ISSUE 8 /seconds
On Curating: Orphan Letters, Open Archives
An invitation to contribute in open response. All media formats
accepted. Deadline March 5th 2008. Please send submitted material to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
/seconds invites submissions from artists and non-artists alike to
unpack and release unseen, unheard or unpublished material. From the
studios, archives, libraries, plan chests, or storage containers, to
act, in other words, in a spirit of openness.
In ‘Mad Love’, André Breton’s poem of 1937, the line 'my own openness'
might be ascribed as 'useful' both as an action and an indifference in
the disclosure of unreconcilable material; these unseen works and
collections of ideas interpolate through 'mysterious communication'
without cause into self-invention.
Presenting a manual of instruction for rethinking acceptable notions of
egality as perhaps suggested in the title ‘La Pensée Sauvage’ (Claude
Levi-Strauss’ 1962 anthropological work, translated into English by a
double meaning of ‘The Savage Mind’, ‘Pansies for Thought’ or more
strangely ‘Wild Pansies’) an encounter disembodied voices, orphan
letters and open archives presents us with something conceptually
'uncompatable' with given data - what Jacques Rancière names as
'literarity' – the ability to disturb the existing circuits of words,
meanings and places of enunciation.
The problem, in the 'real' world, within any action of love, to offer
provocative, powerful, and novel definitions of democratic politics and
of art, is whether the taking-part of those who have, or have had no
part in it is specified. To sustain or to be unsustainable, to affirm
the act 'independent of what happens and what does not happen'. What is
proper to art, and finally nameable, is its identity with non-art. The
configuration and conflation of art into 'democratic politics' must be
itself ideologically 'unpacked', however, if the distribution is not to
be absorbed into the dominant regime. Strictly speaking the egalitarian
regime of the sensible can only isolate art's specificity at the expense
of losing it. We return happily, if empty handed, back to the André
Breton's inviolable Mad Love.
'The key issue consists in thinking love not as destiny, but as
encounter and thought, as an asymmetrical and egalitarian becoming, as
the invention of oneself.' (From Chapter 11, 'Avant gardes' in ‘The
Century’, Alain Badiou, March 2000 translated by Alberto Toscano)
'A pox on all captivity, even in Montezuma's gardens of precious stones!
Still today I am only counting on what comes of my own openness, my
eagerness to wander in search of everything, which, I am confident,
keeps me in mysterious communication with other open beings, as if we
were to suddenly called to assemble, I would like my life to leave after
it no other murmur than that of a watchman's song, of a song to while
away the waiting. Independent of what happens and what does not happen,
the wait itself is magnificent.' (From Chapter 3, in ‘Mad Love’, André
Breton, 1937, translated by Mary Ann Caws)
'If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name,
treat it declaratively as a novelistic object, create a new Garabagne,
so as to compromise no real country by my fantasy (though it is then
that fantasy itself I compromise by the signs of literature)....'
('Faraway', ‘Empire of Signs’, Roland Barthes, 1970 translated by
Richard Howard)
'IL FAUT REVER'
('It is necessary to dream') slogan / caption from ‘Histoire[s] du
Cinema’ (video, Jean-Luc Godard, 1988, Gaumont Pathé Archives); also as
a pun in ‘(Il) Faut Rever Mozart’, read in English as ‘Forever Mozart’
(1996), 35mm film by Jean-Luc Godard, concerning the performance in
troubled times of Musset’s play "On Ne Badine Pas Avec L'Amour" (One
mustn't trifle with love") in Sarajevo by a group of young (amateur) actors.
'There is no meta-language of Art' Alain Badiou
'Thoughts are a dice-throw' Mallarmé, concerning the poem 'Un Coup de
Des Jamais n'Abolira le Hasard' ('A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish
Chance')
'Moreover, doesn’t the pathological peculiarity of the capitalist
machine consist in its ability to do just this: convert random empirical
facts into new axioms? Integrated global capitalism is constitutively
dysfunctional: it works by breaking down. It is fuelled by the random
undecidabiities, excessive inconsistencies, aleatory interruptions,
while it continuously reappropriates, axiomatising empirical
contingency. It turns catastrophe into a resource, ruin into
opportunity, harnessing the uncompatable.' (From 'Remarks on Subtractive
Ontology' Ray Brassier, in ‘Think Again, Alain Badiou and the Future of
Philosophy’, Edited by Peter Hallward, 2004)
Collected together these excerpts might suggest an affirmation for
subject's actions availed paradoxically of the digital immediacy and
excess of the World Wide Web, (capital ‘fusing’ through technology). In
the open assembly with others with respect to the operation of
randomness, we might propose a form of art out of ‘given’ algorithmic
data. (As perhaps anticipated in the archival instructions and notes by
Marcel Duchamp, that break the seal on his hermetic work ‘Etant Donnés’
or ‘Given’. (See Duchamp, Marcel. Manual of Instructions for Étant
Donnés: 1º La Chute D'eau 2º Le Gaz D'éclairage. Philadelphia Museum of
Art, 1987), to connote a contradictory relation that chance is both
given, and not given at the same time); of many contradictions
concerning things ' abstraction; writings, tapes, photographs of
studios, rooms designated to shelving systems; books, manuals of
instruction, selected notes, drawings, documents, home-made films,
videos, montages, scrapbooks, cut-ups, letters, collected decorative
objects, fetishes, etcetera, which in a digital archive, can be
assembled together to index a co-extensive yet blind production as the
self-evidence of love's indifference to any set destination.
______________________________________________________________________________________
/seconds. is an online publishing project initiated by Derek Horton
Peter Lewis and Graham Hibbert
supported by an international editorial and advisoryboard of academics,
artists and curators.
The project acknowledges support from Leeds Metropolitan University.
A new issue of /seconds. will be published every three months and
will include text, visual material (including moving image) and
sound-based work.
General enquiries should be made to:
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Tony Chakar
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Richard Caldicott
Mark Harris
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Steven Wong
The views published in /seconds are not necessarily those of the
individual writers and artists who contribute, nor of the publishers,
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/seconds
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