[AP] Maps for the Outside / the Work of Bureau d'études

Maps for the Outside

“Conceptualism” in the Work of Bureau d'études

Los sistemas de representacion dejaron ser solo un aparato de registro para convertirse en un sistema de accion, es decir en un tipo de lectura muticultural que se define no por la especialidad del sistema sino por una concepcion sobre la practica intima del sujeto, la colaboracion pasa a covertirse en el proceso contextual mas claro, la subjetividad en su tectonica operativa. La revolucion de los sistemas de informacion junto con las nuevas situaciones urbanas a traidas por los proceso de globalizacion desde call centers hasta proceso de lectura metropolitana a traves de la ocasionalidad como el ejercicio POST IT CITY, solo indica que el proceso colaborativo y el ejercicio de critica, ubica a las practicas urbanas como una fuente de objetos de estudios sobre las relaciones interpersonales del individuo y el desarrollo epostemologico contemporaneo.

Si en un momento las huellas o las ruinas formaron una especie de reflexion sobre nuestra memoria, hoy en dia el ARCHIVO y la DOCUMENTACION genera un proceso contextual sobre la experiencia de lecturas posibles, UTOPIAS? quien sabe...

Un ejemplo de sobre lo anterior es el trabajo de Bureau d'études estudio frances que ubica las practicas urbanas y los sistemas de poder como un vector de conformacion de espacios "urbanos" y espacios capaces de re-mirar nuestras experiencia situacionista.

A continuacion un texto de Brian Holmes que desarrolla parte del TRABAJO de Bureau d'études


texto de Brian Holmes

The closure of the gallery space is a classic conceptual gesture. Witness this proposal by Robert Barry: "My exhibition at the Art & Project Gallery in Amsterdam in December, '69, will last two weeks. I asked them to lock the door and nail my announcement to it, reading: 'For the exhibition the gallery will be closed.'"1 Conceptual art can be defined, not simply as the refusal of the commodified object and the specialized art system, but as an active signage pointing to the outside world, conceived as an expanded field for experimental practices of intimacy, expression and collaboration – indeed, for the transformation of social reality.2


Thirty-two years later, in October-December 2001, the French group Bureau d'études reiterated the gesture, sealing off the exhibition space of Le Spot, a converted industrial building in the port city of Le Havre. Instead of a simple sign, they confronted the visitor with a book, Juridic Park, which upon closer inspection proved to be a detailed set of maps to the "legal subsoil" of the city. But these maps, like the more recent cartographic projects, do not simply embrace the outside of one of modernity's specialized subsystems. Rather they detail the proliferating closures of a totally administered society, where almost every square inch of terrain is strictly codified for exclusive, proprietary uses.
The name of the group, "Bureau d'études," denotes an expert consultancy, a study office for technical research. Theirs is an intensely precise apprehension of the world, shot through with flashes of dark humor. But their work in its broadest dimensions is also the foundation, or perhaps the springboard, for an antagonistic utopia.



Beginnings
In 1998, with the exhibition Archives du Capitalisme, Bureau d'études started producing organizational charts showing the proprietary relations between financial funds, government agencies, banks and industrial firms. A number of these graphic charts, or "organigrams," were deployed as part of an installation including black-and-white photographs of heads propped up on wooden pickets (presumably CEOs), as well as a scale model of a proposed new parliament building, to articulate the voting rights of those with real power in today's society. The exhibition was an autonomous project in an artist-run space, at the time called the "Faubourg," in the city of Strasbourg. For a subsequent show entitled Le Capital, mounted by Nicolas Bourriaud in the city of Sète, an organigram detailing the relations between the French state and a panoply of major transnational corporations was blown up to wall size. Squares and rectangles of varying proportions, each identified with a name (Société Générale, Dresdner Bank, Mitsubishi, Pirelli, etc.) were connected with a labyrinth of elaborately traced channels, printed in black against a white ground. The result was something like an all-over painting for the computer and finance-obsessed 1990s: an aesthetics of information. In other words, one of the historical failure-points of what has been called "conceptual art."

Sooner or later, artists working on the analysis and transformation of social reality must face the obvious question: How to escape the formats, publics and modes of exchange that are offered by the gallery-magazine-museum system? The answer is a gradual process, a social and psychic experiment. Invited to a group exhibition for which, as usual, they would not be paid, Bureau d'études responded by creating a "zone de gratuité," Free Land, where treasures and all kinds of junk could be deposited and taken away without the intermediary of money. The experiment of the free zone was pursued in a gallery/living space in Paris, where theoretical curiosity and the more practical prospect of something-for-nothing drew a variegated public. Expanding on the question of the artist's real social status in an age of casual labor and mass intellectuality, Bureau d'études worked with Alejandra Riera, Andreas Fohr and Jorge Alyskewycz to launch the "Syndicat Potentiel" or "Potential Union," a proto-political association addressed to intellectual and cultural producers whose aspirations take them outside all professional categories. The key ideas here came from the French anarchist traditions, but also from theories of the gift economy, developed by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss and reworked by French social critics after the great strikes of 1995, in an era of structural unemployment.3 Among the first co-operators were the group Plus tôt te laat, from Brussels – jobless artists who had occupied an unemployment bureau, transforming it into a center of expression and reflection on the meanings of work in contemporary society. Such reflections in turn led to increasing proximity with the squatters' movements, whether in France, Italy or Germany. From these beginnings, Syndicat Potentiel grew into an open-ended frame for intimate and networked collaborations, with the explicit goal of producing autonomous counter-knowledge, oriented toward an economy of gratuité totale (in which basic services such as living space, water, electricity, access to communications media, etc. would be "totally free").4 The project continues today, giving its name to the self-managed space in Strasbourg where the art group had produced its earliest proposals.


Opportunities



It is against the almost invisible background of Syndicat Potentiel and a parallel project, "Université Tangente," that the recent cartographic projects deserve to be understood. They came as an unexpected, long-desired opportunity. The rupture of consensus brought by the Global Days of Action, beginning in May of 1998, served to galvanize the wider counter-globalization movement, through innovative uses of the Internet as a worldwide distribution system operated from below. A kind of autonomous, do-it-yourself conceptualism began to emerge, whereby "attitudes become forms": an idea or phrase arising in one locality (for instance, "Our Resistance is as Transnational as Capital") becomes a geographically distributed political performance (the "Global Street Parties" against the annual G8 reunions).5 In perfect accord with Lawrence Weiner's famous dictums, the work could be carried out by the initial authors of the ideas, realized by others, or not done at all – something like a taste of planetary exchange, where the "art" is "totally free."

Even as these protest forces emerged on a large scale – mapping out the power structures of globalization with their feet, as it were – the rise of the information society and the deregulating thrust of neoliberalism had made it possible for relatively small, highly mobile groups to appropriate and use advanced technologies, acting upon extremely sophisticated visions of the world, as the present exhibition shows. Yet these new possibilities for the application of specialized research were not immediately visible in France, due to language barriers, a pitifully conservative art scene, and critical discourses dominated by the aging communist professors of Attac. Perhaps it was as late as December 2001, with massive protests at the EU summit in nearby Brussels, that the potential for a more active distribution of the antagonistic maps became clear. Further institutional projects, at La Box in the city of Bourges, then at Kunst-Werk in Berlin, served as occasions for the initial production of graphic charts in large print runs, for broad distribution. These helped prepare the knowledge and the skill-sets needed for two autonomous, collaborative productions, both printed in thousands of copies for specific activist events: Refuse the Biopolice, for the No Border Camp in Strasbourg in July 2002, and European Norms of World-Production, for the meetings of the European Social Forum in Florence in November of that same year.

