Any CPPE-ers with a thing for Bataille or curious to know more about my ongoing collaboration with performance artists Goldin+Senneby, and who happen to be in London on Wednesday evening, might be interested in this:
http://www.ica.org.uk/37023/Talks/GoldinSenneby-Headless-Presented-by-Angus-Cameron.html
I’ve just been asked to become one of the editors of the Journal Of Critical Globalisation Studies. It’s been around for five years, one issue a year, and has been chiefly aimed at/drawing from the IR/IPE community. The aim now is to increase the regularity (initially to two a year) and to diversify the disciplinary content to include such glories as, yes, you guessed it, critical management theory.
So, I will be pestering you all for articles, essays and, in particular, special issues on exciting globalisation-related themes. I hope the journal will develop into an obvious place for CPPE types to publish.
JCGS is properly peer-reviewed, and is fully open access. None of this ‘green/gold’ crapola: it’s open, free and online for anyone to download. One of the aims of the editorial team, in fact, is to propmote the journal as a model of what ‘real’ open access looks like while the publishers flail about trying to protect their paywalls and profits.
Looking forward to hearing from you…….
Fantastic blog post on the ‘Sound of Finance’.
Go here: http://soundstudiesblog.com/2013/04/22/the-noises-of-finance/
Why didn’t I think of that?!
Do Cybernetics Dream of Digital Resistance?
A conversation between Maxigas & Stevphen on Brian Holmes’ Escape the Overcode
This is an exchange between Maxigas, from the Horizon Research Institute / Indymedia Hungary and Stevphen Shukaitis (from Essex, Autonomedia, and the CPPE). We discuss Brian Holmes’s Escape the Overcode in a series of emails, focusing on the ambiguity of cybernetic art and resistance, the conditions of knowledge production, innovation and cooptation.
You know how it’s traditional to modestly apologise for using the list to promote one’s own drivelings? Well, screw that.
Buy this. It’s good.
There were strong echoes of Stefano Harney’s recent seminar at the Exterritory event in Paris this week. Exterritory is a project initiated by Israeli artists, filmmakers and curators Ruti Sela and Mayaan Amir in 2009, to explore some of the many contradictions produced by the struggle over land in the Palestine/Israel conflict. Because both sides lay claim in various ways to ‘territory’ (conceived in multiple ways), Ruti and Mayaan wanted to explore the possibility of stepping outside territory altogether to innovate modes of resistance and to highlight the absurdities of the battle over land. This has involved many different events over the years, most strikingly their projection of images of the region and its many people onto the sails of yachts at night in international waters off the Israeli coast.
Anne Davidian from the Evens Foundation opens the Exterritory symposium
The event in Paris – co-hosted by the Kadist and Evens Foundations – was the first of a number of planned symposia bringing together artists, curators, academics and other oddments to consider what ‘exterritory’ might mean in practice. The Paris symposium explored various aspects of exterritorial and extraterritorial space (the distinction between the two being far more meaningful in French). The first session included (defiantly non-) geographer Stuart Elden’s thought-provoking analysis of the construction of ‘exile’ in Shakespeare’s plays and Laurent Jeanpierre‘s examination of theoretical and juridical notions of exterritoriality. The second session consisted of my own rambling thoughts inspired by events of 2008 and the ‘flash-crash’ – ‘Where has all the (xeno)money gone?‘ – and Dana Diminescu‘s fascinating exploration of the complex and emergent spatialities of migration. All four papers were skilfully brought together by the contribution of Anat Ben David, one of Ruti and Mayaan’s regular collaborators on Exterritory.
Angus getting flash with the Flash-Crash
All sorts of cross-cutting themes and resonances emerged from the papers and subsequent discussion that I won’t rehearse here (the event was filmed and will eventually appear on-line) but for me the most striking aspect was the ubiquity of social, economic, political, individual, collective, planned and spontaneous ‘spaces’ that do not conform to the established norms of legally-defined and reproduced ‘territoriality’. Indeed, by the time we’d worked through the ambiguous spatialities of exile, xenomoney, migration, cyberspace, exception, and many others, territory itself was beginning to look like the minority sport. Which, of course, makes it all the more interesting that so much of our legal, institutional, police, military and political activity should be devoted to what emerges as a very narrow and privileged mode of living in and thinking about the world.
I have just returned from an exhilarating trip to Cairo to present a paper as part of the Downtown Conyemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF) being held at a number of venues across the city centre. I was asked to contribute to an exhibition called ‘I’m Not There’ at the Townhouse Gallery hosted by the Contemporary IMage Collective and curated by its multi-talented curator/director Mia Jankowicz.
