Ralph Paine – 27 December, 2020

Dear X

Thanks for your latest communique, the talking points, etc. Random that your Colombian writing gig has coincided with the Mercy-Event. Your friend R’s museum project sounds remarkable, forcing you to enter the archaeology/ethnology zone, a zone of great affection pour moi, especially when viewed through the Deleuze & Guattari lens: Levi Strauss, Clastres, Leroi-Gourhan… And now the great D&G shaman apprentice Viveiros de Castro—wow! what an amazing book Cannibal Metaphysics is.

But you say R’s project is making for uneasy feelings. That an “ontology of art in which everything’s open, undetermined, a position held by French post-structuralism, and dating back to Romanticism’s enthusiasm for vitalism” is seeming a little redundant, not adequate for the tasks at hand in Bogota. I hear ya.

Different with Mercy’s People of Colour. Rather than undetermined/determined, I’m thinking underdetermined/overdetermined. Thus: PoC is a constellation of ideas, simulacra, picture-thoughts, of which the artists desired an underdetermined and open response. One coming from beyond good and evil, beyond all judgement machines, from a space akin to Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge. But no. Everything got way overdetermined, all psychologised ‘n’ subjectivised, moralistic, manic… A finalised, case closed, end of story and go fuck yourselves response. Crazy-weird-sad.

Perhaps Nina Power’s written piece didn’t help with this. The old wall-text/accompanying theoretical handout problem. Which in turn brings in the wider aspect of art’s current mode of production/mode of perception, inclusive of both social media and the white cube nexus, and thus a more widely dispersed Space of Reception—contemporary art and its constantly mutating public(s), the Aesthetic Regime… Difficult to underdetermine all that!

If social media gives “the masses” a new means of organising and regulating a response to a white cube or museum exhibition, what seems edgy and way fucked-up is that so often the organised responses are negative, iconoclastic, fascist: cancel culture, angry flash mob protests, death threats, vandalism, insulting and defamatory pronouncements, etc. The rest of the time it’s individual “likes” and unicorn emojis. Paul Virilio once said that every new technology brings in a new accident (his example was the car and the car crash). Guess then today we’re living in the Age of the Smartphone Accident, and this has gotta include rare-earth extraction and its connection to war, vast accumulations of e-waste, bio-surveillance, massive energy consumption, and blue-light & scrolling manias. The Wreckage.

All of which changes things for artists. Including the all-consuming issue of technique, manner, style… Random events, throws of the dice, accidents vs. very carefully chosen elements, tools, materials, formats, etc., sometimes to the point of overdetermination (when I feel the latter kicking in I know it’s time to mutate a little, to add or subtract some factor or other). Hence: always make and exhibit art as fresh experiment, test out the undetermined and the determined, the underdetermined and the overdetermined. In-situ, People of Colour was in no way un- or underdetermined. It was very precisely conceived and constructed. Precisely installed. Determined. A non-random set of flags printed on fabric, stretched on frames, hung salon-style. Of itself, the exhibition sang of exactitude. But yeah, then Insta got super-positioned.

In your case, with the Colombian glyphs, the images refuse to speak. There’s a temporal break, a rupture, a seemingly unbridgeable disconnect between the artists who made the rock face images and the people now living and working in the area i.e. those caring for, passing through, patrolling, exploiting, etc. this particular geo-zone. Does this mean that the images remain fully undetermined, thus allowing us to project anything we might desire onto them, any sense whatever?

What about the contemporary toolbox? The bricolage machine? Theory, art history, archaeology, ethnology, different kinds of local knowledge, indigenous thought, a constellation, assemblage of names, translations, understandings, diagrams, maps, tracings (always to be put back on the maps), processes. Isn’t this what R’s museum project is constructing, on the spot, a multi-perspectival Think Tank wherein an underdetermination of sense (the glyphs) is brought in some way toward contemporary collectivity and learning? Paradox: the past cannot be changed, and every generation changes it.

I’m crazy for images and studies of the Nazca lines in SW Peru. Again, no connection between the people who constructed these mega-glyphs and the people who live and work in the area today. The hypotheses concerning the “function” of the lines include: a vast astronomical map; a calendar—the beaks of some of the bird images indicate the points of sunrise on the days of the two solstices; markings for visitors from outer space—the sky-gods or alien theory; ritual treadmills; practical maps e.g. pointing the way to important sites, such as water sources… And archaeologists, often using drones, are discovering “new” mega-glyphs all the time.

