A list of completed projects, published and unpublished texts, and some unfinished things.

Projects

Weak Signals, Wild Cards Amsterdam Noord 27th June-26th July 2009. Group project as part of de Appel Curatorial Programme A series of commissions for a society that does not yet exist.

Disclosures at Gasworks and offsite, ongoing. Residencies, commissioning, seminar and library project, co-organised with Anna Colin.

Resident at Gasworks November 2007. Residency and commissioning of public project with Renata Lucas, co-curated with Anna Colin.

Slash Fiction at Gasworks and offsite March 2007. Residencies, commissioning and exhibition project, co-curated with Nav Haq.

Reviews

Matthew Noel-Tod’s Blind Carbon Copy at Picture This, published issue 121 frieze March 2009

Soi Project’s Island at Ikon East Side, published issue 115 frieze September 2008

Fusion Now! at Rokeby published issue 113 frieze March 2008

Seduced at the Barbican issue 44 Untitled March 2008

Panic Attack! at the Barbican published issue 110 frieze October 2007

Take Care of Yourself - Sophie Calle’s French Pavilion at Venice Biennial 2007. Text submitted for frieze Writers’ Prize 2007.

Texts/publications

Node.London Reader II Documenting the second Node.London season of media arts in 2008. Co-edited with Jonas Andersson, Anna Colin, and Adnan Hadzi. Mute publishing 2009

Polished-up notes for a panel discussion at Women and the Archive: A Partial Disclosure March 2009, organised by Anna Colin at the Women’s Library as part of Whitechapel Gallery’s ongoing programme The Street.

Get down with the let down published Jan 2009 Concept Store

On Hamra Abbas’ ‘MoMA is the Star’ catalogue text for exhibition at Green Cardamom Nov-Dec 2008

My life is hanging by a thread – on Zeeshan Muhammad’s ‘Dying Miniature’ Catalogue text for exhibition at Green Cardamom Nov 08-Dec 09

Dilettantism and Extradisciplinary Artistic Collaboration on n.e.w.s. July 2008

Interview About Disclosures published April 2008 on undo.net. Responded to with Anna Colin.

Breda Beban in conversation with Mia Jankowicz issue 45 Untitled June 2008

Awards

frieze Writers’ Prize 2007 for new and emerging art critics.

Coming soon
The Sense of the Book – endnote to a thesis by Jenny Eneqvist.

Written as a contribution to the catalogue for Abbas’ solo exhibition at Green Cardamom, London, Adventures of the Woman in Black Nov-Dec 2008

Combined stills from Hamra Abbas' MoMA is the star (2004) digital video

At the Berlin Biennial this year [2008], I like everybody else visited the Neue Nationalgalerie. Such visits seem to be made up of seven parts distraction, three parts attention, and when I was caught between a sugar low and a Susan Hiller my eye fell on a small black and pink sticker. Das MoMA in Berlin it announced, in cheerfully bombastic graphics.

Stuck on the corner of one of the invigilators’ stools, and fuzzy at the edges, it was still a sharp reminder of the Nationalgalerie’s past engagements. In 2004, a selection from MoMA’s collection visited Berlin. Following a recent hit show of East German artists, whose audience reached a respectable 220,000 visitors, the museum had hoped to equal this for its next blockbuster. Das MoMA in Berlin got 1.2 million visitors.

Berlin today is populated by little reminders like the old sticker I found; memories of other times when monolithic foreign bodies of thought have arrived here, running cartwheels across the city, dropping monuments here and pronouncements there, until everything leaves and the city falls silent again. Hamra Abbas’ video work MoMA is the Star (2004) records the scenes of Nationalgalerie’s honoured American guest drawing awe-filled crowds, wrapping the building in loving queues in order to catch a glimpse of this famous collection.

As the documentary MoMA in Berlin records, “Everyone believed that what was inside the Neue Nationalgalerie was no less than the history of Western art, and that what was outside was not”. The notion of the show’s North American ‘cultural colonialism’ did not go unremarked by the German art establishment. In Abbas’ video, the use of Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, now inseparable from its use in the giant-leap-for-mankind scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, parodies, at the very least, a demonstrative sense of cultural triumph.

Abbas, however, is more interested in the show as a popular phenomenon; appropriating its graphic identity and filming the crowds, she records the carnival as it happens at the museum entrance. ‘What was outside’ the canon of Western art was the jumble of opportunist entertainers, gawkers and hawkers – jugglers, masseurs, kissing lovers, buskers, pyrotechnics, ’MoMA’-branded t-shirt-wearers, and, apparently, people camping from 3am. Carnival versus canon; low culture versus high. For however drily theorised the act of looking may be, isn’t it strange that with art it should begin with a hot pink logo, your museum brochure as a makeshift fan, your only sustenance the coffees and ice creams peddled near the museum entrance?

On Zeeshan Muhammad’s ‘Dying Miniature’
Catalogue text for his exhibition at Green Cardamom Nov 2008-Feb 2009

My life is hanging by a thread.
- Florence Nightingale, 1896.

Zeeshan Muhammad, Dying Miniature, graphite on sandpaper 2008

The series Dying Miniature (2008) departs significantly from most recognisable aspects of Mughal miniature painting, to the extent that without its title there would be little means of anchoring this work to the genre it nevertheless discusses. The works are exercises in emphatic denial beginning most notably with the sandpaper support, the absolute inverse of the deliberately super-smooth surface of wasli. Whereas wasli enables the hairline-fine, fluid detailing characteristic of miniature painting, the sandpaper not only inhibits but actively aggravates the material of the image, in a kind of gestural violence. The strange congress of graphite and sandpaper is mutually destructive, the surfaces destroying as they destroy, and being marked as they mark – Zeeshan was obliged to use a number of plain old pencils, because the sticks of graphite he had bought for the task kept crumbling under the force of his drawing. The drawings are the result of a process whose violence prompts the awareness that drawing happens by a process of abrasion and residue.

The only recognisably ‘miniature’ aspect of these works is their two-dimensionality and their subjects, whose stylised outlines and poses are recognisably typical. The figure, empty of detail, is a silvery, worn-down silhouette; one of the fading populace of the universe of the miniature. It is as though the genre of miniature painting has exhausted itself for Zeeshan, through overuse; in this situation of overfamiliarity, what is gained in nuance can be lost to banality. As the relentless pacing of a caged animal eventually wears a flat, dry path in the grass, so might the genres of painting eventually make their subject barely detectable.

