#4 International Now-Here


Sina Najafi, New York

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2. Which chances do you see for the ongoing democratization of art? Is it possible to break out of the framework of market hierarchy and exclusive global representation?

What was once an interesting question of scale in art has now become a mere question of size. Stop the supersizing of art.
Make all artworks and art criticism anonymous.
This suggestion, adapted from Foucault, counters the fact that “a name makes reading too easy.” Art will be changed as dramatically as banning inheritance would change the world.

 

3. How important is it today to stop the conveyors of big events, opting instead for internationalist work on location? 

Place a moratorium on all biennials for a period of at least four years.
Also, no more books and shows purporting to round up “the best” of this and that.

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Victor Misiano, Moscow

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1. How important is it to appeal to the Communist roots of globalization today?

How to cope with the Communist and Soviet legacies is one of the key questions of today. The provincialization of the Russian context is connected to the following: while it is possible to speak to the world through the language of Marxism-Leninism, it is impossible to communicate with the world in rhetoric that promises “the return to the civilized family of nations” or extols “the former greatness of Russia”. Indeed, globalization-processes in the contemporary sense did actually arise during the expansion of capitalism during the 19th century, and the Communist worker’s movement really was a part of these processes. By the same token, Marxian theory was really the most adequate theory for describing these processes; it also represented the most authoritative theory for emancipation. It was Soviet Russia’s participation in the Communist project that made her one of the preceding century’s key subjects of history, located in the epicenter of the world’s social processes. Our “thinking class” has not yet been able to suggest a new understanding of the Soviet experience, adequate to the present: one can see this as an intellectual defeat. We either reproduce the birth of the rhetoric of exposure or dethroning from the Cold War, or undertake the aesthetic styling of several external attributes or ideologemes of “Soviet culture” or “Communism”. If we fail to gain a stereoscopic view – both analytical or critical and animate or alive – we will not be able to build our contemporary identity, finding our voice in the contemporary dialogue of globalization.

 

2. Which chances do you see for the ongoing democratization of art? Is it possible to break out of the framework of market hierarchy and exclusive global representation?

So the cult of “big events” is born from the democratic efforts of modern art? I beg to differ. Exclusiveness is actually how the democratic masses understand art! It would be a simplification only to draw connections to artistic phenomena such as Fluxus or the Situationist International, even if they problematize the artistic statement as a means of searching for new, more democratic forms for the circulation of art through society. There are artists – even Picasso and Warhol – who, in the process of solving completely different questions, came to embody creativity in society’s eye, transforming mass-cultural ideas on the visual per se. This too is a civic task, which is connected to democracy just as much as anything else is. During the last years, art and the art system have become immeasurably more democratic. A system of non-profit organizations has been established; intellectual debates have become the natural norm within artistic institutions; the impartial judgment of experts and expert-structures has effectively usurped the authority of the galleries etc.

 

4. In how far is the experience of new local communities that draw their linguistic legitimacy from global pop-culture? In how far do they influence the development of contemporary art?

I feel that that the network-type of alternative movement has already exhausted itself, following what was a romantic period of initiation. Today, we are facing a different situation: on invitation from the mayor of Florence, the anti-globalists brought more than a million of protestors to the streets; “Attac” has been invited to join a revived socialist party etc. Instead of networks, we need real national and transnational organizations, culture instead of subculture. While this certainly brings the danger of bureaucratization and the imposition of hierarchy etc., it is the only way for actually reforming society and effectively counteracting the cultural industry’s muting of sub-cultural initiatives. The future party structure will face the task of renewing the institutions of representative democracy and its system of cultural and educational institutions. This task cannot be achieved on the fairground of a carnival.

 

5. Is international style the only relevant possibility for addressing the local problematique? Is there any room left for creative misunderstandings, lost in translation, experiences that are both subjective and local? Which experiences have you made in highlighting the uniqueness of a local cultural context as something of general relevance?

