A publication of –empyre- soft-skinned space

Sydney, Australia

July 2006

A collaboration with documenta 12 magazine project

Featuring special guests

Michele White
Tina Gonsalves
GH Hovagimyan
Susana Mendes Silva
Conor McGarrigle
Jordan Crandall

And moderator Christina McPhee

On the topic

“what is bare life?”

edited linear pdf from the original hypertext archived at https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2006-July

Introduction by Christina McPhee, July 1, 2006

This month we are returning to the Documenta Magazine Project www.documenta12.de/english/magazines.html , in which we’re collaborating with Documenta to generate a discussion around a theme Documenta calls “bare life’.

Background: the editors of Documenta Magazine project approached us last year to integrate a series of three questions into this year’s programming (2006), with an eye towards publishing some of our conversation in 2007 in connection with the launch of Documenta 12 , in Kassel, Germany. It’s been a pleasure to already launch one such =
conversation, “Is Modernity our Antiquity?” in March 2006. https://=20 mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2006-March
This month marks our second collaboration with Documenta.
Posts from readers, especially the quiet ones, are most welcome. If you want to post in a language other than English, please feel free to do so, if it’s a language we can decode to some extent in Google! We hope to publish print versions of these conversations with Documenta, depending on the wishes and outlook of the Documenta Magazine editorial team.

The increased intensity of global communication and simultaneity makes the challenge of trying to ‘be’ an individual subject—whatever that is--- continually more complex and overwhelming. - empyre-, if not implicated in this process, is still in the midst of it and perhaps may be, as our founder Melinda Rackham has called it , our ‘soft-skinned space’, a space of resistance as well, in that we can hope to generate—on the fly--- a contemporary art and new media ethics in a public space we create for ourselves and others. In the March 2006 discussion, a lot of people were talking about an N space, past modernity and post modernity. Maybe that’s where we’re at now? In the N-space, bare life.
The second question or ‘leitmotif’ of Documenta 12 is described this way:

“ What is bare life? This second question underscores the sheer vulnerability and complete exposure of being. Bare life deals with that part of our existence from which no measure of security will ever protect us. But as in sexuality, absolute exposure is intricately connected with infinite pleasure. There is an apocalyptic and obviously political dimension to bare life (brought out by torture and the concentration camp). There is, however, also a lyrical or even ecstatic dimension to ita freedom for new and unexpected possibilities (in human relations as well as in our relationship to nature or, more generally, the world in which we live). Here and there, art dissolves the radical separation between painful subjection and joyous liberation. But what does that mean for its audiences?”

A group of artists and theorists, from Australia, Ireland, the US, and Portugal, have conspired to join us and to think about this question of ‘bare life’.

• empyre- will introduce them one at a time, as each have differing gifts and perspectives. Gradually over the coming days all their voices will make a polyphony with yours, if the -empyrean- space still works.

Our first guest is Michele White, of New Orleans, Louisiana, a witness to Katrina, and a noted scholar whose new book, The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship, is new with MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?=20 ttype=2&tid=10922
Michele White is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Tulane University, New Orleans. She teaches Internet and new media studies, television and film theory, art history and contemporary visual culture, science fiction and technology literature, gender and queer theory, and critical race and postcolonial studies. She has a background in both visual production and theory. Her published articles include: “Where Do You Want to Sit Today? Computer Programmers’ Static Bodies and Disability” Information, Communication and Society 9, 3 (2006); “My Queer eBay: ‘Gay Interest’ Photographic Images and the Visual Culture of Buying,” in Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting, and Desire, ed. Ken Hillis, Michael Petit, and Nathan Scott Epley. New York: Routledge Press, 2006; “Too Close to See: Men, Women, and Webcams,” New Media & Society 5, 1 (2003); “The Aesthetic of Failure: Net Art Gone Wrong,” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 7, 1 (2002); “Representations or People,” Ethics and Information Technology 4, 3 (2002); “Where Is the Louvre,” Space and Culture – The Journal 4/5 (2000); and “Visual Pleasure in Textual Places: Gazing in Multi-User Object-Oriented Worlds,” Information, Communication, and Society 2 (1999).
In her new book, The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship, White considers how spectatorial positions are produced and structured through such practices as interface design, digital imaging, net art, White poses hybrid critical models and suggests how theories of art viewing, authorship, feminist and psychoanalytic film, gender and queer studies, hypertext, photographic reproductions, television,nd postcolonial and critical race studies offer ways to understand Internet sites and spectatorship. The critical models indicated in this book are intended to support ongoing new media research and production strategies.
Her current research includes two book projects: Buy It Now: Lessons from Imaging eBay and Elements of the Internet: Rethinking the Network and Information Technology Workers. More information is available at http://www.michelewhite.org.

Please welcome Michele and join us for ‘bare life’ on –empyre-

1 Jul 2006 19:54:43 -0700 (PDT) From: M White empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
I am looking forward to participating in this dialog.
Giorgio Agamben’s conception of bare life, or life exposed to and closer to death because of inaccessible social and political powers, provides further opportunities to consider the position of politically empowered and valued subjects, how “masterful” positions render others as less important, and the ways socially produced identity positions—including class, gender, race, and sexuality—organize individuals in relationship to different degrees of bare life. The following considerations of New Orleanians suggests how communities and governmental structures can situate individuals in relationship to bare life and the ways these culturally devalued bodies may gain power by rereading, manipulating, and diminishing other individuals. Such behaviors encourage a combination of Giorgio Agamben’s and Roger M. Buergel’s considerations of bare life with gender, feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories.
I should note that I am writing this while looking out on the lush greenery and vernacular architecture of my New Orleans neighborhood—in what I am constantly reminded is “hurricane season.” The news provided a constant countdown to the season—“it’s 30 minutes until hurricane season”óand reminded viewers of bare life (past and future) and erased it because nothing happened when the clock struck. My mostly air conditioned view is punctuated by the sound of nail guns, the strained bodies of workers fixing my neighbors’ and landladies’ homes, and a series of fears that none of “us” want to fully mention or explain but that we constantly talk about. This view is also fairly recent to me (I moved here in July 2005, evacuated, moved some more, and returned). As the following critique may show, it is not that easy to be Orleanianeanian (particularly someone who both lives in and is sometimes critical of the city) while caught between the bare life of communities, the drive of individuals to regain power by regulating who can speak, and the constant articulation of “real” Orleaniansanians. Ironically, during a diversity conference in New Orleans last month, I was chastised and encouraged as a “visitor” to be more sensitive the city and the struggles and pains of New Orleans.
As grrrl and an academic, I have been using the phrase “big hard” to represent the mythos of New Orleans as the Big Easy and the current struggles that all residents and evacuees face with navigating an infrastructure that is still partially broken and continues to fail on a regular basis. The big hard also represents the struggles residents face when correlating the media production of New Orleans with the diverse places we live. What is also hard about New Orleans is how easy it is to forget our recent losses and pasts when eating at a terrific restaurant (yes we have tons of restaurants but find difficulties in staffing them because of the expenses and limits of the housing market), listening to some jazz, or admiring the glorious architecture in neighborhoods that have not flooded. It is difficult to correlate the everyday shifts between individuals’ experiences—although these shifts are to different degrees—with the big hard, bare life, and situated pleasures and rewards. I also use the phrase “the big hard” in order to represent how empowered masculinities reinstituted with popular media indications that women are simply the object of the gaze and are stupid when they willingly exchange views of their bodies, or “flash,” for cheap beads in the French Quarter and other New Orleans locations. Such narratives displace the ways women visually boast about their place in a visual economy of looks by acquiring and displaying large numbers of beads. There are also other gendered narratives at work in New Orleans’ tourism districts and such festivals as Mardi Gras. Men parade through the French Quarter with gigantic bead balls that they buy from vendors—visually boasting about their masculinity. However, this gendered performance is quite different than masculinities that are produced when poorly paid men, who come to New Orleans at their own expense to document women flashing for beads, fail to achieve the large sums of money in the video industry and the sexual appeal that they dreamed of. The tourism, gender, and sexuality play in the Quarter, as my colleague Vicki Mayer has suggested, is quite different when the position of these flash producers is acknowledged.
Bare life is also an apt phrase when considering individuals who had to stay in New Orleans and outlying areas during the hurricane and the more devastating flooding because of health problems, poverty, lack of notification, unavailability of transportation, and experiences with many unnecessary and expensive evacuations. The car culture and wealth of some Orleanians have created a system in which there is no mass transportation for the more disenfranchised citizens to use in evacuating. Bare life represents the struggles and dismissals, from a media culture and country that have questioned the viability, costs, and time taken by Orleanians trying to rebuild their homes. Yet, bare life also represents the experiences of the underpaid or even unpaid, undocumented, and uninsured workers who are rebuilding New Orleans and many other cities. These individuals are mutually dependent but they do not receive equitable rewards or similar cultural and community positions for their work. While New Orleans is currently relying on a huge influx of workers from Central and South America to rebuild, the US federal government mostly ignores these workers and is developing further legislation that can be used to expulse them from the “country” once their work is done. In most cases, these workers have not been invited into our social fabric and are imagined as temporary visitors. The bare life and struggles of Orleanians have created an even more temporary and outcast society. There are clear hierarchies and power structures among these arrangements.
With the flooding of New Orleans and extended evacuation after hurricane Katrina, Orleanians faced the challenge of articulating their place and identity from somewhere else. Evacuated disempowered New Orleans residents established place-based connections and provided assistance by using the NOLA.com forums, which are associated with the area’s Times Picayune newspaper. Posters to the NOLA.com forums worked to save individuals and update residents. However, these posters also used newfound authority to articulate a posting ethos. They indicated that only New Orleans residents could understand the city and only positive comments were welcome. Concerns about the environment, current government and NOLA’s infrastructure were discouraged. Critical commentary about the city was countered by indications that individuals should stop posting, were traitors, and should not live in NOLA. There were also suggestions that people who had made no “positive” contribution—and such individuals were often associated with housing projects and assumed to be black—were no longer welcome in New Orleans. Through such posts, place refiguredi in an area that appeared otherwise desolate by stripping some individuals of the ability to talk about New Orleans as home and as an aspect of their identity. The vibrancy and value of New Orleans communities was articulated by negating the worth of other lives and opinions. Place is formed and the city of New Orleans is reconstituted in these settings expulsing different opinions, alternate visions of the city, and the “other.”

The comments on the NOLA.com forums suggest the difficulties in speaking of and from a place after media representations and individuals have fixed its meanings. When people ask me about the city, it is always difficult to imagine how the varied cities that exist, those that can now only be imagined, and the nostalgic visions that we still hold can satisfy their ideas about this place that we call New Orleans. The media exposure of New Orleans has not allowed disempowered to speak since those figured as the most abandoned can only speak in ways that are structured and produced by the media. Roger M. Buergel intriguingly suggests, “absolute exposure is intricately connected with infinite pleasure.” To further understand these connections, considerations of the array of bodies, looks, and forms of exposure that produce these pleasures are needed. Looking and being looked at can be satisfying. However, extreme and long lasting forms of pain also accompany such things as regulating stares and medical gazes. Exposure should be correlated to the histories of visibility and invisibility that different cultures and individuals face. Individuals that are described as CEO, tenured faculty member, citizen, adult, artist, or married are likely to associate exposure with different pleasures and risks than those felt by the undocumented worker, adjunct, “alien,” juvenile, fan producer, and sex worker. I am interested in considering the different ways that bodies are put on display, the various demands for exposure, and what it means when people decide or are forced to become visible in the world. Culture does not understand the flash of women’s breasts, men’s breasts (that are supposed to be called something else), and men’s penises to have the same meanings. In future posts, I hope to consider questions of exposure and pleasure in relationship to feminist film theory, the feminist “sex debates, postcolonial bodies, postcolonial theory, and queer studies. –Michele

From: Ana Valdes Sun, 02 Jul 2006 10:39:01 -0000
Dear Empyre!