At the heart of Muhammad Zeeshan’s enquiry and practice for the last few years is the knowledge that that which distinguishes a form also constitutes its limits. The general trajectory of works such as Dying Miniature has its roots in Zeeshan’s earlier painting practice. Bodies of work such as Well Directed (2005) and High Notes (2005) are recognisably and methodologically miniature painting, but their content was a departure, depicting distinctly unpleasant subject matter. Repeatedly featuring delicately bandaged or otherwise concealed objects such as pistols, bananas, rats and vultures, the works alluded to phallocentrism, corruption and violence via extremely delicate, almost vulnerable renderings. Like graphite on sandpaper, here is another conflict; the more disturbing the combinations of images, the more lyrically and compellingly they are laid down. It is uncertain whether the bandages are intended to conceal corruption, or nurse the wounds, but what is clear is the tension, as nurturing and violence tentatively co-exist. And here perhaps are the roots of the irrevocable and paradoxical link between creation and destruction in Dying Miniature. Somewhere along the way, the subject matter was beginning to overflow and even destroy the form.

***********

In 2007, Gasworks and Green Cardamom invited Muhammad Zeeshan on residency in London. As I was the curator of the residency programme at Gasworks, we had plenty of opportunity to talk as we meandered around the damp London summer. The question of how an artist’s practice, interests and assumptions take life, in varying contexts of international art, is raised nowhere more frequently than on residencies. While there is something of an international artistic neverland developing across places with highly mobile and well-funded artistic populations – transnational practitioners with a number of shared values that would seem to undermine the rhetoric of ‘internationalism’ (and, more politically, multiculturalism in the arts) – it is not easy to brush away the element of eurocentrism within the inherited values of such practitioners. The residency programme at Gasworks, in striving to invite artists who would not as automatically enter these freewheeling networks, was often faced with artists who knew what their practice meant at home (for whom, indeed, the notion of an artistic ‘home’ still existed in one way or another), and whose residencies were a process of confronting their work with the multiplicities, banalities, and excitements of London. None more so than in the case of Muhammad Zeeshan.

In London, and at Braziers workshop in Oxfordshire, the differing potentialities of his practice in different contexts began to dawn on him. In Pakistan, he had frequently been told, he said, that his work was ‘not miniature’. In contemporary art circles in the UK, this question was barely relevant anyway, and the transgressive nature of his work – insofar as that was necessarily desirable in an art culture that produces exhibitions such as Sensation (Royal Academy of Art, London, 1997) and the Turner Prize exhibitions – was largely in question. It made sense to Zeeshan, in this situation, to explore different media entirely, such as audio multiples, video, performance, and collage, producing, amongst other things the video work Flag Ceremony (2007), which was later exhibited as an artist’s project at the Dubai Art Fair in 2008. In these conditions it seemed as though Zeeshan could only explore his interests – including, perhaps obliquely, the limits of miniature painting – by using other contemporary media.

Painting has, of course, always had its ‘deaths’, in claims reminiscent of Florence Nightingale’s deathbed assertion – which she in fact made sixteen years before she eventually expired. And the threads in Zeeshan’s paintings in the expanded field of miniature are, after all, remarkably robust. In In God We Trust (2008), the eponymous text of the image is rendered in painted stitches on wasli. These fine lines, reminiscent of the wraith-like hairlines that featured in many of his earliest paintings, represent the, surprisingly immaterial, warp and weft that holds together the most cherished ideals and structures of a society – a construct that also runs through his book work A Colligation (Isolated Facts) (2008). In God We Trust, due to be destroyed by ritual immersion in black ink, in fact survived its ‘death’ in an event that, according to one’s persuasion, spoke strongly of the robustness of God, painting, or just wasli. The thematic and gestural violence of Zeeshan’s works are not there, it seems, in order to destroy, but to renew. Survival – of process, or surviving a process – is then the strongest thread running through Zeeshan’s work. So from here on out, miniature survives in Zeeshan’s practice – even if it is on sandpaper.

G

Internet macro posted on the Livejournal community stupid_free in response to a call for images on the theme of 'BAWWWWWWWW'. The unknown author is thanked.

Disappointment is a difficult thing to glorify. In trying to come up with a good, pop-historical list of the world’s greatest disappointments for this text, I thought of nothing that isn’t better characterised by treachery, failure, and misfortune (all of which have their glorious aspects), and no disappointment that isn’t eclipsed by the tragedy of its own effects.

It would, for example, be absurd to describe the sinking of the HMS Titanic on its maiden voyage merely as a disappointment. On the other hand, Tim Henman’s continued failure to fulfil the unreasonable expectation of winning at Wimbledon no longer disappoints, because we have stopped assigning him that expectation. Disappointment is the quiet guest at the party, only noticeable in the absence of more glorious negatives like violence or disaster. It is most felt at the moments when the stakes are quite low, and in the interpersonal.

It’s far easier to pin down when it is a character trait. In film, history and literature, there is a trope of the character who is a disappointment to his family (usually it is a he, given the fact that the privilege of well-rounded characterisation in mainstream fiction is routinely still given to men). His highest attainment is usually to be born of privilege, and to be evil – if he’s not evil, he is merely weak. (Though if he is evil, he’s truly evil: in the ultimate disappointment-child scenario, Mormon theology is frequently misunderstood as asserting that Satan is the other son of God, who just didn’t turn out as well as Jesus.) Edward Tudor, the weakly and studious prince who died undramatically of an ear abscess, was a terrible disappointment as the firstborn son of King Henry VIII, who openly wished that the princess Elizabeth had been born a boy. These disappointments are the offspring of grand and macho parents, but have none of the qualities their parents desire in them. Commodus, the imperial prince fictionalised in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), exemplifies this role and its evil potential:

… I have other virtues, father. Ambition. That can be a virtue when it drives us to excel. Resourcefulness, courage, perhaps not on the battlefield, but there are many forms of courage. Devotion, to my family and to you. But none of my virtues were on your list.

(This is just before he strangles his father and usurps the imperial throne.) Easily the most interesting character, Commodus had another key characteristic of the disappointment child, which is sexual deviance, in his incestuous impulses. In comedy, too, these etiolated princes exist, such as the Swamp King’s son Herbert who refuses to marry the wealthy princess and only wishes to sing light musical numbers and be carried off by a handsome knight (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, year).