This delayed access to the counter-globalization movements meant that the antagonist maps, with their extraordinary complexity of analysis, have come at the right time – after the initial breakthroughs of the first period of dissent met their enforced pacification and partial neutralization, as a consequence of the violence unleashed by the police riot in Genoa. Both these maps present an excess of information, shattering subjective certainties and demanding reflection, demanding a new gaze on the world that we really live in. These are synoptic visions of the contemporary, transnational version of state capitalism, as constructed "by collusion between specific individuals, transnational corporations, governments, interstate agencies and 'civil society' groups."6 They make visible the institutional patterns that have structured themselves in an overarching, terrifyingly abstract space, almost totally beyond the grasp of the democratic counter-powers formerly exercised within the purview of the national states, and indeed, almost totally invisible – at least until recently when the communicative possibilities have allowed a certain measure of "cognitive mapping" to be performed by inhabitants.7

Refuse the Biopolice, focused on contemporary control systems, also offers more detailed readings of the way that surveillance and incarceration technologies are implemented for profit by private firms, in collaboration with national and interstate agencies. As for the map of European Norms, it specifically charts the vast administrative structure that has arisen around the bureaucratic European Commission, whose directorates, innervated by the demands of corporate lobbies, produce the "industrial standards, territorial models, ideological guidelines and truth criteria" that help structure the production of a life-world – a steel-and concrete form of continental integration, vying with its distorting mirror in North America. European Norms also presents the interlocking structures of so-called "organized civil society," which serves to legitimate the status quo; but at the same time, with the lighter traceries of its mysterious, biomorphic front cover, devoted to "inklings of autonomy," it presents the patterns and meshworks of worldwide potentials for resistance.

These maps aspire to be cognitive tools, distributing as broadly as possible the kind of specialized information that was formerly confined to technical publications. Yet on another level they are meant to act as subjective shocks, energy potentials, informing the protest-performances as they are passed from hand to hand, deepening the resolve to resist are they are utilized in common or alone. In this sense it is the very closure of their intellectual discipline, the rigor of their conceptual effort to depict a totally administered world, that makes them maps for the outside, signs pointing to a territory that cannot yet be fully signified, and that will never be "represented" in the traditional ways. "Solidarity with extraterrestrials" reads one such indication, in an almost empty bubble at the lower left-hand corner of the cover of European Norms.


Perspectives



The acceleration of the last few years has been vertiginous, for everyone. Today, the accumulated knowledge of recent projects and the beginnings of a genuinely networked collaboration make it possible to envision more strategically focused mapping projects. Three recent studies – Info war, Bio war, Psychic war – respond to a need to grasp the fully military strategies of legitimation and population control that have emerged since 1989, with the end of the bipolar stasis predicated on the madness of mutual "overkill."8 Similarly, more limited and precise maps of transnational state capitalism can now be imagined, attuned more closely to the possibilities of the protest and direct-action movements. Another perspective is the possible invention of a computer database, with a visual interface allowing the user to situate specific power-players within a nexus of supporting and opposing relations. Much remains to be done.
In this light, the old dilemma of the relation to museum, magazine and gallery structures fades toward insignificance. For the tactical media underground in Europe, art shows offer useful research deadlines, a chance to share ideas and critiques, at best some production money – and at worst, a damaging distraction. The revenge of the concept has been to finally create parallel and alternative circuits of experimentation, production, distribution, use and interpretation. To be sure, these circuits are hardly consolidated – but the best way to do so is to maintain other urgencies, which cannot be treated within any of the specialized subsystems.
Perhaps one such urgency can be expressed as a question, for artists and activists who must now address increasing levels of confrontation in the world. The question runs like this: Is it still possible to sublimate antagonistic conflicts into the pacifying rituals of reasoned, agonistic debate?9 Or in other words: Can properly political relations be wrested from a totally administered world?

Brian Holmes

Notes
1. See Robert Barry, Gallery Closing, Amsterdam, Art & Project, December 17-31, Bulletin #17, in: Ursula Meyer, ed., Conceptual Art (New York: Dutton, 1972), p. 41.
2. Thanks to Andreas Broeckman for pointing my browser to a Howard Slater text that supports this definition. See the opening section of "The Spoiled Ideals of Lost Situations – Some Notes on Political Conceptual Art," at .
3. The journal M.A.U.S.S. ("Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales") offers a look into some of the background ideas informing the debates over value in France after 1995.
4. See the Syndicat Potentiel website (http://syndicatpotentiel.free.fr) for a far more precise overview, with texts on gratuité totale among many other subjects.
5. Those wishing to piece together the history of the Days of Global Action may consult the websites of People's Global Action and London Reclaim the Streets, among others.
6. The quote, from Refuse the Biopolice, applies to all the recent maps.
7. I refer to the famous phrase by Frederic Jameson, who in 1984 called for "an aesthetics of cognitive mapping" to resolve "the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects." See his essay, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," reprinted in a book under the same name.
8. Anyone with doubts about the epochal shift in military strategy after 1989 can consult John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt's books, such as Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy, available as PDFs at .
9. The antagonistic/agonistic distinction comes from Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy; those who get bored reading dense books can listen to the video of Mouffe's talk at the recent "Dark Markets" conference, available at .

Jose Llano
Arquitecto Independiente
Arquitectura de Archivo & Diseñador de Delitos
editor aparienciapublica
www.aparienciapublica.org
http://aparienciapublica.blogspot.com

