#both relationally and intellectually

[itspileofgoodthings]

School is going better, everything else is getting worse.

[justrustandstardust]

Why y'all pair Geto and Gojo? They're both men it doesn't make sense at all. They are just friends. Respectfully l know people have different views, but why can't men just be friends?

when people say "why can't men just be friends" they seem to think they're making some kind of outstandingly intellectual point. i'm not only going to explain why that is blatantly untrue, but also why this claim imprisons gojo and geto in the very cage you seem so desperate to free them from.

in making this claim, you've created a binary with "friends" at one end and a (presumably romantic) "pair" at the other. you understand the two locations to be diametrically opposed, at opposite poles in a fixed landscape.

queerness, as you understand it, is attached to the "romance" pole within your binary, and heterosexuality is fixed to the "friends" pole. these poles are antithetical to you— either they're friends, or they're lovers. the binary only permits one or the other.

to you, queerness is a a consumptive vacuum that subsumes everything "good" about gojo and geto's relationship. you understand gayness to be the antithesis of heterosexuality; you relegate personhood and agency to the latter whilst deriding the former, resisting what you perceive to be the deliberate action of Turning Them Gay.

this deliberate twisting of their characters then makes them not gojo and geto anymore but two men in love, voiding the intricacies and complexities of their relationship and reducing their dynamic to a one-dimensional romance because that's all you understand queerness to be. either they're regarded as friends and they remain people (retaining their personhood) or they're queered, abandoning their identities because now their only identity is gay.

in attempting to defend them from being queered, you think you're saving them from subsumption by the label. in your mind, you're preserving their nuance and complexity because you seek to protect them from being whittled down from unique individuals into gay-shaped men, who now exist relationally to each other along one axis: romance. to you, there's gojo and geto, the characters you know and love, who are then twisted from their "original form" into being queer.

in seeking to free them from your understanding of queerness, you reify the very structure that you think you're dismantling. you attempt to defend their agency and personhood but you achieve exactly the opposite: you forge their identity on your own terms, pigeonholing them into fixed categories because of your own limited understanding of what it means to be queer.

in constructing queerness oppositionally to heterosexuality, you flatten their characters and push them into a prison of your own making. relegating them to heterosexuality does to them exactly what you're afraid of will happen if they're deemed queer: they become one-dimensional, actively stripped of the agency, dignity, nuance and complexity that you so righteously seek to defend. people cannot be Turned Gay because they are not straight by default; gojo and geto's characters are not being twisted into unoriginality—they are gojo and geto, and they are queer. it is one and the same.

gojo and geto are enemies, and soulmates, and partners, and friends, and lovers, and so much more. what draws people to their connection is that it transcends the binaries of friendship and romance that you so eagerly defend. in pushing for them to be regarded as "just friends" you flatten their characters, imprisoning them in the very cage that you think you're saving them from by rejecting the label of queer.

queerness is not a reductionist subversion of heterosexuality— it constitutes dimensions and layers to identities and relationships, not all of them romantic. queerness goes beyond the static conception within your binary; it is dynamic, complex, agentic and relates to more than merely sexual orientation. in rejecting queerness, you actualize the one-dimensional characterization you so fear through stripping away the integral complexities of their characters that can only be understood through a queered lens. queerness does not reduce— it is constitutive.

gojo and geto are not merely straight or gay, according to your limited understanding. they transcend the binary in which you've imprisoned them, queered in more ways than one. queerness does not take away from the parts of their relationship that make them unique; it is what makes them unique. gojo and geto's connection remains profound, not in spite of their queerness, but because of it.

and to address your comment about how "they're both men"— men have been queer for centuries, regardless of time or place. pick up a fucking book. (or just take a good, hard look at the jjk manga).

[winwintea]

what wayv seeks in a relationship

GROUP ↬ ot6 wayv

WARNINGS ↬ none, pure fluff <33 maybe some angst

AUTHOR’S NOTE ↬ i did the wayv version !!! the dream one blew up and i'll be doing a 127 one soon, but i thought i'd post this in the meantime as well. although wayv is my ult group i feel like i struggle more with finding out their exact personalities and what they like. i hope this is sufficient enough for you all though <33

Qian Kun

kun doesn't believe in taking things lightly. he wants to make sure he's found the right partner before letting himself fall in love. he values a partner that finds traditional values important. someone who will always be there for him, not just when it's convenient. kun prefers someone who is grounded in reality rather than overly idealistic. he also needs a partner who makes him feel appreciated and understood. a partner who is easy-going is also a good balance to his more responsible nature, might also work well with him. someone that might encourage him to take risks and will be there to pick him up if he falls.

Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul

ten places a lot of importance on establishing meaningful relationships. although he may not act like it, he's generally more reserved so he does appreciate a deeper connection. ten likes someone who will challenge him intellectually and is suited towards a partner that is open-minded and willing to explore new things. he's attracted to people who have something unique to offer in this life. ten values personal growth, so he would appreciate someone who is supportive of his journey towards self-actualization. sometimes it's difficult for ten to relax and enjoy the current moment, so he appreciates a partner that will help him find peace and serenity.

Dong SiCheng

winwin believes that a relationship isn't a passive commitment, but it's a way for both partners to learn, grow and develop as time passes on. he wants a partner who will understand his uniqueness and individualism. they must also really understand his sensitive side and the nuances of his personality. winwin appreciates a partner that will look out for him and make sure he feels heard. he may come off as aloof at times, but deep down winwin is a whirlwind of emotions, so he needs a partner that won't be overwhelmed by these intense emotions. since winwin is a free-spirit he values open-mindedness and independence in a partner.

Xiao DeJun

xiaojun strives to connect to people in meaningful ways. he wants to find someone who he can completely devote himself to, who also accepted him as he is and who respects his freedom. xiaojun also needs a partner who understands his sensitive nature. he is also attracted to someone who has a unique way of thinking about things. a partner who can provide a sense of stability and security is also something he looks for. he's not necessarily needing someone to meet his level of emotional intensity, but rather a partner who can provide a grounding presence that will make them feel at home. xiaojun is also drawn to those with very complex personalities.

Wong KunHang

hendery seeks constant growth, both individually and relationally. hendery needs a partner who can provide emotional support and understanding, since he often gets caught up in his own thoughts and feelings. he feels like he is often misunderstood by those around him, so one of the most important aspects to him is that his partner understands him. hopefully they understand his constant need for adventure and growth. hendery has a great sense of humor, so he wants a partner who can match his wit and also make him laugh. he doesn't necessarily need someone who matches his energy levels, but someone who encourages him to follow his passions and dreams.

Liu YangYang

yangyang dislikes mind games in a relationship, he wants a relationship that is genuine and honest. he's not averse to casual dating, just not his priority, since he prefers to form meaningful connections with those on the same wavelength as him. he has a low boredom threshold, so he needs a certain level of mental stimulation in order to be content, and someone who can push him outside of the box is good for him. yangyang may also sometimes find it difficult to stay on track so having a partner who can keep him motivated will benefit him in the long run. he also values those who are patient and trustworthy as he hopes his partner will allow him the time and space to open up.

TAGLIST ↬  @lyvhie @aquaphoenixz @ldh0000 @galacticnct @sharonxdevi

[sustainableprosperity2]

From Modernity to Relationality | Vanessa Andreotti

social, economic, ecological, and technological risks we face, their underlying drivers, and how a more beautiful world might emerge.

Entangled World is a labor of love, I am deeply grateful for the generosity of my listeners and fans. Please consider supporting the project at / entangledworld

Today on the podcast, I talked with Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti. Vanessa is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism, which is a beautiful and critical read for our times in which we must all navigate the global crises we face. Vanessa is also one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective and is also currently the Dean of the Faculty of Education of the University of Victoria.

In this episode, we discuss the implications of modernity and what is required of us today, to plant the seeds for a more just, beautiful future for all. Vanessa shares insights from her work in Brazil and with Indigenous communities, highlighting the artificial divide between humans and nature and modernity's impact on our neurobiology.

We discuss cultivating a sense of relational maturity, emotional sobriety, and intellectual discernment and why a move from narrow boundary intelligence, or “either/or,” thinking to wide boundary intelligence, which considers “both/and,” is essential to perceive and then appropriately and morally navigate our actions.

We also discuss how the pattern of modernity is to project an image of the future with fixed form and fixed meanings, so that we can engineer a perfect world. But this is actually a trap that keeps us bound in problematic ways of thinking that have resulted in the existential crises we face. So rather than trying to imagine objective forms, such as what does the future we want look like, we can focus on the vibrational field, how do we want it to feel and how do we work backwards from that? What does it require of us today? What control and certainly must we give up?

This was a thought-provoking conversation about what it means to live more consciously in our paradoxical world and the role that each of us can play as we navigate from modernity to relationality.