In his book How To Do Things With Words (1955), JL Austin’s treatment of the speech act reverses our common understanding of performance as imitative; instead demonstrating how what is understood as the real is constituted by performative gestures and statements. He also notes that the assigned falsity of the performative results in the theatrical being consistently associated with the weak, the etiolated, the effeminate; strikingly similar to the disappointment-child¹. And while the stronger, more wholesome characters go on to win out as the heroes of mainstream culture (Elizabeth I with her heart and stomach of a prince, and Maximus to whom Marcus Aurelius intended the imperial throne, and the ridiculously battle-prone Sir Launcelot, all being the inverse examples of the characters above), the disappointment-child continues on bitterly and unhealthily in the shadows.

As this child is to his robust and noble parents, perhaps, even more so than theatre, so contemporary art is to mainstream culture. Art is generally inherently unsatisfying according to the criteria of mainstream culture (to entertain, to add to the sum of human knowledge, to glorify or debase, to educate, to provide spectacle). Mainstream culture tends to look to contemporary art for it to provide more profound and gratifying versions of its own output, only to find that instead of being the golden child, contemporary art is the one in the corner burning ants to death with a magnifying glass. This status of disappointment we can bear, in contemporary art; we provide cafes and other nicely designed consumer experiences to pacify those who brought the expectations of mainstream culture to our galleries and museums.

It is little surprise, then, that art has its fascination with failure. In an abstract sense, and in full consciousness of this disappointing position of contemporary art, failure has a lot of appealing qualities. These happen to concur quite nicely with some of the most recurrent artistic preoccupations of the last couple of centuries such as abjection, misunderstanding, bathos, and the quixotic; also, particularly according to the rest of the world, artists themselves tend to spend the majority of their careers occupying one definition or another of failure. It makes sense that we’re interested in it.

The problem with all this is a common neglect of rigour. In accepting art’s failures, we forget to be disappointed, and neglect to define genuinely what failure might constitute for us, for artists and curators and even critics. On a simple level, but one that is essential to understanding the work, Philippe Parreno’s 2007 work Speaking to the Penguins was a total failure. It was known from the beginning that there is no means of communication – on any intellectual level at least, and in that form – with penguins. But in a move reminiscent of the hundred monkeys on one hundred typewriters scenario, he tried anyway, travelling to Patagonia and addressing the masses – would one phrase stick with a penguin? Would their anthropomorphic attentiveness and dapper exteriors pay off, finally? Would their eponymous association with modernism’s great publishing project have given them some appreciation for letters? Of course not. As far as we know, it was a resounding failure. And we like it that way.

There’s a weird compulsion in me now to talk about Anthony Gormley’s work. This is because for all the things you can say about Gormley, is that he never, ever, ever fails. In his great, passive- impressive homunculi are bound the simple and visually sensationalist desires of the British public, and the public art commissioners who strive to please them. Sometimes, you just want a giant, burning effigy of a man, burning so meaningfully, and with his part in The Margate Exodus (2007) Gormley gave it to you. Here is art with a stated, concrete intention – don’t be fooled by its easily-drafted dalliance with intangible-sounding artistic languages, it is all quite tangible – and in this it succeeds.

So this is basically why failure is still on the cards. Despite its prescribed success, even those art professionals who find an arch thrill in some knowing configuration of ‘the popular’ can’t claim to value Gormley’s work despite what it does for the vast majority of people who have, justifiably, no time to react profoundly to art. It’s not just to do with a snobbish aversion to spectacle, or to popular participation, as both a lecture to penguins and a village burning a huge junkheap effigy have their elements of both.

Between these two poles are any number of positions and any number of definitions of failure, which provides plenty of grounds for discussion. The seminar Histories of Productive Failures: From French Revolution to Manifesta VI, organized by Anton Vidokle & Tirdad Zolghadr in 2006, reflected on exactly this thematic as prompted by the apparent political and bureaucratic fiasco that resulted Manifesta VI’s failure to materialise. Perhaps the most pragmatic question that the seminar could have addressed is: what would we prefer, for Manifesta VI to have failed – and produce interesting seminars such as this – or for it to have actually happened? Given the level of anticipation before, and eulogising of the project after, it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s still preferable for a good project to happen, rather than for the failure of a good project to be theorised.

The danger for this situation – particularly as we face the foreclosure of state and private funding of the non commercial art sector – is that we begin to anticipate failure as the ‘interesting anyway’ posture most easily relaxed into after something was patently a mess. Not all failures, unlike Manifesta VI, have the luxury of being that interesting. Not only that, we also need to question how useful it actually is to attempt to re-establish a sense of posture in the whole discussion, with surprisingly few assumptions or sense of authority undone, particularly regarding the value of artistic discussion in itself. Unlike the status of being the disappointment-child of mainstream culture, which we can legitimately celebrate, the exciting aspects of failure to achieve more internalised terms and desires stop being exciting when we relax about such failure and over-anticipate its potential. What is needed for such discussions is candour and indignity, and for this one needs a sense of personal investment, and for that one needs disappointment.

How to formulate this? The Histories of Productive Failures seminar addressed, most strikingly, ‘[…]the question of the elusive nature of collective ideals in a situation where the political projections at hand are lacking in any adequate referent to latch on to²’ – precisely such ideals as are needed for the production of disappointment after things fail. But the idea of art setting, and achieving, concrete objectives is repugnant to many. The hifalutin claims art makes on its own terms and within its own frames of reference are unwittingly parodied in the language of press releases, as Jennifer Higgie paraphrases:

… hollow boasts about subverting, riffing, reordering, dialoguing, deconstructing, investigating and renegotiating; about destroying assumptions, provoking, participating, blurring boundaries or destroying borders, beliefs, poverty, globalism, the World Bank, you name it. (Who do they think they are, Attila the Hun?)’³.

This language is ridiculous because we accept art’s ineffectiveness; if we wanted to hold art to common standards of all these objectives we wouldn’t have art, we’d have interrogation chambers.

So neither the louche pseudo-candour of the curator riffing on failure, nor the strictly instrumentalist approach is quite right; because either position is too comfortable, too opportunist. Perhaps sometimes we just need to be like the kid in the picture: step back from our failures, contemplate them for the embarrassments they truly are, and howl in outrage.

