E-FLUX JOURNAL | ISSUE 67

The Whatsapps, Opening of the Floodgates, 2015.e-flux journal issue 67 with Luis Camnitzer,Douglas Coupland, Natasha Ginwala, Boris Groys,Charles Tonderai Mudede,Reza Negarestani, Ana Teixeira Pinto, and David Riff

www.e-flux.com/issues/67-november-2015

In Djibril Diop Mambéty's 1992 dark comedy Hyènes, an extravagantly wealthy woman returns to her poor village seeking revenge. Her target is the man who humiliated her in her youth by getting her pregnant and abandoning her. It is not only death that she wants, but also justice. She will not murder the man by her own hand, as Charles Tonderai Mudede explains in this issue, but instead asks the village to mete out capital punishment, to murder him for his wrongdoing. In exchange, she will make the town wealthy. As the village reflects upon its principles, the people of the village begin buying things on credit. The wealthy woman will have her way not through the mechanism of justice, but through the mechanism of debt. If the film appears bleak for its conflation of money and justice, it is also a comedy about dividing them in the first place.

The paradoxical phrase "The King is dead, long live the King" originates in medieval Europe, where two divided bodies of the ruler reigned. One was eternal, embodying the principles and responsibilities of the role of ruler, and the other mortal—the human figure inhabiting the role. For Natasha Ginwala, there is a third body in this scheme, and it goes by the name corruption. Corruption is also a passageway between the responsibilities of the sovereign and the corporeal desires of human beings who come into contact with power. It sees an entire world inside the pious division and it goes to work at extracting a benefit from all that passes through this opening, undermining the sanctity of authority as well as the people who are subject to it. It is through this third body of the king that the informal sector or "back room" transforms from a dumping ground of undesirable elements and exchanges into an integral part of a society's basic structure.

In both physics and information theory, the term entropy describes a quantity of heat and energy loss that cannot be converted into mechanical work. For Ana Teixeira Pinto, the second law of thermodynamics is also a social idea that describes the waste or dissipation of labor integral to the supposed equilibrium of any thermodynamic system. As a social idea, entropy directs the poor or unemployed to perform those necessary tasks that do not reflect the ordering principles of society, but are nonetheless crucial to its functioning. In information theory, entropy denotes the element of noise in any signal, or chaos in any orderly system. If allowed to overtake the system, these elements would lead to catastrophe or death. Were they to be eliminated completely, the system would also die. Thermodynamic equilibrium is maintained by managing the constant presence of death within life and waste within work. This holds true for information ecologies, markets, and national bodies alike.

Thirty years ago, the "Neue Slowenische Kunst" (NSK) collective formed in Yugoslavia and gained a reputation for appropriating constructivist avant-garde signs and repressed Nazi and totalitarian iconography into their own form of hypermodernist Slovene national art. At its three decade anniversary, Boris Groys considers how the collective's often hilarious mix of highly charged official and subversive ideological signs in Yugoslavia not only precisely targeted the contradictions of the official ideology at the time, but also advocated a universalist message within communism, as well as within and in spite of the era of modernity. Interestingly, for Groys, the universal message of their avant-garde ultra-nationalism at the end of the communist era extended almost seamlessly into the period of global capitalism with the formation of the NSK State, a passport-issuing entity "in time" with citizens but without a territory—a universal state.

The enormous challenge to universalist thinking today is often attributed to its capture by globalization's market ideology, where the planetary or human scale is only accessible by way of free flowing heteronymous signs. For Reza Negarestani, philosophy can break this stranglehold of heteronymy through its programmatic and functionalist deployment of thought and thinking as an already autonomous enterprise. By establishing and structuring realizable commitments towards their own ends and demands, philosophy still has the capacity to release a full-blown project of emancipation via the extreme rationality of thought's computability and capacity for abstraction. For Negarestani, thought itself is an ancient artificial intelligence whose resilience stems from its artificial capacity to reinvent itself.

—Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle


In this issue: 

Ana Teixeira Pinto—Death Wall: Extinction, Entropy, Singularity
In the 1940s, entropy was grafted onto information theory, after the physicist Erwin Schrödinger reconceptualized it as a measure of disorder. Thomson's twin blades of "work" and "waste" reappear as "signal" and "noise," while information—heretofore a concept with a vague meaning—was recast as the negation of entropy (negentropy). As biological and computational systems were treated as informationally equivalent, organisms came to be described as thermodynamic systems that extract "orderliness" from their environment in order to counteract increasing entropy.

Douglas Coupland—Stuffed: How Hoarding and Collecting Is the Stuff of Life and Death
The collecting of stuff—slightly out-of-the-ordinary stuff—is different now than it was in the twentieth century. eBay, Craigslist, and Etsy have gutted thrift and antique stores across North America of all their good stuff, and in Paris, the Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen is but a shadow of its former self. eBay itself, once groaning with low-hanging fruit being sold by the clueless, is now a suburban shopping center with the occasional semi-okay vintage thingy still floating around. This same sense of sparseness is felt in the museum world, where the slashing of programming budgets remains the norm.

Luis Camnitzer—Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
When a philanthropic institution commits itself to an activity normally performed by a government, it enters something akin to a marriage contract, one that only death or the Pope should be allowed to annul. Hopes are raised, and there is no recourse when these are allowed to fall. Once a private entity starts a project on this scale, it forfeits the right to stop it, unless it wants to show arrogance and capriciousness.

Reza Negarestani—What Is Philosophy, Part One: Axioms and Programs
Even though the corollary problems of philosophy as a specialized discipline (the tenor of its discourses, its traction beyond its own domain, its applications and referential imports) can in no way be ignored, they are however problems that, as it will be argued, can only be sufficiently addressed in the context of philosophy as deeper cognitive enterprise. The primary focus of this cognitive program is to methodically urge thought to identify and bring about realizabilities afforded by its properties (theoretical and practical intelligibilities pertaining to thinking as such), to explore what can possibly come out of thinking and what thought can become.

Boris Groys—NSK: From Hybrid Socialism to Universal State
In fact, contemporary globalization is the direct opposite of the modern ideal of internationalism and universality. The world of globalization is not a world of international solidarity or shared cultural values. Nor is globalization the realm of the anonymous "crowd mind" as it was celebrated by postmodernism. Rather, it is the world of the global competition of everybody against everybody. This competition pushes the subject who participates in it to mobilize his or her own human capital. And human capital, as described, for example, by Michel Foucault, is primarily the cultural heritage that is mediated by the family and milieu in which an individual grows up.

David Riff—Was Marx a Dancer?
Actually, there is a quite a bit of dancing in Marx. To begin at the beginning, there are his poems, written for his distant love and ballroom baroness, Jenny von Westphalen, who waited for him seven long years as he studied to get his degree. Marx's poetry reaches out to its promised partner with memories of the ballroom, or so one imagines, interrupted by long, if chaperoned, afternoon strolls. The verses whirl and twist, curl and rust. These are generic salon rhythms, hammered out somewhat mechanically, but the goal is earnest enough: to protect transcendent love and shared ideals from the dirty world.

Charles Tonderai Mudede—Neoliberalism and the New Afro-Pessimism: Djibril Diop Mambéty's Hyènes
The mayor, with the town's approval, rejects the offer, saying: "We are in Africa but the drought will never make us savages." The village agrees with the mayor. They have rules, customs, beliefs, morals. They will not kill an innocent man for money. That is immoral. That is what animals do in Darwin's race for survival. They are not animals. They are humans. Linguere Ramatou sets up a tent outside of the town and waits. Her offer still stands. How long can this community resist her money? Not long at all.

Natasha Ginwala—Corruption: Three Bodies, and Ungovernable Subjects
The status of corruption may be said to lie at the division of visible and invisible labour, and at this tipping point it "acts out" and loops back into the body politic as a sentient character. The daily-wage worker and the cognitariat are equally implicated in this realm and made subservient to the uncanny sweep of the veiled hand of corruption. The social contract is breached repeatedly through its perverse pleasure fantasies and subterranean nightmares.


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Art_prospect

NORDIC PAVILLON | VENICE BIENNALE

Photo: OCA / Marta Buso.