[spiritualsoul1969]

When Music Met Metaphysics: The World of Sripadaraja

In the quiet sanctums of Indian spiritual history, there exists a figure who did not just compose songs — he composed cosmos. Sripadaraja, the mystic minstrel of the Dvaita school, did something no philosopher dared before: he tuned metaphysics into melody, and turned complex doctrine into devotional ecstasy.

This was not just Bhakti. This was Bhakti with a backbone of metaphysical rigor.

While most saints chose silence or sermons, Sripadaraja chose sound. To him, music was not entertainment — it was embodiment. Every raga became a river, carrying the devotee from the banks of ego to the ocean of divine duality. While the world chased non-dualism (Advaita) as the ultimate truth, Sripadaraja’s veena strummed a different chord — that the soul and the Supreme are eternally two, yet forever entwined in love.

And this was not an intellectual proposition — it was a symphony of surrender.

He took Dvaita, a seemingly austere philosophy, and softened it into song, not by diluting it, but by dancing with it. Sripadaraja’s compositions didn’t just praise God; they navigated the metaphysical layers of existence: duty and destiny, soul and Supersoul, service and surrender. He didn't ask you to become God. He invited you to fall in love with God — again and again, in every breath, every note.

🎵 A Divergent Metaphysical Revolution in 3 Octaves:

Bhakti as Sonic Theology For Sripadaraja, music was a philosophical tool. His verses explained, exalted, and emoted the truths of Dvaita — not in Sanskrit shlokas, but in Kannada kirtans that even a villager could hum, feel, and live by.

Duality as Divine Design Instead of dismissing duality as illusion, he declared it a sacred relationship. Like a flute and breath — one hollow, the other invisible, yet music only arises when both meet.

Devotion as Realization, Not Renunciation His metaphysics did not reject the world. It relationally embraced it. The path to the Divine wasn’t detachment from reality but attachment to Divine Will — through daily duties, songs, and remembrance.

🔧 Sripadaraja’s Practical Toolkit for Everyday Devotees

To live his metaphysical music today, you don’t need a veena. You need an inner tuning fork:

Raga Reminder Ritual (Morning) Before you check your phone, hum any simple raga or devotional line. It need not be perfect. Let your voice carry your soul’s attention back to the Divine. This is daily metaphysics in action.

Duality Diary (Evening) Journal one incident where you saw yourself and another as different — then try to express how God lived through both. This affirms Dvaita’s core: difference is not division, but divine dialogue.

Service Symphony (Weekly) Pick one act of service — feeding birds, helping a stranger, singing at a temple. But do it as God’s servant, not as a do-gooder. Dvaita isn't about helping the world — it's about serving the Lord through the world.

Bhakti Beats Playlist (Monthly) Create a personal playlist of devotional songs — ancient and new. Let your emotional body be massaged by melody. Each note realigns you to Sripadaraja’s vision: that sound can sanctify soul.

In the world of Sripadaraja, music is not mere sound — it is metaphysical scaffolding. Every note holds up a truth. Every beat carries a bridge. And in his world, the Divine does not remain abstract. It sings back.

So next time your life feels offbeat, remember: maybe you're not broken. Maybe you just need retuning — Sripadaraja-style.

[mysticallion]

Spiritual Self Sacrifice

Meditation on selflessness, or the phenomenological emptiness of the conceptually-constructed identity, is a form of purposefully-pursued death. What “dies” in this process is the ego, the mind-made overlay, the historical personality. It’s a true construct, a repetitive patterning of memories—both psychological and somatic—along with incessant “thinking” composed of self-talk mixed with imagery, and sensory input (both internally and externally derived). All these diverse facets are then neatly spliced together by the brain, which conceptually reifies the whole mess into the illusion of actual cohesion—as though there were actually some sort of “true self” to be found among the myriad components, or even somehow in the constructed “whole,” calling itself “me.” This entire event is repeated moment-to-moment during our waking, and most of our sleeping, life. The patterning can shift somewhat over time and circumstances, but in most people it remains remarkably ridged up to the waining moments of life.

That particular “me” is what is being challenged and deconstructed through spiritual techniques, that supposedly independent self, that seemingly substantial island of flesh that seems to exist in and of itself. But in truth, in direct experience, that one doesn’t really exist—at least not in the way it is supposed, is imagined; something deeper does, for sure, something more mental and relational than substantial, but something undeniably genuine—not independently but nonetheless present. This body exists relationally, in dependence on its ever-changing components; so too does this ego-self, this mind-made identity.

Once this pseudo-self is thoroughly seen through—in experience as well as intellectually—what remains is the Genuine.

[librarycards]

[W]hen I claim “genderlessness,” I indicate a politic not of variance within an existing gender spectrum but a defect/ion from it. My goal, then, is not merely to publicly identify myself as different-from-cis, but to generate a political and intellectual project aiming to undo the hierarchical, taxonomizing, and, indeed, medical violence of gender itself: to carve alternative modes of being in the world. Alongside other radical a-spec terminologies, loveless and genderless are designed for worlds beyond allocishet perception.

To be -less, to me, is to be stark: it is to euphemize an absence that, for me, the comparatively-friendly “nonbinary” or even “agender” signify, though both also carry immense meaning and utility in trans lives and communities The ideology of “-less” need not even be expressed by the suffix itself; it is expressed, rather, in a social architecture of refusal in which other intimacies and relationalities might form. Here, absence is not a problem to be fixed nor a misperception of presence. Absence, shared absence, is willful and deliberate. Absence makes vital (sp)ace for new things to grow. Absence is stark, leaving abrasions on the unsuspecting onlooker; this is what I indicate in my choice of -less. The ideology of -less does not merely expand the limits of acceptable discourse on love, sex, and gender, it jars the ideological containers in which we store them. It reaches the end of the hall of possibility and it opens a window.

[sarah] Cavar, in praise of -less: transMad shouts from absent (pl)aces.

[fatehbaz]

Dine/Navajo resistance; life as alternative to death; extractivism; multispecies justice:

The land-based paradigm that emerged from the context of these women’s resistance to forced removal had, at its center [...] both an unwavering critique of the almost totalizing death that extractive practices represented [...] and a framework for Dine conceptions of life rooted in one’s relationships with the land and responsibilities to life-giving forces and beings like sheep, corn, family [...] an entire web of relations that have specific connections to specific places. In other words, through the act of resisting forced removal, these women enacted a politics of life that was both defensive (as in to defend life against the destruction of extraction) and generative (as in to caretake life through an ethos and practice of kinship obligation).

This dual move of defending and caretaking relational life is at the heart of the Dine concept of k’e, which is still widely practiced as a social and ontological custom in both Dine resistance struggles and in everyday Dine life. [...]

Our decolonial aspirations are not just about sovereignty and exerting independence over energy development [...]. Our politics of anti-capitalist decolonization must thus not only act as a form of resistance to the death drive of capitalism and settler colonialism, but also function as a vehicle for imagining a politics of life that will refuse death and instead secure a future for all our relations. [...]

[S]truggles over life and death continue to shape the persistent refusal on the part of Diné grassroots people to acknowledge and accept the violence of liberal development ideologies (Yazzie 2016). However, this differential politics of life has its roots in earlier periods of Diné history. [...]

Through his voluminous research in the 1970s and 1980s, Redhouse uncovered a vast network of connections between multinational resource extraction corporations, tribal governments, US politicians, and other actors that extended through and beyond tribal lands and boundaries. He concluded that the extraction of resources on Navajoland was linked to a larger system of extraction, exploitation, and profiteering characterized by what he called “a grand plan” for the colonization of Navajos (2014: 82). He frequently employed this framework in his writings to trace connections between different forms of violence in locations like Black Mesa, Farmington, and Gallup, where the logic of extraction had transformed everyday social relations into a war over life and death. In Redhouse’s mind, what was occurring through murderous violence and racism in industry-driven border towns had everything to do with the extraction of life happening through mining, forced removal, and disease in rural parts of the Navajo reservation where industry operations had also set up shop. Both locations were geopolitical coordinates connected through an economic network of extractive practices that were destroying the land, killing sheep, killing people, uprooting families from their homes, and alienating people from their entire way of life.

Pauline Whistesinger, a Big Mountain matriarch who was prominent in the struggle on Black Mesa to resist forced relocation in the 1970s and 1980s, likened this network of extractive practices to “putting your hand down someone’s throat and squeezing the heart out”. [...] My critique of the violence that underpins development comes directly from Indigenous feminist and Diné land defenders who draw connections between the everyday lived material realities of environmental violence and larger structures of colonialism [and] capitalism [...]. These connections are key for understanding the politics of life espoused by Big Mountain matriarchs like Whitesinger and Ruth Benally that emerged to context these material realities of environmental violence and death masquerading as liberal promises of development, life, and growth. [...]

