Pensée Atef Mohran
July, 2022
Exactly two years ago, if I wanted to output my insights on a piece of reading I was assigned to critique as an English major, I would, as a force of habit, opt for responding in writing an MLA research paper; conceptual, reflective, and informative. One step further would be an in-class presentation; dull, strictly-graded, and academia-bound.One year later I would experiment with audio-video documentation advancements when I join the Jesuits Film School Program in Alexandria, and graduate with my first short documentary. But, I would still have this urging question regarding the intricate relationship between text and image–Is there more to it than fiction and documentary films? An interdisciplinary point of intersection between art and academia, perhaps? In this paper I attempt to share my reflections on the 4 main workshops of the Visual Arts Program at Behna Al Wakalah and the possibilities they left me with.
As for Magic of Text as Space workshop, the core point for me was the definition of artistic research and its production in an age of contemporaneity. AbdelKarim and Abuarafeh proposed this question of whether artistic research can be considered academic research.Upon reading the first chapter of The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research, one comes across research in, for, and on arts. Borgdoff, the author, suggests that,”[One] can justifiably speak of artistic research (research in [and through] arts) when the artistic practice is not only the result of the research, but also its methodological vehicle” (Borgdoff, 46). Unlike academia, the outcome of artistic research is not a means to an end. That is to say the art practice is pivotal as the subject-matter, the method, context, and the result of artistic research. An art scholar would know better to keep their theoretical distance when writing, while an artistic researcher is freely experimenting with myriad measures of discursive creating and performing- a process that recurs in the research at every turn for an artistic researcher does not know what they do not know yet.
One step away from academia is performance; performing text, performing gestures. Examples of early performers are Robert Morris’, Standing in a Box, leaning till it fell and Bruce Numan’s Performance Corridor where he manipulates his movements around his studio, Bas Jan Ader’s performance, Fall 2, Amsterdam where the artist peddles beside a canal on an Amsterdam street when he swerves toward the water, willing to experience his body on a bicycle and go thus far splashing into water, “not even hurt, just ill-adapted to the world: social suicide” (EXPO CHICAGO: A History of Performance in 20 Mins), Yves Klein who literally leaps into the void, and a group of artists performing a written text in a room, singing to it. improvising; Balz Isler: Gaps of Wonderland. Early performers were keen on experimenting with all that is conscious and sublime to the very limit of their body– Sisyphuses demonstrating the impossibility of perpetual motion: no possible way out. The final conclusion drawn in this workshop was how globalization, the internet, made lecture performances a thing: The lecture in and as art. Mixing the means of artistic research and art (lecture) and (performance) the information is not rigid and raw; it is rather antithetical to the solitary, antisocial modes of online research and socialization: it is human-all-too-human, bringing genuine vicinity to the table.
Recent Claims, Forms and Shortcomings of Dissent in the Contemporary Art: A Review– was the title to the workshop facilitated by Dina Aboul Fotouh and Ghalya Saadawi–one that I find challenging because the more I read into it the less sure I am of a definite definition of contemporary art let alone fathom the institutional critique it postulated. I agree with Suhail Malik, where in his talk “A History of Negations,” he claims that contemporary art has no identity. It is instrumentalised, stuck-up, away from “the real.” What I understand, basically, is that globalized contemporary art is ricocheting in this duality of what it is: artificial, institutionalised, indeterminate, open-ended; and what it should be: real, autonomous. See, Malik’s talks ruined me for good.Then again, what is contemporary art if not defined from a bird’s-eye view in some conference held in NY or London? In more peripheral regions like the Middle East, contemporary art is a product of a rupture which occurred after the “end of art”- a new third system of art, that is. A case in point would be Al-Nitaq’s Festival which was held in Downtown Cairo in 2000. In her chapter in Contemporary Art and Capitalist Modernization, Aboul Fotouh mentions the new channel that this festival established has paved the way for modes of production and distribution; one that’s arguably set far away from the dictatorial state bureaucracy (254-256).