___________________________________
AMERICA has a rest, where you want to be

[AP] Mapping Excess, Seeking Uses

Mapping Excess, Seeking Uses Bureau d'études and Multiplicity

by Brian Holmes

Utopian ideas — like "Spaceship Earth" — are round, multidimensional, interrelated: their archetypal map is the Milky Way, the infinite constellations. But rational thinking is instrumental, linear, it distorts: that's exactly the problem with the Mercator map, the most common world projection. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, created a "Dymaxion map" to undo those distortions. First the earth becomes a geometric figure, an isocahedron: its 20 triangles are disjointed and laid flat, so the land masses radiate from a nexus in the north, without splitting continents or enlarging polar regions. Fuller based his politics on this map: at the '67 World Expo in Montreal, in the dome of the U.S. pavilion, he wanted to lay out a vast Dymaxion projection, and animate it with the most up-to-date statistics, so visitors could watch the flow of resources across the earth — and identify the patterns, the inequalities, the most wasteful and efficient solutions. Delegations from different regions would meet for cooperative sessions, in a problem-solving process called the "World Peace Game." The basic idea was simple: radical democracy. "Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone."1 Gerardus Mercator was a Protestant scholar from Flanders; he published his map in 1569, to help European merchants plot routes to distant shores. The ability to sail in straight lines led to a capitalist world-economy. Oyvind Fahlström was a Swedish artist who spent his childhood in Brazil, and died in the U.S.A. His World Map was painted in 1972, not long after Fuller imagined his utopia. Fahlström's map recalls the Mercator projection: but the oceans have practically disappeared, the continents are crushed or swollen by the political pressures that the world-economy brings. Space overflows with clashes between the wealthy and the downtrodden, the CIA and the freedom-fighters, the capitalists, the communists, the revolutionaries. Fahlström was interested in resistance and excess: by which I mean politics plus overflowing subjectivity, figurative invention. For him, a map was a flat, rule-governed space for a strict social game; but it also was an open territory for imaginary play.2 In the early seventies he created a series of Monopoly sets (CIA Monopoly, World Trade Monopoly, Indochina, etc.), where political and economic information provides inflexible rules, whatever out passion, whatever our creativity. Yet a work like his Pentagon Puzzle — including a detail of a square earth, wrapped in chains — could also be taken apart, dispersed, its pieces reinserted into another game. Fuller's utopia was not accepted for the U.S. pavilion in 1967: at the entryway, officials placed a huge golden eagle. But today, Internet access has brought tremendous information to our reach. Now everyone can play at mapping resources. Part of Bucky's heritage is "osEarth Inc.," which organizes World Game sessions on a huge Dymaxion map, as a learning experience for youth — but also for Fortune 500 corporations. "Global civil society," with all its complicities, is squarely on the map in 2002. Does anyone doubt that Fahlström's Monopoly sets, with their focus on political confrontation, come much closer to the games the world really plays? Yet the recent round of counter-summits and global demonstrations still recall Fuller's basic idea. And one begins to wonder: where are the artist-cartographers of today? Power Lines The Paris-based conceptual group, Bureau d'études, works intensively in two dimensions. For a recent exhibition called "Planet of the Apes" they created integrated wall charts of the ownership ties between transnational organizations, a synoptic view of the world monetary game. Against a black ground, shield-like forms are emblazoned with the names of states, regulatory bodies, think tanks, financial firms and corporations. Texts on privatization and flexibilization are posted among the circuit-like arrays. A few spots give way to blue zones, humorous and surreal, like word-balloons or psychic oceans: these hold counter-information from autonomous zones, manifestos, constitutions, calls to action... Instead of a catalogue, the visitor gets three "Wartime Chronicles," single sheets that divide the power players into overlapping regions. One is a finance pole, with pension funds, portfolio managers and banks, plus gray zones of legitimating foundations. Another shows telecoms, media groups, networks of consumer distribution. So you want to call the police on these criminals? Military institutions, intelligence agencies, weapon makers and satellite companies complete the picture. A few quotes run along the sides of the sheets, like this one from the artist Fabrice Hybert: "My first collector, well, big collector... was a mediator for NATO and the big structures like that, NATO and the African or South American countries, something like that, another one is a mediator for all the arms industries, well, you know, it's horrible but he has this capacity to abstract himself in that scene... Me, I like people like that."3 There's a wager here: paint a totalitarian picture, crystal clear, and people will look for the cracks in some other dimension. Another giveaway, the eight-page text called "Potentiels," explores "autonomous knowledge and powers," with a survey of different anarchist positions, as well as maps or figures listing dissident knowledge producers, squats and hacklabs, plus a chart that relates various forms of non-capitalist exchange. A non-price (0 euros) and a contractual note figures on each of the sheets: "The present publication cannot be acquired, sold or destroyed. All persons may nonetheless use it as long as they please, with an obligation to give it to others if no longer desired." This last detail has its importance: as Bruce Sterling put it: "Information Wants To Be Worthless" — worthless in monetary terms, that is.4 And far beyond the computer logic of Open Source, the great alternative project of the last decade has been mapping the transnational space invested primarily by the corporations, and distributing that knowledge for free. This is the real power of "spontaneous cooperation," in a global information project like Indymedia. Across a decade and more, from the early '80s to the mid-90s, the rules of the neoliberal economy were hidden in the back holes of offshore operations. Today, a multitude of projects like "Planet of the Apes" are making them increasingly visible. To the point where a new resistance means we can start imagining — or exploring — a radically different map of the earth again. Fuller would have loved the design of the Internet, which makes information-sharing possible for the World Game. Fahlström, the admirer of cartoonist Robert Crumb, would have loved the crowd at the Days of Global Action: autonomous and wild, intelligent and quick on their feet. Bureau d'études is in that crowd: by collaborating with squats, jobless people and sans papiers, by operating a self-organizing space in Strasbourg, the "Syndicat Potentiel," and combining it with "Université Tangente," a project for autonomous knowledge production, they have begun quietly broadcasting a pragmatic intransigence to the younger artists on a French art scene dominated by the likes of Fabrice Hybert. This summer, they will meet the No-Border Network in attempts to subvert one of the strongest power-lines: the Schengen Information System. Activities like those simply can't appear on the walls on the art world. In this sense, half the work of Bureau d'études remains underground: the refusals and denunciations are clear, the cooperation and subjective play remains almost invisible. And maybe it's better that way: how could you successfully represent an alternative, radically democratic experience? Uncertain Uses A sophisticated mapping project tries to answer just that question. The screen before you shows a purple-black mass, spangled with mesmerizing constellations: slowly you realize it's a night-photo of urbanized Europe, with white rectangles marking zones of potential activity. The scene breaks: music plays, letters dance and roll, spelling out words; and you begin to wander within a matrix of slightly elevated, freestanding screens. You find yourself surrounded by distinct sets of imposing, static black-and-white images of architectural arrays; then snapshot color pics of people mingling freely in a everyday scenes; then sustained interviews in black-and-white with huge talking heads; then lyrical video strolls through some personal warp in the urban terrain. Stop in front of one screen, and a story unfolds: setting, actors, individual story, subjective path through the city. Until the scene breaks, the language rolls, the music plays, and the permutations begin differently again. On the fringes of the art world, a group of urbanists has created one of the most impressive systems of visual representation to appear in recent years: USE, or the "Uncertain States of Europe," a project by Stefano Boeri and Multiplicity. Multiplicity is a networked research team, exploring the European territory as it changes, in twenty-six different sites from Athens to Espoo, from Porto to Bucharest or Moscow. The basic premise is that borders are ungraspable, that architectural programs and urban limits are unstable — but everywhere, the subjective excess of "autopoetic innovations" creates recognizable patterns of change, at least for the observer who mingles with them. For Boeri, whose aim is to deconstruct an outdated urban planner's gaze, what we are seeing is "the triumph of the multitude": consistently mutating but thoroughly unpredictable patterns of self-organization, niching in built environments that have increasingly lost their predetermined function. Thus one of the sequences (keyword: détournement) recounts how the uses of the Chinese community have the completely transformed the ideal program of a huge modern housing slab in the 13th district of Paris. Another (keyword: eruption) deals with the careful organization of chaotic raves, "nomadic flames": "The paths of the millions of ravers and tribes that invade Europe's streets every weekend bring us ever further away from a precise, functional destination."5 The reference to the multitude in Boeri's text, and indeed, on the screens of USE, recalls the political thinking of Italian Autonomia, with their central theme of "exodus," or conscious withdrawal from modernist planning and salaried labor. Obviously it's a dilemma for the traditional urbanist, or for any politician wanting to exercise control: "Escaping this condition of powerlessness simply implies accepting the ungovernability of a great deal of the contemporary territory," writes Boeri. This in its turn would mean "learning to act in a context directed by different, highly variable subjects."6 Or in what I would call a situation of radical democracy. But the big question that remains is how to use an installation like USE, and the operational model of a networked, collaborative research group like Multiplicity. The actual piece, elaborated outside the typical gallery-museum circuit, is the best installation I've yet seen on interactive social process: with its extensive matrix of screens, it opens up a real-and-imaginary territory, a multidimensional, interrelated world of subjective freedoms. But to what extent is that effectively political? "To resist is not to be against, any more, but to singularize," writes Suely Rolnik, reflecting on the changing meanings of artistic practice since the Great Refusal of the 1960s. "All and any acts of resistance are acts of creation and not acts of negation."7 Beautifully said — but I'm not sure it's so easy. The great theoretical swing of the past three decades, from critical negation to use value and subversive affirmation, has left "progressive" practices wide open to every complicity. Despite the autopoetic processes that an installation like USE so brilliantly lets us see, the entire planet — Spaceship Earth — is prey to a resurgence of repressive authority, within the perfectly legible game of the capitalist world-economy. Berlusconi's Italy, where the project has been shown, is hardly an exception: and the resistance is not yet strong enough. Can we imagine artistic representations of self-organizing processes, in open confrontation with that game? "Rules oppose and derail subjectivity, loosen the imprinted circuits of the individual," wrote Oyvind Fahlström. Only then does a deeper territory emerge, a more complex interplay: power lines/radical democracy.

Notes

This text was originally published in German in the journal Springerin, Vienna, March 2002.

