Elsewhere From Here essay

ELSEWHERE FROM HERE


“The fact that it is possible to take vulnerability seriously as a statement, without simply discrediting it as insecurity, is a very contemporary phenomenon. It is only today that fragility can be seen as an effective weapon, or at least a defiant attitude, against the seemingly inviolable, perfect surfaces that dominate advertising, media, public life and art itself”

Thomas Groetz ‘Unlimited Sympathies: Jutta Koether’s Art’ Afterall 2003


“We think that society has been seduced by a collective fantasy of technological power, such that whatever the question, technology has typically been the ever ready answer. Technology has become second-nature, given and unquestionable part of the order of things. Such is the standing of moral examination of the technological enterprise”

Kevin Robbins & Frank Webster ‘Times of the Technoculture:
From the information society to the virtual life’ Routledge 1999


This exhibition presents a range of quiet and understated works that none the less can be said to mark out zones of resistance.

The physical spaces or state of mind represented in these works share a common quality of the overlooked, patches of calm or situations that permit reflection in an otherwise frenetic, image saturated, commercialised environment. These works indicate ideas of spaces that are beyond contemporary cultures crude demarcation of our relationship to the world around us in terms of zones for work, shopping or other prescribed leisure activities.

The works can be read as the outcome or expression of urban survival tactics in an imperfect built environment and society. Personal coping strategies if you like. These are not the wipe-the slate-clean megalomaniac utopian dreams of the modernists, but works that admit the fractured quality of contemporary life. Presenting the quiet, the calm, peaceful contemplation and wondering. In their own way, each of the works in this show present radical spaces.

Resistance need not conform to stereotypical ideas of cataclysmic violent collapse and conflict or puritanical 'high-horsery'. Resistance by stealth, qualities of calm and gentleness are just as, if not more valid. Of course this is not to condone and idea of ‘going with the flow’ or passive acceptance. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that this, has been absorbed into the prevailing ethos of late capitalist development. As Slavoj Zizek has written:

“The ultimate post-modern irony of today is the strange exchange between Europe and Asia: at the very moment when European technology and capitalism are triumphing world-wide at the level of the economic infrastructure, the Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened at the level of ideological superstructure in the European space itself by New Age Asiatic thought.

The recourse to Taoism or Buddhism offers a way out of this predicament that definitely works better than the desperate escape into old traditions. Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of technological progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavour to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination. One should, instead, ‘let oneself go’ drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference toward the mad dance of accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblance’s that do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being.

‘From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism
Slavoj Zizek (Cabinet, Issue 2 Spring 2001) (www.cabinet.com)

The works in this show represent clear instances of not going with the flow. Instead they illustrate everyday revolutions.

This diverse range of works, by simple merit of the being made in our time and attempting to eke out a space for themselves in the present world share some correspondences to the lofty ideals of the 1960’s Situationist’s ‘Derive’.

The Derive being the attempt of the Situationists, using the tactic of aimless walking (not to work, not to shop, not to sight see) to arrive an new and un-blinkered understanding of the spaces around then and their relationship to them. A psycho-navigation unhindered by the propaganda of contemporary culture, the society of the spectacle. A mode of being neither working, nor at leisure.

Indeed much could be said about the idea of the art ‘work’ and (professional) art practice. How much does this represent the codification, representation and organisation of cultural activity along productive / industrial capitalist lines?

Or might we look upon the use of terms like work, practice, ‘professionalism’ in art as something more playful, subversive and ultimately resistant to the idea of ‘work’. An ideal of no clocking on, no indicators of productivity or worth ….

But then again this whole uncertainty and malleability of what can be bought and sold, what you do with your time has been co-opted by capitalism. The very labour of producing meaning has been harnessed. The theory going (it’s been called the cinematic mode of production (3), that when engage with mass culture, at the cinema multiplex, in shopping mall, at home with our x-box’s and DVD’s – we are manufacturing ‘meaning’, working when at our leisure – consuming and perpetuating consumerist messages and values, being programmed and helping to programme others for this ‘design for life’.

“Beneath the paving stones – the Beach!”
Situationist Graffiti, Paris 1968

Think on this for a moment. Beneath the city is earth. The built environment is accommodated by the natural landscape. The sky above a city is the same as that above a forest, a desert, a snow covered tundra or the sea.

These works represent in an optimistic and concrete way what ‘revolution’ might look like. Contemporary cultural critique as admirable and clever as it is, always ends up expending the majority of its energies painting a distopian, Matrix-like, all encompassing and inescapable picture of capitalist development.

The imparting of any solutions or tactics for resistance is too much a rarity. This show reverses the balance. Its as if we asked the question of artist’s “what does the revolution look like – what places are good for you”? It’s a radicalism defined on a smaller scale …

The Curators