I have been lurking for a while and I have not been participating very actively, I guess, for not having English as mother language and feel my intents to express myself or my ideas can be made in a poorer way through English. I am a writer and cultural activist, born in South America but living in Sweden since 28 years back. My mother language is Spanish and now it’s Swedish which is my best language. Michele White’s excellent text triggered in me an answer, most based on the use of Giorgio Agamben. I am working with Agamben on the issues of memory and reparative justice, the idea of the people who survived Auschwitz as “witness”, with the responsibility of carrying testimony on what happened to them and to their fellow prisoners. I was in a prison as political prisoner during four years and it’s still the fact which most distinctly made me reflect upon life and existence, two quite different issues. We merely lived during the time of the prison, our most elementary needs were covered, we got food but it was often not edible, we slept but always with lights on and the constant interruptions of soldiers with gun machines going berserk in our dorms and throwing away our blankets. We were not allowed to have books or newspapers or radio or television, we were forced to work in the fields with dogs and patrols watching us, we were tortured and humilliated. But, did we exist or did we only live? For me, and more clearly after these experience, to live is to be able to full participate in society, with all your rights, the right to exercise your citizenship (as Saskia Sassen and Will Kymlicka state it in their essays about multicultural citizenship) and most important of all, the right to dissent. To me the right to dissent is the only one which is inalienable. –Ana

From: Christina McPhee Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2006 22:37:46 -0700

Michele wrote:
Roger M. Buergel intriguingly suggests, “absolute exposure is intricately connected with infinite pleasure.” To further understand these connections, considerations of the array of bodies, looks, and forms of exposure that produce these pleasures are needed.
considerations to happen where? in contemporary art? in interactive new media?
Looking and being looked at can be satisfying. However, extreme and long lasting forms of pain also accompany such things as regulating stares and medical gazes. Exposure should be correlated to the histories of visibility and invisibility that different cultures and individuals face. Individuals that are described as CEO, tenured faculty member, citizen, adult, artist, or married are likely to associate exposure with different pleasures and risks than those felt by the undocumented worker, adjunct, “alien,” juvenile, fan producer, and sex worker. I am interested in considering the different ways that bodies are put on display, the various demands for exposure, and what it means when people decide or are forced to become visible in the world.

I wonder, if those distinctions start to mesh and blur when everyone is under suspicion, under another gaze, a gaze from the state wanting to subject everyone to itself via the state of emergency? in the name of security? are there ‘occupied bodies’ in New Orleans... (sounds like a question for the Vampire LeStat :-), but seriously. New Orleans used to be known as the “Big Easy.” Post-Katrina, Michele, you’ve turned that idiom upside down with your exploration of ‘ the Big Hard” :
As grrrl grrrl and an academic, I have been using the phrase “big hard” to represent the mythos of New Orleans as the Big Easy and the current struggles that all residents and evacuees face with navigating an infrastructure that is still partially broken and continues to fail on a regular basis. The big hard also represents the struggles residents face when correlating the media production of New Orleans with the diverse places we live. ...

It is difficult to correlate the everyday shifts between individuals’ experiences—although these shifts are to different degrees—with the big hard, bare life, and situated pleasures and rewards. I also use the phrase “the big hard” in order to represent how empowered masculiniiites reconsitititued with popular media indications that women are simply the object of the gaze and are stupid when they willingly exchange views of their bodies, or “flash,” for cheap beads in the French Quarter and other New Orleans locations. Such narratives displace the ways women visually boast about their place in a visual economy of looks by acquiring and displaying large numbers of beads.

is the big hard also something like, being an object of desire/gaze from the media (so you can say what you think the journalists want to hear when you get an interview on the street_?

Giorgio Agamben is a political philosopher who has written on ‘bare life’ . Agamben looks at a state of emergency: in your world, in New Orleans, its a state of emergency of a special kind in which the infrastructureof the city is fragmented , still partially broken and continues to fail on a regular basis.
are people neutralized, ‘are stupid’ in the ‘big hard’ ?

• cm

From christina112@earthlink.net Sun Jul
2 17:00:28 2006
dear -empyreans- Joining Michelle White, please welcome Tina Gonsalves (AU)
Gonsalves°¶’(http://www.tinagonsalves.com) creative investigation integrates Art, Science and Technology. For over a decade she has used video, painting, animation and interactivity to explore complex emotional landscapes. Rich, painterly video abstractions create emotionally potent narratives that often seduce or repel the viewer. Converging science and art, she attempts to enrich the public understanding of the hidden emotional language of the body. Converging technology and video, she creates embodied interactive audiovisual experiences, discovering new ways of experiencing the internal body and the external environments.
The theme; ‘externalising the internal - revealing what lay beneath the skin’, has threaded Gonsalves°¶ artistic investigations. From 1995 to 2001, Gonsalves worked with diagnostic imaging departments of hospitals within Australia, gaining access to diagnostic imaging machines and resulting imagery. Her work evolved over this period from interpretative representations of the body using diagnostic imaging to
exploring complex emotional landscapes using moving imagery and sound. Shecreated many short single channel films that examined emotional states and emotional contagion. She aspired to showpeople in the throws of emotion, at times using her own body and emotional experiences as the catalyst for the work. This resulted in intimate works that were screened, televised and exhibited extensively internationally.
In 2002, Gonsalves pursued research to explore how her artwork could probe the audiences’ emotional body. She investigated the use of bio-metric sensors as triggers for emotional video narratives, leading to both more immersive installations, as well as intimate ubiquitous works. Gonsalves’work in mobile and wearable technology investigates ways of using these technologies to creating new, more empathic social interactions. Her projects often attempt to disrupt codes of social behaviours, with an agenda to create more intimate and °•authentic°¶
communication between each other (°ßMedulla Intimata°®, 2004; collaborator Tom Donaldson, °ßTryst °ß2006/2007). She sees mobile technology as a vehicle for the dissolution of the barriers between art, the social and the environmental, creating new art experiences integrated into everyday life.
Searching for more empirical foundations to the emotional cues that drive her work, she initiated a collaboration with affective neuroscientist, Dr. Hugo Critchley. Wth Dr. Crtichley, Gonsalves was awarded an AHRC/Ace arts and science fellowship. Currently, through her role as Artist in Resident at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, she is investigating the mechanisms through which emotions are triggered and shaped. Critchley and Gonsalves are discerning the physiological signatures of emotional states to create software and artwork that recognize and respond to internal emotions. Gonsalves work has been screened and exhibited extensively internationally including the Banff Centre for the Arts, Siggraph, USA; ISEA 2004; European Media Arts Festival 1997-2006; Artsway, UK; IAMAS, Japan; The Australian Centre For Photography, Sydney; Barbican,UK; Pompidou Centre, France; DEAF 2004, ICA, London and ACMI, Australia.
She has taken part in many Artist in Residence programs including The Banff New Media Institute in Canada, the Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, Asialink artist in residence at the New Media faculty Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, (Pro) duction residency at Artsway and the Advanced Institute of Media Arts and Sciences residency in Japan.
Her music videos for labels Universal, BMG, EMI, and Festival Mushroom Records have been frequently televised worldwide. Tina’s single channel video is represented exclusively by Novamedia Arts, and 2D prints are represented by the Helen Gory Galerie inMelbourne, Australia. –Christina

Sun, 02 Jul 2006 17:07:29 -0000
Tina Gonsalves writes:
Hi everyone
A few thoughts from a rare 30 degree day in London.
My work has always explored aspects of the intimacies and vulnerabilities of being human. Most of us go through life hiding our wounds and vulnerabilities, or trying as best we can to conceal them. Through the use of video, sound and technology, my work often tries to expose the fragilities, looking at the emotions and feelings often felt when we become exposed.
Nothing seems as private as the bodily experience of raw emotion. Emotions are a common thread that every human being can read, understand, and share. Emotions influence all aspect of behaviour and subjective experience; grabbing attention, enhancing or blocking memories and swaying logical thought. Emotions spread in social collectives almost by contagion. In cohesive social interactions, we are highly attuned to subtle and covert emotional signals, Our behaviours often mirror each other in minute detail. At times, we may voluntarily suppress our emotional reactions, temporarily disguising our intentions or vulnerability, though °•true°¶ emotions are nevertheless evident in a pattern of internal bodily responses that set an underlying tone for behaviour. It is these internal emotion responses that I am currently investigating with affective neuroscientist Dr. Hugo Critchley and through my role as AHRC research fellow and artist in resident at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Functional Imaging Laboratory at UCL, London.
Together, we are creating video installations (FEEL SERIES 2006/2007)that respond to the emotional feelings of the audience. Using a range of cues, (for example sweat, heart rate, breath, prosody, movement, facial emotion recognition, temperature shifts) we are discerning the physiological signatures of emotional states to create software that recognize and respond to subtle changes in the body. We are then creating potent emotional narratives that create [or] engender emotional changes in the body. These are tested in the lab for their salient effect on the body. As the emotional language of the body creates the narratives of the work itself, we are tapping into ideas of bio-feedback. As the audience adjusts their internal body, they adjust the video that surrounds them. Seeing, feeling and interacting with the work allows viewers to gain a personal insight and perspective to their emotional reactions. We are then interested in ways of influencing the emotional state of the audience, entraining different feeling states within the viewer. For example, how can you bring someone from sadness to happiness? It has usually been in my most vulnerable moments when I have truly felt the joy of others, and also true fear of life and all it offers. My senses are highlighted. The feeling of vulnerability elicits a very visceral reaction in my body. A knot builds in my stomach, my heart speeds up, I feel a little faint, hands begin to tremble, voice quavers, face flushes. Feeling of tightness rise in my throat. Tears well up in my eyes, and tumble down my cheeks. I can no longer disguise my emotional state. My autonomous nervous system exposes it for all to see. All who surround me are now confronted with my emotions. Some people pretend not to notice. Other people try to make it go away. My work often tries to highlight how we deal with emotions in social environments. °ßMedulla Intimata°® (2004; collaborator Tom Donaldson, is a sensor based digital video jewelry prototype that monitors the wearer’s internal emotional state by using prosody. Video self portraiture is transmitted real time to the screen of the jewelry in response to the emotional tone of the wearers voice. Through video, the wearer reveals more than they usually might, and repressed and hidden emotions leak into the world of polite conversation. The jewelry changed the way people interacted. When people communicated me, they felt my jewellery was very vulnerable, so therefore in return, people began to have more intimate, deeper and more creative conversations. I enjoy Joseph Beuys’ comment about what it was to be an artist. °ßYou weren’t showing your magnificence and your wealth of ideas and your huge creativity, you were showing your vulnerability. And it was your vulnerability that people picked up on, the perception of your vulnerability as a person and as an artist that sparked the creativity in other people.”
At one time or another, we are vulnerable, all scared. I create work that attempts to allow us to become more sensitive to our feelings. If we embraced vulnerability would we become more compassionate, more creative, more present? -Tina