1. 'The common assumption of ultimate war by the major political powers of our planet brought about the development of World WAR Gaming Science by the great powers’ respective military strategists. World War Gaming Science involved all terrestrial resources. My World PEACE Gaming Science changes the basic assumption of fundamental inadequacy of total life support and applies total capability toward the success of all humans. l Buckminster Fuller, "Preamble and Memorandum to those interested in playing WorldGame", in The World Game: Integrative Resource Planning Tool (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University, typescript, 1971), p. 2, available at: . Fuller is, of course, the coiner of the expression 'Spaceship Earth'.
2. Quoted in Medard Gabel, 'Buckminster Fuller and the Game of the World,' at . Thanks to Hubert Salden for putting me on this track.
3. I use Suely Rolnik's distinction between 'playing-the-game' and 'just-playing', in 'Oyvind Fahlström's Changing Maps', exhib. cat. Oyvind Fahlström: Another Space for Painting, MACBA, Barcelona, 2001.
4. Buckminster Fuller, 'Preamble and Memorandum', op. cit., p. 6.
5. Interview on May 2, 1996, with Fabrice Hybert, artist representing France at the Venice Biennial, in Bureau d'études, Chroniques de guerre 2, brochure, February 2002.
6. Bruce Sterling, 'Information Wants To Be Worthless', distributed free over Nettime, March 6, 2002, archive at ; let me recall that one of the richest Nettime threads over the years has concerned 'the high-tech gift economy.'
7. Mark Lombardi’s sketch diagrams and index cards on banking scandals, or the website “TheyRule” by Josh On and Futurefarmers (www.theyrule.net), are close to the recent projects by Bureau d’études. “TheyRule” introduces a DIY side to corporate tracking:users can build up diagrams of a single CEO’s participation in interlocking corporate boards. However, neither project has the synoptic ambitions of Bureau d’études.
8. Paolo Vari, 'USE.04 Raves', in exhib. cat. Mutations, arc en rêve centre d'architecture, Bordeaux, 2000.
9. Stefano Boeri, 'Notes for a Research Program', in Mutations, op. cit.
10. Suely Rolnik, 'Oyvind Fahlström's Changing Maps,' op. cit.

Jose Llano
Arquitecto Independiente
Arquitectura de Archivo & Diseñador de Delitos
editor aparienciapublica
www.aparienciapublica.org
http://aparienciapublica.blogspot.com
__________________________________
AMERICA has a rest, where you want to be

[AP] DIFFERENTIAL GEOGRAPHY / Brian Holmes

DIFFERENTIAL GEOGRAPHY
Research and Rhythm in Artistic Representation


desde http://brianholmes.wordpress.com

The rhythmanalyst will not be obliged to leap from the inside to the outside of the bodies he observes; he should be able to succeed in listening to them together and allying them, by taking his own rhythms as a reference: by integrating the inside to the outside and vice-versa.

Henri Lefebvre, “Previsionary Portrait of the Rhythmanalyst”1

In an astonishing sequence from the video installation Corridor X, the scene shifts abruptly from a Eurovision control monitor to a make-up session under the eye of the cameras, then to a room full of TV reporters, then to a computer screen where someone is playing solitaire. We are in the official media center of the European Summit of Thessaloniki in June 2003. Outside, a huge demonstration has gathered in opposition to the European Union, to the war, to globalization. Inside, everything is ordered, ranked, segmented: politicians deliver speeches, translators pipe them into headphones, reporters clip out news bites for their stations. Security passes dangle from color-coded straps around each person’s neck, distinguishing name, access level, function. The gaze returns insistently to the control monitor, connected to four video feeds transmitted directly by cameramen outside. Feed number 4, which is going live on the air, shows the police in pursuit of black-clad anarchists; but an instant later we ourselves are thrust into the surging crowd of demonstrators, we feel their movement in our bodies, we are carried off in their flight.

The sequence from Corridor X seems to echo or respond to another one toward the end of the Black Sea Files. This time we are in Turkey, at the site of the historical divide between Occident and Orient. On the left-hand screen, an immense oil-tanker navigates through the straits of the Bosphorous: suddenly it is caught in a viewfinder and keyed into a digital map. On the right, we see the control panel of a computerized system for maritime traffic surveillance, installed at enormous expense to guarantee security during the passage of the tankers through the straits. Over the soundtrack comes a crackle of radio transmissions against a barely audible background of oriental music. Then the view of the control panel flicks to a satellite image of Istanbul. As though the video-maker, once again, were inquiring into the nature and function of the technologies of vision, the condition of the world-on-a-screen.

The two installations, so different in editing and style, display the same desire for a confrontation with the control screen: a device that cuts out and redistributes the flow of time according to a strictly functional and hierarchical order. It is as though the works had to recognize within themselves the presence of a spatial order at once homogeneous and fragmented: the abstract space of the contemporary capitalist planning process, as it is sketched out and realized in some of the largest infrastructural programs of the present. It is this rigidly segmentary space of control that the artworks melt and dissolve into the affective rhythms of “a myriad of human trajectories on the ground.” That last phrase is a quote from the Black Sea Files; but it applies perfectly to Corridor X. Both installations engage with a contradictory relationship of forces, bringing together the implacably unified logic of large-scale planning processes and the sensual and expressive diversity of speaking human beings. That relation lies at the heart of a project that was initially called “Transcultural Geographies,” but was finally exhibited under a much more enigmatic name: “B Zone: Becoming Europe and Beyond.”

Searching for Motives

The B Zone is a complex project, with many different entries and exits. It was in 2002 that the Transcultural Geographies network began to take shape, on the initiative of Ursula Biemann who had already decided to document the construction and the human environment of the 1750-kilometer BTC oil pipeline running from the city of Baku in Azerbaijan, through Tbilissi in Georgia, to the port of Ceyhan in Turkey. To enlarge the scope of this investigation, she invited two other women into the project. One was Lisa Parks, a media researcher who would analyze the destruction of the former Yugoslav telephone system during the civil wars, then map out its replacement by a web of transnational satellite services. The other was Angela Melitopoulos, who wanted to make a road movie about the present realities and historical memories of the integrated system of highways, rails, ports and telecommunications cables stretching across Southeastern Europe, from Salzburg and Budapest to Thessaloniki and Sofia. This multi-modal system is Corridor X, the tenth Pan-European Transport Corridor, running along a route that partially overlays the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity built by Tito’s Yugoslavia, but also the Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad constructed with German capital in the early twentieth century. At stake here, as curator Anselm Franke noted in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, is the “silent language of infrastructure.”2

Yet this is a project that speaks. To instill a dialogical character into the very production and editing of the investigation, Angela Melitopoulos constituted the group Timescapes, including the VideA collective from Ankara, Freddy Vianellis from Athens, Dragana Zarevac from Belgrade, and the German video-maker Hito Steyrl who filmed the European summit in Thessaloniki along with Melitopoulos herself. Another participant was the professor of media art and cultural studies, Ginette Verstraete, who accompanied the project of Transcultural Geographies from its inception, along with numerous other artists, theorists, inhabitants and experts who contributed their images, their voices and their texts, or who participated in one of the four project seminars held in Amsterdam, Ljubljana, Istanbul and Zurich. All this was documented in a book, and given spatial expression in the two exhibitions of the project mounted in Berlin in 2006 and in Barcelona in 2007.3 It was, to date, one of the most searching and insightful projects of what some people are calling visual geography.