The question of justice, what some who write and organize about resource extraction call “alternative futures,” has been a central concern of the post-humanist ethics that Haraway has contributed to academic knowledge about relationality (Jalbert et al. 2017). [...] Post-humanism urges scholars and historical actors to develop theories and methods that address the “necessity of constituting new worldviews and modes of action appropriate to the recognition of ecological interdependency and interresponsibility” (Boyer 2017: 191). [...] Although it is important to point out that neither Haraway nor any scholar working in post-humanist traditions is offering any new insight into relationality that has not already been expertly theorized and practiced by Diné and other Indigenous peoples since before the advent of American academic institutions, I see the work emerging from [...] Indigenous feminism as a sign that intellectuals writing from both the front lines of Indigenous resistance and academic positions are formulating a politics of relational life that can serve as a form of multispecies justice [...].

---

Melanie K. Yazzie (Dine). “Decolonizing Development in Dine Bikeyah: Resource Extraction, Anti-Capitalism, and Relational Futures.” Environment and Society. September 2018.

[anniekoh]

Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory by Qwo-Li Driskill (2016)

In Cherokee Asegi udanto refers to people who either fall outside of men’s and women’s roles or who mix men’s and women’s roles. Asegi, which translates as “strange,” is also used by some Cherokees as a term similar to “queer.” For author Qwo-Li Driskill, asegi provides a means by which to reread Cherokee history in order to listen for those stories rendered “strange” by colonial heteropatriarchy.

As the first full-length work of scholarship to develop a tribally specific Indigenous Queer or Two-Spirit critique, Asegi Stories examines gender and sexuality in Cherokee cultural memory, how they shape the present, and how they can influence the future.The theoretical and methodological underpinnings of Asegi Stories derive from activist, artistic, and intellectual genealogies, referred to as “dissent lines” by Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Driskill intertwines Cherokee and other Indigenous traditions, women of color feminisms, grassroots activisms, queer and Trans studies and politics, rhetoric, Native studies, and decolonial politics. Drawing from oral histories and archival documents in order to articulate Cherokee-centered Two-Spirit critiques, Driskill contributes to the larger intertribal movements for social justice.

Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora by Gayatri Gopinath (2018)

In Unruly Visions Gayatri Gopinath brings queer studies to bear on investigations of diaspora and visuality, tracing the interrelation of affect, archive, region, and aesthetics through an examination of a wide range of contemporary queer visual culture. Spanning film, fine art, poetry, and photography, these cultural forms—which Gopinath conceptualizes as aesthetic practices of queer diaspora—reveal the intimacies of seemingly disparate histories of (post)colonial dwelling and displacement and are a product of diasporic trajectories. Countering standard formulations of diaspora that inevitably foreground the nation-state, as well as familiar formulations of queerness that ignore regional gender and sexual formations, she stages unexpected encounters between works by South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Australian, and Latinx artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Akram Zaatari, and Allan deSouza. Gopinath shows how their art functions as regional queer archives that express alternative understandings of time, space, and relationality. The queer optics produced by these visual practices creates South-to-South, region-to-region, and diaspora-to-region cartographies that profoundly challenge disciplinary and area studies rubrics. Gopinath thereby provides new critical perspectives on settler colonialism, empire, military occupation, racialization, and diasporic dislocation as they indelibly mark both bodies and landscapes.

Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain Zeb Tortorici (2018)

In Sins against Nature Zeb Tortorici explores the prosecution of sex acts in colonial New Spain (present-day Mexico, Guatemala, the US Southwest, and the Philippines) to examine the multiple ways bodies and desires come to be textually recorded and archived. Drawing on the records from over three hundred criminal and Inquisition cases between 1530 and 1821, Tortorici shows how the secular and ecclesiastical courts deployed the term contra natura —against nature—to try those accused of sodomy, bestiality, masturbation, erotic religious visions, priestly solicitation of sex during confession, and other forms of "unnatural" sex. Archival traces of the visceral reactions of witnesses, the accused, colonial authorities, notaries, translators, and others in these records demonstrate the primacy of affect and its importance to the Spanish documentation and regulation of these sins against nature. In foregrounding the logic that dictated which crimes were recorded and how they are mediated through the colonial archive, Tortorici recasts Iberian Atlantic history through the prism of the unnatural while showing how archives destabilize the bodies, desires, and social categories on which the history of sexuality is based.

[globalworship]

Worship, Theology, and the Arts in a Divided World (Feb 9 conference, free livestream)

The Brehm Center (Fuller Seminary, California) is hosting a one day conference: Worship, Theology, and the Arts in the Divided World. 

Join us, February 9th, as we discuss the ways in which we can become sources of good news to a world that feels constantly at odds. Group rates, student rates, and alumni rates are all available, and in case you can't make it to Pasadena, we will be livestreaming the event as well!  (Details below)

Details at https://www.fuller.edu/brehmconference/

+++

OVERVIEW

To say that we live in a divided world is to state the obvious. Less obvious, perhaps, is to believe that worship might become a vehicle for reconciliation, or that theology might serve as an invaluable aid to mend our personal and social brokenness, or that the arts might forge unity across the divides—whether political or economic, racial or relational, linguistic or cultural, whether in the academy or in the public square, whether inside the church or outside of it.

But that is exactly what this conference wishes to suggest.

A primary goal of this conference is to show how worship, theology, and the arts can become sources of good news to our divided world as well as resources to make tangible that good news by God’s grace. A secondary goal is to generate practical helps that extend beyond the immediate context of the conference in order to serve the broader community. This involves not just the presentations themselves, but online resource offerings: for instance, a one-page resource for small groups on art and racial reconciliation; a Spotify playlist for both pastors and worship leaders; a “top 10” list of most common mistakes in multicultural worship; an annotated resource on global worship; a handout for church leaders on art in a post-Christian society; and more.

This conference promises to be an intellectually stimulating, relationally rich, and missionally inspiring event for pastors, worship and ministry leaders, artists, creatives, and teachers. We welcome you to join us!

Titles of all the seminars are at https://www.fuller.edu/brehmconference/schedule/

+++

There is a live stream ticket available for free. You can watch live at fuller.edu/watch.

Get the free ticket in advance! Click the green “Tickets” button near the top right of this page, and scroll down to the bottom of the choices to register and get a free ticket to watch the event online.

+++

The keynote speaker is my friend David Bailey:

"WORSHIPING WOKE: FORMATIONAL WORSHIP BEYOND THE FOUR WALLS OF THE CHURCH"

[correspondencearchive]

4. Yujin Lee & Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai (part 1)

Yujin Lee and Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai discuss Paul Chan’s article, “What Art Is and Where It Belongs,” artistic production and its relationship to capital, making art for (or not for) a Western art audience, their interest in collaborative/process oriented projects, and whether or not one can be free as an artist from the intersecting systems of global capitalism and white supremacy that make up the art world. Read part 2 of their conversation here.

Yujin Lee (YL): Hi, Prima! First of all, thank you so much for accepting my invitation! I see that you received my email with the link to Paul Chan’s article, “What Art Is and Where It Belongs.” I suppose I will start with this obvious question. What is art to you and where do you think it belongs?

Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai (PJ): Hi Yujin, thank you for sharing the Paul Chan text. It was indeed an interesting read! To your question as to “what is art to me and where I think it belongs”, my job as an art handler has deeply affected how I view art. I can no longer see art as a product of a singular mind but rather, an object that exists in relation to multiple networks. Paul Chan is generous in giving art the definition of a “more than” an object by the way that it expresses what an object desires to be. I would argue that art is only “more than” an object because it’s value is not intrinsic to its material properties and use-value but the cultural value assigned to it by a number of actors. When I was in undergrad I came across this book called, Worlds of Art (Les Mondes de l’Art) by Howard S. Becker. Anyway, he was one of the first authors to place art and artistic production in a chain of labour production from administrative works of post-production and marketing to intellectual works from universities and curatorial work. That vision of art is more true to me in my daily life than the art that is heralded for its poignant inquiry into humankind’s psyche and advancement of what we call “civilization”. So the simple answer to your question may be that art belongs to capital and serves those who can afford its production and consumption. But at the same time, while I serve as a clog in this system, I also want to make an art that can exist outside of the system and truly be moments of disconcert with the real. My current show is up at a gallery that used to be a storefront in a shopping plaza in Chinatown, Los Angeles. The interface with a non-art audience is inevitable. The projections attracted attention and the occasional passer-bys waiting to pick up their food would stop and talk to me. But the conversations remained fairly surface. None of them have yet made an appointment to intentionally see the work. Not to mention the heightened tensions caused by art’s complicity in gentrification. So, even in a public-facing space, art can only rely on its existing structures and those who already have access to them.