From mwhite@michelewhite.org Tue Jul 4 03:06:52 2006
From: M White

Thanks to Ana and Christina for their productive questions. I was particularly struck by Ana’s consideration of Agamben, and important questions about agency, that were thought through her own imprisonment. I wonder if it is possible to exist without being recognized? What does existence mean when it is only negatively and cruelly constituted through torture and dismissal? How do I, as anindividual and critic, offer Ana comfort while attending to her critical consideration through the self? Offers of physical or emotional support, while I mean them, end up seeming unreal.
In my own experiences of being figured as “victim,” even though I watched the flooding of New Orleans from the weird space of my childhood bedroom, I have found that I cannot successfully answer people’s questions about the current and past places of New Orleans. People often want some quick answer that echoes the media’s “truth.” Most of us in the city want to talk both of something else (please!) and in a different way. I certainly find it hard that people both want me to recycle through the old story and then turn away
from the length of the narrative.
All my best,
Michele

From Ana Valdes Tue Jul 4 03:27:00 2006

Subject: Re: [-empyre-] on existence

Hi Michele, really interesting to speak about the “victim”. As Agamben writes in Homo Sacer, the victim or the doomed are sacred, they became “divine”, they break or expand the boundaries between themselves and the others. I am now rereading one of Euripides most fascinating tragedies, “Alkestis”. The story of the young queen who chooses to die instead of her husband struck me, why did she chose to became a victim? Was it a proof of love, sacrifice, denial or a proof of strength? I think the challenge to all of us is to discover in all our individual situations the “border” between our conception of ourselves and the sheer existence. You did that in New Orleans, I did that in the jail, other people do that in sickness, or in the lost of someone dear...I was in the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin in April 2002. A photographer colleague and me were among the few civilian who suceeded after climbing the mountains for hours to go into the city, which had been besieged and shelled by the Israelian army for ten days (very similar to what happen in Gaza today), we saw the destruction of the city, bombed and bulldozed, we smelled the sweet scent of the bodies buried under the tons of stones.People there were sitting in the ruins of their distroyed houses, what kind of life they levt? This is the link to my texts and Cecilias images, http://this.is/Jenin -jAna

From christina112@earthlink.net Tue Jul 4 05:48:14 2006

The new film by American filmmaker Liza Johnson, “South of Ten,” was screened recently at the Flaherty Film Seminar at Vassar College. Liza was present for the seminar Q and A afterwards and had some things to say about this problem of how to tell the ‘story’ of trauma after Katrina. The film is so new I haven’t been able to find much online reference to it, but here is some info on the filmmaker herself: http://www.zoominfo.com/directory/Johnson_Liza_158388749.htm
South of Ten (2006) synopsis:
“Using the decimated landscape of the Mississippi Gulf coast as its backdrop, South of Ten restages quotidian activities of survivors of Hurricane Katrina. A girl flees a makeshift tent city. A man finds a trombone. A worker watches the ocean from under a moving house, while its owner gazes at the view from her shifting living room. In ten very short stories, residents of the destroyed Mississippi Gult Coast act out atmospheric scenes of everyday life and the relentlessness of labor in their extreme terrain. “ (52nd Flaherty Film Seminar, IFS, Inc http://www.flahertyseminar.org/
From my notes on Liza’s comments at the seminar—hopefully not too garbled:
“Their bodies bear witness to that [trauma]. [I decided to] ask less of them in terms of [verbally] testifying...were ready to feel yet not ready to be put into language.”
“They [survivors] were very interested in being ‘seen’ , willing to perform” i. e. to give the news media what they wanted, paralleling Michele’s observation (above) that spectators [after the fact] “often want some quick answer that echoes the media’s ‘truth’.” People often want some quick answer that echoes the media’s “truth.” To get around being told what the survivors assumed she’d want to hear as a media person, Liza developed, with the survivors, a series of scenes that ‘has no news hook’ to register “affect/shared feeling/ textures/waiting” She did this by asking survivors to pick a typical activity (like chopping wood for cooking fires, riding a bicycle down a street of devastated houses ). She filmed the staged activities as performed by t by the people there. They were not professional actors. Rather they acted out through their bodies and gestures what the reality of living in the aftermath of Katrina is. –Christina
From tina@tinagonsalves.com Tue Jul 4 06:07:57 2006
Ana and Michele - thanks for sharing your story. I have a hard time knowing to respond. My role here seems to be to talk from my experiences of being an artist, and my first response to reading your story is to wonder why I bother being an artist. Today, it seems rather inconsequential and irrelevant. At the same time, for me, it often feels limiting to use verbal language to describe the experience of pain, vulnerability, exposure – how do you describe the feeling of the hollowness in your chest or gut when everything that protects you is stripped away? I guess for me, the act of creating an image, sound, video or through performance often enables me to recognize my own pain, and through an image, I might be able to translate those feelings so others can also recognize their own pain, hurt, vulnerability. In that way the work becomes some sort of conduit for viewers to recognize their own emotional feelings. My video work is often created in fast and frenetic vulnerable moments. Often, they are left raw, messy and by not ‘refining’ them, I imagine I am allowing others to view my own personal flaws and vulnerabilities. I feel a little fearful when people view it, but some how that rawness feels a little more authentic, like its beginning to strip away the residues from the onslaughts that the world delivers, penetrate the sediments.. slowly breaking down the walls that keep much of life safely outside. When I work, the more raw it is, the more it returns a potent pleasure, a feeling of truthfulness, openness. There is room for accident and mistakes. There is room for surprise.
I guess, in my installation and video works, I want people to become more sensitive to themselves, to their breath, their pulse, their emotional feelings. “vulnerability” and “sensitivity” is often regarded in a negative way, but with my work, I am trying to see sensitivity as an asset that enriches each day. Being able to cry, to share the pain, to engage more intensively in feelings. Be more compassionate.
But then again creativity seems a luxury when you just managing to exist. Actually, I dont know where it fits in. –Tina

From mwhite@michelewhite.org Tue Jul 4 06:08:18 2006 Return-Path:
Ana, thanks for your important texts and Cecilia Parsberg’s images. Such practices make me wonder about Buergel’s indication that “absolute exposure is intricately connected with infinite pleasure.” How is this pleasure figured among desires to look at unpleasant occurrences, comfort in knowing such occurrences didn’t happen to the individual and a belief that they could never happen “here,” the desire to look away or be “blind” to such events, individuals’ needs to tell or show their stories, and resistance to being imaged in bare life and pain? When we view images of catastrophe and torture, what should our position be as viewers? Certainly there has been important critical writing on the ways that the bare life of subjects can be further compromised by being imaged. As photographers, writers, critics, how do we keep the desires of our subjects and the need for critical conversation ethically in tension?
I was struck by the following passage in your essay and the process through which the image is taken: “An older woman wearing a white scarf on her head and dressed in typical Palestinian dress, with a beautiful ochre colour, talks to us in Arabic. She wants to tell her story. Her house has been destroyed; her pots and pans smashed. The soldiers destroyed cabinets, which she was still paying off. At first, she does not want to be photographed. She says she has not been able to wash herself for twenty days. We compare our dusty clothes, and find that hers are cleaner than ours are. At last, she agrees to have her photo taken.”
During a visit to The Ogden Museum of Southern art this summer, I briefly viewed Thomas Neff’s “Come Hell and High Water: Portraits of Hurricane Katrina Survivors.” However, I had to run out of the gallery because the stories of people’s actions during the flooding (and maybe the images) were overwhelming. I am a “trained art historian” but I couldn’t see, let along evaluate, the images. I couldn’t view the show because it made me deeply sad, physically sick, and panicked in a way that was already woven into New Orleans life. Personally, I wasn’t ready to perform these feeling in front of the museum’s opening crowd. I know that such a show needs to be shown elsewhere but I have begun to doubt the political purpose of the many many artistic representations and shows of New Orleans flooding and losses, which appear in the city. Are there other or more global ways of working through our feelings? And given the reactions to questions about New Orleans, I wonder if anyone wants to hear and see these images. My feeling is that this disinterest in other truths makes their showing in other areas and a concomitant resistance to the pleasures of exposure even more imperative.
Since moving back to New Orleans, I have wanted to take pictures of the strange occurrences, tableaux, and visceral mess that frames our everyday lives. However, I have never managed to even carry my camera. When contemplating the possible images, I have been stymied by the real use of such images, how would quality (resolution and “good” shots) figure into these images, and where would they justly be displayed? Yet each time that I drive to work, an old 1950s kitchenette table that sits and rusts on the side of the road strikes me. To me, it represents the loss of things and places that continue in the area. It also stands for the huge piles of trash and former lives that sit constantly in some areas and seemingly will never be fully thrown away. The table has also become a sign for me because intentionally or not, its arrangement and series of things that sit on it change from day to day. One day there is a dead plant on it and then a 1950s ice bucket—hip but stained and these objects are rearranged, disappear, and are replaced by other things. Last week, I was thrilled and saddened on my drive back from work when the table was not there. Then I noticed that someone had just turned it upside down.
Ana’s consideration of existence also reminds me of medical imaging issues—particularly as they relate to women. I wonder if Tina would comment on the ways she uses technologies that tend to image women but prevent women from seeing or having any control of their depictions? The ultrasounds that pregnant women receive are one of the few instances where women are allowed to see their own depictions. In most cases [other ultrasounds, CAT scans, MRIsÖ] the images are held back from the “patient” or technicians and doctors refuse to read what the individual is seeing on the screen. I requested to see a CAT scan and the technician wouldn’t let me view it without my doctor’s permission. What does it mean when we lose control of our bodies in such ways and can be seen by others but cannot “look” at “ourselves?” I am reminded of Roland Barthes’ indication that other individuals can see us but we can never see the full view of self except through such mediating structures as mirrors and photography. –Michele

From Ana Valdes Tue Jul 4 07:22:30 2006
Interesting thoughts about the camera as protection or hindrance. In the text Cecilia wrote—“The pictures I didn’t take”—she writes about how difficult it was to take pictures of the mayhem or the dead bodies or the young children digging the dead with their bare hands. She writes too about how the camera was her only protection, the shield between her eyes and the images of the destruction. I know well the Chilean/American visual artist Alfredo Jaar. He lives in New York since many years but he has being working with African issues for a long time. He travelled to Rwanda just after one of the worst genocides on our time had stopped, he got the chance to interview survivors, people who saw their whole family be cut up with machetes and themselves left as dead in a pile of bodies. But Alfredo took never a picture of the mass graves or from the morgues or from the piles of skulls, he took images of laughing children, life goes on and New Orleans, Jenin, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, all those places which were place of death and mourning goes on, as life does.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/arts/rwanda_3412.jsp
∑ Ana

From mwhite@michelewhite.org Tue Jul 4 08:36:38 2006
Tina, I completely understand your feelings about not having the authority (and ironically) position in relationship to bare life that allows you to speak. However, I also think that we should avoid the ways culture (I hope that I am not contributing to this) likes to silence certain people—particularly those that dissent. Many of us have noticed a tendency among people from other places to tell us that we are “lucky.” “You are lucky that your stuff/house wasn’t flooded” and “you are lucky to have a job,” which somehow suggests we don’t deserve one. Certainly, things could be drastically worse but suggesting that people are “lucky” also erases the ways they live in these situations and silences them. The suggestion is that their luckiness prevents them from “authentically” speaking about the experience. Most of the people saying these things are in fact “luckier” if such distinctions were useful. I want to avoid a tendency that I noticed at a feminist media studies conference (and that I associate with the continued cultural devaluation of women) where women tended to use the dismissive term “just” when representing themselves: “I am just a grad student,” “just an independent scholar,” “just an assistant professor,” It seem to me that art production provides one way to think critically about the world and that such tactics and potential forms of resistance should not be underestimated.
I also wonder, what happens when the silenced, bare life, and the tortured try to speak/write/be visible and no one answers? Our lack of reply might be guilt, disinterest, feeling “lucky,” being told we are “lucky” and that the event does not apply to us, or fear of contamination but this lack of acknowledgment has serious consequences. I know that I have been unable to answer and that worries me.
∑ Michele