These precisely conceived investigations of the southeastern periphery of Europe, and of its continual transformations since the end of the Cold War, take us far away from any purely aesthetic definition of art. The ambition is clearly to develop a new mode of inquiry and expression, yielding results that are qualitatively different from those obtained either by artists or by social scientists. As Ursula Biemann remarks: “In my understanding of the practice of art, images and text are inseparably interwoven in their common purpose to produce knowledge.”4 But the question is, what kind of knowledge? All the works in the project are carefully researched, yielding a synthesis of existing disciplinary studies; and particular efforts have been made to to integrate the precise distinctions of the social sciences into a broad and consistent narrative. Yet there is also a critical examination here, not so much of the “text/image relation” that formed the semiological stock-in-trade of concept art, but instead of the more pragmatic confrontation between analytic discourse and cultural performance. Analysis, in short, is brought up against the lifeworlds of Southeastern Europe. And while the discriminatory power of objectifying analysis reaches deeply into the existential singularity of the encounters – and into the warp and weft of the video editing – it also serves to bring out a fundamental heterogeneity. One could say, in the spirit of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, that the logic of capitalist rationality is inscribed into the sensuous material of art, and that the incongruity of the two points beyond the informational level of representation, toward other human realities whose promise is rarely voiced.

Let’s focus for a moment on the heterogeneous nature of representation in these works. On the one hand, the “objects” that are treated (the pipeline, the transportation net) must be read as the material emanation of a highly abstract process of corridor planning, which extends the infrastructures of capitalist production from the fully saturated historical centers (the “A Zone,” in the jargon of the technocrats) to the peripheries which can still bear heavy capital investment (the “B Zone”). It is in this sense, at least from the planning perspective, that the southeastern periphery is gradually “becoming Europe,” as it is ever more deeply integrated to the infrastructural net that constitutes a full-fledged capitalist production circuit, from extraction all the way to processing, finance and markets. Corridor X, leading from southern Germany into Greece and Turkey, can offer a perfect example of this kind integrating infrastructure, with its central axis and its diverging branches, its 2,500 kilometers of roads and rails, its twelve airfields and four ports, most of which which already exist in scattered pieces and yet remain to be forged into a functional whole, via private-public partnerships of tremendous stealth and complexity.5 This kind of project seems calculated to dwarf the human being, and in that way, to vanquish in advance any imaginable resistance or possibility of democracy. Yet by a chance linguistic twist, the Roman numeral “X” in the name of this immense infrastructure is able to perfectly designate its lack of meaning, its absence of ontological density – at least when it is viewed through the mathematical lens of the planners. The segmented void of the corridor can only be transformed by the fluid diversity of its users, who alone will provide the project’s real motive forces.

The BTC pipeline presents a similar aspect. Today it is already buried beneath the ground, to secure it against terrorist attacks, but also to reduce its exposure to the media. It was only visible for a few short years, during the period of its construction; and even then, you had to find it on the terrain, since the British Petroleum corporation gave no information whatsoever as to its location. But one can ask if such a project could ever truly be “visible,” or if it does not rather consist in the informatic space of coordination and control that assigns it its real functions. Biemann raises this question throughout the film, for instance when she shows the image of the oil-tanker in the viewfinder; but she also turns her gaze elsewhere, along the full length of pipeline, to engage in conversations with the workers, the farmers, the experts, the prostitutes, the refugees, all those shape the space of this infrastructure, even as they are shaped by it. Ultimately, it is the human environment that forms the subject of the film. The other side of the pipeline – all that is “beyond” its abstract functionality – rises gradually into our field of knowledge through this questioning relationship with the people along the wayside, often migrants, displaced persons, who know what it means to have to recreate a world.

Now, to question the others and to make them into the living motifs of a buried and invisible landscape suggests the need for a certain research into one’s own motives. Through one of the unlikely coincidences brought on by the networked structure of cooperation in the project of Transcultural Geographies, Biemann found herself in the spring of 2004 in the city of Ankara, and in the workspace of the VideA collective, when an urgent phone call arrived from a community of Kurdish refugees. The municipality was in the process of expelling some one thousand persons from their dwelling place, a huge vacant lot where they were doing recycling for a living. At their request, Ursula went out to record the brutal intervention of the police, placing herself in situations of violence and political engagement that she had never planned into her investigation. On the finished two-screen video, she presents these dramatic scenes in parallel to a self-reflexive sequence where she asks about her own role in the events, while sitting in front of a portable computer and filming herself with a webcam:

What does it mean to take the camera into the field, to go into the trenches? How did it get to the point where she stands at the front, next to the journalists, at the very moment of the incident, without press pass or gas mask? … Is an image made under dangerous conditions more valuable than material found in libraries and archives? Is better knowledge that which is produced at great risk? … [scene shifts to the pipeline] Are these cognitive methods any different from the ones used by geologists, anthropologists or secret intelligence agents? They all probe different sorts of sediments and plots that give meaning to this space. What is the sediment I should be probing in my fieldwork? What role do I play in this plot?6

The critical examination of the relation between analytic discourse and cultural performance is now turned on the “I” behind the camera, that is, on the subjective position of the camerawoman herself. Her memory and its particular association to a place becomes the material that the artistic research probes. Reflecting on the same scene in her writing, she formulates one of the project’s fundamental goals: “It is not so much the capturing of a spectacular human drama that is at work here but the relentless search for the uncontrollable shoots of buried histories.”7 What the artist begins to add to the classical formats of geographic research is an inquiry into the texture and temporal depth of the relations that produce the videographic flux itself – a dialogical texture, brimming over with contrasts and differences, yet always somehow uncertain or inconclusive, and partially opaque even to those who bring it concretely into being.

Multiplying Narratives

To move closer to the most important stakes of this research, one could begin by saying that what it represents – what it shows or explicates – is the production of space, in the sense that was given to that phrase by Henri Lefebvre. That is to say, the continuous production and reproduction of an existential milieu lived and fashioned by its inhabitants: a vital space open to the most unexpected becomings, and at the same time, inherently contradictory by dint of its own multiplicity – especially when it is submitted to regimes of transparency and totality, as illusory as they are oppressive. Beyond the abstractions of control, it is this qualitative dimension (embodied, sensuous and playful) that Lefebvre calls “differential space.” As he wrote in 1974:

The enigma of the body – its secret, at once banal and profound – is its ability, beyond “subject” and “object” (and beyond the philosophical distinctions between them), to produce differences “unconsciously” out of repetitions – out of gestures (linear) or out of rhythms (cyclical). Just like the fleshy body of the living being, the spatial body of society and the social body of needs differ from an “abstract corpus” or “body” of signs (semantic or semiological – “textual”) in the following way: they cannot live without generating, without producing, without creating differences.8

Lefebvre’s philosophy, in The Production of Space, is turned entirely toward the conceptualization of this differential creativity, in its distinction from the sterile infinity of abstract serial production. Yet today one can go further than the sheer concept of differential space. Between Lefebvre’s time and our own, there has been an immense flowering of feminist inquiries and postcolonial historiographies, which have brought particular attention to the interactions between the positionality of subjects and the forms of situated knowledge (including expressive knowledge). These interventions have awakened the desire for a new treatment of representation, a multiplication of its gestural and narrative textures: for it is these textural elements, with their transindivdual dynamics, that are directly productive of human perception, and thereby, of the very capacity for the creation of space. Extending the pathways opened up by feminist and postcolonial theory, certain artists working with contemporary media have sought a more active and affective intervention into the production of space, by means of the material and linguistic qualities of videographic editing itself. Instead of a pure analysis of abstract space or a pure aestheticization of the human landscape, artistic research can now give form to a differential geography, that is to say, to a mode of cognition – and of recognition, and of self-recognition – that allows subjects to inscribe their own positionality into the gestural texture of the narrative, exposing the socioeconomic determinants of their lives to the flux of intersubjective time, and to the electronic fluctuations of the video image. Through such a process the controlled and segmented spaces of the multimodal corridors can become a fluid realm of expression and exchange, a sensuous and dialogical field, able to convey the contradictory resonance of multiple threads of historical experience and unanchored desire. And through this differential representation, the perceptions and perspectives of the B Zone – which Melitopoulos describes as “a zone of transitions, processes of becoming, unstable political conditions, neocolonial strategies of cooptation and antithetical historiographies”9 – can start flowing back into the saturated imaginary space of the A Zone, and begin to create a field of coexistence. This is the active force of differential geography.