Since you work a lot with the public and collaborations, I wonder how the experience has been for you and whether you believe art can belong outside of the art world itself?

Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, Chloropsis Aurifrons Pridii, 2021, performance and multi-media installation, 2 video projectors, 2 overhead projectors, transparencies, colour filter, printed black and white images on photocopy paper, books

YL: I completely agree with everything you said about the complex networks that build up a work of art (and the artist’s career). Come to think of it, when has art ever been outside of that system? One example comes to mind that relates to how Paul Chan began and ended his article. Chan begins with a very “kitsch” painting that he purchased for thirty dollars in the streets of New York and an unexpected challenge in finding the right place to hang it in his home. And he ends the article with, “For art to become art now, it must feel perfectly at home, nowhere.” This beginning and ending reminds me of the Korean shaman paintings (portraits of the indigenous gods). Even though the tradition goes far back in history, not many of these paintings remain. They were either burned or buried because people believed that the painting is a physical dwelling (or a seat) for a particular god served by a particular shaman. In most cases, the artist is also unknown and unimportant. Moreover, up until the late 80s, art collectors refused to collect shaman paintings as they are not merely powerful paintings (as an art object) but empowered paintings (as sites of divine presence). Despite it all, if it somehow falls into a collector or enters the museum, it is believed to become what Marx called the commodity fetish, losing its power, thus losing its value. In this case, the art object, artist, and collector all have no place! This may be why shaman paintings have not been considered “art” for so long by its creators, users, and admirers. So for me, it’s not a matter of whether art can or cannot belong outside the “art world,” but that “it must feel perfectly at home, nowhere,” or that it must feel perfectly at home, everywhere. I test this theory by experimenting with process-oriented, collaborative, performance and relational art.

I watched the video documentation of the performative lecture installation that you’ve mentioned, Chloropsis Aurifrons Pridii, at The Fulcrum Press. The collage of your voice with the light and shadow of texts and images created by multiple projectors choreographed by the subtle gestures of your hands… It was a sensorial and immersive experience, even through my computer monitor. The occasional sound of the machines turning on and off took me in and out of this poetic narrative. I was also compelled by the intricately untangled individual journeys of your family members crossing three generations, and your re-interpretation of the overarching macro history that wolves together three continents. The most memorable moment was when you said, “... Both view history as driven by cycles of reincarnations. Within one body, one consciousness, are contained centuries of all earthly desires, unquenched. History thus progresses as a movement of return. For the last five years, I face the Pacific and the fear of a return.”

Having said that, I wonder why contemporary art often appears to be disparate from the rest of the world. Sometimes even alienating and elitist. Judith Butler actually defends this position quite eloquently:

“Who devises the protocols of ‘clarity’ and whose interests do they serve? What is foreclosed by the insistence on parochial standards of transparency as requisite for all communication? What does ‘transparency’ keep obscure?”

This statement may sound like art gibberish to the non-art audience and support your disappointment of the disinterest displayed by the non-art audience in Chinatown. But I wonder, what does it mean to desire the interests of the “non-art audience”?

PJ: First of all, yes to process art works! I think our two approaches to art practice staunchingly demarcate us from “the commodity fetish” that most high art/internationally-recognized art ends up becoming by the very fact that we care less about the end product and more about the creative process themselves. The process can take shape as a form of knowledge or a set of techniques that in my case, takes on a certain shade based on my personal narrative. But taken up by someone else, the combination of voice, body movements and layering of images that you noted, would express something else entirely. That is what I am interested in in achieving: rather than creating an original product, I want to redefine techniques and processes of thought. I think the relationality and collaboration in your work that I’ve seen at VER and what you continue to do at your residency in Jeju strive for a similar balance between the creation of processes and the specificity of the people you engage with.

This reflects the other side of our art practice: although it is defiant of consumerist art, it is still bound to the Western art canon. Even a working against or criticism of Western art canon asks the audience to be aware of the canon to understand our respective positions. I respond strongly to you raising the example of the Korean shaman paintings (of which I know nothing of!) as being uncollectable and therefore, not considered art. In this case, its power operates in a culture that is closer to the non-art audience. It doesn’t need to invent value for itself but its symbolic code is embedded in the culture that receives it.

That is why I am saddened by not being able to touch the “non-art audience”. I believe that I envy the power of the shaman paintings, a power that can touch anyone without necessary prior knowledge. That is what I lament in operating in the current art world that I am in. At the same time, I do deeply agree with you that the demand for clarity and the parochial is a form of holding back of thought and the need to plunge in the mystery that is sometimes too specific for the artist themselves to put words to. That is perhaps why I still value art over other forms of knowledge: art can give shape to what is previously unknown. I also don’t mean to juxtapose the shaman paintings versus the inaccessibility of high art, as if one holds more intellectual value than the other. What I simply want to highlight is the different levels of reception that each form allows for.

YL: It’s true that the non-art audience (who may not necessarily understand the painting’s aesthetic value nor its symbolic meaning) are likely to succumb to the power of shaman paintings because of its deep-rooted history that vibrates within the culture. Do you know about the Swedish artist and mystic, Hilma af Klint? I think she didn’t give two cents about the art or non-art audience. Af Klint considered her experimental paintings (the first Western abstract art known to date) too avant-garde for her contemporaries and rarely exhibited them in public in her lifetime. Meanwhile, her so-called Theosophical art, which was heavily influenced by Buddhism and Hinduism, interestingly brings us back to the Korean shaman paintings. Before creating a shaman painting, one is to take a good bath, wear clean new clothes and oftentimes chant a prayer. Af Klint did something similar. Before starting a new series of paintings, she dedicated many months of “purification” by adjusting her lifestyle, like practicing vegetarianism. It may sound like a frivolous formality, but it demonstrates a belief on how the creator’s (artist’s) personal life cannot be severed from their creation (art), even if the admirers (public) may never know or care about the creator to begin with.

I’d like to go to your comment on how art “can give shape to what is previously unknown.” Chan also states that “in art, the only ideas worth realizing are the truly untenable ones.” I seriously weighed this concept (of art giving shape to obscurity) during my exhibition in Bangkok at the end of 2019, especially through the work you mentioned earlier, Drawing Conversation 2.0, a series of collaborative live automatic drawing performances created with local Thai artists. The obscurity for me at the time was the uncomfortable reality of having a solo show at a place where I did not understand its native language, culture, nor history.

A smaller room attached to the main gallery was dedicated for this work. The walls were painted black, and the floor laid with a dark grey carpet. A square table (around 30 cm in height) was placed in the center of the room where a blank sheet of paper covered its entire surface. A large scale drawing titled, In the beginning was___, was hung along with 5 other blank sheets of papers ready to be conversed upon. Drawing materials such as graphite, charcoal, eraser, and pen (no colors) were provided. For each session, a local artist was invited to create a drawing with me in silence for 108 minutes. A timer was set on my phone. The audience could freely enter and exit the space, sit, stand, or walk around us. The first ten minutes or so felt highly performative. But as more of our marks, gestures, breaths, and bodily heat crisscrossed, I experienced a kind of a (collective) trance. And when the timer went off and broke the silence of the room, the familiar ringtone of an iPhone sounded like the Korean shaman bell, bringing everybody in the room back to the present time and space. I think maybe this was my closest attempt in creating an “empowered painting.”

Yujin Lee, Drawing Conversation 2.0, Nov. 29, 2019, collaborative live drawing performance with artist Dujdao Vadhanapakorn, 108 minutes, Gallery VER

YL: Back to Chan… He asserts that “art and life would rather belong to the world than be free in it.” That is a bleak outlook for art, don’t you think? So, my question is, can we imagine art to be free in the current world (of capitalism)? I wonder what your thoughts are on this last point, and could you expand your thoughts on “art giving shape to the unknown” in relation to how you use language/text in your work?

PJ: Two big questions! [laughter]. I think it is a good question because we’re working towards agreeing that art is more often than not, not free in capitalism but can there be instances where they are…

YL: I thought that the last part of his text was interesting because when he’s saying “art and life would rather belong to the world,” it has a negative connotation... contrasting to what follows, “rather than be free in it.” Also you would think that he meant to say, “be free from it,” suggesting an escape from the world of inequity. But he’s sort of saying even within the system, art can be free inside of it, right? I thought that was an interesting, nuanced statement, and I want to pose this question to you, since you are still in the system, the LA art scene.

PJ: Are you saying that you’re not part of a scene because you are in Jeju?

YL: [laughing hard] That’s how I felt when I moved to Jeju, but with COVID I don’t think that’s true anymore because the internet in some ways amplifies the presence of the international art scene.