From tina@tinagonsalves.com Tue Jul 4 08:54:00 2006

A major thread through my work is has always been intersections between medicine, art and technology. Like art, the practice of medicine is loaded with grief, intimacy, vulnerability and exposure. Sick people must bare their fragility, reveal intimacies of body and mind, The sick person is often in a dependent, apprehensive, vulnerable, and exploitable state. With the development of the Xray, the internal was externalised, revolutionizing science (and the way we looked at the world) with its ability to reveal what was invisible to the naked eye. It gave us insight into the workings our body, allowing us to build a more intimate relationship with it.
But within the consulting room, these medical images are only briefly shown to the depicted individual and the practitioner rarely explains them. The doctor becomes the all powerful decoder. The patient°¶s view is rarely sought. There seems to be a one directional flow of information, with the medical professional as an active transmitter and the depicted individual as a passive receiver. To the patient, the medical images of their depicted selves can seem swathed in mysticism and mystery, holding an almost prophetic quality when it comes to detecting serious diseases. Does the image reveal life or death?
With 3 dimensional ultrasounds, expectant parents can purchase high-resolution video sequences of the foetus, as foetal keepsake videos°¶. The diagnostic image is transposed to a recreational image.Beyond the purpose of ascertaining foetal well-being and promoting parental bonding, the technique changes the private experience of the mother and foetus into a public exhibit. Also, the advances in foetal imaging due to ultrasound impacted on society with its potential to underwrite anti-abortion arguments.
Mediating our inner body has also distanced us from it. The medical community is inclined to decode the diagnostic image rationally, objectively, and deny the patient°¶s sensory perception, often creating a discord between what is seen and what is felt. Often the body is rendered alien, as the doctor fragments the body, the patient becomes a specific illness, the dysfunction they suffer. I often wonder if the diagnostic image serve to distance the doctors from their patient°¶s often smelly, vulnerable and messy conditions? Has society has become far too sanitized or clinical and that people no longer engage with the messiness of being human? In the 16th Century, it is said the doctor would use all of his senses to diagnose, often tasting the patients urine in order to diagnose the disease.As the body becomes mediated, the body is then being used as a commodity, a thing consumed. Our bodies unique biological characteristics have become commodities to be sold and traded. The way we smell, our eye structure, our fingerprints, our voice patterns and conversations, sweat, heart rate - are being mapped and digitized as part of a new industry.
In my work, earlier collage works were expressions of subjective emotional response to the beauty and complexity found in the °•medicalised°¶ images of the body, sort of more basic reinterpretations. Some of these questioned the°•nature’of communication, commenting on science and the medical profes_sion in often satirical, subversive, or ambivalent ways. I then started to use video to look at how the rational medical gaze separates images of the body from an awareness of other cultural, sensual, erotic, social, spiritual, emotional and historical conditions and contexts. A lot of earlier video work explored this fragmentation, and the angst this caused. Other video works, such as °ßDischarge°® and °ßI Am You°®, attempted to engage the way the contemplation of dreams, emotional states, spiritual awareness and notions of self can inform the artistic recon_struction and representation of modern diagnostic images. With °ßLoss Series°® 2002, I began using my own emotions to create the work itself. to attempt to translate the emotional interiority of the body. I then attempted to mimic the technique, using technology to monitor the audiences’ emotional body to drive the emotional narratives.I then began to use wireless and intimate wearable technologies as biofeedback devices, to allow better relationships with our own bodies; --looking at the role of art experiences to create healing.
Ultimately, through artistically reinterpreting the diagnostic images and techniques from a subjective and emotional perspective, my work attempts to emancipate the diagnostic image, imagining how emotional and individually designed images could potentially play a role in future healthcare, by inserting the °•lived°¶body into the image. imagined, by providing images that did not display solely factual information, this would provide a basis to further inform complementary modes of communication between the practitioner and the patient in the future.

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 03:14:07 -0000 Gianni Wise writes,
Michelle’s points are a good counter to those many arguments we hear against taking a position - it’s how we voice it that counts - I found myself a while ago having lived in Chile at the end of the dictatorship beginning to write about my the pain I saw around me in the hearts of people I loved and admired. I was also accused of being a part time radical with no authority to speak up. Yes I was from the safe north etc. I was wondering what you meant by culture in the context of your statement “I also think that we should avoid the ways culture (I hope that I am not contributing to this) likes to silence certain people”
Gianni Wise http://gianniwise.blogspot.com/

From mendi@blacknetart.com Tue Jul 4 15:35:14 2006
Thanks to all who have been participating in this interesting and challenging discussion so far. I’ve been thinking about Tina’s ideas about mediation while thinking about the question of where art fits in. They reminded me of a poem by Robert Pinsky called “Poem of Disconnected Parts”. I’m excerpting it, and hopefully you’ll be able to follow since it is, literally, a poem of disconnected parts, but there’s a link to the whole poem below.

“At Robben Island the political prisoners studied. They coined the motto Each one Teach one.
In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners Address them always as ‘Profesor.’
Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say.
Culture the lock, culture the key.”
http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/0206/poem_177610.html
It seems to me that one purpose of art is to make sure that as long as culture is used as a lock, we can find a way to use culture as a key.
∑ Mendi

From: Tina Gonsalves

Michel I agree with what you say. But, for me, the feeling of having a ‘voice’ and the potency of that voice, changes daily for me. Some days I feel my voice is strong. Others not.
I do believe that pain, suffering, is something that links everyone. Everyone has been hurt , known pain. We are all vulnerable. I am a big believer that everyone has the authority to speak about Bare life. I have had times where all that I have depended on has stripped away. To cope, I lost myself in my practice, and tried to make sense of it through the act of creating. Some days I thought the work I produced was hopeless, other days brilliant. But those opinions also changed daily, and only time could allow me to judge the work. What I did have to do, was create, then not look at it for six months or so. If I kept re-working it, it slowly became sort of clinical and sanitized, sort of neutral.
I guess what I am trying to say is, is that my internal environment creates my perception of my external environment. It is always changing, always fluctuates. Some days, my voice is strong, some days it seems diluted. We are constantly affected by, and attuned to the world around us. Powerful emotions can simmer beneath the threshold of awareness, impacting on how I perceive and act, even though I have no idea they are at work. In daily encounters, people automatically and continuously synchronize with the facial expressions, voices, postures,
movements of others. Some happen in milli-seconds. In essence, we are carriers, dancing with each other in harmonized body language, infecting each other with our emotions. Through these behavioural patterns, as you suggested, hierarchical and social power structures emerge.
Today, searching for fashionable beauty and youth, plastic surgery has evolved to the point that people (with enough money) can receive augmentation to lips, penises, vaginas, breasts, waists and buttocks. Nerves can be cauterised, so the blushing action can be arrested. Through surgery, we can conceal the body’s involuntary responses, the ones which are meant to reveal emotional stress or elevation. Botox causes temporary paralysis of localized muscles, making the face lose expression, and therefore the reading of someone°¶s emotions harder. As flesh is sculpted with lasers and scalpels, faces and bodies become a dynamic, ongoing works in process - an amour to hide the bodies natural =response to emotions. The face becomes harder to read, harder to show joy, fear - the face sort of becomes a mask.
My current work tries to look at this relationship of how the internal body changes the way experience the world, our daily experience, How the external changes our internal feelings. Why is it that some days there is a huge clarity and vision, and others days it feels dulled and diluted. As an artist, I feel I need to be aware to those daily changes in the way I look at the world, and how I make sense of it. I thinks its important to admit feeling hopeless and dull as much as its important to celebrate feeling strong, salient.

From dkellysocialchange@yahoo.com Tue Jul 4 16:55:37 2006 this is a wonderful discussion, so tentative, skinless, and now with a riproaring poem. thanks!
∑ Deborah

From kanouse@siu.edu Wed Jul 5 05:20:35 2006
Michele, Ana, and Tina,

Thanks for what has been a thought-provoking discussion. I began reading Agamben only recently and have found him challenging and very exciting for thinking as an artist and a human being.
Michele---While I appreciate your analysis of how being told you are “lucky” both fetishizes as authentic the experiences of the “unlucky” and devalues/silences the ways of living and voices of those designated “lucky,” I’m concerned with how quickly you brush over how “things could be drastically worse.” Yes, there are some non New Orleanians who may mean to imply that you don’t deserve your job, unflooded house, etc, but the statements could just as easily be read as an implicit and unspoken recognition that ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ are useless distinctions—that what separates the professional and jobless, the flooded out and the drylanders is often chance and above all the accident of birth. I am curious how you respond to people when you feel silenced by them in this way. Admittedly, it is different to embrace for yourself the idea that you are “lucky” than to be told it by others. I remind myself every day how lucky I am to be (not only!) an assistant professor, not in order to devalue my accomplishments and certainly not out of a sense of gratitude to the benevolent university, but as an ethical practice. To put it in Agamben’s terminology, I consider myself lucky in order to recognize the fragility and arbitrariness of the “abstractly recodified social-juridical identities” that separate me from others (assistant professor vs. disability aid recipient; homeowner vs. squatter; straight, white, HIV-, woman vs. black, HIV+, transgendered man) and from earlier versions of my ‘self’ (student, renter, arrestee, sexual harassment target, etc.). As I am understanding it, Agamben holds that the apprehension of the potential for these various “forms-of-life” within the self is what allows for the possibility for communication and intellectual thought that is the political project of forging a common form-of-life that does not enforce unity through the expulsion of, for instance, those who have been expelled from New Orleans. In more old fashioned terms, maybe it’s what differentiates noblesse oblige from solidarity.
I look forward to continuing conversation.
Sarah

From christina112@earthlink.net Wed Jul 5 05:47:30 2006

On Jul 4, 2006, at 12:20 PM, Sarah Kanouse wrote:
“As I understanding it, Agamben holds that the apprehension of the potential for these various “forms-of-life” within the self is what allows for the possibility for communication and intellectual thought that is the political project of forging a common form-of- life that does not enforce unity through the expulsion of, for instance, those who have been expelled from New Orleans.”
To leave open this vulnerable space in the work itself so that ‘others’ , the audience, finds its ‘various “forms of life” ‘ inside the work. But this kind of work is challenging to the State. In its totalizing mood it wants to set groups against each other not allow the contradictions of free thought..Working within this level of psychological and political risk is as Tina has witnessed, a daunting experience, both with great highs and the many days of emptiness and vulnerable awareness.
if art forges a common form-of-life it is through the open work which itself is instantly subject to disintegration: its ephemerality though is powerful—a moving target
∑ Christina

http://strikeslip.tv

From agora158@gmail.com Wed Jul 5 06:00:06 2006
I feel this discussion so alive and so interesting! In the Middle Ages we were not individuals but collectives, it was not any movement between the classes and the bakgrounds. The life was the collective life, the hive. In the 17 century we start to concieve us selves as individuals, not bounded to our class or country or family, but fully able to create a life of oue own. Today, after Postmodernity and Baudrillard and Wimlycka and after Agamben, where are our boundaries, where are our borders and our belongings? --Ana