I also mention Al-Nitaq because I want to postulate critiquing the art institution of, say, the Ministry of Culture. How to critique the institution in light of late Capitalism and a concept of contemporary art with its all-encompassing definition(s)? In his essay “The Ape Says No,” Suhail Malik claims art’s total freedom from the institution; that art reserves a place for itself outside the social practice and the tacit political fight is a radical human rights postulation. This guarantees contemporary art’s valorization as an affirmative negation of institutionalisation. But, this is too radical, too ideal to be true- much like what happened with the French Revolution (a radical dismantling of the state only brought bloodshed and an underlying regression because actual problems were not addressed gradually), radicality never brought actual change; it helps no one since, in this case, the institution would still dominate and patronise with an ongoing affinity with the people of Al-Nitaq festival or anyone who tries to break free-affirmatively negating the state. An artist, however, who still works in the institution and wants compromised freedom; aims at an infrastructural change, that is, they are acknowledging the institution as an entity, but choosing to negate- is an ape screaming negating nonsense in vain, insinuating negation to no avail. It is only when it learns to speak the language of the institution that it gradually disagrees affirmatively with a negative, “No!” loud and clear. What is left of infrastructural critique is, on one hand, forms that deal with structural concerns of workplace or labor rights, such as, W.A.G.E.,Gulf Labour, and art unions. They call to strike entire entire museum board members, boycotting biennials, and sharing pay spreadsheets– infrastructural affirmative negation. On the other hand, there are projects like weird economics, Forensic Architecture in the art space, and Phase of Transition; these seek to coexist with socio-political, economic and legal systems aiming at remodeling existing infrastructures across contemporary arts’ arenas; providing a new paradigm for art platforms (Saadawi, “Vapid Virtues and Real Stakes: Left Art Protocols''). Side note: Despite the contingent road an independent festival like Al-Nitaq might have paved for contemporary art to thrive, one might assume it was also paving the way of genterificating areas where future galleries for state propaganda are built–
I believe it is safe to say that Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s What’s Absent is At Work: Workshop on “Artistic Research” was a sister-workshop to Nour Abuarafeh and AbdelKarim’s Magic of Text as Space. What was theorised for and introduced in Nour and AbdelKarim’s was practiced more and pondered upon in Natascha’s. In the second the highlighted space was the text as a point of departure for performance; text as a space for fictionalising gaps in an artist’s research if the archival facts were lacking, or simply, dull, so we find Noor Abu Arafeh utilising museum’s archive to construcg an imagined museum: The first Palestinian musem in town–building her piece, Rumors Began Some Time Ago. While in Haghighian’s the highlighted space is “at” work. Natascha challenges the notion of artistic research as a body of work restricted to tangibility,visibility, or being institution-based and argues that one needs more than vision to make sense of such a complex reality of a practice-based, or studio-based research. In a way, Haghighian proposes the artist goes back and forth between practicing performance and writing about it. Because what is absent is really in the work. Natascha would suggest walking into a library of archives, identity-less, with a blank notebook taking notes of your stream of consciousness while unraveling an ancient archive is work, unironically. According to her, it’s a hands-on practice that is so very present and ricocheting to your research body of work. I remember how my friends were elated when she asked them to show her their handwriting and the way they normally take down notes, doodle or type on their phones. Even in that simple, mundane act she could draw a line of thought.