PJ: I think art has always been in network and in communication across borders and that capital gives more value to the kind of art that travels or is part of the international scene. LA or New York may have a very specific local scene but these major cities give the impression that if you’re part of their local scene, you’re somewhat seen internationally. So I think that art still depends on this kind of network. But the thing that is different with COVID is that people are more proactive in participating across countries and timezones.

YL: Yeah, that’s actually what I mean. I thought I left, by relocating to an island, a countryside, but COVID definitely brought me back to the network.

Yujin Lee, Painting Conversation, 2021, collaborative drawing performance with artist Jo Ahra, paintings completed over 4 sessions (March 19th, 21st, 23rd, 28th), Next Door to the Museum Jeju Artist Residency completed painting used as a costume for an improvisational dance video (work in process)

PJ: I want to also argue that maybe even if our locations are specific, that doesn’t mean that we’re not part of a larger network that has formed us.

Whether you like it or not, your context will always be informed by the experience you had in New York.

YL: You’re right. I thought, ‘physically leaving New York= leaving the art world.’ But the reality is, like you said, my experience as an artist is based on my time in New York. So, I’m probably going to carry that with me. So back to my questions on Chan’s statement… We’re all part of this world that is not very equitable... How can we be part of it, yet “be free in it?”

PJ: I want to believe that there is some sort of freedom.  When you give away a certain part of the bargain and that bargain being monetary or investment by some sort of institution to give value to your art, to me, by abandoning that, I feel much more free. And I’m able to have full ownership of decisions around my work, which would not be the case if I was trying to respond to a certain expectation.

Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, Seven Springs, 2019, Collaboration with Chris McKelway, 2 violins, 2 overhead projectors, images printed on transparencies, colour filters

Yujin Lee is a Jeju-based visual artist working with drawings, performances, videos, and audience-participatory projects. Interested in the Buddhist concept of yuanqi (interdependency), Lee have pursued collaborative projects with artists Emi Hariyama (108 Bows, 2013), Nicole Won Hee Maloof (Same/Difference, 2015), Aracha Cholitgul (im_there_r_u_here, 2020~ongoing), and Jo Ahra (Untitled, 2021~ongoing). Since 2019, she has been running an alternative artist residency at her farmhouse, Next Door to the Museum Jeju. Lee received her MFA in printmaking from Columbia University and a BFA in painting from Cornell University.

leeyujin.com @jejuanarchist

Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai is a transdisciplinary artist, working across performance, video and installation, based in Los Angeles. Born in Thailand in 1989, they were raised in Europe before moving to the US in 2011. They received their Visual Arts Degree from the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Nantes Metropole and a License in Film Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. They earned BFA at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago and MFA at the California College of the Arts, in San Francisco. Featured in the 2015 Arizona Biennial at the Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona. Recipient of the SOMA Summer Award, Mexico City and the emi kuriyama spirit award.

Recent projects include: Fieldnotes for Useful Light, The Prelinger Library (San Francisco), Irrational Exhibits 11: Place-Making and Social Memory, Track 16 (LA) and The Anthropologist As Hero, in collaboration with Linda Franke, Justine Melford-Colegate and Jessica Hyatt, PAM Residencies (LA), Chloropsis Aurifrons Pridii, Fulcrum Press (LA). They curated the MAHA Pavillion for the Bangkok Biennial 2020.

www.primasakuntabhai.com @prima_jalichndrsakntbhai

[blogrivendell]

# 6. the  “ultimate community”

Ephesians 1:4 -5 . “Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ.  This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.” 

 We, as children of God, are intended  to live as the family of God - doing life in community with God and each other. The quality of this communal life  is meant to be “salt and light” to those around us, and  our love for each other is meant to prove to the world that we are Christ’s disciples. What is our model for the nature of our  relationships as the family of God?  We go back  to the  divine origins of life - in - community.   So what goes on in that community of  eternal 3 - in - one? Darrell Johnson gives us some helpful insights, suggesting: intimacy, joy, servanthood, purity, power, creativity and peace. 

1. Intimacy. “a deep, abiding, tender, affectionate belonging” Intimacy implies a deep inter-connectedness between Father, Son and Spirit and it is joining in THAT intimacy which  is the purpose of  God creating humankind.  we are not just saved from the consequences of rebelling against God, we are saved FOR the eternal  relational intimacy and connectedness  that we both yearn for and run from. 

2. Joy is at the centre of the universe and is a fruit of the Spirit’s life in us. Jesus said, “These things I have said to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be made full.“ John 15:11

3. Servanthood. The love within the trinity is self-giving, and exists to serve each other joyfully.  So Jesus emptied himself of all the status and powers/advantages   of  his divinity becoming our servant in order to restore us to union with the trinity.  Philippians 2: 5 -11. I think it will take us eternity to fully appreciate what it cost our 3 person-in-one God to do that for us!

4. Purity. How could we ever feel safe with God, if  He was anything less than completely pure?-  perfect integrity - no deceit, no manipulation, no  selfishness, no darkness?  How could we join eternally  that perfect relationship of love if we still carried into it all our imperfections? we would destroy the very harmony and joy that makes Heaven what we long for, after the  relentless darkness of life on earth. Requiring  us to “Be holy as I am holy”  is not a  harsh demand but   a logical necessity and an invitation to become what we were made to be in the first place. Isn't it wonderful that God doesn't leave us to  try to change by our own efforts but also gives us the power to become holy!  

I am so glad that the Holy Spirit has brought some correction to our understanding of God so we can see Him as  the foundational and original Relational Being who has made humankind in his likeness. It is ultimately relationships that give life meaning for us humans, and we have no real joy without them. It has been one of the “detours” of western  culture to focus on  tasks, achievements and intellectual understanding to  the detriment and devaluing of  our relationships, community- building  and the primacy of  learning to love like God does. We need to evaluate our gatherings on the criteria of relationality and we need to resist all the forces in society that destroy our capacity to form effective loving relationships. 

[isawafulgentsky]

for the most part, life was like a series of travelators. there was the travelator of kindergarten. then of school, in all its glory - primarily, secondary, jc. there were state imposed travelators, at least for us guys. though many would quietly grumble at being “forced” to serve the nation, i believe some part of us were pleased, that for 2 more years, our life courses would be determined.

there were other mini-travelators along the way. piano classes, art classes, tuition, softball and soccer. these were a bit less rigid than the others. some I eventually jumped off. Mdm Tan’s piano lessons, as nice as that lady was personally, was plainly uninspiring. others, like tuition, were framed as necessities, though I now view them more as privileges. still others, like softball and soccer, were just activities I naturally grew into, both out of a certain obligation to structure (CCAs in school) and also a personal inclination to sports. 

most young people desire freedom. they await the day that they turn 21. the spirit of youth is adventure, potential and possibilities. nestled and nurtured within the structures that they find themselves in, or for arguably good measure, society and parents place them in, they desire freedom. an escape from these structures, or at least the freedom to determine the ones that they choose to inhabit. 

i felt this spirit of youth once, and on some days, i still do. but i think you know that you’ve ‘grown up’ when these possibilities and promises feel more terrifying than inviting. when the remaining years of your life looks more like a wilderness rather than a blank canvas full of possibilities. that’s where i’ve found myself - at the end of the travelators, staring in great expanse of time and space, choices and trade-offs. 

the second last travelator that i was on was college. for most of it, i was a flaneur - drifting in and out of ideas, practices and pursuits. i did a lot of random things, and my school encouraged it. i took up filmmaking and made a couple of films. it was great fun with great friends while it lasted. i dabbled in acapella - dabbled, i say, because i wasn’t that great, and that particular gig lasted as long as it did more out of obligation than calling. i took up academic subjects in history, science, economics, art. there was much richness in my intellectual exposure, for which i remain grateful. i went urban exploring - abandoned mansions, stumbled upon graveyards. taking in the grime, forsakenness of those space with a detached aesthetic appreciation, befitting of a flaneur. 

