best, Brian

_i think many interesting things can come up from the project you’re setting up_ the process of examining earlier periods is really important_ especially when you see (or live intensely as i am the suspended (meteori/μετέωρη) situation of my generation)_

_(in some ways) i work on ideas such as- a planner’s line of flights_ (as you mentioned) security & surveillance aspects of our society_ (bio)regional functions_ (the current tragedy of) commons_ european union’s drift_ bioethics_migration_& other, kind of more specific stuff (like guattari+castoriadis for example) /& (experimentation) concrete transformations of everyday life_ from university to radio stations, magazines & food, collective moves_

_i’ve went through some of your work and texts you mention_ & the orienting post on the next layer_ so how do we do the legwork?_

http://afterall.org/online/istanbul.biennial

Here it is said among other things that my statement (I guess that means the text for the roundtable) is pathetically romantic and that the above response to Resistanbul is “rather unsophisticated.” The latter comment is, for me, the characteristic one. Anyone who recognizes that what’s mainly going on in the international artworld is a transfer of considerable amounts of money to people pursuing their private ends and pleasures, in exchange for letting their works be used to legitimize transnational state capitalism, is by definition rather unsophisticated! And probably doesn’t fit very well in Celestial Time!!!

Still the conversation is worth reading. There is a lot of discussion as to how the Biennial was too Modernist, too “realist” and did not do anything to change the strategies of display. Some quite interesting things are said by Pip Day, whoever that is. My view is that the artworks in a show like this could develop their full potential only in a social situation which allows for collaboration with people in a whole range of institutions – schools, workplaces, theaters and leisure facilities, psychiatric and other hospitals, etc etc – and also with people who are not part of institutions, people engaged in self-organized associations on the anarchist model. This would open up a real public sphere of politically involved individuals and groups, and thereby inscribe art in quite a different support structure than the usual neoliberal corporate legitimation complex and real-estate market that pays for it nowadays. And it would allow the excellent works in a show like this to develop their full symbolic potentials, which I think could be crucial to the cultivation of generous and resistant human beings.

The text above, and the roundtable in Istanbul, was meant to provoke a discussion on the ways of collaborating that might lead to such outcomes. However, I am afraid that most of the members of such a sophisticated milieu is actually perfectly happy to drink their champagne and complain that the display strategies are not good enough to solve the world’s problems…

Further opinions on these questions are quite welcome.

stabbed in the back
bureaucracy numbs the pain
defeat strategy

control by design
tyranny by any other
art by numbers

the end of the show
the end of the paradigm
the end of the pier

and when time runs out
my significant other
the last drop for love

Cómo se hace para analizar y participar, y todo al mismo tiempo.
Verónica

–> Hola Verónica,

Es una pregunta? Yo diría : Hay por cierto una fase en la vida cuando es necesario iniciarse, hacer primeras experiencias del pensamiento analítico y de la actividad política, y este periodo puede dilatarse bastante en las sociedades contemporáneas porque carecemos de buenos modelos, la esfera pública es muy empobrecida (yo perdé un montón de tiempo). Pero aún siendo así, hay también una fase cuando el pensamiento tanto como la acción tienen buenos fundamentos y se puede asumir el rol del intelectual y del artista, que los dos a su manera no hacen otra cosa que percebir, sentir, analizar y contestar al presente, todo en un mismo movimiento. La idea de puro analasis funciona sólo en los circuitos académicos de autoreferencia infínita. Todos los demás somos mortales y tenemos que analizar y participar a la vez! ciao ciao, Brian