From mwhite@michelewhite.org Wed Jul 5 07:32:10 2006
Thanks to everyone for their comments. I appreciated the parts of the Robert Pinsky poem that Mendi forwarded. I find the line, “Culture the lock, culture the key” particularly intriguing. The first part of this line is what I was alluding to when suggesting some of the ways that cultures and people including cultures in peril try to establish authority by creating further outcasts.
I hope that Ana will expand on her enquiry: “where are our boundaries, where are our borders and our belongings?” I have been thinking a great deal about belongings (stuff that connects us and the things that we have to own) as well as belonging recently. I have been trying to wrap my mind around the ethical and cultural tensions between the imperiled New Orleanians (present in the city and those unable and uninvited to return) and the ways New Orleans has/and continues to be built on the backs of the disenfranchised and ostracized. Part of my earlier exploration of The Big Hard and the New Orleans’ bead culture is related to this problem.
Shiny plastic beads, the French Quarter, and Mardi Gras are key aspects of how New Orleans is understood globally and an important part of its tourist industry. Many businesses, and the infrastructure that relies on taxes, are struggling in New Orleans. We would do better with an economy that pays its workers more equitable salaries but how can this be balanced with the ways that losing the tourist industry (at least in the short term) is going to create further problems for most residents and the city infrastructure.
I keep thinking about the varied ways that these beads mean New Orleans and what we pay for this image. The Big Hard should invoke the crunch of hundreds of pounds of beads discarded underfoot and carted off in gigantic coolers after each Mardi Gras parade. These beads and other plastic “throws” are beloved by New Orleanians of every age. Nevertheless, most of these beads are quickly thrown away. If tourism remains one of our key economies then New Orleans may be a city rebuilt on beads. However, this also means it will be a city further built on the backs and through the painful work of women in other countries. In David Redmon’s provocative Mardi Gras: Made in China, the viewer learns that Mardi Gras beads are made by women under oppressive conditions in China. Their pay is low, workweek very long, there are health risks from the heated toxic plastics that they breathe all day, and they face the loss of limbs or death from machines with no safety features. Most people in New Orleans don’t think about where their beads come from and the greater price of such economies. I keep wondering what it means to live in a city that is so enmeshed with this product and to participate in a recent diversity conference where of course beads become a symbol of being in New Orleans. How can we be ethical visitors and residents after the intense media spectacles that have unfolded in the area? What are the better options in order to rescript New Orleans and these global circulations of beads? -Michele
From voyd@voyd.com Wed Jul 5 09:46:07 2006
As someone who is an extended member of the New Orleans art community, one = of my homes being Baton Rouge/New Orleans, this hits home hard.
As noted, I don’t think that people realize the oppressive throwaway culture that New Orleans is built on. So much of the arts culture there was buil t on the poor (often Black) communities, which have been all but discarded. In addition, the State Division for the Arts has been given a mandate by Lt Gov Mitch Landrieu to structure most new state art projects under the rubric of economic rebuilding, often in higher dollar value terms.
The odd thing to me in looking at Louisiana and rebuilding in the arts is that likewise some of its most vibrant artists are also some of its lowest paid, by and large. And, when cultural rebuilding in mentioned, the hard linkage between culture and capital ignores the foundations that New Orleans as a cultural milieu is based on. There are some grass-roots programs on the way, but I think that there is the possibility for clearing and rebuilding New Orleans in a way that could fundamentally integrate the arts and the fundamental infrastructure of the city that fuels is, and thereby creating the desired environment for the State. However, this would mean funding of contracting, artists, calls, etc. Honestly, I don’t see the US government being a hard-weather friend enough to make this investment.
The other odd thing is that the low-income population is becoming hispanic,= so instead of blues and jazz, one is as likely to hear salsa or cojuntao nowadays. It was under Spanish rule once, which makes the shift even more= interesting.
The bead issue - with all respect possibly a little less crucial in the sho= rt term than the problems of the NO diaspora, I think could have some solut ions.
Could there be a culture of beads, in many ways like Art Cars, or painted street statuary?
Two ideas come to mind. The first is to challenge that artists to come up with ways to make new beads, like Glass (a tradtional New Orleans form) or ceramic (easy to do), or others. More or less, turn the bead culture into a populist art culture.
The other comes from contemporary African forms. So much African art incorporates recycling of cast off materials, and it isn’t if there aren’t entire wards of material there, wire, metal, plastic. It’s not easy to get good material that isn’t degraded, but I think of the local artists and their extensive use of found materials, and I don’t see a problem.
• Patrick

From christina112@earthlink.net Wed Jul 5 12:19:44 2006 dear -empyreans-
Introducing a third guest, GH Hovagimyan (US)

G. H. Hovagimyan is an experimental cross media, new media and performance artist who lives and works in New York City. Born in 1950, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, he is one of the first artists in New York to start working in Internet Art, beginning in 1993, with such artist’s online groups as the thing, ArtNetWeb, and Rhizome. From 1973 to 1986 GH was involved in the SoHo and Lower East Side underground art scene, showing conceptual works at 112 Workshop in 1973. He worked with Gordon Matta-Clark on several projects, including. Days End, Conical Intersect, Walking Mans Arch, and Underground Explorations. In 1974 during the video-performance series at 112 Greene Street, he performed opposite Spaulding Gray in Richard Serra’s video, A Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Much of his early work is ephemeral in nature. Active in performance art, written and language works, GH used text conceptually in installation. HIs word piece, Tactics for Survival in the New Culture, was exhibited in “The Manifesto Show” (1979) organized by the artist collective colab. This particular piece was to become the basis for one of his first online hypertext works in 1993. He showed in several group exhibitions organized by Jean Dupuy, a French Fluxus artist living in New York. In 1980 he did a series of punk performance pieces for Artist’s Space series called Open Mic. One piece, Rich Sucker Rap was recorded by Davidson Gigliotti for a videotape called Chant Acapella (now in the Electronic Arts Intermix catalog) . He also performed in several No Wave Cinema films among them, The Offenders(1980) by Scott B & Beth B and The Deadly Art of Survival by Charles Ahearn. In May, 1994 he created twenty billboard project for Creative Time, Hey Bozoˇ Use Mass Transit, widely publicized on television and in print media. His early internet based works, such as BKPC, Art Direct and, Faux Conceptual Art, converged conceptual practice with punk aesthetics on the net. His pioneering internet radio/TV talk show , Art Dirt, is part of the Walker Art Center’s Digital Studies Archives collection. Of his collaborative works with Peter Sinclair, the most well known are A Soapopera for Laptops/ iMacs, Shooter and Rant/ Rant Back/ Back Rant.
Shooter, an immersive sound and laser installation was developed at Eyebeam Atelier as part of its Artist in Residence program.
His new work involves mash-ups online with new art dirt redux at http://nujus.net/gh/ and http://post.thing.net/gh/ He is also active making HD video installations and curating, most recently for SCOPE Hamptons art fair http://www.scope-art.com/main.php July 13-16, 2006. He’ll be presenting excerpts from an HDV database http://=20 nujus.net/gh_04/gallery10.html.
• c=

From agora158@gmail.com Wed Jul 5 18:48:50 2006
Boundaries and belongings and borders are related to one’s identity, “this is mine”, “this is yours”, “this is ours”, since we belong to the same family or the same couple. I am raised in a cloister and was always apalled about how the nuns shared everything and made vows of poverty. The order owned all they had, once a nun left the school and she was given a bag with some clothes and some money to take the bus. Later, in jail (I spent four years in jail for political reasons), it was very difficult to learn how to share. Our “belongings”, the stuff we were allowed to own was minimal, a tootbrush, a comb, some pictures of the family, underwear and socks. We wore jail clothes and “civilian” clothes were banned. Books and paper to write and pens and pencils were banned as well, no newspapers no radio no tv. But our relatives sent to us some food and cigarettes. At the beginning we had long discussions about how to share the food and the cigs. Some grandmother sent a cake who could feed 5 or 6 people, how to share it among 45? And cigs, how to distribute them? Depending on each one’s need or depending on how much your own family had sent? Later on, already in Sweden, I lived for three years in an anarchist collective, we owned all together and we worked, lived and spent free time together. We decided to invest all the wages on projects, we started a publishing house, we supported social movements. The only “belongings” we had were some personal clothes and some few personal items, all was owned by the “collective”. When I left them to live by myself I took from the “collective belongings” a pan, two dishes and some few books. Started to gather things again... In all my visits to Palestine I was atonished by the degree of solidarity and hospitality the common people had, in times of hunger and severe pain we, the visitors, were not allowed to pay for anything, we slept in their rooms and shared the pita bread, the cucumbers and the hummus which is the staple diet of the impoverished Palestinian. I guess the people in New Orleans have also the solidarity and the sharing the people learn itself to have when need is big. But often I ask myself, why can we not live in the wealth as we lived in need? I mean, why not share when nobody is asking you to do that, why not share for sharing/s joy? I think George Bataille’s book “The Accursed Share”, where he develops the theory of Marcel Mauss about the “Gift” is a great tool to discuss the conditions for ownership and sharing. –Ana
From ghh@thing.net Wed Jul 5 21:56:20 2006

The only thing artists have is themselves. What’s in their hand, what’s in their mind, how they move about in the world, is all they have. You make art to clarify your mind, to clarify your thoughts, to see what the world is about, to find the truth... and this now, in the 21st century, using media, using digital media, is all about finding the truth, the truth within the circle of language.”– http://spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod/archives/2006_05.html>
Art is about stripping bare the psyche. Punk was a consequence of the poverty and recession of the 1970s. We all felt there was no future for us because the previous generation of rich hippies controlled everything. The only thing to do was to negate their philosophy in every way possible. This included challenging feminism by acting outrageous. The other side was a sort of capitalist S & M position.. That was the way out of the dilemma, freedom through punishment; destruction and self-destruction, extreme nihilism. They didn’t want us therefore we didn’t want them, not only that but we didn’t want each other. We didn’t want anything. Richard Hell expressed the emotion best in his song lyrics, °ßI’m part of the blank generation, = I can take it or leave it alone.°® < http://post.thing.net/blog/9/feed>
I’m working on three projects right now. Each one is about stripping bare reality. The processes are different. Let me describe the procedures without telling you which belongs to which. 1) I walk around with a 1 gig flash memory audio recorder and sample the sounds and conversations I hear and engage in. I do this in 3 minute samples. I put the samples into an editing program and then overlap them. What is produced is an immersive sound event that is closer to the way we actually remember things. 2) I decide to go back to the origins of video art which is essentially an artists doing something in front of a camera. When I edit the footage, I am using myself to create a media object. I am becoming a digital object that can be duplicated, sampled, cut apart, endlessly multiplied and put back together. 3) You walk into a room and a film/video is projected on a wall. The scenes played are not in any particular order yet they make sense. What occurs is that a computer is picking sequences in a random order and playing them. Your mind and your imagination fill in the story. http://spaghetti.nujus.net/artDirt http://spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod http://nujus.net/gh_04/gallery11.html

dear -empyre-
Conor McGarrigle is joining us from Paris where he is living this month. He’s asked me to forward to you his initial reflections on ‘what is bare life?”... these follow his short bio here.