The Timescapes experiment is an attempt to provoke this movement of reflux, through a set of protocols, a technical device and a highly original practice of editing. The participants, who filmed along the routes of Corridor X and beyond, accept to place their results in common, constituting a stock of video images which each then receives back as a collective memory bank (around 25 hours of rushes). Each video-maker then works in an isolated studio; but a specially conceived Internet platform allows the editors to share the timecodes of their cuts with all the others, and to relay any additional material such as subtitles, image overlays, supplementary scenes, etc. In this way, the editing software can reconstruct every new sequence from the raw material stored in the memory bank, so that at any given point in the process, each one can see the video that the other is in the midst of creating. A billboard function allows everyone to post observations and commentaries on their reciprocal borrowings and contrasting narratives. What this amounts to is an invitation to experience the other’s construction of reality as it unfolds, and to integrate that experience as a troubling, inconclusive element within one’s own expression. As Melitopoulos wrote to one of the other participants, the Turkish video-maker Oktay Ince, “I tell you something about how I feel becoming a part of your editing: can you explain to me, how I as a person am going to be the material for a psycho-graphic line of yours? What of me becomes part of your movie?”10 In the space of exhibition, this reciprocal appropriation becomes an astonishing experience: from gallery to gallery, from monitor to screen, the images and soundtracks reappear, echo one another, diverge and recombine again. And yet this echoing, divergence and recombination is one of the best available translations or prolongations of the ways that cultural history is really made, on the grounds of a trans-subjective territory.

For Melitopoulos, non-linear editing means working with the durée, the time of our consciousness: a modulation of the attention that informs our memory, our thought and our spatial awareness. As she writes: “The video image does not document the real, but acts as a mnemonic agent or a visual memory.”11 What results when these mnemonic agents are combined is a kind of phrasing of being in the landscape of time, bringing memories from the past to the surface of the present and mingling them with the experience of perception, in close relation to the sensibility of others. Following this inspiration – which is deeply influenced by Maurizio Lazzarato’s vidéophilosophie – she constitutes a moving picture of Corridor X in which multiple layers intertwine: her own travels to her father’s homeland of Greece during the summer vacations of her childhood; the construction of the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway in the early twentieth century; the digging of Loibl tunnel by conscript labor during the Second World War; the mobilization of the Yugoslav population for work on the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity; and the actuality of Corridor X, where technical information and political events weave their way into the gestures and voices of those who experience the impacts of the planning process on their everyday lives.

The principle of the two-screen installation works perfectly with this editing philosophy, allowing for parallel narratives and historical contrasts, but also drawing on the play of repetition to generate singular affective rhythms which could never precisely be named, but which pass distinctly through the landscapes, the faces and ourselves. To quote Lefebvre once again, this could be the material of a “rhythmanalysis.” As he wrote at the very end of his life:

In the social sciences we continue to divide up time into lived time, measured time, historical time, work time and free time, everyday time, etc., that are most often studied outside their spatial context. Now, concrete times have rhythms, or rather are rhythms – and all rhythms imply the relation of a time to a space, a localized time, or, if one prefers, a temporalized space. … Let us insist on the relativity of rhythms. … A rhythm is only slow or fast in relation to other rhythms with which it finds itself associated in a more or less vast unity. … Every more or less animate body and a fortiori every gathering of bodies is consequently polyrhythmic, which is to say composed of diverse rhythms, with each part, each organ or function having its own in a perpetual interaction which constitutes a set [ensemble] or a whole [un tout].12

Could there be any higher ideal for practitioners of video recording and non-linear montage? Like Charles Baudelaire in his “petits poèmes en prose,” Lefebvre gleaned his inspiration “from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.” Indeed, the polyrhythmical metropolis of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the great resource of differentialism and multiplicity. The works of the “B Zone” embrace a larger scale, extending the rhythmanalysis of the city to an entire region and its history. A politics of precise and detailed information is exposed to its affective and dialogical dimensions, in a process of trans-subjective editing that traverses a continent.

At this point one might object that interiorized totalities were another great resource of the romantic nineteenth century, and that nothing of the sort can help us come any closer to the world of today – that is, to the realities of geography. Yet such an objection ignores the entire aspiration of the project, which is to unfold the inner worlds of its subjects/objects into the outer one, to exfoliate the sedimented layers of the self into the expressive vectors of electronic media. What occurs is the spatialization of subjectivity, the recognition through the editing process of what Ursula Biemann called the “shoots of buried histories,” emerging not from a unitary metaphysical source but instead at the mnemonic place were they begin to diverge and multiply. As Melitopoulos writes: “To see video documents (whose interpretation one believes one knows) integrated in other montages is a strange experience out of which the connection between creative practice and geographical position emerges and enters into conflict: the emotional potential of the pictures points to their mnemonic tie to the geographical space of memory.”13 In Angela’s own film, to be sure, all of this has a distinctly personal dimension, whereby one woman’s life becomes tangled up – and to a certain extent dispersed – in a larger field of historical cultures. But the personal and situated dimensions of the film are essential to its ambitions. As she explains: “The mass media do not censor individual opinions, but the complexity of the processes of subjectivation. Many-layered, complex relations of identity and subjectivity affect people beyond their self-attributed identity and produce a group that is not represented by the majority opinion.”14

Aspirations like these most often arise from moments of crisis. Here we should think of the first Gulf War, contemporary with the appearance of CNN. At the time, Melitopoulos shot videos in Paris for an activist project called Canal Déchaîné (Unchained Channel), which involved people carrying radical video monitors, complete with battery pack, on their backs through demonstrations in the streets. The Internet platform of the Timescapes project strives toward a future in which images from across the earth can be recombined amidst the urgency of the event, not into the one-dimensional characters of an impoverished subjectivity, but into the rich and contrasting textures of a collective self-reflection that can endure through the awesome shockwaves of idiocy that militarized capitalism now imposes on us. The point is not simply to send a clip around the world; it is to begin responding to the challenge of flatly imposed universals with the alternative of interwoven landscapes of becoming.

Ursula Biemann’s work, to this date, has sought no such technological mode of distribution or interactive editing. Yet the production of her videos as multiples, costing the price of a book rather than that of a limited-edition video artwork, means that these visual narratives get around, contributing both to cultural education in the diffuse sense and to the more focused encounters of activist groups concerned with a particular issue. There is a palpable need for this kind of image-production. The fact is that sustained artistic research into the gendered and ethnically hierarchized worlds of uneven geographical development does not yet exist to any massively significant degree – no doubt because it cannot be planned like a pipeline or a corridor, but must instead emerge from the cultivation of desires for a more meaningful mobility. The whole point is to support this cultivation of desire, in the face of instrumental programs that have no need for anything but their own results, the tautological fulfillment of their functions.

One of the speakers of Corridor X, Alexandre Zdravkovski, remarks that the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity was full of life, because it was infused by the society of the time with emotional energy. To the contrary, present conditions in Macedonia where he resides are somber, not least because the freedom to travel has actually declined since the early 1990s. “We in Macedonia would like to have all corridors alive,” he explains. “But to make such projects alive you need more than professional managers, architects, engineers and work force. … It is important that the corridor functions on all levels. … Everything that is made consciously, with good intentions, with emotional energy, is more alive and has a chance to last longer in our time-space continuum.”15 Interviewed on the back seat of a moving car, this modest and alert-looking man tries to formulate a principle of vital resistance, locating its importance somewhere beyond the arrival of what are metaphorically and literally called “the bulldozers.”

As the struggle over oil resources drags our planet ever deeper into war, and the extension of Corridor III is planned all the way to China, this effort to breathe some life into the abstraction of global infrastructures may prove to be the real challenge of the twenty-first century.

