolozzi, for the most part Carol Rama’s work still sleeps in the basements of Italian collectors. And yet as traces of seven decades of art production, her body of work shifts how we understand avant-garde movements. Carol Rama invented sensurrealism, visceral-concrete art, brut porn, organic abstraction… and more and more.

Carol Rama, Dorina, 1940 (Collection privée, Turin)

A history-fiction might propose that her works produced between 1936 and 1940 were made with the intention of being seen in 2014. The way in which Carol Rama represents the body and sexuality could be compared with a sort of Piero de la Francesca who would have painted “The ideal city” in the context of a society that didn’t recognize, or rather rejected, the notion of perspective. A woman shitting, a penetrated by a human penis, a body who opens up a vulva with two hands, a snake sliding out of an anus….The images that Carol Rama produced surpass the frames of the sexual intelligibility of modernity. And yet how are we to understand the works of Kara Walker, Sue Williams, Kiki Smith, Elly Stik, Marlene Dumas and Zoe Leonard without them?

Carol Rama, Appassionata, 1940. Courtesy Galleria civica d’Arte Moderno,Turin

Among other things, Carol Rama anticipates the transformations of the representation of the body and sexuality that will take place over the last three decades of the twentieth century. In the watercolors of her early work, Carol Rama invents a figure that, despite having never appeared in the grand catalogues nor entered the exhibition halls of MOMA, is one of the most iconic images of the 20th century: a body whose head is crowned with thorns that gradually become a small garden of yellow flowers. In the series Appassionata (1940), a body, naked apart from the shoes, appears lying on a bed strewn and hung with a web of restraining straps. In the background floats a structure that emerges from the crossing and interweaving of the bed frames and the straps. It could be said that this structure is the consequence of the schematic application of some of the visible laws of cubism but that Carol Rama has modified with the extra variable of “affect.” We could call it, following Deleuze, Affection-Cubism. Art is the result of the extraction of the image from its space-time co-ordinates in order to transform it into percepts and affects. The floating structure is at the same time madness and the incarcerating system of the subject, a possible man of unconscious and of its relationship to the disciplinary apparatus.

Carol Rama, Appassionata, 1940. Courtesy Galleria civica d’Arte Moderno,Turin

The representation of the body that Carol Rama would construct by the end of the 30’s is comparable in poetic intensity and acuity only to what Antonin Artaud would also be working on throughout the same period. In another one of the watercolours, the body, now with its arms and legs amputated, appears naked and fallen on a vertical plane with wheels. Here, as with the floating bed structure, the space-time of the wheels suffers a distortion as if it were observed from a multiplicity of viewpoints. However this multiplicity of perspectives doesn’t necessarily produce a sense of movement (as would have been the case with Muybridge or Boccioni), but, on the contrary, it forces the body to incorporate the inorganic: the wheels and footrests become prosthetic limbs. In the centre of the image the chromatic vivacity of the head-garden, the erect tongue and the vulva represented as an external organ and not as a orifice stands out against the subdued colour of the body. This body should be dead, but its not, it’s alive.

How did Carol Rama make these watercolors at only 18 years old? All the biographical summaries about Carol Rama mention the same event that is presented as foundational: her father, an industrial manufacturer of bicycles, went bankrupt and committed suicide when Carol was 22. Speaking with her friends, gallerists and collectors, however, there emerges a different story. Her father was homosexual and lived a double life. The dishonour brought about by being homosexual in the Turinian bourgeoisie in the 40’s was much worse than financial ruin. After the suicide, the mother ended up in a psychiatric hospital. But this story can’t answer these questions: Who is this amputated body? Who is looking at it? Where does this sexual desire come from?

In her apartment, after visiting her studio we approach her bedroom. The skin of Carol Rama is almost transparent and her white hands are the only soure of light in the otherwise opaque room. I get closer to her. Teresa is a little more discreet, waiting just by the door. I’m like an insect seeking out answers to my questions. But there won’t be any. Since 2005 Carol Rama has begun a terminal process of loosing consciousness.
It seems inconceivable to be curating the first big retrospective of the work of an artist who has been nearly entirely forgotten by the history of art, who herself is in the process of loosing her memory. The history of art is the history of our own amnesia, the forgetting of all that we don’t want to look at, of that which resists being absorbed by our hegemonic frames of representation.

I ask myself if this exhibition could be a form of reconstructing or inventing her memory or, alternatively, if our attempt will simply form part of the general amnesiac process that Walter Benjamin called progress. I ask myself if our act will be tautological or oppositional. If we are just another stage of this collective Alzheimers or if we could open a line of flight, undo forgetting, invent another archive.

L’article Carol Rama For Ever (2/2) est apparu en premier sur Peau de Rat.