(that the very ability to be a flaneur, to saunter, to selectively experience life not out of compulsion but exposure, is a privilege not enjoyed by many is not lost on me. to the fact that i have had this privilege, i can only say that this is the lot that God has dealt with me in my life, and i better use these experiences for good.)

relationally, i too couldn’t, or didn’t, “settle down”. i’m not sure if an exact diagnosis is meaningful, but i think that part of what lead to this was that i was afraid of committing.  

towards the end of the second travellator, some of my friends started to get cold feet. while college drummed into us the picture of a world of endless possibilities, it didn’t really teach us how to choose which path to take. the expansive, soaring visions of admissions soon gave way to the realist, pragmatic world of career guidance and job hunting. for most of us, i think we just jumped onto another travellator in part because that possibility opened up, and we knew that the ‘end’ was near. 

it felt assuring, good, and even ego-boosting to say that i had a job lined-up, that 3 months before graduation, my next path was already certainty. i looked with those friends, whose ‘next steps’ had not yet been firmed up, with probably some subconsciously pity. they too, for the most part, didn’t hide their worry. 

but time melted slowly away, and soon enough, we were all on our individual, ‘chosen’ paths - our own travellators. for my part, i felt that work was more like the raging sea than a mechanical walkway. i often felt drowning, exhausted. two quick rotations in vastly different roles meant that i was constantly learning and being challenged. it was exhilarating and exhausting. except for rare moments for clarity, i think it was a time where purpose (in all senses of the word) was fuzzy. 

i had no grand sense of purpose! i thought i did - as a Christian, i knew that story of reality that i was in, and my place in it. yet, quite honestly, i don’t think it mattered much in the day to day. there was a gap between what i believed in my head and my practice. this gap was damning, horrifying, excruciating simply because it was there. 

it wasn’t as if i could not find another purpose to live for. i could! see, that man over there dressed in office clothes, eating hurriedly with a distinct sense of urgency. a quick glance at his timepiece, another chomp of his mashed potatoes. what was driving him? what was given him that sense of purpose? perhaps an urgent task assignment or client meeting, perhaps a desire to rush home to see his family. i could, i really could, find these purposes to live by. and very so often, i slipped into such a state - and even enjoyed it (at some level lah). the upcoming exhibition, to be launched by Singaporean dignitaries, had distinct tasks and outcomes. though it was stressful, the path from here to there was clear. i could live for love. find a lover, be lost in her eyes, talk with her and dream of her. i very much believe i have that capacity. or career success! strategising, networking, storytelling and the like. if this was the game that mattered, i think i’ll do decently well if i gave it my heart and my soul.

but i didn’t think it was worth my heart and my soul. and i still don’t think that it is. there is too much of ecclesiastes within me to hold me back from an unadulterated pursuit of these goods as ends in themselves. before i am even midway into pursuit, i can imagine the end. vexation. vanity. vapour. those things, and our lives too. i saw it, clear-eyed, aided by the light of scripture and casual observations in the office. 

what then? as admirable as the negative project of determining what one shouldn’t be driven by is, what then should drive us? (- for to stick with just the negative project would be to stick in despair.) 

i admit that this is kind of where i am right now.   

you may be shocked, surprised, enraged, disappointed! how so, you say. are you not a Christian? do you not believe the great truths of the gospel? are you not driven by the good news? are you not part of that story? 

with a whisper, i say, yes i am. i am part of that story by grace. i am in Christ, and he is in me. i am captured by the glory of the scriptures, and the beauty of the christian story. i am become more keenly aware of the providence of God, his working in and through creation, guiding and directing and moving. i am too, i hope, growing deeper in faith, in trust, in submitting to God. 

and yet with the same whisper, i say, i am not there yet. i am not where i ought to be, i am quite afar off. it deeply horrifies me that i could know the truth, and yet be so cold and unyielded to it. right now, i resonate more with wandering Moses, drifting through the wilderness of Midian, knowing that the glory of Egypt would never satisfy, yet really not knowing what else he is meant to do. i resonate more with Thomas, who after that first Easter was perhaps so jealously craving the conviction and new found belief of his fellow disciples, yet never being able to himself come to that place in his own strength. 

another story in the Bible that quite captures me is the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord. Jacob too, was a wanderer. his cunning and craftiness got him the birthright, but at the expense of being able to remain at home. so away from the comforts of his own family, he wandered and after some time, found himself in love with Rachel. he made a deal with his uncle (a very hard deal, in my opinion) but strove to complete it to win Rachel’s hand. and yet at the end of 7 long years, he was bitterly deceived by his very kinsmen, and endured yet another 7 years to finally win his love. this was a man whose cunning was ultimately matched by another, a man part honourable (for his loyal love to Rachel) and part despicable (for his calculated cunning), but very much relatable, in that he was neither perfectly good or pathologically bad. this was a man who inherited the great faith of his father and grandfather, and on a few occasions, had a privilege to be personally reminded of God’s involvement in his life. and yet, he, on the night before he was to met his existential reckoning (in crossing path with his brother Esau whom he deceitfully cheated) was evidently not who he was to be. he was still fretting and relying on his cunning to appease his brother. 

in the night, all alone, separated from his family, he met God and wrestled with him. i don’t know what this really means, but i do know that Jacob wanted a blessing from God and he eventually got it. he was doggedly, he did not let go, and in the end, he got his blessing. it would be easy and tempting to read this story as an illustration for how hard work eventually pays off, but that would be too simple. wrestling with God is not ‘hard work’. the very fact that God appeared to him at this time of utter need was one of grace. the grace and giveness of the whole situation is undeniably, but i think there is still more. Jacob wrestled as if his life depended on it. he didn’t know what he needed - he could only articulate a request for a blessing - but yet he knew that he needed something. the Lord obliged, and Jacob was never the same again. 

these days, i feel like i too, am wrestling. there is a keen sense of need, though i don’t know exactly what i do need. there are deep earnest cries, bless me O Lord, give me a blessing. there is me, at the end of the travelator that i just got off, perched over the great expanse of time and space and possibilities. i am reading, waiting, praying, pleading, wrestling. 

Rembrandt, 1659

[betonbetondomdom]

Copying as Performative Research Toward an Artistic Working Model Franz Thalmair

Why original and copy yet again? Why still? Copying has attained a new diversity. In the context of digital technologies, which facilitate identical reproductions of any data, the practice of copying is omnipresent yet often invisible. It has evolved into a multifarious but controversial cultural technique, which surfaces in public discourses about copyright and plagiarism or unauthorized fakes of patented products. At the root of these debates is the prevailing negative understanding of the copy in opposition to the positively connoted original. From the perspective of contemporary artistic production and in contrast to discussions often conducted from a commercial standpoint, the original no longer serves as the moral basis for the evaluation of the copy, rather the focus has shifted to the interplay between the original and the copy—a potential that was already recognized in art history. With a view to the generative and mimetic processes that constitute this relationship, not only are value systems derived from the establishment of bourgeois ownership privileges in the nineteenth century being questioned anew today; there is also debate about the (digital) control mechanisms that lead to the increasing disappearance of the practice of copying from the realm of the visible. Various artistic movements explored original and copy throughout the twentieth century. In particular, the pre-war avant-garde and later neo-avant-gardist movements employed artistic processes such as collage and readymades to create new artifacts from found materials. With such forms of appropriation artists explicitly challenged and nuanced traditional categories like originality, authorship, or intellectual property. The computer’s capability to duplicate data without loss, however, antiquates these historical methods of dealing with original and copy for current practices. The ubiquity of various copying techniques confirms that this phenomenon has now established itself both as an artistic and everyday process. But as its mechanisms—largely supported by readymade digital technologies—frequently remain hidden and increasingly immaterialize, especially the functionalities and logics of copying are up for discussion. Artistic practices that utilize the same copying methods they research can be particularly effective for such an investigation into the interplay between original and copy. The previously merited distinction between original and copy is no longer of importance in the twenty-first century. The former opposites have combined into a new entity. They are not conceived as temporally or hierarchically consecutive but as parallel and equal. In order to examine this circumstance with methods from the humanities, Gisela Fehrmann and other authors proposed viewing the relationship between original and copy as a “process of transcription”, which reveals the relationality of these categories: “The ‘characteristic relational logic’ of processes of transcription consists in the fact that […] the reference object precedes the transcription as a ‘pre-text’, but its ‘status as a script’ is only conferred by this process.”1 Such a thought loop can also be applied to the act of citation: This special form of textual copy refers to a precedent, another text, yet the source only attains the status as original through the selection and reference process. Looking at “secondary practices of the secondary”, as the author team around Fehrmann poignantly phrased, facilitates, on the one hand, an investigation of the effects these phenomena of appropriation have on the content, formal, and material conditions of current artistic production. On the other, it allows one to simultaneously practice this act of copying based on repetition and to investigate it within this practice itself. The aim of artistic explorations of original and copy is widely to construct a space of resonance which is not characterized by bipolarity rather where the permanent oscillation between the poles constitutes a self-reflexive practice.2 For only a space where the continuous flux and reflux between original and copy intrinsically represents the unity of the two elements bears the potential to generate new forms of knowledge and artistic practice.