Notes

1Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Regulier-Lefebvre, “Portrait Prévisionnel du rythmanalyste,” in Éléments de rythmanalyse (Paris: Syllepse, 1992). An English translation has been published by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore, under the title Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (London: Continuum, 2004); but here I preferred to retranslate from the French.
2Anselm Franke, “Introduction,” in B-Zone: Becoming Europe and Beyond (Barcelona: Actar, 2005), p. 7.
3The exhibitions were held at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Dec. 17, 2005 – Feb. 26 2006, and at Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona, March 10 – May 1, 2007.
4Ursula Biemann, “The Black Sea Files,” in B-Zone, op. cit., p. 25.
5For official information on Corridor X, seee, among others, http://edessa.topo.auth.gr/x.
6Ursula Biemann, “File Four,” in Black Sea Files, 43’ 47”, 2005.
7Ursula Biemann, “Black Sea Files,” in B-Zone, op. cit., p. 59.
8Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (London: Blackwell, 1991/French ed. 1974), pp. 395-96.
9Angela Melitopoulos, “Timescapes,” in B-Zone, op. cit., p. 144.
10Angela Melitopoulos, “Corridor X,” in B-Zone, op. cit., p. 168.
11Angela Melitopoulos, “Timescapes,” in B-Zone, op. cit., p. 140.
12Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Regulier-Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, op. cit., p. 89.
13Angela Melitopoulos, “Timescapes,” in B-Zone, op. cit., pp. 140-41.
14Angela Melitopoulos, “Timescapes,” in B-Zone, op. cit., p. 145.
15Alexandre Zdravchovski interviewed by Angela Melitopoulos in Corridor X (2005), transcribed in B-Zone, op. cit., p. 229.

link
brian holmes
http://brianholmes.wordpress.com




Jose Llano
Arquitecto Independiente
Arquitectura de Archivo & Diseñador de Delitos
editor aparienciapublica
www.aparienciapublica.org
http://aparienciapublica.blogspot.com
_________________________________
AMERICA has a rest, where you want to be

[AP] Investigaciones extradisciplinares / Hacia una nueva crítica de las instituciones

Gov’t Office in Baku, (Ursula Biemann, Black Sea Files)

Investigaciones extradisciplinares
Hacia una nueva crítica de las instituciones

Hace unos años mantuve un intercambio de correo electrónico con un estudiante que me trajo inesperadas noticias: mis textos se entendían en el mundo del arte como “crítica institucional”. ¡Qué desconcierto para alguien interesado en el éxodo y la crítica en las calles! La imagen que me vino a la mente era no solamente la de October y toda la envejecida jerarquía académica. También me recordó vagamente una colección de trabajos de artistas como Haacke, Serrano y otros sospechosos habituales de las “guerras culturales” de los años ochenta, confinados en las asfixiantes profundidades del millonario museo de La Jolla al sur de Los Ángeles. En ese recuerdo, rodeaban a estos artistas críticos algunos guardias de seguridad neopop recientes, incluyendo algunos fragmentos de la popular serie de televisión Alf debidamente flanqueados por sus derivados artísticos (una pintura de Alf, una escultura de Alf, etcétera). La crítica institucional, para mí, era Hans Haacke atrapado por Hollywood: otra pesadilla de la fábrica de sueños americana.

Y sin embargo no podía eludir el tema de fondo. Desde un punto de vista filosófico y existencial, lo que nos importa son las estructuras organizativas de la sociedad en la historia, cómo nos cambian, cómo las cambiamos. “Pues muy bien”, pensé, “sí que tengo algunas cosas que decir sobre las instituciones, y no sólo las artísticas. Pero tendríamos que redefinir qué entendemos por ‘crítica’”.

“La personalidad flexible”, que escribí en 2001, examinaba las formas contemporáneas de dominación tecnopolítica y los modos en que anudan la camisa de fuerza de un yo hiperindividualizado. “El póquer mentiroso”, de 2003, era la respuesta activista a esa misma crítica: una puja en favor de la transvaloración cultural con la máxima admiración por los artistas políticos que descubren sus proprios faroles institucionales y se lanzan, en momentos de crisis, al movimiento social1. Fueron contribuciones teóricas al extendido deseo de escapar de los marcos convencionales, que exigía también acudir a los lugares en los que la noción de gubernamentalidad se hace real: lugares ejemplificados en aquel entonces por los encuentros del Fondo Monetario Internacional o del Banco Mundial, así como por la concentración de miles de policías armados que los circundaban. Y aún así, la idea, al menos desde mi punto de vista, nunca fue afirmar la mera inmediatez, la transparencia, la espontaneidad del instante. Más bien se trataba de preguntarse cómo imprimir efectividad política al análisis de procesos complejos, y a través de qué medios (en toda la polisemia del término). Bajo ese prisma, lo que más me chocaba negativamente del concepto “crítica institucional” era la pobreza de su ecuación tácita: “institución = museo”. Por si quedan dudas sobre cómo las instituciones continúan produciendo disciplinas, en el sentido foucaultiano, es precisamente ahí donde tenemos la prueba más clara: en las ataduras de un estrecho profesionalismo. Hay tantísimas otras funciones y campos que estructuran nuestras vidas y relaciones, que modelan los contenidos mismos de nuestro sensorium. ¿Por qué no utilizar las lentes artísticas para investigar otras instituciones?

Este ensayo, esbozado originalmente en francés para un volumen de colaboración entre las revistas transversal y Multitudes2, intenta definir un tipo específico de trabajo investigador, que se propone explorar las estructuras tecnológicas y organizativas de las sociedades contemporáneas tomando como punto de partida lo que quizá sea el legado más relevante del arte experimental: su manera de corporeizar la crítica a los valores sociales. El propósito no es tanto polemizar con las formas previas de la crítica sino más bien impulsar algunas de sus ideas prometedoras más allá de sus circunstanciales vías muertas. Lo que está en juego es la actual viabilidad y efectividad de una estética crítica que ha logrado afianzarse recientemente en las instituciones artísticas, aun cuando otras formas más tradicionales de crítica filosófica y sociológica están siendo atacadas en la universidad. Una generación previa de artistas y críticos apostaron todo al intento de inscribir ciertas formas de investigación radical en las instituciones de la cultura visual. Ha llegado la hora de hacer un uso más significativo de estas posibilidades abiertas, averiguar hasta dónde pueden llegar. Lo que obliga también a tener una idea más precisa de dónde vienen.

Punto de partida

¿Cuál es la lógica, la necesidad o el deseo que impulsa a cada vez más artistas a trabajar fuera de los límites de su propia disciplina, definida por nociones de reflexividad libre y estética pura, materializada en el circuito galería-revista-museo-colección y acechada por la memoria de la pintura y la escultura como géneros normativos?

El arte pop, el conceptual, el body-art, la performance y el vídeo marcaron una ruptura con el marco disciplinar ya en los años sesenta y setenta. Pero se podría argumentar que, en realidad, estos estallidos sencillamente importaron nuevos temas, medios o técnicas expresivas a lo que Yves Klein había denominado el ambiente “especializado” de la galería o del museo, cuya cualidad está marcada por la primacía de lo estético y que está dirigido por los funcionarios del arte. Son exactamente estos argumentos los que Robert Smithson lanzó con inolvidable violencia antiadministrativa en su texto sobre el confinamiento cultural de 1972, posteriormente reafirmados de manera más sistemática por Brian O’Doherty mediante sus tesis sobre la ideología del cubo blanco3. Es evidente que dichos argumentos mantienen en gran medida su validez. Pero pierden parte de su pertinencia cuando se los confronta con una nueva serie de estallidos que tienen lugar bajo nombres como net.art, bio art, geografía visual, arte espacial y database art, a los que se podría añadir un archi-art o arte de arquitectura que, curiosamente, nunca ha sido bautizado de esta forma, así como un arte maquínico que se remontaría al constructivismo de los años veinte; incluso un finance art cuyo nacimiento fue anunciado en La Casa Encendida de Madrid justo el pasado verano.