The opposition “global vs. local” is a dichotomy of the 1990s. Today we are facing a form of re-sovereignization, a return to the nation state, to confession. Once again, people are turning to the institutions of the nation-state or the institutionalized churches for protection from globalism’s unifying tendency. This is why the dichotomy between the global and the local disappears and is replace by the dichotomy between the national and the international (!)

 
See the Russian version of the site for the author’s complete answer.

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Oleg Kireev, Moscow

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1. How important is it to appeal to the Communist roots of globalization today?

It is enough to skim through the cross-referenced links on the IndyMedia list to understand the force and size of international solidarity. If capitalism is global, then resistance is international. On the other hand, we Russians have been excluded from this intellectual laboratory and its inspiring activity.
…We have yet to understand the meaning and content of Soviet Internationalism – we are all living on its shards. To global/international humanity, the defeat of the Soviet state became a wound or trauma, which continues to obscure its view of its own past. This can be compared to a blind spot in the field of vision. Please note that I am not saying that the society of the future should be built upon a Soviet model. However, first, we need to consider the Soviet experience. Personally, I think that it is a great historical challenge that we all face – namely, to understand, focus and examine this experience, in order to bring some clarity to the matter. Why did the Soviet empire crumble and fall? The answer is important for them as well as us. This is the local context, which we need to connect to the context of globality.

 

2. How important is it today to stop the conveyors of big events, opting instead for internationalist work on location?

The technologies of resistance need to be adequate to their local situations, but if globalization, by definition, is bringing the same values, orders, techniques of coercion to many different countries, activists from all of these different places have good reason to trade notes of how to resist them. While the European Left is always the first to discover and set “trends” – new technologies, for an example – in order to develop its method of resistance, Third World countries tend to receive these methodologies, reworking them to fit their own situation, enriching them with their non-Western experience and returning them in an altered form. This is even more interesting in a situation where there are suddenly many “centers” and many peripheries, when the exchange becomes more and more interesting and the root rises exponentially, to three or five…
This is what actually happened with the conception of “tactical media”. It developed in Amsterdam, and then, it was used successfully in India, Brazil and Italy.

 

3. In how far is the experience of new local communities that draw their linguistic legitimacy from global pop-culture? In how far do they influence the development of contemporary art?

The organization of the movement as a network (and not as a hierarchy, such as the traditional International) is really one of the discoveries and achievements of the contemporary Left. But for how long can this continue? As Empire grows stronger in terms of politics and military force, will the Left find itself in need of a more rigid, disciplinary form of self-organization? Or can this self-organization find some new developmental vector, free of partisan interest and discipline?

 

4. Is international style the only relevant possibility for addressing the local problematic? Is there any room left for creative misunderstandings, lost in translation, experiences that are both subjective and local? Which experiences have you made in highlighting the uniqueness of a local cultural context as something of general relevance?

As far as the specifics of working with context are concerned, the worldwide movement only needs clear and comprehensive information to know what exactly is going on. I don’t see any way other than speaking to one another extensively and appropriately, telling stories, asking “them” what’s going over “there”, and telling “them” what’s happening here with “us”. By probing and making mistakes, we can come to a mutual understanding that corresponds to the contemporary world’s high level of complexity.

 

See the Russian version of the site for the author’s complete answer.

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Dmitry Gutov, Moscow

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2. Which chances do you see for the ongoing democratization of art? Is it possible to break out of the framework of market hierarchy and exclusive global representation?

The “art world” is a corporation just like any other. It is impossible to speak of any democratization on its territory.

 

3. How important is it today to stop the conveyors of big events, opting instead for internationalist work on location?

To me, a reaccentuation of internationalist work on location seems both senseless and irresponsible. Nobody “on location” actually needs this kind of art.

 

5. Is international style the only relevant possibility for addressing the local problematique? Is there any room left for creative misunderstandings, lost in translation, experiences that are both subjective and local? Which experiences have you made in highlighting the uniqueness of a local cultural context as something of general relevance?

It is decadent “to search for spaces of creative misunderstanding”. Anything in local experience that has no universal meaning automatically disappears.

 

See the Russian version of the site for the author’s complete answer.

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Pyotr Bystrov, Moscow

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1. How important is it to appeal to the Communist roots of globalization today?