Repetition and Repeatability

The basis for these forms of self-reflection are ideas about the reality-forming dimension of language that philosopher John L. Austin formulated in the early 1960s in his book How to Do Things With Words.3 In contrast to most words which simply describe the world, linguistic expressions that Austin called “performative utterances” create reality. They perform an action. Austin provides the word “yes” in marriages as an example and links the success of such a speech act with its repeatability. That means a “yes” articulated by the couple performs the act of marriage when the word is incorporated in a ritualized and generally agreed upon form, such as the wedding ceremony. Only then does “yes” create reality. That speech acts do not describe but create reality can be applied to the inextricable relationship between original and copy. A key factor is the repeatability of linguistic expressions, the main aspect of performativity, which—in keeping with Austin—was further developed by Jacques Derrida with the term “iterability”4 and later elaborated by Judith Butler5 in the sense of a political act. Repeatability is not only decisive for the success of speech acts—moreover, its iterative and repetitive character forms the causal basis of the phenomenon of copying. In order to have a reality-forming effect, linguistic expressions need to happen within specific conventions. Analogously, art, too, must act within a framework based on conventions in order to be perceived as such. Drawing upon these traditional and repetition-based principles, Dorothea von Hantelmann establishes “how every artwork, not in spite of but by virtue of its integration in certain conventions, ‘acts’” and “how these conventions are co-produced by any artwork—independent of its respective content”.6 Hence, the rules established in the art field in the past continue to have an effect in the present of the respective current artistic work and elicit effects both in the here and now of the artistic activity itself as well as in the conditions of the art field which led to this activity. An analogy to the aforementioned “processes of transcription”, where the original is only constituted as such when the copy refers to it, becomes quite evident. Building on Anke Haarmann’s thoughts about the methodology of artistic research, it may be concluded that these forms of performative research facilitate two things above and beyond the aesthetic experience: first, the opportunity to reflect upon “the conditions of one’s own position in the medium of artistic practice”; and second, “to investigate”—and, not least, express—“something with the specific means of art in the process of artistic knowledge production”.7 Consequently, certain themes and matters are not viewed exclusively from a supposed outsider position, rather the performative art practice is, at the same time, active within the respective field that is the subject of analysis. Such an artistic working method not only pushes dichotomous dualities like original and copy to their limits—it is a methodological approach whose self-reflexive and performative character allows it to delve into social discourse because it was derived directly from it.

Post-Media Condition, Post-Digital Tendencies

In contrast to pre-digital artistic tendencies, like the readymade, pop, conceptual, or appropriation art, which tried to dissolve the boundaries between original and copy, the copy has become constitutive to contemporary art production. In the “post-digital”8 age the interplay between original and copy has evolved into an overarching phenomenon. Also outside of digital contexts it has become inscribed into artistic production, reception, and distribution processes and—whether forced consciously or unconsciously by the artists—participates in their shaping. An example of a performative research in which the interplay between original and copy under the described conditions is not only reflected upon but also generated from this in-between is provided by the Brit Mark Leckey with The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things (2013) [fig. 1]: Conceived by Leckey as a touring exhibition of the Hayward Gallery in London, works by colleagues such as Martin Creed, Jonathan Monk, Louise Bourgeois, or Ed Atkins are juxtaposed with numerous pieces of art history, everyday culture, and artifacts of other sorts. In specially designed displays the artist-curator presented objects like a mummified cat, a singing gargoyle, a giant phallus from the film “A Clockwork Orange”, and a cyberman helmet. [fig. 2] [fig. 3] All of these objects originated from a collection of images that Leckey had compiled over the years while randomly browsing the Internet and saved to his hard drive. He activated this incidental collection for The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things and triggered a performative cycle by presenting the depicted objects in the exhibition. The digital data materialized in the show and aggregated9 into clusters, similar to how the files were stored in folders on Leckey’s computer. The three-dimensional things took a detour as two-dimensional images in virtual space before reappearing in a three-dimensional form once again as items in an exhibition. The objects, which he collected as digital depictions of real objects, exist today as exhibition views and are likely again circulating in the social networks where the artist once found them. Leckey went a step further when he transformed “The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things” into an installation called UniAddDumThs (2015) [fig. 4] for a subsequent exhibition series. At Kunsthalle Basel, among other places, he presented select things from the already selected collections of things as 3D prints, photographic or otherwise reproductions. Elena Filipovic, director of the exhibition house, wrote about the project: “Having thrown open the floodgates of his hard drive and watched as digital bits and bytes summoned forth actual atoms and matter, materializing in a slew of undeniably real things, Leckey welcomed, organized, and installed them again and again during the exhibition tour of The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things. Yet I can’t help suspecting that he was most fulfilled when the show was still yet to be made, when he was busy collecting all those jpegs and mpegs that constituted the potential contents of the show.”10 Here Filipovic addresses precisely this in-between in which self-reflection couples with performativity into a form of research which is only active while doing it. The processes researched and practiced by Leckey in The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things and UniAddDumThs are informed by the digital, yet they do not have to manifest in a digital form necessarily. The point of this performative research—which Filipovic referred to as an “artwork-as-ersatz-exhibition”—is to remain in this fluctuation between the apparent immateriality of digital technologies and their material manifestations. Leckey links this poignantly with the reciprocity between original and copy. While Walter Benjamin stated in the early twentieth century, “To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility”,11 twenty-first-century explorations of original and copy propel this thesis. The act of copying is no longer viewed from the perspective of the original, as it was in Benjamin’s time. And the copy is not conceived as a nemesis of the original either. Here the focus is on artworks fundamentally oriented upon re-installability, re-performability, serializability, versionability, and photographability—or even “jpeg-ability”.12 The transition from technical to electronic and digital media and the corresponding changes in our experience have regularly been the subject of media science debates in the past years. However, they were frequently addressed from a one-sided technological viewpoint, thereby breaking the connection with the fine arts. This is owed not least to so-called media art itself, which has distanced itself from traditional fine art formats since the 1980s with its special institutions, festivals, and exhibitions. Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook see the period “when the term new in new media art was most widely accepted and used” in the years between 2000 and 2006: “After the hype of those years, from 2006 until today, understandings of new media art in relation to contemporary art have significantly changed, and the use of the term new has become outmoded.”13 In the 2005 exhibition The Post-Media Condition at the Neue Galerie Graz, Peter Weibel, with reference to Rosalind Krauss,14 still dealt with the question “whether the new media’s influence and the effect on the old media […] weren’t presently more important and successful than the pieces of the new media themselves”.15 Today, the answer is clear. Artistic practices like Mark Leckey’s not only convey copying methods, more generally, they also help retrace the tracks left in contemporary fine arts by artistic forms of expressions previously distinguished with the attribute “new”. As opposed to Lev Manovich’s juxtaposition of “Duchamp-land” and “Turing-land”,16 two terms that embody the dichotomy between traditional fine arts and media art, the oscillation between analog and digital, between image and object, between Internet and exhibition space dissolves precisely this distinction. Employing the multifaceted processes that reside between original and copy, in The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things and UniAddDumThs Leckey not only investigates the changes in appropriation strategies in a post-digital context, but also the effects that this phenomenon has on the fine arts. Ultimately, the focus becomes how the structural requirements, the manifestations, and the perceptions of “Duchamp-land” are transformed by a “Turing-land” that is increasingly in a state of dissolution—how our medial realities are changing.

[1] Cf. Gisela Fehrmann et al., Original Copy—Secondary Practices, in Media, Culture, and Mediality: New Insights into the Current State of Research, eds. Ludwig Jäger, Erika Linz, and Irmela Schneider (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2010), 77–85, here 79. [2] Such an approach is employed, e.g., in the artistic-scientific research project originalcopy—Post-Digital Strategies of Appropriation (University of Applied Arts Vienna). See: http://www.ocopy.net [3] Cf. John L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. James O. Urmson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). [4] Cf. Jacques Derrida, Signature Event Context, in Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988[1972]), 1–25. [5] Cf. Judith Butler, ‘Excitable Speech’ A Politic of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). [6] Dorothea von Hantelmann, How to Do Things with Art. The Meaning of Art’s Performativity, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Michael Turnbull (Dijon: les presses du réel, 2010). [7] Anke Haarmann, “Gibt es eine Methodologie künstlerischer Forschung?” in Wieviel Wissenschaft bekommt der Kunst? Symposium of the Science and Art working group of the Austrian Research Association, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, November 4–5, 2011. [8] Cf. Kim Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music,” Computer Music Journal 24, 4 (2000): 12–18. [9] Cf. David Joseslit, “Über Aggregatoren,” in Kunstgeschichtlichkeit. Historizität und Anachronie in der Gegenwartskunst, ed. Eva Kernbauer (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015), 115–129. [10] Elena Filipovic, Mark Leckey. UniAddDumThs, in The Artist As Curator. An Anthology (London: Koenig Books / Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2017), 384. [11] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969[1935]), 6. [12] Hanno Rauterberg, “Heiß auf Matisse,” Die Zeit 17 (Apr. 20, 2006), 20. Translated for this publication. [13] Beryl Graham et al, Rethinking Curating. Art after New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010), 21. [14] Cf. Rosalind E. Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea. Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999). [15] Peter Weibel et al., The post-medial condition, Artecontexto 6 (2005): 12. [16] Lev Manovich, The Death of Computer Art, Rhizome (Oct. 22, 1996), http://rhizome.org/community/41703 (accessed on Apr. 1, 2018).

https://www.springerin.at/en/2018/2/kopieren-als-performative-recherche/

[perkwunos]

Georg Lukács wrote in his essay "The Marxism of Rosa Luxembourg", “Bourgeois thought concerns itself with objects that arise either from the process of studying phenomena in isolation, or from the division of labour and specialisation in the different disciplines. It holds abstractions to be 'real' if it is naively realistic, and 'autonomous' if it is critical." The intellectual currents of our age are most well defined by their inability to be grasped coherently, all together. One can discuss the implications of one's aesthetic or moral experience, or talk about the world of physics. It is felt, however, that you can not discuss both together as if they were one world, without recourse to some fundamental dualism.