Soi Project – Island
Ikon Eastside, Birmingham, UK

Soi Project’s Island was not conveniently reached except by taxi, through an unlovely set of light industrial streets clearly earmarked for ‘cultural development’ by the local council. However, arriving at the Ikon Gallery’s newest offsite space, in Birmingham’s East Side, it was impossible not to marvel at the contrast – at least when I visited, on the most assiduously wet day of the year – with the fact that I was visiting a tropical Thai island. (Surely the gallery marketing department’s easiest sell ever.)
Soi Project is a fluctuating group of collaborators, with artists and architects Jiro Endo (Japan), Wit Pimkanchanapong and Pitupong Chaowakul (both Thailand) at their core. Their projects display a clear, Baudrillardian love for the symbolic commodity’s loosening association from any anchoring referent. In their Fruits project, also on display at Ikon’s main site that day, visitors could soothingly fold and glue together a variety of paper fruit, which was then put on display and swapped for its real counterpart, marking the process of change from edible fruit to symbolic existence.

For Island they worked with satellite images to create a composite Thai national reserve; a tropical fibreglass landmass rising out of a paper sea pasted over the entire ex-warehouse floor. For the artists the island represented an abstracted version of a Thai official national reserve island, overlapping in part with the presumed UK viewer’s more abstract ideas of paradise. The temptation to add details such as a mossy surface and little model trees must have been strong; instead, the forests and beaches of this island are printed on, and the landmass shaped according to the triangulated tessellation of 3D computer rendering rather than geologically defined shapes. Preserving the work’s architectonic backbone basically saves it from becoming a really good place for a Hornby model railway.

In fact, it is this tension between convincing simulation and deliberately visible technicality that makes the work fascinating. It was carefully negotiated in a number of ways. A complex lighting installation of 42 large computer-controlled lamps simulated the daylight phase of a 24-minute circadian rhythm that moves over the island; yet the appearance of night-time is conveniently represented by Buzz Aldrin’s polyresin lamp designed for Habitat’s ‘Very Important Products for kids’ range. It all but announces ‘this lanthorn doth the hornèd moon present’ before wobbling cheerfully across its mechanical track. Such visibly contemporary falsities and borrowings – including the images that make up the island itself (which, despite being surprisingly high-resolution, still bear the mental watermark of Google Earth) – pay attention to the fact that make-believe with good props is always going to be more effective than the best virtual reality. The combined effect is unexpectedly charming. That day even the rain played its part, beating on the roof precisely like a roaring sea. It’s easy to spend time with this work: lying back, cradled by a small bay, and watching the sun set, like a tropical Little Prince.

There was a more prescribed participatory aspect of this work, though, which ramped up the Utopian narrative: visitors to the project were handed sheets of glow-in-the-dark stickers. The idea goes that you have the opportunity to despoil, develop or beautify the island with stickers of cars, sections of road, elephants, palm trees, road signs and holiday flats. Much coherent development – such as roads – is only possible through collaboration and barter with other sticker-bearers. Visiting on the first day, it was hard to know whether this would eventually result in a heart-warmingly well-organized series of lush villages with a robust infrastructure or whether everything would be spoilt by the basic fact that a sticker of any shape is just one of those things that need to be stuck. Some visitors, I am told, went ‘off-plan’ and used all the remainder sticky odds and ends to build their own shapes. From images sent to me later, what it produced was the evidence of a very local obsession with property, and a micro-history of conflicts of interest – and it’s clearly been a hit. The full implications of this William Golding-esque metaphor don’t easily follow, though; in truth we can’t compare the complex and competing machinations of international property developers, environmentalists, miners and governments with the ham-fisted imperatives of a Birmingham toddler. (Actually, maybe we can.) As the ‘sun’ went down, the glowing stickers lit up, pleasingly, like satellite pictures of the earth glowing at night.

This aspect almost overrode the work’s potential for make-believe; maybe we don’t always need a ‘social experiment’ for a work to be effectively participatory. Seen in this way alone, it can only tell us what a lot of people with stickers can do with such illusory control over a shared imaginary, and distracts from the work’s undeniable ability to comment on the underlying mediation and fabrication of that imaginary in the first place – ending up as an almost literal play-off between structure and surface.

undo.net: Since 29th March 2008 you have been presenting at Gasworks (London) Disclosures, a project that looks at the manifestations of Open Source methodologies outside of the Internet. Why do you think that the Open Source world can be related to art?

Anna Colin: To give some background to the project, Disclosures started with a two-day seminar on Saturday 29 and Sunday 30 March 2008, taking place off-site, in East London. During it, we talked about the extent to which Open Source methodologies find applications in fields of cultural production outside of the Internet. The topics that naturally emerged were that of openness – as organisational strategy and/or ethos; diffuse authorship and open content licences; and the limits of openness, the conditions of its existence and its economic reality, amongst other dominant themes. After the seminar, which included keynotes, presentations of current projects, roundtable discussions, readings, performances and a guided walk by artists, media practitioners and curators alike, we opened a film and reading library and have organised regular events at Gasworks.

The works included in the library relate to questions of open participation, multiple authorship, ways of sharing one’s creative outcomes and encouraging their appropriation while protecting them from abusive uses. They also share an interest in and commitment to building and maintaining networks. These works are not only artworks, they are documentaries, research projects by non-artists, books by fiction writers and open music tools for instance. So we are suggesting connections between Open Source methods and art practices at large. All the themes brought up reflect in many ways some of the questions that artistic and curatorial practices have been addressing in the last five to ten years. Yet, what is striking is that despite the increasing tendency for artists to work collaboratively and the multiplication of practices that require participation to become meaningful (i.e. discursive practices), the issue of who should be credited and how the collectively-produced knowledge should be distributed and re-used is still poorly addressed. A lot of artists still strictly copyright their films while the content is entirely based on other people’s knowledge, and don’t make them publicly available.

Mia Jankowicz: Broadly speaking, the functions and methodologies of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) has informed ideologies shared in various spaces both within the FLOSS world and the art world. Accessibility of source materials, working collaboratively with such materials, emphasising the multiple and its widespread distribution, and making this production again accessible and available as part of a largely pragmatic process rather than as the development of a single, authored, finite piece – these are all processes shared with FLOSS and taken up, to varying degrees, across contemporary and modern artistic practice. Furthermore, making these processes the substance and value of the work itself (rather than the ‘backstage’ of the work) finds an increasing place in artistic and interdisciplinary practices. The recent workshop, organised by Armin Medosch and Adnan Hadzi in collaboration with Disclosures Taxi to Praxi (and back again) addressed this proliferation of research-led practices and their place within current art institutions.