• cm

Conor McGarrigle is a net artist based in Dublin. He is the founder of online arts space Stunned.org . In 2002 as part of the Irish Museum of Modern art project he started the net art open: the uncurated open submission net art show in which all entries are accepted. His art has dealt with themes of surveillance (Spook...) , identity (PLAY-lets) and art activism (IrishMuseumofModernArt.com), often involving fictional identities with an element of prankstavism never far away. He is currently working on an extended narrative work about artists in Dublin based on Joyce’s Ulysses (Cyclops, Proteus episodes completed to date) and has recently developed an interest in mapping resulting in Google Bono : a google maps / surveillance camera mashup.
His work has been widely exhibited internationally including the Seoul Net FEstival, File Sao Paolo, FILE RIO, Thailand New media arts festival, Fundacio La Caixa Barcelona, SIGGRAPH, ReJoyce Festival Dublin, Arthouse Dublin,Project Arts Centre Dublin, The City Arts Centre and Intermedia Cork. He is currently studying for an MFA at the National College of Art and Design Dublin.
Connor writes,
First of all I would like to thank Christina for inviting me to partake in this discussion, it’s a great honour particularly to be in such good company.
In reflecting on bare life the work of Giorgio Agamben and his key concept of Homo Sacer are unavoidable. Agamben bases his concept of bare life on an obscure point of ancient roman law; when a condemned person was banned from society and had their rights as a citizen removed, thus becoming Homo Sacer, the living dead whose killing was not a crime, excluded from the protection of the law but still subject to the law, living in a state of exception. Obviously the ‘unlawful combatants’ of Guantanamo Bay, those subject to ‘extraordinary rendition’ and held in secret prisons around the world stripped of all rights and at the mercy of the state of exception are modern day Homo Sacer. There is even a school of thought which holds that liberal democracy is a mask and that ultimately we are all Homo Sacer.
What does this mean for art and in particular for the possibility of political art? Around 2000 I was interested in surveillance online culminating in my Spook Project. The central conceit was that it placed a military server which had visited my site under surveillance and was able to track where it had been on the web using very basic techniques. While exposing the amount of data left behind as you surfed Spook... implied that online surveillance was a two way street and that such surveillance was a haphazard affair not to be taken too seriously. What was a little naive even then today looks like a charming period piece which raises questions about the role of political art. It’s obvious that political art is needed now more then ever but how can we challenge this growth in the state of exception, of rule by decree °V think of all the special anti- terrorism legislation being enacted all around the world °V artistically? On what criteria do we judge this art and would the effort not be better spent in some sort of direct action that has a better chance of being effective? These are questions I ask myself, not questions that I raise just to be controversial and I look forward to everyone’s thoughts.
There is another more optimistic aspect to bare life. Agamben notes that Bare Life is “ a form of life over which power no longer seems to have any hold” which opens up possibilities for a “lyrical or even ecstatic” dimension. Colin McQuillan in his essay ‘The Political Life in Giorgio Agamben’ argues that Agamben “defines this politics in terms of°ßa life directed toward the idea of happiness and cohesive with a form-of-life°® in which °ßthe single ways, acts, and process of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always above all power.°® and that °ßAgamben’s conception of the political life is the result of a radical rethinking of the potentiality of life, and life as potentiality.” I have had a long term interest in Joyce and Ulysses in particular and have recently embarked on the (foolhardy) task of attempting a series of narrative based works structurally based on the chapters of Ulysses. This aspect of bare life seems to me to echo many of Joyce’s concerns or certainly that aspect of Joyce that I find of particular interest. While Joyce is often seen as the austere high priest of modernism it is the humourous Joyce, the lyrical Joyce, the politically conflicted Joyce who abhorred the absolutist position and most of all the Joyce who believed that the highest form of art was to be found in the everyday lives of ordinary people, that I find of most interest and that informs my recent work. I am interested in the idea that by focusing on simple everyday things like walking through a city, we begin a process which clarifies what we do and how we relate to our world and reveals greater truths about ways of being in the world. It is of necessity an open ended process one for which the result is not clear. For me this ties in with this dimension of bare life the idea that stripping life down to its essentials opens up new and unexpected possibilities.
Which brings me to the idea that art can dissolve the “radical separation between painful subjection and joyous liberation” . An ambitious and honourable aim…but can it be realised? I look forward to the debate. On a personal note I’m doing this on what was going to be a computer free break in Paris. I will be using internet cafes so my responses will not be super fast and I apologise in advance. –Connor

From mwhite@michelewhite.org Fri Jul 7 03:43:06 2006
I think that it might be useful to correlate Ana’s comments about mapping and belonging/belongings with Conor’s about surveillance. I believe Ana also had some interesting commentary on mapping on her web site.
Mapping is a key aspect of the Internet and new media practices. Yet, mapping has also been a key strategy in the colonization and possession of physical spaces. Cultures, histories, and evidence of specific living situations are reshaped by the ways that countries and areas are drawn, how they are named, and where places end up on a map (centered of represented as smaller and pushed to the edges). Mapping articulates a place and who owns it but it can also provide resistant readings of place and categorizations. Has anyone considered the ways Rhizome’s varied maps and rethinkings of its structures and the Internet fit into these practices?
There have been some considerations of how Google Maps and other Internet-based services, in providing detailed aerial satellite images, render the individual and home as further surveilled and at threat. At the same time, Google Maps, in combination with varied aerial images of flooded New Orleans, provided a way for individuals to check on homes and offered a connection to place rather than an intrusive gaze.
I find the impossible routes sketched out by attempts to avoid surveillance cameras, as figured by the Surveillance Camera Players and others, both amusing and terrifying. It is clear why their site notes: “Not intended for use in the commission of any crime or act of war.” However, such gestures also indicate the difficulties in doing critical work about the state and all of the private enterprises with a stake in watching and gathering data on individuals. Feminist research on surveillance cameras indicates that some bodies are much more likely to be surveilled, feel regulated by the gaze, and to experience serious physical and psychological effects from these viewing and mapping strategies. In the back rooms of such institutions as private companies and public transportation systems, images are alternately ignore and accompanied by workers’ technologically facilitated sexist and racist commentary about bodies. In Robert Greenwald’s Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price, the director indicates that shoppers felt protected from violence because of exterior surveillance cameras but no one came when they were attacked. The cameras were only used when Walmart was trying to prevent employees from participating in union-building activities.
In my book, I consider women’s active representation on webcams and too briefly think about how they use or frame these devices as a way to create a global surveillance/protection system for themselves and their belongings. These women alternately control and celebrate their visibility. At the same time, news programs, talk shows, and other media encourage women to submit to being visible for their own safety and suggest that they remain on populated paths, in well-lighted corridors, and within the safe purview of surveillance cameras. Nevertheless, there are some ways women’s bodies are not supposed to be visible. Such narratives are much less likely to be directed at men. Such genres as the slasher and stalker film focus on the terrifying possibilities of being in the dark and out of the watchful and protective gaze of society. These films have indicated that there are ways of being properly visible and protected and ways of being endangered through obsessive and invisible surveillance. Some bodies and individuals face significant problems in trying to navigate their ways through both mapped and ignored terrain.
By the way, thanks to Patrick for the terrific thoughts on throws and the NOLA art communities. It would be a pleasure to continue this conversation. -Michele

From aliette@criticalsecret.org Fri Jul 7 04:21:05 2006 00
Hello beautiful Christina, hello Patrick Yes, hello splendid Guests, hello All !
In the acts of Yes Men there is both a funny and hard laconic irony on deep causes, it is both time a wakefulness and that help with a certain exuberance to better coming next, without utopia but in real time, more if they are working to concur socially whatever they create as activist spectacular Art performances. So Courage New Orleans, one day it will turn to people advantage... Courage Patrick _ how great is the critical reputation of Yes Men!_ And courage French Arts against what is turning into local bureaucratic post-fascism in a global environment that is not to help people, a secret monster upsetting the references. The question is not of people as People closed to a Nation, but population on a territory... We would have to read again ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ that was the report by Hannah Arendt to tribute The New Yorker. The emerging question of this text precisely being of bare life _ and the current confirming the exception (can be something lightening institutional practice of Arts, social life, and the current war as porn, in our days ?) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem

From agora158@gmail.com Fri Jul 7 05:02:12 2006
Yes, Michele, you are so right, mapping has been the colonization’s principal tools to draw borders, to steal territories and to conquer by fencing the new world. Last year I was in a meeting in Tarifa, in the south of Spain, where Brian Holmes and other people hold a workshop about social mapping, mapping networks and mapping “countersurveillance”. The crew of Fadaiat.net and Hackitectura.net has been involved in the alternative mapping of the Gibraltar strait, the border between the rich Europe and the poor Africa, where every day people are killed. (Yesterday 3 were killed and 25 wounded intending to hope over the high fence in Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish colonial enclaves.) http://madiaq.indymedia.org/ Ursula Biemman, from Old Boys Network, has done a great work making video in those camps where desperate people wait for nothing, they are not recognized as refugees by the UN and Spain and Marocco send them back to Senegal, Ivory Coast and Botswana. Mapping the alternative ways and trying to dissect the complex social networks operating in the Strait is a really important political and artistic tool. –Ana
From dkellysocialchange@yahoo.com Fri Jul 7 08:24:16
Speaking of political understandings of people in place, and of radical cartographic practice, there is a lovely blog resource mapping a deep and broad array of related projects; they are also keen to receive clues for their investigations.
It’s US-based, but curious:
http://criticalspatialpractice.blogspot.com/
I reckon it’s a wonderful site,
regards, Deborah (Sydney)
From greg.smith@utoronto.ca Fri Jul 7 09:17:48 2006
...and while on the topic of “the new cartography” I cannot recommend enough the Janet Abrams and Peter Hall edited text “Else/Where: New Cartographies of Networks and Territories.” More info on the text is available at http://design.umn.edu/go/project/elsewheremapping

-- greg smith http://www.serialconsign.com
http://www.vagueterrain.net

From ghh@thing.net Fri Jul 7 21:59:39 2006
I don’t believe that bare life has anything to do with art. We are all on the edge of a potential tragedy. One day everything is fine, the next you are confronted with your fragile world as it collapses. I live eight blocks north of the World Trade Center. My windows face the buildings. I saw the planes crash into the buildings as I was doing my morning exercises. I saw the people jumping from the burning buildings. No it was not on videotape for me it was °ßbare life.°®It is almost impossible to make art about the WTC attack. It is an enormous physical disaster as well as an information event. The same may be said of the New Orleans disaster that is still unfolding. The psyche of America is disturbed. It is now operating on a belief system that has no basis in reality. This narrative and its larger reality make a fitting subject for art. The reduction to bare essentials, to mere survival, does not create the conditions for art. If art matters and is not a diversion (divertissement) or entertainment. It is not about teaching (didacticism) or the marketing of high priced objects for the idle rich. If anything the art makes a counter proposition…to process a collective trauma and re-balance the human psyche. This then is the true nature and value of art and the artist. The artist makes it possible to continue living in spite of a shattering event.. What it does is reorder our sense of the world and our internal narrative.
From agora158@gmail.com Fri Jul 7 22:12:42 2006
I feel great sympathy with your eloquent writing, but I am still going to try to make Art about myh experience in a concentrations camp. The jail in Uruguay did not qualify to the horrors of Auschwitz, no crematory ovens, not execution patrols... but we had all the “other”, the constant harassing, the dogs watching us work as forced labor in the fields, move around stones to place and move them again, the Sysiphus work, I did it. But it’s not good to make level differences in horror, all what is against the life and the freedom and the rights of people its wrong, it’s doesn’t matter it’s called Guantanamo or Gulag or Punta Rieles (it was the name of my prison). I saw Cavanis great film and loved Maus, I read Primo Levi and Kertes and Dostoievskis description of his time in Sibirien, I read Ho Chi Minh’s books from the jail the French colonial power put him and Mandela‘s book from Robben Islands. Everyone who traversed such a journey must be able to write or tell its history, because Art is this, the ability to be a protagonist, to use your own feelings and fear and desires to express yourself in the form you choose. –Ana
From ghh@thing.net Fri Jul 7 22:43:29 2006
Ana Valdes wrote:
“the fields, move around stones to place and move them again, the Sysiphous work, I did it.” In your snippet I can see a whole art work. Richard Serra the sculptor tells a story of how, when he was a rambunctious young man, his father would punish him by making him move a huge pile of dirt by hand from one location of their back lot to another location. When he was done, he and his father had an aesthetic discussion about it’s location. If they agreed the pile was in the right place he was finished his task. If not he would move the pile to the agreed properly aesthetic position. –GH