The rhetorics of “democratism” and “internationalism” are characteristic of the world-wide process of globalization. Whose “internationalism”? Whose “solidarity”? It is crucial to understand all of this, because there are no abstract “communications”, “unifications”, or “brotherhoods”. The pathos of “solidarity” or of “equal opportunity” etc. are incidental to big corporations and business projects. And the way the question is formulated in its given form hardly allows for the development of any adequate solution. I don’t agree with the way it is posed. It is impossible to conquer global representation, because there will always be millions of people who lick their fingers at a spectacle in its alienated form. A simple call for “democratization” will not change anything in that matter.
The democratization of the art world is a tendency that doesn’t exist. I simply don’t agree to the fact that it plays any role at all. For this reason, I have no means of making any judgment, insofar as the “chances for the ongoing democratization of art” are concerned.

 

4. In how far is the experience of new local communities that draw their linguistic legitimacy from global pop-culture? In how far do they influence the development of contemporary art?

The last years have failed to produce any fundamentally new form of community. Moreover, all of the old forms have succumbed to commercialization, degenerating or dying out. All of this has happened without the exclusion of “crowds” or groups of friends, dependent on the global media-order, infected by the virus of “success”, “the very best” and all the rest. In principle, only one thing is important: movements and artists represent a certain value. Their activity offers a fundamental appeal. Subcultures are often much alike in their use of pseudo-activist slang. A sign-system with referents such as “realness” or “radicalism” is actually little more than a clich? since its over-exploited terms can be related to anything at all. If a movement arose who potential values would not consist in making the “top ten”, of becoming a trend-setter, there might actually be something to talk about. However, most movements, directions and groups measure themselves by (and represent) the values of clich?s. “Radical chic” is a gene of “victoriomorphosis” (=triumphant opportunism), destructive from within. All of these international communities aren’t even worth a damn, simply because their architecture (their structural base) is identical to a key product of the media – clans, “families” and mafias. Art only deceives itself through a false orientation toward what seem to be objective societal precedents. But these do not exist.

 
5. Is international style the only relevant possibility for addressing the local problematique? Is there any room left for creative misunderstandings, lost in translation, experiences that are both subjective and local? Which experiences have you made in highlighting the uniqueness of a local cultural context as something of general relevance?

In the final analysis, global significance is constructed by concrete personalities, which interpret and re-transmit their personal taste in the regime and the rhetoric of “socially relevant events. The verdict on the acceptance of projects or programmatic texts is always pronounced on a personal basis, deciding on what to promote, what to launch, and what to leave rotting in marginality. Global significance is a projection, a phantasm of an individual who suffers under the mania of “globalism”. Context is never objective. Mass culture produces the fiction of “collectiveness”. The unification of language and style is impossible. If someone “understands” you, it is a lie, a game, a construction of meaning. It’s always nice to “agree”, just as it is also always nice to fuck. Because fucking means that you are loved. But that is a fiction.

 

See the Russian version of the site for the author’s complete answer.

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Dmitry Bulatov, Kaliningrad

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1. How important is it to appeal to the Communist roots of globalization today?

For me, the appeal to such roots is not important. Instead, I see a number of principles, one of which consists in a serious reconfiguration of all relationship-systems, a change that has taken place within the last years. We have long since passed the transnational stage of capitalism’s expansion, the stage that influenced the birth of the Communist Manifesto. In examining all of the contemporary system’s components, it is impossible to find anything that corresponds to the historical conditions of the Communist International and its functioning. Since the multi-national model of capitalism is being replaced with its virtual variant, the strategy of conquering new markets and subjugating Third World countries has been exchanged for the subjugation of consciousness. The ideology of “the alien other (i.e. of foreign birth)” has passed the stage of “knowledge as the other”. Now, it is in the process of becoming “biology as the other” before our very eyes.