Lukács of course meant for his approach of understanding the "totality" to represent a resolution of this intellectual problem, but he was not primarily focusing on the kind of metaphysical/cosmological problems which I have just centered in my bringing up mind-body dualism and its related issues. There were other contemporaries who were focusing on this, however. One person, in particular, I would argue made more advances at going beyond the bourgeois division in thought than anyone else: the mathematician, physicist, and metaphysical philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

Whitehead defined his speculative philosophy as "the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted." Every element of our experience, i.e., everything we ever come into contact with and can know anything about. So it's a grand project, and he makes sure to remind the reader he sees it as one of constant experimental reconstruction that would never reach a perfected conclusion; it's an ever-ongoing project.

So why undergo the project at all? Because it allows for a confrontation with the division of fields and topics of discussion that we saw Lukács diagnose as symptomatic of bourgeois thought. Contemporary Whiteheadian Matthew Segall puts it thus, at the beginning of his short book "Physics of the World-Soul": "The importance of philosophy in our age, according to Whitehead, is primarily to serve as the critic of the abstractions of the specialized sciences ... the philosopher must always be at work attempting to harmonize the abstract sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology), both internally among themselves, and more generally with our deep moral intuitions and aesthetic feelings". This is the attempt to get at a mode of thought that sees physics and our experience of value as existing in the same plane of being.

Whitehead's view is one of relationality; everything can only be fully explained by its relations to other things. One must understand the environment to understand the thing, for the thing is an expression of the environment. This puts him directly in confrontation with the assumptions of specialization, which allow people to feel they’ve fully grasped something when it is in reality only viewed in abstraction from concrete totality. When you entertain a variety of such abstractions without understanding their entire concreteness, you face dislocated incoherence. He wrote in Adventures of Ideas, "We habitually speak of stones, and planets, and animals, as though each individual thing could exist, even for a passing moment, in separation from an environment which is in truth a necessary factor in its own nature. Such an abstraction is a necessity of thought, and the requisite background of systematic environment can be presupposed. That is true. But it also follows that, in the absence of some understanding of the final nature of things, and thus of the sorts of backgrounds presupposed in such abstract statements, all science suffers from the vice that it may be combining various propositions which tacitly presuppose inconsistent backgrounds." Some thinkers of Marxist dialectics have likewise continued through the 20th century into today in the explicit attempt to so comprehensively understand things in terms of their internal relations. I would argue, however, that when it comes to a fully cosmological and experiential model, Whitehead has been far more comprehensive and direct in the issues he faced. I don't necessarily expect this to be contended by many people; after all, Marxism is primarily a methodology for understanding social sciences. My argument, however, would be that Whitehead's system not only generalizes from and thus encompasses the subjects of physics, biology, psychology, aesthetics, but also just as well sociology, economics and anthropology. Society, its conditions and relations, certainly play a role in supplying the concrete facts which Whitehead knows he must not explain-away but rather locate in a wider system.

In fact there is an argument for the study of social interactions and its presuppositions playing one of the most vital roles for Whitehead. He was fond of citing sociological facts to show the reality of aims and self-decisions. I believe Victor Lowe described this as Whitehead's "humanistic" side, but I'd rather call it his anthropological side. Now, what is ultimately really concrete for Whitehead are occasions of experience seen as composed of relations to other occasions of experience. He generalizes that every process is an experiential process, because the only actuality we know of is, of course, that of our own experiential processes. However, this does not mean he appeals to only a crude psychological empiricism for his data as to what experience is like. He knows that our consciousness when put under the conditions of self-investigation will become such as to only emphasize certain kinds of experience. Rather his methodology puts forward that we should catch experience “in the rush of immediate transition.” One of the best ways to see evidence for what that’s like, actually, is not by documenting experience directly, but rather systematically studying the documentation of all of the actions that people do, and the perspectives they take on - for these are, ultimately, the effects of certain experiences. In Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead states, "The main sources of evidence respecting this width of human experience are language, social institutions, and action, including thereby the fusion of the three which is language interpreting action and social institutions." So some of the most intimate evidence for Whitehead's basic metaphysical entity, the occasion of relational experience, is thus derived from the social sciences!

I've often lamented before that I did not study physics more, so as to be able to attempt my own direct integration of its most recent findings with Whitehead's generalizations. Now, however, I realize that more important than that is to integrate the most recent findings of social studies with his thought. Whitehead himself was a highly sophisticated physicist, around for the cutting edges of relativity and quantum theories. His philosophizing shows that. He never dedicated quite so much time to the social sciences, nor was he as ensconced in the most revolutionary theoretical turns; he had an ethnocentric understanding of history and anthropology, and was still essentially a liberal gentleman in his confrontation with economic problems. Here is where the best possible sophistication is still to be brought.

There is of course the criticism that this philosophizing, as it does not confront the material conditions of capitalism which allowed for this incoherence of consciousness, does not focus upon the direct, material condition of alienated labor that leads to consciousness of an alienated ego, but instead stays as a purely ideological critique, cannot really help in doing away with the reality of these mental tendencies. I think this is a valid criticism against many liberal Whiteheadians. The integrated ecological metaphysics of Whitehead will not be at the forefront of abolishing the harmful conditions of today, except insofar as they are in the minds of those who will attack and abolish the relations of labor which produce the society we live in. However, Whitehead’s worldview can include the knowledge that our current consciousness arises from the conditions of our producing our material environment; indeed, his philosophy may explain better than any other how our experience comes out of the conditions of prior activity. This intellectual, or ideological, activity does play its role, and I do believe Whitehead above all others will serve the specifically philosophical purpose of integrating the slivered knowledge of the world into a true consciousness of totality. This totality is that of each subjective experience as it contains in its relations the entirety of the world. If nothing else this philosophy is a system of poetry which is truly a glimmer of the post-modern, i.e. post-bourgeois, and declares the pleasure principle, the Eros, of such. This experience of desire does not remain a private solipsism, but returns back upon the environment so as to affect it, and it is this affect existing within social relations that is the true object of desire. Whitehead's philosophy shows this.

I believe that when we make it beyond the capitalist organization of our global society, if there are still any organized intellectual efforts such as there are today, they will grasp upon the work of Whiteheadians to achieve a comprehensive framework for understanding our world. This will arguably advance the specific knowledge of physical sciences; more importantly, it would certainly advance the integrated knowledge of our interactions with an inherently aesthetic, desirous world. The pondering teenager confused by the existential separation they feel between their ego and the material world is an incoherent product of bourgeois-dominated culture, and will disappear in turn once those conditions of bourgeois domination are systematically abolished and replaced by the freedom of truly democratic, socialist control over production. For the time being, Whitehead's thought is a weapon against this kind of alienated consciousness we develop inside of capitalist society. It will not fully destroy this sickness, but it can be part of the healing process.

[silenttrystero]

Infante, Ignacio. After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics across the Atlantic. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

Even though modernismo is generally regarded as the first poetic movement consciously connecting and bridging both sides of the Atlantic, the critical impact of the movement outside of the field of Hispanic studies remains negligible, literally as though it had never taken place. (180)

See The Inverted Conquest  modernismo as untranslatable and not taken into the Anglo-American canon

In other words, if modernismo has remained “untranslatable,” using Mejias-Lopez’s term, it is not because  of its historical relevance as a transnational poetic movement that articulates a pioneering transatlantic response from Latin America to modernity and colonialism -- clearly affecting the fields of Latin American, European, and world literatures -- but rather, because up until now it has not been deemed worthy of critical consideration and translation within the hegemonic Anglo-American modernist canon produced by scholars and critics of the Anglo-American literature. (181)

...models that trace historically the transcultural circulation and forms of relationability and exchange established between particular writers, journals, publishers, or groups of artists and intellectuals from different parts of the world... the generation of a transnational literary history share the following features: They acknowledge the importance of translation as a foundational hermeneutic and linguistic process; they adopt a multilingual framework of analysis of literary and cultural forms; and they are intrinsically connected to the critical methodology of comparative literature as a scholarly field...(183)