This isn’t to suggest a shared history, however, or a perfect mirroring of practices. A majority of contemporary artistic practices continue to work in ignorance of, or only partial adherence to what could be identified as FLOSS-related ideas, and contemporary art and its consumption is still generally regarded as a bourgeois activity. However, Brian Holmes’ essay The Revenge of the Concept successfully argues for the unexpected and vital place of gesture, symbolism, and immanent meaning (all most successfully developed by contemporary art) within ideologies of grassroots self-organisation and networked resistance (arguably the activist field with the strongest ties to FLOSS).

undo.net: In what way have Open Source practices changed the present cultural production?

AC: – We are far from being an authority in that area, so the answer will be subjective and limited. Open Source practices go back to over twenty years and the work of some but not all media practitioners has been adopting this way of working for about the same time. In the case of Disclosures, we have been using the term Open Source as a metaphor for openness rather than solely referring to its technological underpinning.

If one talks about what about contemporary art, then the internet and Open Source tools have had a growing impact on artistic diffusion and, as a snowball effect, on production. Even though, as mentioned above, a lot of artists still stick to outmoded values as originality and single authorship, an increasing number of artists and art institutions take on board alternatives to these values. One significant illustration of that shift is the rising interest from artists, in the last five years or so, in constituting archives, digging old material falling into oblivion, preserving memory and presenting histories that have been out of civic knowledge for political, economical or bureaucratic reasons for instance. The sole idea of making material publicly available is already an act of openness. And the only (fairly) open tool that can reach large numbers of people is the Internet. Open online archives such as archive.org or pad.ma, or more mainstream circuits as youtube, are such platforms to diffuse information and knowledge widely.

MJ: – Following from the possibilities offered by digitisation and the internet for cultural production and its distribution, Open Source appears to offer a set of methodologies that artists seem keen to apply to their practices across analogue or traditional media, for example the project Philip organised by Mai Abu El Dahab and eight artists bears some of the characteristics of Open Source production; the artists decided to write a collaborative science fiction novel distributed via print-on-demand or free pdf. Practical and economic issues, however, often prevent Open Source methodologies from being transferred exactly, such as the economic structures that make it difficult for artists to contemplate free distribution of their work, and the premium on individual authorship that already appears in place of financial rewards in the art world. However, when artists cite FLOSS as an influence in addressing exactly such infrastructural problems, there seems to be a useful transfer of ideas, ethoses, and potential methodologies.

undo.net: Do you think the Open Source model can produce new curatorial attitudes and a new art platform?

AC: – Certainly and it already has. An example that is often cited is Kurator, a curatorial research project associated with the University of Plymouth in the UK and which ”links curating with programming, systems and software.” Taken in the more traditional, non technologically-driven art world, Open Source has had a low impact to date, but as intimated earlier, institutions are engaging more and more with those subjects. On rare occasions, some institutions use wikis as an open working tool, which is then visible to all (e.g. The Critical Practice research cluster at Chelsea School of Art and Design, London and Iaspis, Stockholm with Who Makes And Owns Your Work, 2007). Also, by now quite a few art institutions use blogs instead of websites, thus allowing for comment and feedback, and have starting sharing their archives (thinking for instance of the art magazine Frieze which until very recently only gave access to its archives to magazine subscribers).

What Open Source can teach curators is for instance to be more open and generous with one’s research, less secretive about one’s ideas and curatorial plans. In that way, Open Source introduces the relaxation of competitive behaviour. If curators, writers and institutions shared a third of their research, discourses and movements would advance at a much faster pace and change would not be such a remote possibility. But it is certainly getting closer to this utopia than it ever did before.

undo.net: With Open Source culture the traditional concept of authorship have radically shifted. What does it mean today to be an “author”?

AC: Perhaps it hasn’t changed meaning. The author has always appropriated imaginaries, formulas and theories that belong to others, taken them forward and put his/her name to the outcome. Open Source culture may only be another platform for the same exercise to take place.

We have posted a few quotes about the relationship between author and progress on Pipeline, a tool we commissioned ElectroNest to set up to share the research generated within Gasworks. Anyone can add more in the comment section.

MJ: – Through Open Source there seems to be a re-emergence of interest in pre-modern literary notions of authorship (if at that stage ‘author’ is the right word); one can argue that the history of printing tells us that intellectual property produced the ‘author’ as a by-product of protecting the income of the distributor. Prior to this, transparent attribution and inheritance, at least in literature, were not only common but natural ways of demonstrating the informed status of one’s work. In this sense, undoing the traditional figure of the author is not necessarily specific to high-tech applications.

Under the FLOSS ethos, even those producing individually authored works can’t claim full authorship – one of the Pipeline bylines Anna mentions above is a quote by philosopher Rodrigo Nunes: “Whenever you make an utterance without crediting someone, you are in fact quoting everything you ever heard, thought and saw.” It throws the lone practitioner out of the ivory tower and relocates him/her back within a quotidian network of influence. Indeed in this way authorial protectiveness is frequently cited as a negative, narcissistic or enclosing gesture.

Nevertheless, this is a very situated position; individual reputation, in the FLOSS world as much as in art, remains an important privilege that often comes in place of financial renumeration. Looking historically again, it also becomes clear that such authorship is a kind of territory, which for centuries has been the construct and preserve of white male bourgeoisie. While FLOSS and contemporary art discourse begin to unpick this position, it potentially reproduces the author as a white male straw man; yet those whose work has only recently been partially accepted into a canon of authorship may have an entirely different relation to it in the first place. There is space for a reinvigoration of what second wave feminism can contribute to considering authorship in FLOSS methodology.

Breda Beban: While filming or taking photos, I tend to go blank. Editing becomes a process of trying to make sense out of the material generated. I think that my films become films when, after looking at the footage a pattern emerges and then the meaning is created.