Another space she adamantly highlighted was how the body was the archive, and memory of the artistic research. Honestly, I found the list of multimedia and listening performances in this section overwhelming to an extent. Someone echoing their voice in a room-a loop of echoes(I’m Sitting in a Room (1967) by Alvin Lucier), another was an attempt to listen to a performer’s nervous system in his head via physiotherapy-like wires- a human-based orchestra(Music for Solo Performer (1965) by Alvin Lucier), and one was for a lady toning out her screams mustering using her larynx on tape and video (The Voice of the Wind is not a Metaphor (2021) by Jasmina and Kamila Metwaly),another was for a boy imitating the sound of a bullet in the air (Sing for me a little by Omar Mismar) or better yet, Pauline Oliveros, an awesome composer, giving meditative instructions on how to listen to basically anything- start from your breath, “Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears'' (Sonic Meditations). Now, taking a walk has more meaning to it. It is not merely moving your legs in arbitrary movements; it’s your body remembering how to walk; the body as a vessel, a cartilage of ink that runs out sometimes. While you do your research on things outside you, you will find answers awaiting you at the tip of your fingers–just in the right time–research peoples echoing their voices and sounds across personal rooms, spaces, making use and creating with what they have, no matter how limited-in-their-endeavours they feel: Lungs expanding underwater and feet swelling from swallowing the pain that is touching the ground when the body they are carrying is heavy with fear, overworked and existentially tired of moving, of having to move–
Last but not least, was Assem A. Hendawi and Bahar Noorizadeh’s Contemporary Art in the Age of Financial Speculation (that is a name I have just come up with in light of what I gathered so far). One salient opener notion postulated by this workshop was: “There is a shift in thinking.” Noorizadeh’s point of departure was neoliberalism—an amalgam of idealist battles with no base in today’s lived reality; that there was never pure capitalism, socialism, but an accelerated form of both- a product of how investors’ and shareholders’ actions, rather than what either movements intended in the first place.In Michel Feher’s Lecture “The Journey to Self-Esteem,” he elaborates on this shift of thinking mentioned earlier. To insure the survival of political neoliberalism, neoliberals made sure liberal democracy was not left on its own lest it creates a fatal descent into socialism, thus, economical liberalism would be safe, sustained. The shift in perspective starts when an individual treats their life as their business. The focus was now given to making yourself creditworthy, of course that is not the same as seeking the maximisation of your profit. The focus is shifted from a profit-seeking business to a credit seeking portfolio. All a contemporary artist ever aims at in such a paradigm is to attempt the liberty of changing from object making to becoming art’s subject: a speculation of a fake persona, that is. Or as Noorizadeh put it commenting on this text in our discussion: What satisfaction is to profit, self-esteem is to credit.
Another point of discussion was how capitalism has now expanded into finance so much so that financial activism is not a matter of choice anymore. And it definitely is not personal. Exemplary of this was the Gamestock adventure, how a group of amateur investors tried to give the WallStreet hedge funds a lesson via short squeezing them and buying more shares in Gamestock till the owner of Robinhood froze their buying, Feher mentions that, “[ the WallStreet Reddit degenerates’] main purpose was to make money for themselves, not to challenge financial capitalism.” Their financial speculative move, despite self-gratifying in essence, asserts that speculation is now accessbale for the wider mob. (Feher, “Another Speculation Is Possible: The Political Lesson of R/WallStreetBets”).
To conclude this part, what Noorizadeh describes as a “byzantine crises of global capitalisation,” in a cybertonia-fantasy world of computers–the internet– scale planning was equated with imagination, and economic efficiency has not been always the characteristic of political economy. The hallmark of economy has always been economic growth, an accelerated one: A concept that gave rise to platform capitalism (Cybernetic Pasts, Financial Futures,pp.256-257). In this system markets are no longer about the value of exchanged commodities, but rather about platforms; social media, on which resources are shared for the sake of rating, “modifying the value attributed to someone or something”– allocated credit, that is. And that, I believe, is the main shift in thinking.
All in all, ranging from a workshop on artistic research in which the text is a the medium of performative expression if one let it be, to one, getting more practical, on the body as research tool, the body as archive and memory, to another on a possible definition of contemporary art and its dissent and the position of the artist in relation to the institution; infrastructural negation, to one last workshop on what comes after a capitalist scarcity and how to entertain the idea of a speculative finance whereby self-esteem is more important than profit-- with one workshop leading to another, one grows weary; staring at a dull wall in the corner of their room just to try and let it all sink in. Perhaps this paper is incomplete, still, for I have read the piece Architecture is Obsolete to no avail of formulating words of reflection on it simply because it is too accurate, for me, to elaborate on now. My reflections are incomplete however, I am taking the day to digest what I have just finished writing on because today the way I see my practice is brand-new multifaceted with an amalgamation of nonlinear history and "weird economy."
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