Today, the idea of the commune as such is not important. The only thing that plays a crucial role is individual choice as the only basis and only real criterion of its activity… On the other hand, I don’t understand why is it necessary to keep raising the brilliant dead, even if their ideas had a powerful impact. Obviously, any relatively complex system of axioms will eventually generate a question that its axioms cannot answer. For this reason, I see no reason for reanimating the International in its Communist essence. But to set some kind of marker nevertheless, I find more and more reason to call today’s phase the Rhizomatic International, a phenomenon whose ideological and technological characteristics are adequate to our time.

 

2. Which chances do you see for the ongoing democratization of art? Is it possible to break out of the framework of market hierarchy and exclusive global representation?

The growth and preservation of any process depends on physical differentiation. It also depends on a heightened unity of the field. This is how I would characterize the rhizomatic essence of any community’s existence, no matter whether they are artists, activists etc. Note that we are not speaking of solidarity as a constant quality – the community faces each motivation as it arises, forcing the community to change its vector of development each and every time. However, the ideology of “big events” or institutional success does not play any decisive role, in my opinion. I would characterize one of the Rhizomatic International’s attributes as the capacity for self-organized criticism. The combined effect of a multitude of small communities can break into the exclusiveness of global representation. Technological re-tribalization  – the gradual reversion of communities into a tribal state, accompanied by a strong technological dominant – is our time’s most important need. Without it, any progressive idea will inevitably become a decorative idiocy, once it takes its place at a trade-fair.

 

3. How important is it today to stop the conveyors of big events, opting instead for internationalist work on location? 

I wouldn’t talk about the possibility of stopping the conveyor of global events if I were you – it reeks of leftwing rhetoric of most worn and infantile-romantic sort. Stopping the conveyor is the same as stopping the actual broadcast of a TV channel while sitting in front of a television. While you can turn the television off, the broadcast itself will continue…Among other things, a century of pragmatism sets us apart from the revolutionaries and their troubled times. Since then, it seems that people have learned a lesson taught by history, namely not to act through head-on confrontations. Today, one needs to act in more round-about, mediated, tactical, indirect ways, as technology teaches us. We need to be more subtle…In this sense, tactical media make no difference between global and local events.  Under the conditions of the “global-localization” effect, which has already been described, this or that project inevitably focuses the meta-linguistic interlinks themselves, organizing significance. Thus, your question of whether one should reaccentuate one’s activities from the global to a local field means almost nothing to me.

 

4. In how far is the experience of new local communities that draw their linguistic legitimacy from global pop-culture? In how far do they influence the development of contemporary art?

It is obvious that subcultures are actually divided and in conflict with one another. Many phenomena are descriptively identical to art. They fulfill art’s functions for people who aren’t involved in art or who have made too few or too negative experiences with it. Today, one can discover many instances of what Peter Weibel calls “hotel cultures”. Oriented toward presenting changing impressions, they address fields of significance that have long since lost their uses (among them, all-time favorites such as MTV-consciousness, fashion, lifestyle, and clubbing). Some components of the art system have shifted: elements that were once auxillary supplements have become primary, as far as pop consciousness is concerned. In turn, elements and characteristics that once played the role of dominants have now become secondary. In the end, on both profane and expert levels, they supply us with a pre-validated factor of indifference, translated from one event to another. Returning to the question at hand, I am interested in the experiences of some communities connected to contemporary art, while the experiences of those who camouflage or disguise themselves as contemporary art simply leave me cold.

 

5. Is international style the only relevant possibility for addressing the local problematique? Is there any room left for creative misunderstandings, lost in translation, experiences that are both subjective and local? Which experiences have you made in highlighting the uniqueness of a local cultural context as something of general relevance?