Camille Norment Rapture Performances by: Camille Norment Trio 20 and 22 November 2015, 2:30pm Sofia Jernberg  21 November 2015, 2:30pm  The Nordic Pavilion Giardini di Castello Venice Italy www.oca.no

Commissioner: Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) Curator: Katya García-Antón, OCA Director, in collaboration with Antonio Cataldo, OCA Senior Programmer  The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) is pleased to announce the upcoming and concluding performances within Rapture, Norway's contribution to the 56th Venice Biennale. This year Norway is solely responsible for the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale for the first time in its history. For this unprecedented occasion, OCA has commissioned artist Camille Norment (b.1970) to develop the project. Norment's Rapture is a site-specific sculptural and sonic installation in the Nordic Pavilion, for which the American-born, Oslo-based artist has composed new music on the glass armonica—a legendary 18th-century instrument which creates ethereal music from glass and water. Invented by Benjamin Franklin and once played by Mozart and Marie Antoinette, the glass armonica was at first celebrated for curing people with its entrancing music, but was later banned because it was thought to induce states of ecstasy and arouse sexual excitement in women. If it had the power to cure, so the logic went, this bewitching instrument might also have the power to kill by overexciting its listeners. In a contemporary context, Norment explores the tensions this music sustains today by creating a multi-sensory space within which she reflects upon the history of sound and contemporary concepts of consonance and dissonance. The artist composes a chorus of voices corresponding to the unresolved notes of the much-censored "devil's" tritone of the glass armonica, thus immersing visitors into Rapture. Rapture explores the relationship between the human body and sound through visual, sonic, sculptural and architectural stimuli. Today the sonic realm can be both a space of misuse—as we have seen in the militaristic use of sound to abuse the body—and of affirmation—as in the performative utterance of free speech to affirm the right of the body's very existence. The body can be stimulated and moved by sound, and in Norment's work, the Nordic Pavilion itself becomes a body in rapture and rupture, subject to consonance and dissonance. Throughout the run of the Venice Biennale, Norment has been performing new compositions on the glass armonica and has invited artists as well as musicians to participate in a series of performances that echo elements of the installation. On Friday 20 and Sunday 22 November at 2:30pm, Norment will present new compositions with The Camille Norment Trio, whose instrumentation parallels the artist's investigations into the relationship between vibration and the body as perceived during the Enlightenment period and today through social and scientific discussions. The Camille Norment Trio consists of the glass armonica, played by Norment; the Hardanger fiddle, played by Vegar Vårdal; and the electric guitar, played by Håvard Skaset. Each of these instruments was thought, at various points in history, to invoke a socially and sexually transgressive experience in the body, especially the female body, and was subsequently banned. On Saturday 21 November at 2:30pm the Swedish soprano, voice-artist, improviser and composer Sofia Jernberg will perform in the pavilion.Throughout her career, Jernberg has developed a unique vocabulary of sounds and techniques which include split-tone, pitchless and distorted singing which allow her to appear in a broad constellation of music performances across time and genres. Jernberg's versatile vocalisation will expand the 12-voice chorus that Norment composed for the soundscape of the pavilion, pushing the limits of sound and music. The performances are co-produced by OCA, nyMusikk and Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival, with the kind support of Music Norway. Another counterpart to Rapture is a three-volume publication reflecting on the relationship between sound and the visual arts across time, while complicating the hegemony of vision in contemporary theory and art practice.Rapture Vol.1, 2 and 3 features contributions by an international set of practitioners from various fields in music, research and theory. These include David Toop, María del Pilar Blanco and Rob Stone (first volume, published May 2015); Anne Hilde Neset, Greg Tate, and Sami Khatib (second volume);and Nabil Ahmed and Nida Ghouse (third volume). The publications also contain a series of discussions between Norment and curators Katya García-Antón and Antonio Cataldo, addressing the reasoning behind an artistic practice which seeks to highlight the influence of sound upon our collective consciousness. For media enquiries please contact OCA's Communications Manager Tara Hassel at tara.hassel@oca.no. For more information about the artist and performers, please click here. About Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) OCA is a foundation created by the Norwegian Ministries of Culture and of Foreign Affairs in 2001 with the aim of developing cultural collaborations between Norway and the international arts scene. OCA aims to become one of the main organs in the international contemporary arts debate through initiatives such as exhibitions, seminars and publications, as well as by providing support to Norwegian artists for their activities in the international art arena, and by inviting international curators and artists to Norway. OCA has been responsible for Norway's contribution to the visual arts section of the Venice Biennale since 2001.

CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI | FONDAZIONE MERZ

(1) Christian Boltanski, Hôtel de Immigrantes, 2012. (2) Christian Boltanski, Dopo, 2015. (3) Christian Boltanski, Théâtre d'ombres, 1984.

Christian Boltanski DOPO November 3, 2015–January 31, 2016 Fondazione Merz Via Limone 24 10141 Turin Italy Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–7pm T +39 011 1971 9437 info@fondazionemerz.org www.fondazionemerz.org Facebook / Twitter

From November 3, 2015, the Fondazione Merz presents Christian Boltanski. DOPO (After), a solo exhibition of the French artist, curated by Claudia Gioia.

Christian Boltanski (Paris, 1944), one of the great interpreters of contemporary life, displays his work for the first time in Turin with a new, site-specific project. The exhibit unfolds inside the Fondazione gallery spaces and is conceived as a total installation, a choral narrative addressing individual and collective memory, entwining the past with the present, urging unattended promises, recombining history with each individual's life.

Boltanski's subject matters are history and life duration. Vulnerability is his strength, and reflecting upon absence is his way to express his passion for what is real. And so Boltanski builds his own archives, moves shadows around the gallery space, or brings forgotten memories back to the surface through the eyes and faces of strangers that emerge from found photographs; he synchronizes the sound of the human heartbeat to the rhythm of history; he creates settings with old clothing so that individual stories may not be dispersed; he investigates fate and challenges, through irony, the transience of things to propose the art of time.

The exhibition path starts off with a significant installation consisting of about 200 large-scale photographs printed on fabric. Hanging from the ceiling and moving around the gallery space, they portray faces and images of everyday life taken from Boltanski's personal archive, which he built through the years and where stories are condensed into a look, a portrait, a snap shot. The constant movement created by the suspended images is an invitation to let oneself go with the flow of time and memory. What happens afterwards? And how many afterwards are already there in people's lives, in their recollections and fortuitous past events? The photographs fly around like facts of life. Visitors can decide whether to just look at them or physically move after them, but eventually they will have to let them go, and think of what will happen next.

A series of quick sequences—life flashbacks, from young age to adult age—also linger on Boltanski's faceEntre Temps. His photographs lend themselves to the game of time going by, as memories change and shrink until they become shadows. Shadows that appear unexpectedly, like quivering slender shapes stretch out on the walls evoking presences that linger between dream and reality, in a game where the playful aspect is combined with anxiety, illusion and deceit. Like the photographs, these shadows put emphasis on human transience, on the effort to hold onto what is fleeing, insisting especially on man's personal involvement in this collective narrative called life, history, thought.

In the video Clapping Hands, a liberating applause accompanies visitors as they head down to the lower floor of the Fondazione. This is Christian Boltanski's tribute to Mario Merz's work and the ability to be present in one's own time, nurturing it and making it fruitful for those who will come next.

The exhibition path ends with two important installations. The gallery space is filled with cellophane-covered cardboard boxes piled one on top of the other to create different constructions of different sizes: unstable towers, fragmented archives—an evolution of the biscuit boxes Boltanski is so fond of—lie on the floor as if forgotten there, only slightly illuminated by the light bulbs that create the word DOPO (After) in the dark. Memory is right there and, like a brain circuit, it only awaits to be reactivated by opening drawers, looking into everyday life stories and playing with references to the present time.

Accompanying the exhibition is a publication featuring images of Christian Boltanski's works and installations displayed at the Fondazione Merz, the curator's interview with the artist, and an essay by philosopher Massimo Donà.

The exhibition is organized with the support of the Fondazione CRT.
Thanks to Kunh & Bülow and DUPARC Contemporary Suites.

Media contact
Nadia Biscaldi
T +39 011 19719436 / press@fondazionemerz.org

PAUL MCCARTHY | THE RENAISSENCE SOCIETY

Paul McCarthy, Dwarf House, 2009. Pencil and collage on paper, 97 x 80 inches. Collection of Rena Conti. Paul McCarthy Drawings November 8, 2015–January 24, 2016  Opening: November 8, 4–7pm, Paul McCarthy in conversation with Donatien Grau at 5pm  The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago  Cobb Hall, 4th Floor  5811 S. Ellis Ave  Chicago, Illinois 60637 USA  Hours: Tuesday–Friday 10am–5pm, Saturday–Sunday 12–5pm  renaissancesociety.org  Twitter / Instagram / Facebook

The Renaissance Society presents over 75 rarely and never before seen works on paper from Paul McCarthy's hundreds of "White Snow" drawings, produced between 2008 and 2015. This is the artist's first solo exhibition in Chicago and is part of the Renaissance Society's Centennial program celebrating its 100th anniversary.

Known widely for his prolific output of video, sculpture, performance, and installation, Paul McCarthy also works extensively in two dimensions. The ongoing series "White Snow" reveals the artist's deft draftsmanship and layered, gestural approach to drawing. Co-curated by Solveig Øvstebø and Susanne Ghez, the current and former Executive Directors of the Renaissance Society, respectively, this presentation offers an opportunity to consider a significant area of this major artist's practice.

Sex and mythology, bodies and violence, death and humor—these works are at once familiar and repulsive. With his characteristic irreverent wit, McCarthy melds the iconic 1937 Walt Disney depiction of Snow White with the darker forces of the fairy tale's earlier incarnations. The selection here features figures in various stages of erotic play, architectural renderings, and textual annotation, ranging in size from small sketches to large collages. Also included are preparatory works for McCarthy's major installation, WS, at the Park Avenue Armory, New York in 2013.

McCarthy's drawings represent the threshold between fantasy and reality, the point at which the artist's imagination directly crosses over into the physical realm before being further developed into three-dimensional and time-based productions. Together, they form a body of work that reflects drawing as a direct mode of expression and a space of possibility. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of related events, including the theatrical premiere of McCarthy's seven-hour moving image work, WS. 

Tuesday, December 8, 7pm: Art historian Cary Levine presents lecture "The (De)Civilizing Process: Paul McCarthy's Regressive Regimes" at the Film Studies Center, Cobb Hall, 3rd Floor (one floor directly below the gallery)

Thursday, January 14, 7pm: Screening of McCarthy's White Snow Mammoth (2013, video, 90 minutes) at the Film Studies Center

Sunday, January 17, 2pm: Exhibition walk-through with Susanne Ghez and Solveig Øvstebø

Sunday, January 24, 1–8pm: Theatrical premiere of McCarthy's WS (2013, video, 7 hours), at the Film Studies Center

All events are free and open to the public. The screening program is presented in partnership with the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago.

Paul McCarthy was born in 1945 in Salt Lake City and lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo museum exhibitions include Lala land parody paradise at Haus der Kunst, Munich and Whitechapel, London (2005); Head Shop / Shop Head at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2006) and Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2007); Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement – Three Installations, Two Films at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); and White Snow Dwarf (Dopey # 1) at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011). He has participated in many international events, including the Venice Biennale (1993, 1999, 2001); the Whitney Biennial (1995, 1997, 2004); SITE Santa Fe (2004); and the Berlin Biennial (2006).

The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago is committed to supporting ambitious artistic experimentation, primarily through the commissioning of new works, and to fostering rigorous, interdisciplinary discourse. In addition to the exhibition program, this independent, non-collecting museum hosts lectures, concerts, performances, screenings, and readings, and regularly publishes catalogues and artist books, which are distributed widely.

All of the Renaissance Society's exhibitions and events are free and open to the public.

The Renaissance Society turns 100 years old this year and celebrates with a special Centennial program of exhibitions and events from September 2015 to January 2016, including exhibitions by Irena Haiduk, Wadada Leo Smith, and Paul McCarthy; a presentation of archive materials from 1915 to 2015; a symposium addressing the role of the contemporary art institution; public programs on Gertrude Stein, visual arts on Chicago's South Side, and more; and a significant new publication covering the Renaissance Society's first century.