Catherine Lord
Okay. A question as impossible as it is irresistible, and entirely impossible to venture an answer except by negation, with sadness. There's an Anglo Saxon ode to paradise, written, I imagine, somewhere around what is now London, in January or February, at any rate one of those months when plane fares to and from Los Angeles sink like stones into a pond. No wet, says the poet, no cold, no dark, no snow, no sleet, no bloody rain, no hail, no ice, no floods, no gales, no drought, no scorching sun. Thus, no fraud, no fakes, no fly-by-night dealers, no bureaucracy, no jargon, no using ten words when one will do, no assholes, no trust fund newbies, no careerists, no back stabbing, no foolishness, no flappery, no frippery, no puffery, no attitude, no bullshit, no strategic amnesia, no tedium, no more boring art (for real this time), no price gouging, no ripping off artists, no ripping off the audience, no contempt, no censorship, no boundaries, no borders, no jerks doing the nasty with the usual isms. I'm skeptical about the idea of the unknown. There is no transporter. I can't get beamed up or down or sideways or outside my own knowledge. I suspect that it's less a question of what's unknown, uninvented, unpracticed, unimagined, etc. and more a question of what's unnoticed, what was always there, or if not technically always for a really long time, what's been right in front of our eyes. Technology changes the world because the change has been imagined and the technology is developed to achieve it. The following things are NOT unknown: art generated by the technology of the moment, intensely local art, obsessional art, private art, art directed at small and exquisitely precise communities, revolutionary art, ephemeral art, cheap art, art that is life, art that relays through circuits that are not turned on in America or Europe, art made by people who are not beige, queer art, women's art, etc. etc. etc. etc. I'm skeptical about the idea of the future because I can't get from here to a construct I'd like to stand on. Maybe the future will come from the direction we're not staring at: archaeology: excavation, memory, the fabulous delusions of hindsight, closely observed tree rings or core samples or fossils or strange fish netted from the bottom of the ocean or ancient mudslides or frozen vials of old flu sputum, the sodden junk heap that is history. Maybe it's not a question of hurrying up to slow down. The difficulty is not the unknown, but the apparatus of art. Consider the strategy of queering art, which does not mean exhibiting (in the various senses of the word) artists who are gay or lesbian or bi or trans or 2. Rather, the project (not coextensive with but contiguous to post-colonial and feminist moves) is to position the second term, the marked term, the lesser term — in this case artist — in a manner and location that allows agency. This can be achieved only by recognizing and analyzing and dissecting heterosexuality itself as an object of knowledge rather than a site of the production of knowledge. David Halperin calls for a recognition of heterosexuality's "crucially empowering incoherence", which, lest anyone think I'm straying too far from the subject of art, is an incoherence produced by "the strategic functioning of discourses that operate precisely by deploying a series of mutually contradictory premises in such a way that any one of them can be substituted for any other, as different circumstances may require, without changing the final outcome of the argument". No wonder openings are depressing. Take the artist, then, as an "eccentric positionality" (Halperin again, via Foucault). Like queer, art is not a stable or essential identity, but WHATEVER is outside the normal (or "normate", to use Rosemary Garland Thompson's denaturalizing term.) Forget schema and definitions and essentializing constructs and inhabiting categories, and proceed to an articulation not of "what" but of "where" and "how". Of course, this is globalism and nomadic fluidity, offered not as curatorial hooks for biennale theme parks, but as modes of practice for those who understand that power is everywhere and want to take pleasure in using it from the bottom up. It's already familiar, already possible, already there. Catherine Lord Los Angeles |