In Aotearoa the situation is somewhat different. Māori often claim an intact and powerful continuity between the past, the present, the future. A continuity—whakapapa + storytelling + wairua-type connections to a primordial source + etc.—that has not been severed by colonialism, muskets, Christianity, the introduction of money and the commodity form, the English alphabet and the printing press, and so on to the Internet. Yet the Māori conceptual world overflows with intricately complex continuity/break problems e.g. the variations of the Tāne myth.

Sounds very labyrinthine between R, her university department, the museum in Bogota, and the indigenous artists she has been working alongside of. All the contradictions of class, race, gender, etc. plus the cultural appropriation thing! And all of it playing out in extreme conditions of a Sth American-type extractive capitalism—Marx in the Rainforest! An “anything goes” situation for the artists then? A wild frontier of code and affect creation? Why not? And maybe the artists’ responses to the artefacts in the museum’s collection were always already connected to both the pre-Columbian and the global, as found on the ground, and explored from where they see it, in all their indigeneity. As for who benefited cultural capital-wise, yes, no doubt the academic, the university, the museum. Question: “Where do we stand when we speak and make?”

Certain zones of anti-foundational thought might help here. Engagements with notions of situational relativity and complimentarity, a way of thinking which posits there are no actual points of view outside of situations. And further, anti-foundational thought maintains that even within given situations nor is there any exact still-point on which to stand or speak from. All is process. And in order to fathom process, we’re gonna require the complex fathomings of logical incompleteness, contradiction, philosophical paradox, and a taste for radical breaks. And in turn, this welcomes in a (cautious?) celebration of the free play of difference, of hybridity and fluidity of identity, and investigations into the possibility of non-essential being.

In the scheme of things named the history of ideas, there’s a contemporary version of anti-foundational thought that is said to have called in an end to Universal History and its “grand narratives,” and thus an end to Western, linear ideas of progress. And in their place, a resurrection and reinvention of “other” histories: her-stories, nomadic thought, indigenous forms of knowledge, etc. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari give all this a wonderful twist by stating that there is in fact a Universal History, but that this history “comes at the end”—meaning with the real subsumption of the whole of life, i.e. all life-worlds, by Capital—and hence, Universal History is rejigged by D&G as: “the history of contingencies, and not the history of necessity… Ruptures and limits, and not continuity.” Meanwhile, Walter Benjamin believed that the only continuity in history is CATASTROPHE.

Not that any of this helps much with untangling the privilege formula: ranking + training = culture. Perhaps then a badly posed formula? Not sure. D&G’s concept “becoming-minoritarian” certainly reconfigures it. Here’s how I stated a personal account during an online conversation a few years back…

The Black Panthers used to say that even blacks must “become” black. In other words, praxis comes before being, politics before ontology. Which might just mean that today women must become woman, indigenous become indigenous, māori become māori, proletarians become proletarian, etc. etc. In my youth, the 60s and 70s, all around I witnessed an amazing and extremely powerful becoming-black-woman-indigenous-māori-proletariat, a linkage which can be singularised as: becoming-minoritarian. This becoming-minoritarian necessarily affected me, and so my choice was an attempt at entering the process, at tearing myself away from my majoritarian identity… Yeah, even on the bus.

Interesting what your nephew says about Internet social justice warriors who “don’t do anything constructive on the ground.” And I love it when he says “grass-roots political movements have to be ‘pragmatic’ in their approach to allies and enemies alike.” Yes, a lot of the time “pragmatic” doesn’t seem to be a thing on Instagram, Twitter, and the other platforms. More like take-no-prisoners drone warfare and fuck the collateral damage.

Kinda aristocratic of me, but I figure the artist’s life as an Autonomous Zone—and to be defended as such! So, I don’t regard my drawing, painting etc. as forms of activism. For a long time I was an admirer of art activism—Hans Haacke, Black Arts Movement (BAM), Martha Rosler, Guerrilla Girls, Pussy Riot—but less and less so of late. What’s changed? Capture by the institutions? A corporate take-over of disruptive thinking and resistance? The subsumption of the revolution into fashion and advertising? Massive propagation of the creative industries paradigm?

At the end of his Surrealism essay—and again in Author as Producer—Walter Benjamin asked what might have seemed some rather depressing questions for artists of the time e.g. “In order to become part of a new political function, might the abandonment of your art career be the way to go?” Guess a lot of water has flowed under the art-politics bridge since Benjamin posed that question, but it still resonates. Which returns me to the Mercy-Event. People of Colour was an amazing act of artistic abandonment, a prodigious new example of activism: simple, precise, explosive! Instead of taking a position within the current debate, Mercy EXPOSED the debate itself.

In the meantime, the Pohutukawa are in bloom…
Aroha nui & Happy X-to-the-max!
Rx

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