This interview was conducted over two glasses of red wine and some cigarettes. Later, it was transcribed in my flat on Word in a marathon session of coffee and typing. The transcript was then sent to Beban to tidy her answers. It is now my task to summarise it in an informative and authoritative fashion, in some three-way struggle to locate where the meaning lies between the interview itself, its transcription and its editing processes.

Breda Beban has been living in the UK since 1991, when she moved from the former Yugoslavia. She has worked with film and film installation since the 1980s and in addition has curated projects such as Imagine Art After at Tate Britain (2007-08 ) and the exhibition Imaginary Balkans at Site Gallery (2002). The slide between the depiction of large-scale events and phenomena, and the experience of the specific or the personal, seems to occupy many of her works, operating outwards, until the thematic capture of the work nearly always implicates the viewer.

I had learned that she began working in performance, and I asked her about it. She said she didn’t remember much of it.

BB: I do, however, remember a performance which triggered filmmaking. In the mid 1980s, Hrvoje Horvatic, a young film director, came with a small crew to film one of my performances for a TV programme. As we were going through a brief rehearsal for camera positions, I was openly excited by the fact that whatever I was up to made much more sense when seen on the monitor. The next day Horvatic gave me a call to ask if I would like to make a film. Within a month we produced our first collaborative piece.

Mia Jankowicz: I’m interested in artists like Gail Pickering or Marcia Farquhar, both of whom have recently been making works that tread some line between documentation of performance, performance and filmmaking. That day, what did you recognise in the camera that you realised you might be able to take forward?

BB: It was the way in which the cinematic frame transformed the space. For some, probably unrelated reason a scene from Tarkovsky’s film Nostalgia comes to mind: it’s a very long single shot showing the main character in a rather unfriendly climate as he makes attempts to carry a lighted candle from one end of an empty swimming pool to the other. In essence, it is a performance, however at the same time, it is a very cinematic moment in terms of figure and background relationship, framing, camera movement and distance, and focal depth.

So then a reversal. In Beban’s relation to this most deceptively transparent of media is an understanding of the real as something that still lies under the surface of the footage, waiting to be scratched up and exposed. This seems key to Beban’s relating of histories – the contradiction of the subjective eye being the more effective agent of truth as it rifles through and alters material.

BB: Or, as with The Most Beautiful Woman in Gucha (2006), it shifts from non-edited raw footage to edited footage, when the former is slightly fictionalised. In fictionalising the recorded event, I actually focus on the reality of the moment, if that makes sense. It makes perfect sense to me. [laughs]

In this work (displayed at Tate Britain this winter), the camera follows an incredibly beautiful belly dancer who is working, glazed with boredom and sweat, at a cacophonous Serbian festival. For her own amusement she picks on a handsome but wasted young man sitting almost asleep with his family. There is clearly chemistry and a subtle power dynamic.

BB: I filmed 20 hours of footage. As I was viewing it, I knew that the new film was to be found somewhere in the 19 min recording of a particular event. I could remember the genuine intensity of the moment as I was filming it. However, the recorded footage didn’t really match the memory of the reality as experienced on location. Therefore, I decided to reclaim it through postproduction.

Before this interview, we once had had a conversation during which I had asked Beban about her use of archival television footage in a work called How to Change Your Life in a Day (2004), specifically of a woman mourning publicly in a headscarf.

MJ: Through re-editing the archival footage, the work seems to re-invest these images with some impact again. Otherwise these images are so tired and abstracted to people who are channel-surfing, that they’re almost bland symbols of conflict.

BB: That’s what you do when you’re bombed. You cry.

Maybe it’s because you are on a sofa on the outside of the TV screen – I am one of these women on the other side of the screen. We are a background for the news reporter, like wallpaper. Yes, a war is engineered somewhere, then there’s the TV crew, the newsreader and women grieving in the background. I wanted to engage with this phenomenon in a straightforward way.

The title How to Change Your Life in a Day is taken from the self-help book Change Your Life in 7 Days by the popular hypnotist Paul McKenna, and which topped the bestseller charts in the UK at the time. The piece is set to the sound of a hypnotic voice, which supposedly has the power to induce one’s connection with the perfect self and consequently transform one’s life. The images show the domestic setting of a covered window, overlooking a residential area in London, interjected by newsreel archive footage of grieving women. The window is covered by a blind that moves with the wind in tandem with the voice and appears to obey its instruction, occasionally revealing the outside view.

My intention was to set a popular quest for the ideal self in the so-called developed part of the world alongside the devastating outcomes of contemporary world politics.

As commodified as it seems to be in the hands of someone like Paul McKenna, healing still seems to be a part of the process for Beban. In 2002 she was invited by Site Gallery to curate a show of art from the Balkans which ended up being Imaginary Balkans, and in 2007 the process of Imagine Art After – in which artists based in postcolonial countries correspond with diasporic artists from the same origin – came to fruition in an exhibition at Tate Britain.

MJ: Both of the projects you have been invited to curate seem to stem from the premise that art has a role to play in healing.

BB: Both projects come from a necessity for telling stories that the official narratives and histories are often unable to tell. Based on a kind of ‘big’ (i.e. fucked up) life I’ve had, I am driven by the need to highlight unexpected facts and fictions and hopefully to introduce some form of change. It would be good to know that some form of healing could be achieved in the process.

Funnily enough, the title of one of the pieces I’m currently working on is Heal Me. Yes, there is definitely something in the word ‘healing’ that I am attracted to. I also like the concept of white magic. It’s easy to be bad, whatever that means… I find life much more interesting when the word healing comes into play.

MJ: Does that mean there’s a moral bent to your work?

BB: ‘Moral’ is confusing, ‘healing’ is not. I’m certainly slightly wary of certain moral issues inherent in the European tradition of philosophy which I’ve been exposed to while growing up. To start with, it’s predominantly a male territory.

I was nervous to ask the next question and phrased it badly. What I really meant to ask her was whether she had ever been aware of certain exoticising gaze from the economic and artistic ‘West’, and if she ever thought artists internalised it; it leading to an anticipatory form of art making that, by providing something to rub up against, allows the West to perform the assuaging of its colonial guilt while re-embedding certain ethnic tropes. In explicit or implicit terms, but that’s the box that certain artists are allowed to prosper within. I had been reading Radical Chic by Tom Wolfe at the time. But she somehow got what I meant.

BB: Whenever I have to talk about ethnic aspects of art in general without referring to individual works, I feel like talking about pornography where the mechanics are revealed, but everything else is hidden.

