Word as square, in a manner of speaking

 (Context)

The process of remembering, recording, representing in a manner that is not formal, an extension beyond the traditional lecture where you must be sat, where you must be taught geometrically, beyond the formality of the white cube gallery, an extension of the square. 

How do you make a work of art that can never be reduced to an instrument? How do you make a work of art that is not an instrument, not a primary instrument, not one designed to service other instruments—namely ideology and morality? I’d like to see these conversations as using art as a research instrument, an insistence to further deepen the approach of using both lecture performance and discussion as tools within the “artistic process”, and even more, as a valid method in artistic research. I believe it would be fruitful and even necessary to find a form in which discussion, both its process and outcomes, can find a way to be formalized and documented: to develop a research instrument for a) designing questions relevant for the artistic and research process, b) creating a form to guide the audience discussion and reflection, c) the collection and processing of the discussion's results.

I find it imperative to view knowledge as a reflexive formation that is as much aesthetic as social, or in other words, as an open feedback system. As a result, the lecture performance in itself is part of the research and is part of the artistic process. Second, it is important to note that, rather than organising an audience talk following such a conversation (as it is common in the theater scene), I attempt to utilize the presence of an audience of a conference to garner comments. It is popular to position the performative lecture to be seen as a “defense” of the artistic field within the “institution”, of the public, political, and social sphere. However, I hope my formalizations of these verbalized thoughts is the antithesis of such. When Désanges refers to the notion of “deskilling” as a central notion of conceptual art, developing from it the model of “deskilled curating”, such rhetoric poses the question of whether Désanges’s lecture-performance primarily stages the lecturer or the spectator as the acting protagonist. 

In other words, it makes one wonder to what extent such an approach does not risk falling into a depoliticisation of the self, thus serving, rather than questioning,

the co-option of human creativity and affect.

To that, I must say, our poets, our artists, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world and if their catalyst is unchanged, unabsorbed, their activity is therefore not acknowledged. It is particularly difficult to accept this thankless task, to mediate, to communicate something so essential, and yet to be able to do so only from a position of insulation. My hope for translating my conversations with them is an easing of their acceptance of the contrary experience, to drink, with Socrates, the deadly cup. 

-Shannon

___________________________

Hyungtae

Q: Poetry is an absolute awareness of the identity of word and image, and in the plastic arts, it probably takes the form of what we call an “intuitive sense of proportion”, something with or without an intuitive sense of color or harmony.

What about your poetics compels you to visualize them in the formations of squares?

A: Ever since I moved to California, all my poems have become squares, there was no decision towards the movement of a square, there was no intent for it to become a square. 

There is a revealing of the self without being explicit, to suggest the vocalization of something without it being thought.

The property of something, or rather, dissecting the “aboutness” of such is a losing game, it is the shortest way out.

If you stick with the thoughts that evade thinking, you begin to see hesitation as an inherent non-performance—as something that inherently cannot collapse into meaning making, and you stay in California when you feel this way.

When it comes to the matter of overabundance of language, truthfully, my medium only concerns the page and poetics, not idiomatic language. Solutions to exorbitance already exist, in the form of post-minimalism or suprematism if that is what you are truly seeking. 

Personally, I think the only productive way out is being a babbling idiot, of absorbing the exorbitance, 

[pause]

of making it fit. 

___________________________

Alejandra

Q: There is an understanding that now, today, everyone is “doing” anthropology as we constantly move between different cultural worlds through media and especially the internet, so now, the real question is which perspectives the institutions choose to recognize.  What does your work say about what counts as anthropological knowledge?

Rather than thinking about what “counts” what it means to study anthropology, is that you are much more aware that there are new worlds, that the world still has certain things lingering. 

To think through such worlds is to be able to gain new visions, of being able to see what is still stratified in the present and determining if my visualized layers of stratification are to be studied.

My first chapter of my dissertation is truly about separating the paragraphs and the misconstructions that avow anthropology as reality. I work between French and English, and for me, translation is more about the language rather than the words, sometimes the language does not matter because the way my thoughts are translated in the momentum of fruition are how they must be understood. If they present a certain set of words in a certain language, that is how my thoughts must be brought to the surface. 

If anthropology is to describe being human, and in another sense, contemporary art is used to describe what is challenging about being human, my work begins with the violence of the encounter. 

If anthropology must be anything at all, it is something that is devouring itself, and as it encounters something, it reflects by devouring itself, it is undermining its own conditions that makes it possible. The encounter is what constitutes my desire to create my research, my work, my presentation.

What truly matters is my fieldwork, an attempt to understand my encounters with the voices and voices and voices. 

___________________________

Clara

Q: Constraint creates freedom. There holds a certain precision, a way you carefully paint that activates the cords, combined with the physical rising and falling of your movement when you ascend and descend the ladder. 

How does your own movement, the physical act of covering and erasure feel like a form of movement for one that shifts presence into something alive?

A: I see painting parallel to the act of dancing, as a practice, as an almost entertaining self. There are many times in which I feel like I physically cannot paint, for the task of the painter is to lay out the world, and there is so much presence to be laid out in a singular stroke. I often feel as if I could never paint because there is so much of myself to lay. 

I suppose that is why I am gravitated towards sculpture as a way to borrow things from the world, to borrow the material and reveal how it acts upon itself, almost in a way that is external to the self in a way painting cannot. The act of sculpture is stealing from what is already present, the act of borrowing already contains a mind of its own, and my performance was a way of painting in which there were no means of controlling my own laying of self.

The verge of painting, the verge of drawing, the verge of dancing, the verge of sculpture, the verges come together in this space. It’s an “almost”, an almost painting, an almost dance, an almost sculpture.

I struggle with engaging too much, letting myself be fractured into different geographies, and when I come back to a place, my practice is my battle with bringing different forms together, to bring together practices of form, of being in a space of coalescing forces from different mediums and different practices. I am borrowing from the natural force of my struggle with fracture to bring these different practices together.

When I finish something, I tend to abandon it completely.

When the cord snaps in the performance, it is a breakage of my repetition of process. Perhaps an indication of an end, but the breaking is merely part of the logistics of my work. The only significance of breakage is that it is inherently a process of my procedure.