My experience and praxis in the field of hi-tech art calls into doubt the recipe of producing pieces executed in an international style but making reference to local contexts. I would call this “pavilion thinking”, in analogy to the many “big event” with their representation through national pavilions. This kind of thinking was already old and lame at the end of the last century. True, the experiences of a number of artistic movements – from Fluxus to International Network Culture – have developed “international styles”. But who said that technology is still at the same level it once was? Because the development of technology actually unifies local specifics; by now, it is an empty waste to accentuate these “differences”. For an example, during the early 1990s, net culture (as a developing technological principle) devoted a great deal of attention to local specificity, all in an international style. But now, 10 years later, the socialization of next-generation technologies – developing on a molecular level – simply lifts the question of local differences, rendering it useless. The specificity of a local cultural culture dissolves if technology finally becomes a part of the body on a molecular or atomic level etc. As technology becomes an inside-element of the body and the mind, the artwork can now be imagined on a hitherto unthinkable molecular level. So why should I accentuate the nuances of local difference? In my opinion, the representatives of contemporary art need to realize that we have reached a stage at which the development of technology (including bio-technology) has rendered moot many of the questions that we were asking 3-5 years ago. Today, they have not simply “lost their currency”, but have actually disappeared from the field of vision completely. I would say that the dichotomy “international style” vs. “national content” is one of these disappearing questions. In other words, the genome revolution has led to a state of affairs in which “Faust shudders in fear when he hears of Matter, around whom there is no room, only the continuing groundless of space”…

 

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Ilya Budratskis, Moscow

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1. How important is it to appeal to the Communist roots of globalization today?

The Communist International came about as a product of all previous practices of emancipatory movements. Coming a long way from the romanticism of the French Revolution and the utopian constructions of Saint-Simon, the Manifesto of 1848 crystallizes the idea that solidarity and “globality” are the main conditions for victory. Much in the same way, the Leninist Comintern was a synthesis of the qualitative development of the Social Democratic tradition and its proletarian organization, its class politics, but it also broke with these traditions radically in the name of the “Party of World Revolution”. It seems to me that as we pass into a new historical situation, it becomes necessary to formulate and make sense of the key moments of continuity and discontinuity, if we are to build a new international. This will only be possible through theoretical work, but even more importantly, through the analysis of contemporary capitalism and the ongoing class struggle.

 

2. Which chances do you see for the ongoing democratization of art? Is it possible to break out of the framework of market hierarchy and exclusive global representation?

The future of contemporary art and its strategies and forms is connected to changing the social context. It seems to me that there are no grounds for singling out the art-system for its cynicism and corruption, even if such accusations may be just. After all, one can apply this form of interrelation to capitalism as a whole. As mass movements grow, updating international solidarity in the face of Neo-Liberalism’s onslaught, they can supply new meanings to the figure of the artist.

 

3. How important is it today to stop the conveyors of big events, opting instead for internationalist work on location? 

The real meaning of international events can only be recognized through their immersion in local situations.

 

See the Russian version of the site for the author’s complete answer.

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Konstantin Bokhorov, Moscow

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1. How important is it to appeal to the Communist roots of globalization today?

It seems to me that the question is not quite correct. Globalism is an objective state in capitalism’s development, which by now has extended its interests to all portions of the globe. This process does not have any Communist roots. One might say that it makes sense to know the situation of globalization as the Communist Manifesto describes it, but only as the first chapter of something that is still going on today.

 

2. Which chances do you see for the ongoing democratization of art? Is it possible to break out of the framework of market hierarchy and exclusive global representation?

To be honest, I don’t see such a problem here. One unified global system is replacing the more closed regional artistic contexts. This is an objective process. The state of dissatisfaction that the contemporary artist often experiences is the subject is another question. This question has little to do with democratization. Quite on the contrary, the art system is extremely effective under the conditions at hand. Thus, it is hardly surprising when the struggle for its democratization turns into a squabble for a more advantageous place within its hierarchy.

 

See the Russian version of the site for the author’s complete answer.

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Bart de Baer, Antwerpen

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1. How important is it to appeal to the Communist roots of globalization today?

It seems crucial to understand these, and it will be unavoidable, since they remain to be as a potentiality. They may lead to a critical awareness, a possibility to think the future.
What seems important to me too is the roots of the communist roots, the strands of thinking it comes forth from, so that it doesn’t become an isolated image but multiplicity.

 

2. Which chances do you see for the ongoing democratization of art? Is it possible to break out of the framework of market hierarchy and global representation?

We now have an exhibition titled ‘All under heaven’, which seems to be a poetic title but is actually the base of the Chinese image f the world, an inclusive image.