Carol Rama, Appassionata, 1939. Courtesy of Galleria Franco Masoero, Turin

At the same time as I try to write a political history of the organs (not as quickly as I would like incidentally) I have also been trying to curate an exhibition of Carol Rama’s work, commissioned by the director of Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA), Bartomeu Marí, which will open in 2014. Although I’ve been working in the context of the museum for over ten years now, my relationship with the format of the exhibition has always been distant. The museum, more than the university, has been an apt place for rethinking the relationship between languages, the representations of sexuality, of gender, of the body and the politics of resistance to processes of normalisation.  As an experiment in public micro-spheres, the museum puts in dialogue artistic practices, the processing power of social movements and the critical innovations of the humanities. It’s a place in which counter-fictions are invented; a place where techniques of dissident subjectivities can be tested.  At MACBA or the Reina Sofia, I have always privileged the invention of dispositifs of production of discourse and critical visibility over the exhibition format as they seem to allow for a large amount of experimentation and direct action. The Postporn Marathon, which I organised in 2003 at MACBA under the direction of Manolo Borja and with the support of Jorge Ribalta, could have been an exhibition but what I felt was necessary was to transform it into an investigatory meeting, a place for debate, live experimentation and performative production. The important thing was to create networks of collaboration, invent other languages and alternative practices.

When your work concerns political minorities (feminisms, dissident sexual and gender movements, anti-colonial movements…) there is a danger with the model of the exhibition (the list of examples from the last couple of years would be long and embarrassing). Especially in these contexts the danger is double: epistemological and political.

From an epistemological viewpoint, the ‘minority’ exhibitions run the risk of emerging as a mere footnote at the bottom of the page of the great narratives of the dominant historiographies. They seem to say “it’s true that modern art was mainly made for and by white central European men, but lets not forget about Sonia Terk, Liubov Popova, Claude Cahun, Dorothea Tanning… see how every now and again, although in the shadows, they make lovely little masterpieces!?” Many exhibitions respond to a paradigm that could better be described with a phrase uttered by an editor of Playboy: “There weren’t any women or black people in art, just as there weren’t any bikinis in the North Pole”.

From a political point of view, exhibitions concerned with the minorities can be roughly classified into two groups, depending on the criteria through which the selection of works is made. Many are “universalist” while others operate the logic of “the politics of identity”. With the universalist approach (the dominant trend in French institutions) the important thing isn’t that the works were made by “women”, “homosexuals”, the “mentally ill” or “non-white” people but that the experience represented allows access to a universal —or rather, it can be absorbed by the hegemonic narrative. On the other hand, when the “politics of identity” is at stake, other dangers spring up: how is it decided that artists are women, mentally ill or homosexuals? Do we use anatomical criteria, clinical archives, chromosomic evidence, speech acts, confessions found in personal diaries? In all of these example the risk is the same: in the place of demonstrating the techniques of normalisation of gender and sexuality, the majority of exhibitions by “women”, the “crazy”, “homosexuals”, “blacks” or “indigenous peoples” contribute to the re-naturalisation of these categories, integrating these ‘differences’ into the grand narrative as anecdotes (a sort of memorial of victims that is useful for celebrating women’s day or the day of the abolition of slavery). Far from dismantling the hegemonic narratives, they end up being reaffirmed.

I suppose it is for some of these reasons that until now I have been hesitant to face up the exhibition.  But this time, the subject is Carol Rama.

Carol Rama’s work produced between 1936 and 2006, is monumental and yet nearly entirely unknown. An exhibition of her work could function as a counter-archive of the art of the twentieth century and allows for a critical re-reading of the dominant historiography and a questioning of its foundations. Carol Rama’s work is as masterly as it is subversive, as marginal as it is irrefutable.  I would even dare to say that Carol Rama will be one day as indispensable and significant as Frida Khalo and Louise Bourgeois are now.

L’article Carol Rama for ever (1/2) est apparu en premier sur Peau de Rat.

Photo : Lea Crespi

Over the next couple of months Jeu de Paume’s blog will expand its area of debate from artistic practices and contemporary cultures to the politics of the body, gender and sexuality. My intention is to “install” a transfeminist philosophy blog within the digital home of a cultural institution; an act which, given the resistance of French museums to promote the insubordination of normative gender and sexual policies, I imagine to be as profane and precarious as introducing a pack of rats in a sports gymnasium. If I’m thinking about rats it’s because the Jeu de Paume Gallery, before it became an art gallery, was once the most distinguished Parisian centres for playing the game of Handball. One of the oldest racket sports —an ancestor of the Basque Pelota— the game entails hitting with your hand a ball made from, as the legend goes, the skin of a rat. It was in a different hall dedicated to jeu de paume, in Versailles, where, on the 20th June 1789, the French National Assembly declared itself a constituent body opposed to the King, thus paving the way for the processes of social transformation that would later be referred to as The French Revolution. Just as one day the third state of the realm rose up against the sovereign power of the Former Rule, today the skinless rats of cognitive capitalism are too rising up, calling for somato-political revolution and semiotic-sex: gays, butches, feminists, junkies, migrants, the undocumented, sex workers, crips, HIV positives, transsexuals, transgenders….the game of the rat has begun. The revolt pulses in the digital mousetrap of Jeu de Paume.
Thanks to Rebecca Close for the proof reading and translation of the blog in English.

L’article Skin of a Rat est apparu en premier sur Peau de Rat.