I make different kinds of works, but the work that is based on where I come from tends to come across well. Does this say something about me or about the audience’s expectations? I certainly am not in charge of this game. I’m willing to ask myself whether I’m better, whether what I do communicates better when based on the part of the world where I come from. But then where am I from? Marked by the process of Gypsyfication, I feel rather liberated by the absence of desire to belong to a place.

Maybe there is a valid reason why these issues are relevant over here. When The Most Beautiful Woman in Gucha was recently exhibited in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, the audiences seem to have enjoyed it without questioning the ethnic aspect of the film.

Aside from anything else, it’s a sexy piece. I was reminded of her mention of pornography, defined here as the pure display of mechanics but somehow missing the essence of what happened, all the same. I had been intrigued by the romance of the story of how another work, Beautiful Exile (2003), got made. It’s a five-channel installation piece, where each screen displays a head and shoulder shot of a woman prior to, and then reaching, orgasm.

BB: An essential part of Beautiful Exile is the subject of surrender. It had to be filmed with close friends and a cinematographer like Robby Muller, who is women’s accomplice. While we were filming in Duino, there was a strong sense of bonding. It seemed like a long moment where all other points of reference have disappeared. We had each other, the beautiful bay, the sea, a commitment to the project and plenty of wine. Some of the women involved claim that they were deeply changed by the experience of filming.

And the exile thing has to do with the impossibility of finding a clear-cut notion of identity. One is much more aware of this as a migrant – identity becomes such a big, heavy question, you become so tired of its inadequacy; all you want to do is to escape.

It works on a psychological level as well. At the moment when one begins to think that a singular definition for a particular understanding of a point in life has been reached, this is exactly the moment when one begins to dissolve into hundreds of combinations. When it comes to definitions, I like the fallings apart.

The viewer of Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Today is led chronologically through the most infamous periods of sexual depiction across various times and cultures, staying largely with the preoccupations of Western Europe but also delving into Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Persian and ancient Roman collections of works. The ground floor takes up the ‘historical’ perspective and the upstairs galleries hold contemporary and early modern works. The exhibition is accompanied by a curated season of events ranging from film screenings, burlesque nights, to flirting classes, serving to link the exhibition’s historical trajectory to our present day sexual consumption and habits. I visited on the night when the London club night Torture Garden was the guest event, and any pretence of an atmosphere of sober, historical reflection were whisked away entirely by gaggles of fetish clubbers and innumerable couples on dates.

Seduced has been designed with both monumentality and intimacy in mind – smallish chambers hold distinct bodies of work on the ground floor, while in the centre of the gallery a full height structure links the ground floor to the upper galleries, creating ample space for some of the more spectacular contemporary works to be displayed above the chambers. Such tactics create the possibility for artlessly interesting connections without shoving any anachronisms down the viewer’s throat. Chris Cunningham’s 2000 film flex (Excerpt) flickers uncannily above the Sex and Cold Marble section, which deals in classical antiquity and includes the beautiful Roman sculpture Sleeping Hermaphrodite (2nd Century AD). Also are projected some of the simplest and sexiest works in the entire show, Warhol’s 16mm films Kiss, which records head shots of couples kissing messily, and Blowjob, which notoriously records the faces of men receiving oral sex (both 1963).

This assertion about Blowjob and Kiss betrays the difficulty in holding a critical position on Seduced. The show is designed to arouse, and if something so subjectivised as arousal is the main criterion of value then the art critic here is doing little more than projecting her personal kicks onto others. On this level, Seduced can seemingly escape any true critical assessment: if it doesn’t turn you on, the problem’s with you and your libido. If Boucher’s genitally literal treatment of Leda and the swan doesn’t do anything for you, then maybe Alfred Kinsey’s largely uncredited collection of graphic and pornographic photographs will. Given the variety, very few people are likely to leave without a throbbing heart (or something like that), and so this critical equivalence is not too much of a problem.

Despite the tone of pure sensation, Seduced does, however, have its own constructs and positions. The very first work confronting the viewer is a large plaster fig leaf by an unknown artist borrowed from the V&A. Created specifically for the eyes of Queen Victoria, its job was to cover the genitalia of the museum’s cast of Michaelangelo’s David. These days at the V&A it hangs on the back of David’s plinth, near the wall, and only those who happen to wish to see his behind ever discover the leaf, with a note telling of its now redundant role. The roles of the genitalia and its fig leaf have thus been reversed, and as an added irony, only the especially lascivious (there’s only one, very firm, reason to look at the back of David) get to discover the fig leaf’s existence.

The inclusion of David’s fig leaf falls within a narrative construct that is now rather familiar, from Ann Summers shops to Channel Four late night documentaries – that of happyfun sex winning a battle over censorship and public morality. In prefacing the entire exhibition with the fig leaf, the show’s curators Marina Wallace, Martin Kemp and Joanne Bernstein position Seduced squarely within this narrative, seemingly taking at face value what Foucault’s History of Sexuality identified as the discursive driving force for western expressions of sexuality. Subsections feature The Reserved Cabinet and the Secretum, collections of sexually explicit objects and works from classical antiquity onwards that in 19th century Europe were given their present names and correspondingly illicit status. Thus many of the works exist within a double timeline; that of their own creation, meaning, narrative and context, and that of their subsequent place within western scientia sexualis and its morality. As a show patently foreseen as a blockbuster, Seduced’s dialectic of expression versus repression acts as a kind of pantomime argument that only makes its plethora of sexual variety stand out in even sharper relief.

This aspect of the forbidden adds spice, but it also forecloses much debate on what other ideological frameworks might wish to question dominant forms of sexual expression within art. Seduced shares this situation with much contemporary popular culture, whereby radically-informed criticism constantly risks being conflated with conservative moralistic repression. The anti-censorship tone of the exhibition is in some ways contradictory, given that the curators have been highly selective of what aspect of sex in art they have decided to reflect. “We have excluded exploitative images that are savagely aggressive or degrading. Consent is an important watchword” state the curators in the catalogue introduction.