The MuHKA tries to articulate its position not only within art but also within social acting. In order to do this we rethink basic words that have been discarded. We now work around ‘reflexivity’, ‘joy’, ‘conversation’ and ‘morality’. We also asked Rudi Laermans to write an operational text starting from the polyphony idea of Bakhtin.
We want to make our position knowable. This may be a base. We want to relate this to our activities, so that we can be approached on these grounds.

Besides we do theoretical research on the articulation of not-economically validated formats of art (that which may be found in other databases of the museum besides the collection).

 

3.How important is it today to stop the conveyors of big events, opting instead for internationalist work on location? 

I feel events to be one of the main possibilities of these times. Most often they are horribly empty, but they may be full, like Paulo Herkenhoff’s Sao Paulo Biennial or the last Kwangu biennial. Those were the richest moments I encountered the last years. I feel they should not be opposed but entered, reassessed and critically validated as a possibility of intensity and transformation.

 

4. In how far is the experience of new local communities that draw their linguistic legitimacy from global pop-culture?In how far do they influence the development of contemporary art?

How horrible that we don’t have an alternative to the ‘glocal’ word. Now, I am. I am connected, in the choices of my mind, with you, with my local environment, with Paulo Herkenhoff in Rio as well. These connections make me specific. These make activity, being expressed. Aren’t we on the wrong track in our negotiation?

 

5.Is international style the only relevant possibility for addressing the local problematique? Is there any room left for creative misunderstandings, lost in translation, experiences that are both subjective and local? Which experiences have you made in highlighting the uniqueness of a local cultural context as something of general relevance?

Is style relevant as a concept? Is there an What do we address? Do we address the local problematique or our problematique which has local as well as international as well as bodily, past and future, human and accidental dimensions? Isn’t it more intresting to think in terms of contingencies rather than in creative misunderstandings? Creative misunderstandings postulate the possibility of absolute understanding. Isn’t it more intresting to have an ambition of relative understanding?
Any of my experiences did so, experience is always also localised.

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Victor Mazin, Petersburg

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1. How important is it to appeal to the Communist roots of globalization today?

It is important to address a variety of globalization’s roots. In my opinion, the “romantic” boundlessness of capitalization played a far greater role in globalization than the Communist Manifesto. Notwithstanding the tangible historical connection between the International and the transnational corporations, they actually belong to different orders. It is not advisable to mix up an economic order with a political program, all the more since the political program has been discredited, while one might say that the economic order has been given the “green light” in terms of ideology. Any radicalization should not have the effect of eroding this thought, but should also not tarry in the utopia of its activity of resisting the state’s ideological apparatus. In my view, it is important to develop a poly-ethical position rather than the desire to influence a multitude of millions, in symmetry to the desires of the controlling bureaucrats, who serve the transnational corporations.

 

2. Which chances do you see for the ongoing democratization of art? Is it possible to break out of the framework of market hierarchy and exclusive global representation?

Suspicion toward solid frameworks. Mistrust of frameworks on the whole. You can spend your life trying to adjust to the extant framework, but you can also strive to create a framework of your own. When this framework becomes a set of institutional walls, you break out of their bounds. When a creative program has been depleted and is being bureaucratized, you move on. As it happens, this is also a question of a certain psychic state, close to the question of psychosis, a state of compulsive representation, to which the market production of artistic products will lead. This is the question of the incompatibility or at least the incommensurability of creativity and institutionalization. Once again, we are not talking about a comprehensive political program of some artistic International, but about a form of inner resistance. I don’t really want to talk about the democratization of art; I would rather speak of its de-hierarchizing, its de-bureaucratization, and its de-capitalization.

 

3. How important is it today to stop the conveyors of big events, opting instead for internationalist work on location? 

It is impossible to “stop the conveyor” since art is not isolated from life’s other registers. And by the way, this utopian isolation would hardly lead to anything. But I agree that it is necessary to “work on location”. Regardless of what they say about globalization, we all work in specific cultural contexts. Once again, it is necessary to render the meaning of this work from the context that it affects.