From agora158@gmail.com Fri Jul 7 22:49:08 2006
I think the point here is how much “bare life” is to feel yourself constrained, privated of your right to dissent, lacking your “citizenship”. We gathered a lot of anger and a lot of passion, it’s a bit difficult for me today to wake up the passion of a 19 years old girl in a woman of 53, but that’s the challenge, to move yourself between your own memory, the collective memory and the fiction and the narrative. Sarat Maharat wrote something wonderful about Memory and we met and discuss my project, to write about the prison in Agamben terms, seeing it as a testimony finding it’s place between the documentary and the literary. –Ana

From aliette@criticalsecret.org Sat Jul 8 11:03:22 2006 Searching to keep the safety of insubordination I range in the side of ethic;--
Regarding ethic as a deconstructivist question of phenomenology Jacques Derrida said : “Qu’est-ce que je dis quand je dis : “Ê me regarde” ?” What I say when I tell me that “it looks at me”?
From a part I agree with G.H. Hovagimyan. From another part I understand Ana Valdes’ request.
But her quotation of Giorgio Agamben reminds exactly of an unpleasant impression that I felt by reading in “ Remnants of Auschwitz” his evocation of Primo Levi. That seemed particularly a point of view from an arbitrary observation of laboratory. But Primo Levi was not still alive to revoke this report of their meeting (Agamben having crossed Primo Levi). Primo Levi was in a sort under the regard of a cool machine for the second time in his life, the first time being the regard of the camp (the eyes of the Gaolers more the eyes of the prisoners “surviving” both appointing a prisoner or a prisoner become “mushlem”—of whom Primo Levi reports in “If This is a Man”—and from another part testifying by the complex of the surviving man being other); like a sort of revenge of the life (Agamben being alive sees Levi such as a embodying realization of which he reports and analyzes) against the death (Primo Levi being dead—whatever—Be more the point of view from Agamben to Levi yet dead suicides him for the second time). Here lives a sort of philosophical abuse revealing into obscenity.
Anyway from very far it is not the book of the real time. But the terrific work of the real time exists, which were the hard drawings of Zoran Music when prisoner in Dachau. A way to survival, he said. The documentary of creation as representative cinema surfs between report and Art work : wasn’t the first anthological work asking such a mediatic question or the book “In cool blood” by Truman Capote, in 1960?
Any references that surrounds me :
Quotation in the site of the publisher “éditions de minuit” of a review extracted from Art Press ( issue 297 ) concerning aesthetician Georges Didi-Huberman’s book “Images malgre tout” where it is question of images in certain circumstances (notoriously 4 photos from Auschwitz ): the question of the truth as materialist reality of the life, and as common metaphysical event, of the obscenity, of the testimony, on the irrepressible missing representatitivity of the worst: “there is no icon of what happened in Auschwitz”. http://www.leseditionsdeminuit.fr/presse/art_press_images_malgre_tout.pd...
More, you have the point of view developed by sociologist and anthropologist of the contemporary, Bruno Latour, co-curator of the exhibition “Iconoclash”, ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, in 2002, in his text ( part of the book resulting of the exhibition ) : ‘What is Iconoclash? Or is There a World Beyond the Image Wars? Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art. ZKM, Karlsruhe & MIT PRESS, Massachusetts, 2002.) “Pourquoi iconoclash et pas iconoclasm ? L’iconoclasme detruit une image, une icone, une representation. Devant ce geste on ne peut que se rejouir ou s’indigner. Dans un iconoclash -neoologisme inventé pour la cause on ne sait pas ce qui c’est passé, le plaisir et la fureur se trouvent suspendus - ; leur font place le doute, l_inquiétude et l_incertitude sur ce qui se passe vraiment quand on veut produire ou détruire des représentations. “ http://hosting.zkm.de/icon/stories/storyReader$64 That means for a part how the production and the destruction of representations by icons install the experiment of the life far from the represented events. Icono->CLASH as an accident: mutes the symbolic mirror of representation into a representation not being a mirror but a proper event.
Consequently installing the representation as event by the disappearance of the living reference ; that produces the representation instead of the live event: meta life as representation of the bare life—not being a materialist reality designed by the concept of “bare life”.
You can read a realization of entropy from the iconoclash effect in real time of the life, by making its filmic documentary and more... in the novel of science-fiction by Adolfo Bioy-Casares “The Invention of Morel” (1940).
From post-modernity till nowadays as philosophical found in post dialectic materialism, it seems that Jean Baudrillard is still available in his exploration of bare life (through the event and the phenomena as materialist reality of the life and as symbolic representation) and meta life (through the signification and the representation as simulation and simulacrum which the question of commodity).
At last I want to say that I do not believe in memory; collective memory does not own to anyone, it is dynamic and plastic; it is just an event when we think that we are consensually plural as an exception of the social history... Under my point of view collective memory is not the fact of Artists it is the fact of every member of the city in cognitive disposition of the feeling of existing between other existences, with a certain common changing mode. What does not change in matter of testimony are archives, that could not be both of bare life being testimony of former events.
Writers, artists, or thinkers probably they do not testify of other reality than the one of their respective existence and mode of existence at work, even they can sincerely wish to work for others or to others. –Aliette

From Conor McGarrigle Sun Jul 9 01:56:03 2006

I was fascinated with the debate of New Orleans and sorry I missed the flow of the debate. I briefly visited there a few years back and it struck me as a very unamerican city, that is a city that doesn’t fit in with this idea that we are receiving, particularly as Europeans, of what America stands for today. Even then it was a surprise what happened. In recent times I think of what has been happening in the US as a slipping of the mask, Guantanamo, Katrina every time a little bit more of what made America great slips away and we’re face to face with bare life in the US empire.
When GH says he doesn’t believe bare life has anything to do with art I’m inclined to agree. Art is a poor refuge faced with illness, death, disasters, prison camps but at the same time we are close to bare life these things are never very far from us and perhaps today closer then ever.” If art matters and is not a diversion (divertissement) or entertainment. It is not about teaching (didacticism) or the marketing of high priced objects for the idle rich.”
it must deal with these things. Still it’s not easy. I grew up in the 70s in Ireland during the troubles - what we called a 30 year war the T word was almost never used which is why we can now deal with the combatants from both sides - there was much art made about it most of it failed in any attempt to deal with the horror of what was going on. This is the problem, we need to deal with bare life but its very hard. –Conor
From gana@iinet.net.au Sun Jul 9 12:29:26 2006
Hi everyone...
enjoying the way this discussion is going. It occurred to me that there has been a range of quite strong responses to the (im)possibility of an art practice that can deal with or engage with ‘bare life’. This maybe true given that by Agamben’s critique bare life refers to body°¶s simply the state °•vegetative°¶ being, separated from those qualities, the social and historical attributes that constitute individuality. The stateless refugee. And that artist as a cultural producer - even if he or she is working out their own poetic sensibility or some political engagement. Art is still cultural production. Bare life is raw and means for some the point at which you are starving or losing your humanity.
I saw this in a few faces in the streets in Chile when I lived there.
I produced art there and felt completely useless against the overwhelming sadness of the victims within the family I lived with. I kept making work ad hid it away. Yet somehow by the very action of producing something that was not obviously “dealing with the horror” as Conor so eloquently puts it I still was able to keep my humanity and I knew inside of me that the work would feed back into the foodchain - into the cultural bloodstream - and in some small way would give something back. I think it was Susan Sontag who said art only becomes ‘real’ or ‘true’ as it changes or reconfigures the field (the culture). It will always do that even in some small way. -Gianni

From aliette@criticalsecret.org Sun Jul 9 22:29:54 2006 Dear all,
From my part entering “ the heart of the matter “: what disrupts me a lot, it is that the proposition coming from dokumenta under Agamben’s reference “ bare life “ forces us (as turning us into “homo sacer” ourselves in some place of thinking) to separate one of the terms of Agamben’s dialectic between the power and the people from which he extracts the contemporary “homo sacer” from, in his work (1998).
In a certain sort unfortunately this option of the concurring title of the event acts as a revisionism of Agamben’s proposition (which is yet attractive but not so sympathetic) by extracting the power out of the question, that is, What is openly unacceptable? or no more fight could be relevant. Because it returns to a certain conception of “natural” (even resulting from the power) to “ homo sacer” that personally I cannot accept.
I know for example that Christoph Winkler has made the best of this inspiration, but if all is possible in a matter from static to dynamic Artistic performances and creations (Winkler being now the famous choreographer who know of after having experiment a lot of contemporary art and music fields_and pop fields_ in an integrated destiny), the same mental action is not possible in matter of reflecting philosophy. That is exactly the difference between Arts and Philosophy, the frontier, when philosophy tributes to the collective as ethic. Bio-politic is exactly the domain realizing philosophy in ethic, after the separate fields they were.
It is not a question of doctrine it is really a question of ethic at the base of the relevant capacity of reasoning in each human knowing a maternal language, can be the language of the environment without “bare” mother.
But obviously having reached this situation of all frontiers can being over passed in matter of thought to the life, there is no more means to create an event or bare life itself as real?--real criticism of the theory by the event of the life as No art: coming after the radical object of Body Art _a= s ultimate Art.
Besides abstracting “ homo sacer “ out of its structural context of reference as a concept from Agamben, that unfortunately can inform a revisionism to this philosophy (by installing a “natural” conception of “homo sacer” that makes nonsense regarding Agamben, which installs toward the domination of power the question of “nature” as fate_even social heritage of education_ or superiority of certain humans being able to be executive on other humans.
In other words let us return to the dialectic of the master and the slave chez Hegel. But more it makes moving the word toward the sense of the antique Roman conception that tells “homo sacer” in singular symbolic situation to be killed without a crime by whomever has a special leave to deny protection by the law to the one is in danger to be murdered without punishment.
So ontologically (regarding the phenomena of the collective live west culture) and philologically (regarding the history of the concept and of the phenomena of collective humanity from west culture) being impossible to reject the question of institutions and of sovereign power outside of the term of “homo sacer”, the same as “bare life” resulting of the condition of “homo sacer”, I do not see where “bare life” can make sense all alone or by a total deregulation of the traditional and original progressive philosophic device from which it is extracted; that installs a critical collapse absolved from the philosophy.
(Of the iconoclast crisis of philosophy absolved from the modern philosophy whatever of Dokumenta, we are involving a schism. Can be “bare life” from Dokumenta in this special disposition produce the multi semantic sign of a total redistribution of the references after Human rights. having become totally obsolete as sense at the horizon of current practice outside of the law by more laws effected by the new power (the same of global as local or micro-local). At this point: the representative power of the democracy represents itself as collective citizen itself able to claim at the act “homo sacer” to the part of human genre not being the power, by generalizing the use of murder not being a crime.
The last post political emergent question which results is this one: in which arrangement to save himself all on one’s own, or by the other means (then which one?) is “homo sacer” settled by such a deregulation of the law , of the power, of the society?
Otherwise the leak or the social boycott - and consequently the repression?
Thus we would really be in war against the power and against the representative law even democracy in particular and generally. But the war not being dialectical: how to win safe toward the current condition of homo sacer?
As homo sacer is not a missing human condition. Homo sacer is not of another genre. He is the basic human condition as collective condition of the one, it appears. What of the secret known but predictable force of “homo sacer” in danger?