This puts a huge question mark over Seduced’s numerous depictions of satyrs busy raping nymphs, and paintings such as Fragonard’s The Beautiful Servant (Pointless Resistance), whose story of an assaulted servant is clearly told between the image and the title. Rape, when it’s a bit Roman, or when it’s conducted in a chocolate-boxy scene of billowing skirts, apparently isn’t rape at all. The presentation of these works is a difficult line to walk, as the curators at this moment (despite the earlier quote) seem to have decided that it is important to reflect honestly the presence of these works as aspects of their contemporaneous mores. However, this possible ‘distanced’ line of reasoning is difficult in such a provocative show, as Seduced, in all of its sexiness, has already set its stall absolutely nowhere near the idea of providing a scene for distanced moral reflection. Through these slightly mixed messages, the line between non-judgmental exposition and implicit approval of the scenes becomes blurred.

A more clear-cut position is Seduced’s avoidance of the conflation of ‘sex’ as a physically and mentally provocative experience, with ‘sex’ as a set of gendered constructs. The curators state, in the same catalogue essay: “Equally, we have avoided […] images that directly address issues of gender. The exhibition is concerned with depictions of the sexual act – whether before, during, or after.”

The very small number of female artists in the show – for which the curators can hardly be blamed – is clear evidence of the historical marginalising (to put it mildly) of female sexual expression. Seduced’s focus on something as vital and basic as sex does something rather urgent to the over-familiar cry of ‘where are the women artists?’ – making us realise that this is not simply an unfashionably 1990s-bound question of identity politics, but a question of the formation of female collective memory and the subsequent uncertainty it places over the very idea and expression of female experience. Put simply, if we don’t know what women really found good about sex then, then how can we be sure we know what we like now?

Louise Bourgeois’ sculptural works Couple (1996) and Couple III (1997) are paired with Rihcrad Hamilton’s Typo/Typography of Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass (2003) in what has to be the least titillating room of the exhibition. In Couple, headless bodies formed of clothing are sewn into each other in folded, embracing forms that are more uncanny than at all sexual. The work refers to the adolescent Bourgeois’ bewildered sense of jealousy of couples, the work taking to its logical extreme the perpetually-attached sensuality that comes so naturally to lovers and that sticks out like a sore thumb to the lonely and single. The work is not in the least arousing, but is one of the rare pieces that deal with the psychological experience of a desiring female body.

The only other work that deals directly with purely female sexual experience from a female perspective is kr buxey’s Requiem (2002). This video work, shown as a response to Warhol’s Blowjob, and depicts the artist, from head and shoulders up, experiencing the slow buildup to orgasm. Its monumental aspect is emphasised by the accompanying classical music, and the work is frankly sexual without succumbing to the visual language of pornography, largely thanks to buxey’s unglamorised appearance. It’s a strong work, but its importance in this context depends on its status in opposition to the wholesale glorification of a male sexual viewpoint.

Seduced, like any exhibition, cannot stand outside of the problems, freedoms, and sexual contradictions of contemporary liberal society, but it clearly exists as a vivid and multifaceted part of them.

Published in Untitled March 2008

‘Take care of yourself, yeah?’ is probably the last, and least sincere instruction made by those on the point of concluding a successful romantic disentanglement. Intended to instate a more platonically-based relation, in fact this throwaway line more realistically functions as the final signifier that your rapidly-becoming-ex lover has had the audacity to absolve himself of any responsibility for your welfare. Most of us, in our impotent fury, reach for whatever crutch it takes (gin, large bags of crisps, promiscuity) to get over it. For Sophie Calle, however, the resultant confusion is the basis for a project.

Having received a break-up email concluding with this sentiment, Calle found it so difficult to take in that she employed 107 women to interpret or transcribe the text using their various professional skills. The interpretations range from more direct bureaucratic processes, such as analysing the letter for legal implications or the correction of grammatical and spelling mistakes; through to more performative responses such as a ballerina ‘dancing’ the letter and a parakeet beakily tearing it up. The presentation is highly seductive, with each printed/annotated set of conclusions configured both within a framed, enlarged print, and also available for closer inspection as the original ‘documentation’ laminated in lead-framed Perspex. The bourgeois presentation succeeds with the prim, whimsical aesthetics of paper bureaucracy, and avoids that sensation of ‘I’ll buy the book’ that has been the downfall of many other documentation-based projects – despite Calle’s own assertion that she is generally much more comfortable working in book format. Those correspondents whose responses are more suited to video (mostly performance based) are presented in one darkened space by three large screens and in another as a whole bank of many smaller screens running simultaneously.

Like a princess obliged to seek a suitor, Calle had been unsure of the necessity for a curator and had considered and ultimately rejected the various bright young things suggested to her. She eventually decided simply to submit the role to an open application process via three French art publications. Her stable-boy prince turned out to be Daniel Buren, whose ambivalence towards the growth of the role of curator is well known. Paying further attention to this strategy as part of the work would undermine both Buren’s wariness of curatorial ‘authorship’, and the thematic sovereignty of the piece. Buren, having reconfigured the interior walls and incorporated the peristyle to create seven rooms, appears to have worked largely along the more conventional curatorial lines of spatial arrangement to serve the interpretative experience of the viewer. However, on a more general level the recruitment method does find some echoes in Calle’s career – the relinquishing of semantic control by opening a conduit for the anonymous to become the intimate.
Within the show, this tendency is emphasised with a photographic portrait of various participating women, each reading the letter in question. The considered, luminous staginess of the photographs strongly evokes the basic feminist notion of ‘sisterhood’, despite all participants being paid professionals. It’s impossible not to draw some form of gendered meaning from Calle’s involvement of only female correspondents (were it the other way round, it could possibly go unremarked upon, but that’s an issue for another day). The persistent sense of female camaraderie is also achieved through the sheer entertainment value there is in seeing 107 women more or less humiliate a man – it’s not exactly fair play, but reading a journalist’s list of reasons why the letter is not newsworthy enough to be featured by her paper, or looking over the pedantry of a proofreader’s corrections, does have a cumulative comic effect. Calle overperforms, and thereby lampoons, male privilege by taking a man’s text very, very seriously; to be fair, it’s taken far more seriously than he would ever advocate. It is, of course, the ultimate revenge.

The processing of this letter in so many ways makes it into a satisfying semantic machine, whereby so many forms and meanings are extracted from one private communication. One feminist assertion holds that all (107) semiotic processes are constructed within the bounds of patriarchy, and cannot therefore fully express an understanding not tainted by male domination; if this is so, Calle’s attempt nevertheless seems more playful than futile.

2 July 2007