 

4. In how far is the experience of new local communities that draw their linguistic legitimacy from global pop-culture? In how far do they influence the development of contemporary art?

There is no such thing as a universal language of pop-culture. On the one hand, the language of Russian pop stars, with only a few exceptions, is impossible to translate. On the other hand, a universal pop star like Brittney Spears is not universal. People in England and Japan don’t actually see her in the same way. There is no such thing as complete transparency of seeing or vision at all, be it external or internal. The illusion of the outer markers’ code-compatibility does not allow you to understand the other better. Instead, it confirms the narcissism of recognizing yourself. Moreover, I see that it often comes down to punk vs. punk, that subcultures are internally and externally divided. So I wouldn’t speak of pop-culture at all. Instead, there is mass-mediated culture, which strives toward unification and universality, but never actually reaches its goals. As strange as it may seem, this non-fulfillment is a necessary condition for the movement of capital. Mass-mediation strives to capitalize everything that moves, including what we call “counter-cultures” and “the avant-garde”.  Thanks to this, culture’s critical voice is both muted and amplified. As far as the pressure of mass-culture is concerned, it depends on your position. You can subordinate yourself and rush into its embrace, but you can also say, “They may be fucking us over, but that only makes us stronger.”

 

5. Is international style the only relevant possibility for addressing the local problematique? Is there any room left for creative misunderstandings, lost in translation, experiences that are both subjective and local? Which experiences have you made in highlighting the uniqueness of a local cultural context as something of general relevance?

You can see misunderstanding and loss in translation not only in the context of “big events”, but even within the confines of one city’s art scene. Furthermore, the same applies within boundless bounds of the individual artist or critic. Who said that the artist or critic knows exactly what he-she is doing? In my opinion, the character of creativity explains itself through the fact that something is always lacking; something is always impossible to translate or to understand. The decisive question is how the artist or the critic approaches the question itself. Understanding is always a misconception, a narcissistic phantom, stimulated by the mass-medial instruments of de-autonomization.
In my work, I don’t “make connections”. I work with people who seem important to me, with people who touch or move me in some way. Of course, we’re also talking about a certain “job”, an exhibition or an article, “ordered” by some concrete person from the outside, maybe even by someone from another culture. It is important to consider this addressee, respecting him without feeling constrained by a leash. The addressee is actually always present. Even if I am writing an article that I don’t know whether or where to publish, I am still addressing some imaginary other. Even if this is none other than “me”, it is still important to display respect without being confined to a leash.

 

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Ekaterina Degot, Moscow

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Which political role can feminism play in the contemporary world?
Which strategies of solidarity between women of different social, national, and ethnic backgrounds are possible today? Or is it better to shift our focus from the differences between men and women in order to address different universal features, such as political power-relations or social class?


Even if they prefer to remain in their “grant ghetto”, failing to become civil-rights-activists, Russia’s feminist organizations face a mass of political questions such as prostitution, family violence, the status of women in Islamic regions etc. Today, it is paramount to differentiate all of this from the discourse of feminist liberalism, which has displayed what I would call “positive gender racism” throughout recent years: the woman is equated to the Other, thus confirming as a privileged victim. This gives rise to fundamentalist statements (a woman is soft, caring, intuitive etc. “by nature), which, in turn, form the basis of political decision-making: in contemporary Russia, it is politically necessary to stimulate the woman’s role as a housewife by decree, for an example. They also form the basis for intellectual decisions: in American cultural studies, it has become necessary to prohibit anything that is not marked by “Otherness”, anything rational or masculine, condemning it because of its one-sided point of view.


The discourse of the “Other” has been very harmful in all of its variants, be they synthetic-deconstructivist or rehabilitational. The Other does not exist. What we need today is a reassertion of the subject’s universal heroism, not as androgyny, but as something abstracted from gender (and ethnos). This abstraction DOES NOT mean any coincidence with “masculinity”. People who identify themselves as to whether they are women or men fail to understand that this status is no more important that than a congenital illness like asthma or stuttering: it simply conditions the bounds of our possibilities; it is something to be taken into account, but little more. Solidarity between women of different social or ethnic backgrounds is possible and necessary in the same measure as solidarity is necessary between the ill. Incidentally, there is no place better suited toward solidarity than a hospital.