Reflecting this question may be open “bare life”? -Aliette

From mwhite@michelewhite.org Mon Jul 10 02:47:28 2006
Thanks for the thoughts on the concept of bare life and art.
I previously questioned Roger M. Buergel’s indication in the Documenta texts that “absolute exposure is intricately connected with infinite pleasure.” Foucault’s critique of the panopticon and feminist film and art history considerations of the gaze would suggest that “exposure” can be extremely painful, regulating, and normalizing. Are we differentiating between self-generated acts of personal exposing and exposure. How do societal messages provide individuals with limits or rules for such actions?
In this earlier post I noted that: Exposure should be correlated to the histories of visibility and invisibility that different cultures and individuals face. Individuals that are described as CEO, tenured faculty member, citizen, adult, artist, or married are likely to associate exposure with different pleasures and risks than those felt by the undocumented worker, adjunct, “alien,” juvenile, fan producer, and sex worker. I am interested in considering the different ways that bodies are put on display, the various demands for exposure, and what it means when people decide or are forced to become visible in the world. Culture does not understand the flash of women’s breasts, men’s breasts (that are supposed to be called something else), and men’s penises to have the same meanings.
Painting, photography, and other forms of art production have a history of exposing some individuals to the observational and regulatory gaze. This would suggest that artists and producers might want to be particularly aware of how exposure and looking are facilitated by their work. What would an ethics of looking and exposure contain? What are the ways to theorize exposure? Certainly feminist art production (Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Laura Mulvey...) has proposed some models for these engagements.- --Michele

From christina112@earthlink.net Mon Jul 10 03:22:38 2006
what about when and if surveillance generates accidental (or not so accidental) performance? “Bare Life” in a vaudeville costume...

From gh@thing.net Mon Jul 10 03:24:42 2006 Subject:
The Artist vs The Terrorist (New Orleans reprise)

New Orleans is a city that has always been a problem for America. Like New York City it is a place of ambition and neglect. New Orleans was the center of the slave trade. The first place that Africans set foot on American soil. The discussion of bare life is quite pertinent when looking at New Orleans. Its culture of mélange and balance is the result of its brutality. If I couldn’t live in New York City I would live in New Orleans. There is an anarchy and chaos that is always covered over by the gloss of laissez les bon temps rouler. The poor of New Orleans have been scattered in a diaspora around the United States. What is already happening is that the artists are beginning create works about the experience. It will take some time before we fully understand how the city and its poor will reconstitute itself. The art and service industry of New Orleans depends on cheap housing for all the service workers, musicians and parade crews. This is a big dilemma for corporate developers. The opportunity to make a lot of money and turn the city into a bourgeois paradise conflicts with the need for subsidizing the poor and the marginal. Artists never figure into any equation of money and corporate greed in the USA unless they are creating major commodities. There is no such thing as support for struggling artists or mid career or those who might not ever become blue chip. There is no understanding of the environment of discourse and messy anarchy that is the gumbo of creativity.
Bare Life has two components—the individual reality and the group reaction. Both are being played out in this drama. Luckily, the artists’ first instinct is to make art. The reaction to a stripping away, to bare life, can vary quite a lot. I see the terrorist and religious fundamentalist instinct as a countervalent reaction to bare = life. Art is a liberating force. The desire for release, for liberation from, can create either a terrorist or an artist. The sad part is that in the worlds and cultures where art is suppressed or not valued or de-valued only religion and war are appropriate. –GH

From: criticalspatialpractice.blogspot.com Tue Jul 11 17:44:32 2006

Just learned of a current project that is very relevant to the “Bare Life” theme....
<< CAMP CAMPAIGN >> http://www.campcampaign.info/
How is it that a camp like Guantanamo Bay can exist in our time?
We would like to begin our campaign with this simple question and join other organizations, lawyers, thinkers, and activists in contesting not only the existence of this camp but also examining its relation to other phenomenon we are confronted with in the social and political landscape. We feel that Guantanamo Bay is only a more acute or extreme version of what is taking place around us in the name of security. And our campaign attempts to draw out those connections and link them to historical precedents as well as everyday phenomenon .
The Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has introduced two critical questions that pertain to our current political crisis and to our campaign.
First, that the state of exception, in this case, the suspension of the rule of law (e.g., Patriot Act, illegal combatants, military tribunals, extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay), have become increasingly common devices of governance, perhaps the norm, in “democratic” states in this last century. Second, that the camp should not be seen exclusively as a historical fact (e.g. Auschwitz) or as an exception reserved only for the “inhuman” (e.g. Guantanamo Bay) or displaced refugee (e.g. Palestine), but as the paradigm, the “hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living.” This second theme is interesting because it is closer to a question which relies on discussion to first understand and then to interrogate and explore....
In this context, Camp X-Ray, Echo, Delta* become more than exceptional sites of the suspension of law, or mere examples of America’s unilateral policies and ignorance of international law. Instead they serve as glaring examples of what remains one of the critical apparatuses and unspoken structural underwriters of modern governance (including democracy). With this understanding the exception is not a freak occurrence, but rather a means of conditioning and establishing (a relation to) the norm. For these reasons, we believe that Guantanamo Bay is a critical site for developing a discussion with a public about various timely themes in politics today (e.g., security and terror, citizenship and statelessness, human rights vs. political and legal rights, the coming / unavowable / inoperative or terrible community)....
Continued @ http://www.campcampaign.info/about.htm
See also: The Guantanamobile Project http://vectors.iml.annenberg.edu/index.php?page=3D7&projectId=3D3 http://guantanamobile.org/
--Nicholas www.walkinginplace.org
dear -empyre-
Thanks to everyone for contributing so much already to the discussion on “Bare Life,” in collaboration with the Documenta 12 Magazine Project http://www.documenta12.de/english/magazines.html.
Please welcome artist Susana Mendes Silva (PT).
Susana Mendes Silva lives and works in Lisboa, Portugal. She has been working in the interstices of intimacy and affection, but also with reflecting about the object of art. Some of her projects make a very visible bridge between these two universes, especially the site- specific or the performance works. She has recently shown the installation Mind Walls in a group show at Museu da Cidade (Lisboa), and has developed the work Sheet for vector (the e-zine of virose http://www.virose.pt/) and for hidden agenda, contemporary art editions. Susana has spoken, this March (2006), about her networked performances - artphone, 2002; art_room, 2005; and artphone, 2005 - at The Upgrade! Lisbon. Her media art is found in festival venues and art databases internationally since 2002, including Free Manifesta, manifesta 4, Frankfurt, prog:me, Rio de Janeiro, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art / Rhizome Artbase.
In 2005 she presented the solo exhibitions Words in my mind (where she presented a drawing installation at Casa d’Os Dias da Água, Lisboa) and Life-cage (where she shown video and photographs at Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisboa), and in 2006 Did I hurt you? (where she presented video and drawings at Zoom, Galeria Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa). Her video work was shown in the group screenings Mar Atlantico- Portuguese Video Art, FVNM, The School of the Art Institut Chicago and Del Zero al 2005, Fundação Marcelino Botín, Santander, Spain. This year it will be shown in Mostra de Vídeo Arte Portuguesa Contemporânea - Antologia, Luanda, Angola.
susana mendes silva em on http://www.turbulence.org/blog/index.html
°ßspamming: from aesthetics to politics°® by luís silva
links http://www.virose.pt/vector/b_16/mendes_silva.html
http://www.susanamendessilva.com
• cm

On 11/07/06 18:54, wrote:
Hi Aliette, empyreans
As I am in Paris at the moment and as Aliette has already mentioned it’s hard to escape football and of course the fortunes of les bleus. I watched both the semi final and the final at the Stade Charléty here in Paris and I feel I got an insight into what Roger M. Buergel means when he talks of the ‘ecstatic dimension to it _ a freedom for new and unexpected possibilities’ . The photographer Jurgen Teller made a video a few years ago consisting of a fixed camera watching him as he watched Germany play in the World cup. Divorced from its context it’s very amusing watching him lose all reason but that’s what football is all about. Watching France play surrounded by thousands of French fans reflecting the diverse backgrounds of the team, a team it seems that embody so much of the political issues that are important in France today. But when the ball kicks off all that matters is the game and you are exposed to some form of bare life where the highs are ecstatic and the lows terrible but all that matters is the moment and there are no differences, no class, no colour just for that moment. Then it all comes crashing down in an instant as it did in Berlin when Zizou walked off the pitch taking French hopes with him and we all left to be greeted by phalanxes of riot police batons drawn and ready for action. But it is all worth it for those moments and those moments are what I search for in art. -Conor

from gh@thing.net Tue Jul 11 21:36:32 2006
Michelle wrote:
“Individuals that are described as CEO, tenured faculty member, citizen, adult, artist, or married are likely to associate exposure with different pleasures and risks than those felt by the undocumented worker, adjunct, “alien,” juvenile, fan producer, and sex worker.”
GH comments:
Your categories are points of view created by a corporate society in which everyone has a role. Your underclass functions as the chaotic miasmic countervalence or “other.” You play right into the major discourse of Western Techno-culture. You reinforce it. In another culture people might be categorized as, sinners, knights, peasants, nobleman, etc.. This is the reason why people riot in the banlieusn of France. It ‘s the reason why the Arab world claims that the West does not respect them. The same age-of-enlightenment supposedly dispassionate observer is in reality creating the conditions for an oppressive corporate mono-culture. This dialectic presumes that the underclass wants nothing more than to be part of the ruling technocrats. It assumes that the Arab world wants a Western style capitalist democracy. What if that’s not true? Indeed from my point of view people live their lives in spite of the ruling hegemony. What if one does not have a “will to power?” You put artists in the successful category that’s even more of a problem for me. That’s perhaps the most interesting of your mistakes and exposes the corporate classes point of view. Artist’s who play the mercantile game of the art market are accepted by the technocrats. Those who don’t are ignored or perhaps they must pick another category such as faculty member or maybe adjunct. I have a colleague who is an artist and runs a major artists’ alternative web site here in New York. Since this is America, there is little or no funding for experimental art endeavors no matter how beneficial they might be to the society at large. He is totally without money and has been sleeping on my couch for a year. He is living the life of an anarchist nomad. He is not young. This is not a romantic choice. He doesn’t fit into one of your categories. He is in a non-category perhaps akin to Hakim Bey’s temporary autonomous zone. Your analysis of exposure is so incredibly trite it’s laughable. It’s a position born of privilege. It has the same sense as Marie Antoinette dressing up as a peasant and playing as a milk maid. Another romantic choice from a different era. The “bare life” of the 21st century is a life that is lived in spite of the military-entertainment complex. It is a life that is not incorporated or crushed by the supposed benefits of corporate global culture. As an artist I insist that I live my life without categories. That is freedom. My colleague who sleeps on my couch lives in a zone of bare life. I make art that defies categories. My ongoing digital performance piece RANTAPOD is a stripping away to bare life. The corporate art market an the military-entertainment complex don’t have a mechanism to include this work. It is significant and exists in spite of it being outside the realm of corporate categories. It is only by a lucky circumstance that I am not the one who is sleeping on the couch in someone else’s home. –gh
From mwhite@michelewhite.org Wed Jul 12 01:42:23 2006

Subject: Re: