Friday, 23 October 2015

Person showing his penis: A test case in knowledge production

This essay is from Broadsheet volume something, number something something, probably 2009 sometime. The lateral leaps in this one are pretty funny, but I stand by what I said about Burn after reading. It was written in one go at the kitchen table.


According to the Coen Brothers farce Burn after reading, the real agents of history are not the intelligence and security apparatuses of Western society as one might expect, but rather its plastic surgeons and divorce lawyers. Their role, in fact, recalls that of the assistants or Gehilfen who appear again and again in Kafka’s novels, representatives — advocates — of some unfathomable force, whose sole narrative purpose seems to be to guide protagonists from one situation to the next, but in such a way that any knowledge they impart will be inconclusive. Indeed ‘they have no knowledge’, as Agamben has noted, ‘no skills, and no “equipment”’; they are, quoting Benjamin, ‘“crepuscular”’, ‘incomplete’. When, at the end of the film, a senior CIA staffer asks his assistant, ‘What did we learn, Palmer?’, he receives the answer ‘I don’t know sir’, and concludes ‘I don’t fucking know either’, adding ‘I guess we learned never to do it again’, and, after a pause, ‘I’m fucked if I know what we did.’

This scene was the first thing that came to mind in conversations immediately following Santiago Sierra’s intervention into One Day Sculpture, the cluster of temporary public art projects that unfolded across New Zealand in the latter part of 2008 and into 2009. Art audiences have lately assumed a certain agency in the sense that the weight of expectation itself will place impetus on a given artistic project to deliver, as Jan Verwoert quite ebulliently pointed out at an accompanying symposium held the very morning Sierra’s project was itself delivered. Our collective expectation is the insurance policy against which we are guaranteed delivery of what we desire, and what we desire, according to Verwoert, is always the phallus. Should we not receive the phallus, our ‘dick in a box’ as he put it, we feel entitled to be critical. But what happens to criticality when this process is short circuited, when the facilitator of the exchange turns out to be a Gehilfe, when we’re fucked if we know what we got? Not the modest gesture Roman Ondak had provided Wellington a day earlier by piling small mounds of sawdust around the city’s wooden Old Government House, the gesture Verwoert happened to be coming to terms with, but something else entirely?

For what Sierra did deliver was Verwoert’s dick in a box, but not his phallus. The box was a rather tatty empty office at the top of a narrow flight of stairs on Wellington’s Dixon Street. Symposium delegates, eager to see Sierra’s pirate one day sculpture — competing, against the rules, as it was, with Billy Apple’s one-man campaign to have the wax removed from a nearby Henry Moore — were lined up at a doorway, into which young artist and project ‘producer’ Reuben Moss was allowing one person at a time. ‘Where are we?’ asked a colleague I’d arrived with, who was standing in front of me in the line, ‘I mean, what was this place before?’ ‘I don't know … an architect’s office maybe?’ Moss replied, evidently entirely comfortable in his role as unforthcoming Gehilfe — and so much for site specificity. Once inside the office, we were initially confronted with an old bulletin board punctured with a few odd pushpins; only on suspecting an Ondakian anti-climax — or perhaps that, like another Ondak performed throughout the city, the line itself was the work — and turning to leave did we encounter a sad looking man with his head hanging down and his flaccid member protruding from his fly at the mercy of the dry Wellingtonian air. I say we but I’m talking about me. In any case, I didn’t get the phallus, but I did get the joke.

But what ultimately was delivered? Was it what we, I, expected? The oscillation between collective and personal pronouns here comes naturally, because though individuated, so much of the work was experienced collectively — such is the peculiar duality of queues, one that speaks of the true extent of community as it constitutes itself in civil society. What was not expected was that everyone involved did precisely what was expected of them — One Day Sculpture artistic director Claire Doherty generously encouraged symposium delegates to rush over to see Sierra’s work during their lunch break, fully aware of the possibility that the whole thing might be directed against her project; delegates eagerly and patiently lined up to catch a glimpse of exactly what Sierra was doing; Moss performed his unforthcoming Gehilfe act to a T; the sad old man stood for three hours as strangers filed past to look at his penis; Sierra, an artist known for exploiting institutional elements, often to political ends, did just that, and in the most matter-of-fact and juvenile way possible, whose deadpan pragmatism was illustrated beautifully in the work’s tautological title, Person Showing His Penis; and so on. And if everybody did precisely what they were expected, if everybody did their job, the real question around this work is not so much what did it all mean, but what was produced out of all that work? And did we learn anything?

Talking about such production is not new in contemporary art discourse. Rex Butler wrote of the Queensland Art Gallery blockbuster Optimism, in the last issue of Broadsheet no less, of an ‘equivalence made between the works and the audience’, that ‘the work actually is its crowds’, that ‘it actually is made by its spectators’. Brian Holmes is particularly good at it in describing ‘museums that work, museums that form part of the dominant economy, and that change at an increasing rate of acceleration imposed by both the market and the state’. But we’re not talking about museums here; we’re talking about work, the working of the work, the art work. Arguably, though, the terms of the discussion are not dissimilar. After all, isn’t Sierra’s work — and one can argue this about the entirety of his oeuvre — concerned with mobilising precisely the forces that manifest themselves in the new museology, a museology no longer concerned with the self-affirmation of rational, individual bourgeois subjects, but with the wholesale production of human consciousness; mobilising them and turning them against themselves? The work is political then. Or, given our participation, is it politics itself, the shifting ground against which we might define ourselves? Is politics what is produced here?

Let’s step back from that dead-end equation for a moment — if politics is what is produced then we ourselves must also be what is produced, which is not you’d expect from simply lining up to see a person showing his penis — and look elsewhere in art for some kind of clue. Exactly four weeks before a man climbed a staircase and unzipped his fly, an exhibition of the work of Deimantas Narkevicius opened at the Van Abbemuseum in the industrialised Dutch town of Eindhoven. A version of a major retrospective of the important Lithuanian artist’s work prepared by Chus Martinez for the Reina Sofía in Madrid, economised by Martinez and Van Abbe curator Annie Fletcher to provide an elegantly paced, engaging installation in the museum’s historic old wing, The Unanimous Life seems like an odd consideration to raise in the circumstances of trying to come to grips with Sierra’s intervention into One Day Sculpture. The relationship between Narkevicius’s complex cinematic proposition on the nature of memory and truth in a post-Soviet context and Sierra’s self-consciously dirty provocation is not quite clear until we return to the two questions posed earlier, ‘What did we learn?’ and ‘What was produced?’ The only thing that could have been both learned — even if we’re fucked if we know what that was — and produced is knowledge. The staging of the event in its Gehilfe-like structure did not provide any conclusive form of knowledge because it could not; it could only produce it. That knowledge is a function of truth and memory, a circuitous play between proposition, interpretation and retention, qualifies Narkevicius’s work as useful in a discussion of Sierra’s.

This relevance, however, can only be seriously underscored by an unpacking of Narkevicius’s own production in relation to that of two further artists, both of whom are provided, appropriately, by particular instances of his work’s staging—El Lissitzky and Zhang Dali. The relationship of Narkevicius to Lissitzky is the more programmatic, a particular construction of Van Abbemuseum director Charles Esche’s stated desire to link ‘the beginnings of the Soviet experiment with its aftermath’, to ‘bridge the commonly perceived divides in Western European understanding’. The comparison with Zhang Dali is more incidental, and stems from a particular resonance that occurred between works by the two artists through their inclusion in the 2006 Gwangju Biennale, and the critical position that they occupied within a trend in the international exhibition framework that suggested the emergence of the documentary form as commonly understood signifier for ‘world’. There is, of course, far more nuance and structural consequence to these conjunctions than this essay is capable of even touching on, but at the risk of coming over as instrumentalising and production-oriented, there are, for the moment, questions that need to be answered.

To work efficiently and chronologically, then, Fever Variations, the 2006 Gwangju Biennale, included Narkevicius’s 2005 video Matrioškas, which took the form of a series of recollections by three young Lithuanian women describing their experiences as economic émigrés exploited as sex workers in Belgium. Static shots of reflective windowpanes, city views and portentous religious sculptures intercut with handheld ‘talking head’ sequences suggested a work coherent with the popular documentarian style whose aesthetic function is to express the actuality of trauma through its representation. Halfway through the work, however, the process was suddenly interrupted when one of the women supposedly interviewed recounts her own murder, adding the detail of the subsequent disposal of the body with an appropriately pained expression. The women are actors, not simply actors employed by Narkevicius to recount a fictionalised narrative, but actors from the popular Belgian television serial after which the work was named (screened internationally as Russian Dolls), rehearsing the plot of that program from personal recollections of their characters’ points of view. Extraordinarily, though, rather than treating this repositioning of the viewer’s techniques of interpretation as a punchline, a moment of revelation, a dick in a box, Narkevicius continues with the narrative, allowing the third woman to tell her story, which ends, after a short, poetic and oddly redemptive pole-dancing sequence, on the sombre note of a visit to her friend’s grave.

In another part of the biennale building, Zhang Dali presented the entirety of his A Second History—China History Photographic Archive, consisting of a vast collection of images produced and circulated by the Chinese Communist Party. Over the course of 120 didactically installed panels, Zhang systematically demonstrated the extent of the role played by photographic manipulation in the construction of official histories of China. There is nothing new about drawing attention to the propaganda strategies of totalitarian states; such is their familiarity that, for example, those of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the most visible of surviving Stalinist regimes, are now relentlessly parodied to the point of cliché in Western popular culture. The significance of Zhang’s work was not so much its presentation of extreme manifestations, such as the rather chilling removals of various party functionaries from the pages of history, but its highlighting of the prosaicness of the majority of the alterations — placement of figures against more photogenic or symbolically important backgrounds, for example; cropping for composition; airbrushing the occasional wrinkle. The implication of the China History Photographic Archive is that manipulation is intrinsic not just to representations of centralised power, but to its more dispersed form in ‘democratic’ political propaganda and general advertising, and ultimately to representation itself.

Possible readings of Matrioškas are many — Simon Rees has suggested its relevance to the ‘calcification’ of ‘certain stereotypes’ in ‘Western media depictions of Lithuania’ — but in the context of Zhang’s archive, the question of truth in art becomes paramount. But where can this problematisation of truth lead if not to a smug relativisation represented traumas, represented realities? Deimantas Narkevicius’s work never comes across as smug; we can see this across the body of roughly a dozen years of production at the Van Abbe — the tone is sensitive, sincere, reflective, only ever approaching anything like smugness in its caution to avoid sentimentality, but only the resentful could seriously describe such carefulness as smug. How, moreover, do we move from the problematisation of truth and the production of truth? How does the one work do both? Let us look back to the Van Abbe, for this is where Lissitzky comes into play.

The Unanimous Life was presented alongside a pithy selection of works from the museum’s substantial Lissitzky collection, the largest outside the former Soviet Union. This was not the first time that Esche had positioned the two artists alongside one another — Narkevicius’s 2000 film Energy Lithuania, his contribution to the 2001 Venice Biennale, was screened alongside a group of Lissitzkys for around a year following its acquisition by Esche in 2004. Whatever Esche’s specific motivations might be for developing this ongoing dialogue between the artists’ works — and whatever their problematics — the question of ‘What is produced?’ is again what I want to ask here. For Lissitzky could hardly be understood as a partisan of the problematisation of truth. Indeed, as an occasional propagandist he could have been expected to rely to a certain degree on the suspension of doubt in the truth of art, or at least to be aware of the mechanics of that doubt’s negotiation. There is, precisely, an element of exclusion in Lissitzky’s work that reflects the erasures, highlighted by Zhang, of historical figures from history as it is officially recorded, represented at the Van Abbe by a masterfully constructed Proun (1922–23), a sketch for which reveals the excision from the original composition of the spectral name ‘Rosa Luxemburg’. Even if that excision was aesthetic, a purely painterly vanity directed toward the perfect pictorial unity that the Proun incontestably manifests — and there is little in Lissitzky to suggest that it was anything more than aesthetic — it nevertheless constitutes an acknowledgment, no matter how tacit or inadvertent, of representation’s contingency, or of the contingency of truth in representation.

What Lissitzky proposes is a working through of this contingency that produces new truths, truths perhaps not as self-reflexively immunised to their own contingency as the process might suggest, but truths that might at least challenge prevailing frameworks of meaning — counter-truths, or ‘second histories’ as Zhang’s project suggests — or that might participate in the construction of new histories. Again, I’m moving through this quickly; if my logic sounds like totalisation, this is probably because it has been infected with a certain confidence that comes staring too long at Lissitzky’s paintings. Totalisation might be perceived there, too, but it has to be remembered that this kind of avant-gardism was not yet the official artistic language of Soviet Communism, nor did it ever become that language; that honour was of course reserved for socialist realism, which Lissitzky’s and other canonical avant-gardist practices like it existed alongside in a plurality that, for a time at least, included other, more traditional forms. Such considerations are important, for as Reina Sofía Director Manuel J. Borja-Villel reminds us in his preface to the catalogue for The Unanimous Life, ‘To analyse European painting in the 1940s or 1950s, for example, without knowing that it coexisted with neo-realism’ — here he is writing about cinema — ‘is to understand only a part of the story’. Narkevičius does the same with his film The Head, the first work encountered in the Van Abbe exhibition, a documentary assembled from found footage that details the construction of Lev Jefimovich Kerbel’s bust of Marx, which Narkevičius had attempted, but failed, to have relocated from Chemnitz in the former East to the Westphalian town of Münster for the 2007 Sculpture Project — socialist realism is proposed as the excluded other of Western art history. Any totalisation that my line of thinking might express should be tested against such complex understandings.

So the equation as it pertains to Narkevičius goes something like this: if his work suggests that truth is contingent on its representation, that representation inherently problematises truth, it does not necessarily propose that this truth is irrelevant, and in the same process proposes new truths, or at least new understandings of truth. In the case of Matrioškas, for example — one of the works, incidentally, that was not included in the Van Abbemuseum iteration of The Unanimous Life — the unaffected perpetuation of a mythology it has already identified as such serves to remind viewers reassessing their own recollection of mythological narratives presented under the guise of fact that there might still be some relevance to the material. Whatever the accuracy Christa Blümlinger’s assessment of the work that ‘the fact that the story suddenly slips into fiction does not make it invalid but vividly shows the ruining of the lives of Baltic youth’, what remains is that Narkevičius allows the narrative to run its course and mechanics of documentary construction to unfold themselves, which is to say that it is presented for us to make of it what we can, to learn from it what we can.

Now, none of this is intended to suggest that there is a necessarily immediate correlation between what Narkevičius’s work produces and what Sierra’s work produces — both are, after all, very different artists who make very different machines. What I am trying to get at here is a particular function of art, one that Narkevičius’s work at times embodies, and one that might shed at least some kind of light on Sierra’s. What the two artists do have in common is that meaning is performed in or by their work, which is to say that rather than lie in wait for a particularly insightful exegete, meaning manifests itself in the process of encounter, and that it is contingent on the conditions of its presentation, at least to the degree that language is both shared and prone to slippages. The work of both artists therefore operates with a considerable degree of porosity, not to the point of subscribing to the rhetoric of ‘open-endedness and viewer emancipation’ associated with those practices privileged as relational art in the 1990s and in certain degraded forms still visible today, but through the capacity of each to resist reduction to the singular intentional readings — this is why Sierra’s work doesn’t ‘mean’ so much as ‘produce’. Certainly the audience is far more visible in Sierra than in Narkevičius, but each works to destabilise and confuse individually and collectively held notions of truth without outwardly proclaiming its total irrelevance. This is the knowledge they both produce.

Sven Lütticken, cautioning against the trend in art world rhetoric toward parodying scientific language — think of how frequently, lately, you hear the terms ‘research’, ‘laboratory’ and ‘knowledge production’ itself — as an instrumentalisation of the necessarily inconclusive outcomes of artistic work toward quantifiable ends, and worse, as contributions to the contemporary knowledge economy, invokes a widely publicised speech by Donald Rumsfeld, which, on reflection, the exchange at the end of Burn After Reading seems to beautifully satirise. ‘Building’, he suggests, ‘on a famously rambling epistemological statement by Donald Rumsfeld, in which the then US Secretary of Defense mused about the “known knowns”, “known unknowns”, and “unknown unknowns” in the war on terror, one could say that such practices’ articulate the “unknown knowns” of society — its ideological unconscious, its repressed knowledge.’ Lütticken is writing of a specific set of practices he describes as reflexively ‘symptomatological’, but his description that they ‘produce dubious knowledge about knowledge’s other’ is appropriate for my purposes to thinking through the productive aspect of Sierra’s intervention. So I want to hijack it. This is one thing we might have learned from Person Showing His Penis. Something dubious. Which, as it turns out, we probably knew at the time.

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