Do you feel that qualities like “vulnerability” will die out as unnecessary capacities?
Or is it possible to engage in a certain revolutionary politics of vulnerability?
How can feminism convince human beings of both genders of the need for emancipation and of the benefits of real freedom?


Tolerance, softness, sentimentality etc. are not typically feminine qualities. Instead, the proven biological difference between women and men lies concerns the dominance of this or that hemisphere of the brain; left-hemisphere dominance and the resulting propensity for language and logic is actually more common than among women, while men’s brains are often dominated by the right hemisphere (spatial orientation, emotion, intuition and creativity). So in terms of biology, everything is actually the other way around. However, culture superimposes its own stereotypes (projected and confirmed through the historical division of labor), forcing women “not to be too smart” and men to hide their emotions. Discovering “the hidden Other in you” may be beneficial in the psychological sense, but as a cultural demand (resonating constantly), it imposes the unreal ideal of “androgynous all-roundness”, becoming source of frustration and even force (such as the force that prohibits men from urinating while standing up etc.) Also, I do not think that contemporary society disqualifies weakness and “the attempt at understanding the Other” in any way. Quite on the contrary, tolerance has become the norm, whereas radicalism and certainty are condemned as outbreaks of “totalitarianism”. As soon as you say “I think this or that”, people will already be accusing you of being a Bolshevik. Social life is dominated by those qualities that society itself sees as “feminine”, but this change has taken place under the slogan of “Women are also people”. As on the political stage, the victim is given certain privileges, so that the role of victim is easier to impose.


During the last decade, art that privileges vulnerability has done a great deal of damage. Today’s essayism, for an example, confronts us with lots of lame writing that masks its authors’ inability for thought – men write like this more often than women, by the way. Contemporary exhibitions are flooded with pieces that have not been ‘made’: they are formally and intellectually helpless, shown under the auspices that “the weak also have a right to life”. All of this reminds me of radical ecologism, which sees yogurt as a form of life with rights. It seems to me that we have come to long for the artwork as a display of heroism, an explosive event, rupturing time, giving rise to the truth. These qualities are not “masculine”. Art is cognition, intellectual activity, flying above life. This is what freedom is all about. In everyday life, it is more laudable to display subtlety.


Does love have any political potential in your opinion?
Do you think that there is anything specific in the feminine experience of love?


As Houellebecq has justly noted, it is impossible to buy a single bed without the risk of catching the shop-assistant’s scornful gaze. With love, society places a great burden on people – and most of all women, since their feeling of self-sufficiency is far smaller on the strength of their social defenselessness. So-called “love” is an endless form of communication which eats up horrendous amounts of time and presents a serious obstacle to any further personal development. Again, women are most likely to fall victim to this “love”. It is this kind of “love” – an idealized sphere of “gifts and liberation”, elevated to an absolute – which is so often praised highly through mass culture as something “authentic” in contrast to calculation. In this end, everybody simply sits around, waiting for “gifts and liberation”. Bataille and Mauss have long since shown that the gift-economy flows into a form of moral terror, since receiving a gift implies obligation. In practical terms, it is far more honest to admit to the contractual and reciprocal character of any interpersonal relationship. It would be self-deceit to ignore this, and what’s more, it could even end in the conscious exploitation of one’s partner.


On the other hand, there is such a thing as an amorous encounter, but it is marked by the qualities of an explosive Event (although this event-explosion can be prolonged, if you are lucky), and for this reason, it is exclusive, as an encounter that takes place between two people. To blur the event of an Encounter across society’s entire collectivity would mean freeing oneself of any human and political responsibility and passing up the chance for any kind of truth. (An old Soviet anecdote, a kolkhoz farmer honestly prefers group sex because it is easier to shirk there.) In the end, it is time to stop pretending to criticize consumerism while lapping up the rhetoric of liberal democratism, which actually covers up a great deal of violence.

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