As its title suggests, the exhibition comprised a series of ‘absent’ artworks – missing because they had been censored, destroyed, banned, stolen or otherwise prevented from being shown. Instead of the works themselves, therefore, the exhibition space was filled with the ‘biographies’ of the missing works and, in some instances, empty frames and/or wall-spaces whare the works would otherwise have been.
The result was a rather austere exhibition consisting almost entirely of english and arabic text in black and white telling the stories of the various absent works. The idea of an ‘empty’ exhibition is not a new one – as the curator happily acknowledged – but in the context of the ongoing revolution in Cairo it took on a very particular resonance. The Mubarak regime was extremely censorious (though apparently presented itself as doing those being censored a favour because it saved them from future trouble and/or civil unrest) and the habit of censorship seems to be one that is continuing. The prospect of the Muslim Brotherhood winning forthcoming presidential elections in Egypt, and promising to introduce Sharia Law, has raised fears of even tighter restrictions in the future.
My own contribution stemmed from my involvement with Swedish performance artists goldin+senneby‘s ongoing project ‘Headless’ for which I act as spokeperson/emissary. Headless concerns, among many other things, the ways in which contemporary offshore finance uses legally structured absence and agency (e.g. in the form of shell companies, tax consultants, impenetrable private trusts, etc) to conceal wealth and other nefarious activities from the tax and regulatory authorities. In the context of Headless, I stand in for the artists whenever they are innvited to exhibit and/or speak about the project – as they put it, they engage in an ‘act of withdrawal’ (multiple puns intended).
I was, therefore, in the strange position in Cairo of being the only part of an actual ‘artwork’ present, though of course standing in for the ‘real’ artists. In light of this ambiguous position, the paper given was a rather rambling reflection on the representation of absence entitled ‘The art of not being (t)here’. (The Prezi accompanying the talk can be found here).
Having foollishly imagined that the visual arts would offer a wide range of examples of the representation of absence, in fact this is a far trickier topic than anticipated. Fortunately, I was rescued by a combination of earlier reflections on money and boundaries but more importantly by Rosalie Colie’s fascinating but largely neglected study of the use of paradox by Renaissance poets, writers and artists – Paradoxia Epidemica.
Not only was Colie’s analysis relevant to my own profoundly paradoxical situation (having flown to Cairo for 48 hours to stand in an empty exhibition standing in for two people who were absent), but had a resonance with the wider context of the exhibition. Colie quotes a letter by the poet and master of the paradox, John Donne, that gives a flavour of why (with Dr Donne’s apologies for the pre-orthographic spelling):
“Only in obedience I send you some of my paradoxes; I love you and myself and them too well to send them willingly for they carry with them a confession of their lightnes. and your trouble and my shame. But indeed they were made rather to deceave tyme then: although they have been written in an age when any thing is strong enough to overthrow her: if they make you to find better reasons against them, they do their office: for they are but swaggerers: quiet enough if you resist them. if perchaunce they may be pretyly guilt, that is there best for they they are not hatcht: they are rather alarums to truth to arme her then enemies: and they have only the advantadg to scape from being cald ill things that they are no things: therefore take heed of allowing any of them least you make another.”
John Donne, letter to an unknown friend, early 1600s (emphasis added).
The highlighted sections caught my eye in particular. The first emphasises the playful aspect of paradox – something that certainly applies to Headless, but also to many other contemporary art works (e.g. a lot of the grafitti that has sprung up all over Cairo during and since the Revolution). The second is more complex. On the one hand it suggests that the paradox is weak – it simply collapses in on itself if examined too closely. However, it also alludes to the way in which paradox holds a mirror up to the powerful – power itself is a paradox that ‘swaggers’ a little too much and that can always, therefore, be resisted. Paradox, this suggests, playfully mocks power in a way that can both wrong foot it, and higlhlight its own contradictions and vulnerabilities. It also allows for a mode of political commentary that defies censorship by making a virtue of (apparent) banality. As Colie put it:
“The paradox does not commit itself, nor does the paradoxist: another reason why in the melee of Renaissance ideas, there was a paradoxical epidemic, affording man the chance to postpone a philosophical or religious choice he might live to regret. Indeed, the paradoxical form denies commitment: breaking out of imprisonment by disciplinary forms and the regulation of schools, it denies limitation, defies “siting” in any specific philosophical position.”
Rosalie Colie, 1966, Paradoxia Epidemica: 38