El carácter heterogéneo de esta lista nos permite apreciar inmediatamente que se puede ampliar a todos los dominios teórico-prácticos. En las formas artísticas que resultan, encontramos siempre el viejo tropismo modernista por el cual el arte se designa en primer lugar a sí mismo, dirigiendo constantemente la atención hacia sus propias operaciones de expresión, representación. metaforización o deconstrucción. Independientemente del “sujeto” del que trate, el arte convierte esta autoreflexividad en su rasgo distintivo o identificativo, incluso en su razón de ser, en un gesto cuya legitimidad filosófica fue establecida por Kant de una vez por todas. Pero en el tipo de trabajo que quiero discutir hay algo más.

Podemos hacer una primera aproximación a él mediante el término que el proyecto Nettime utilizó en sus comienzos para definir sus ambiciones colectivas. Para los artistas, teóricos, mediactivistas y programadores que habitaron esa lista de correo (uno de los vectores importantes del net.art a finales de los noventa) se trataba de proponer una “crítica inmanente” de internet, esto es, de la infraestructura tecnocientífica que en aquel entonces estaba en construcción. La crítica inmanente debía llevarse a cabo en el interior de la propia red, utilizando sus lenguajes y herramientas tecnológicas y focalizando sobre sus objetos característicos, con el objetivo de influenciar o incluso directamente configurar su desarrollo, aunque sin rechazar las posibilidades de distribución fuera de este circuito4. Se bosqueja así un movimiento en dos direcciones, que consiste en ocupar un campo con potencial de agitación social (la telemática) para después irradiar hacia fuera de ese dominio especializado con el propósito explícito de efectuar cambios en la disciplina artística (que se considera demasiado formalista y narcisista como para escapar de su propio círculo encantado), en la disciplina de la crítica cultural (considerada demasiado académica e historicista como para encarar las transformaciones en curso) e incluso en la “disciplina” –si se quiere llamar así– del activismo izquierdista (que se considera demasiado doctrinario e ideológico como para aferrar las oportunidades que brinda el presente).

Se pone en funcionamiento aquí un nuevo tropismo y un nuevo tipo de reflexividad que implica tanto a artistas como a teóricos y activistas en un tránsito hacia más allá de los límites que tradicionalmente se asignan a su actividad, con la intención expresa de enfrentarse al desarrollo de una sociedad compleja. El término “tropismo” expresa el deseo o la necesidad de girarse hacia otra cosa, hacia un campo o disciplina exteriores; mientras que la noción de reflexividad indica ahora un regreso crítico al punto de partida, un intento de transformar la disciplina inicial, acabar con su aislamiento, abrir nuevas posibilidades de expresión, análisis, cooperación y compromiso. Este movimiento adelante y atrás, o más bien esta espiral transformadora, es el principio operativo de lo que llamaré investigaciones extradisciplinares.

El concepto se forjó en el intento de superar esa especie de doble impotencia que afecta a las prácticas significantes contemporáneas, en efecto una doble deriva exenta de las cualidades revolucionarias que buscaban los situacionistas. Pienso en primer lugar en la inflación de discursos interdisciplinares en los circuitos académico y cultural: un sistema combinatorio virtuoso que se limita a alimentar la maquinaria simbólica del capitalismo cognitivo, actuando como una especie de suplemento al movimiento perpetuo financiero (virtuosismo del que el organizador de eventos Hans-Ulrich Obrist se ha convertido en el incontestable especialista mundial). Y en segundo lugar pienso en el estado de indisciplina que surgió como un efecto indeseado de las revueltas antiautoritarias de los sesenta, en el que el sujeto se somete a las solicitudes estéticas del mercado (en el caso de los artistas en la vena neopop, la indisciplina significa repetir y remezclar interminablemente el flujo de imágenes comerciales prefabricadas)5. Aunque no son lo mismo, la interdisciplinariedad y la indisciplina se han convertido en las dos excusas más comunes para la neutralización de la investigación significante. Pero no tenemos por qué aceptar más esta situación, en vista de todos los problemas que debemos afrontar en el mundo actual.

La ambición extradisciplinar consiste en llevar a cabo investigaciones rigurosas en terrenos tan alejados del arte como son las finanzas, la biotecnología, la geografía, el urbanismo, la psiquiatría, el espectro electromagnético, etc., para impulsar en estos terrenos el “libre juego de las facultades” y la experimentación intersubjetiva que caracterizan al arte moderno y contemporáneo, pero también para tratar de identificar, al interior de esos mismos dominios, los usos espectaculares o instrumentales que con tanta frecuencia se hacen de las libertades sorpresivas y subversivas del juego estético, como hace el arquitecto Eyal Weizman de manera ejemplar cuando investiga la apropiación militar israelí y estadounidense de estrategias arquitectónicas cuya concepción original era subversiva, inspirada en particular por Deleuze y Guatarri. Weizman sale de la arquitectura para desafíar a lo militar en su propio terreno, con una muestra de sus mapas de infraestructuras de seguridad en Israel; pero regresa con elementos nuevos para el examen crítico de lo que había sido su disciplina exclusiva6. Es en este complejo movimiento de ida y vuelta, que sin negar la existencia de diferentes disciplinas nunca permite dejarse atrapar por ninguna de ellas, donde debemos buscar un nuevo punto de partida para lo que se llamó crítica institucional.

Historias en el presente

¿Pero qué pasa con el fondo histórico de este término? ¿Nos sirve de algo hoy, sin repetirlo?

Lo que ha quedado establecido, en retrospectiva, como “primera generación” de la crítica institucional incluye figuras como Michael Asher, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke y Marcel Broodthaers. Ellos examinaron el condicionamiento de su propia actividad por los marcos ideológico y económico del museo, con el propósito de escapar de dicho condicionamiento. Tenían una intensa relación con las revueltas antiinstitucionales de los años sesenta y setenta, así como con las potentes críticas filosóficas que las acompañaron7. Quizá la mejor manera de entender por qué limitaron su enfoque al museo y al sistema del arte sea asumir que lo hicieron no para afirmarlos como un límite autoasignado a su práctica ni como fetichización del medio institucional, sino más bien como parte de una práctica materialista lúcidamente consciente de su contexto aunque con intenciones transformadoras que lo excedían. Para poder observar adónde conduce esta historia, empero, tenemos que mirar hacia el escritor más importante sobre este asunto, Benjamin Buchloh, y ver cómo enmarca el surgimiento de la crítica institucional.

En un texto titulado “El arte conceptual de 1962 a 1969″ Buchloh cita dos proposiciones clave de Lawrence Weiner. La primera es A Square Removed from a Rug in Use (Un cuadrado recortado de una alfombra en uso), la segunda, A 36′ x 36′ Removal to the Lathing of Support Wall of Plaster or Wallboard from a Wall (Un recorte de 36 x 36 pulgadas sobre el enlucido o el yeso de la pared), las dos de 1968. Se trata en ambas de tomar la forma más autorreferencial y tautológica posible –el cuadrado, cada uno de cuyos lados repite y reitera los otros– e insertarla en un entorno marcado por los determinismos del mundo social. Como Buchloh escribe, dado que “su respeto por la geometría clásica como elemento formal definitorio les impide romper estructural y morfológicamente con las tradiciones formales, ambas intervenciones se inscriben en las superficies de soporte típicas de la institución y/o del hogar de las que esas tradiciones siempre renegaron… Por un lado, ponen en entredicho la idea generalizada de que la obra de arte debería ubicarse exclusivamente en una localización ‘especializada’ o ‘cualificada’… Por el otro, ninguna de estas dos superficies es independiente de su localización institucional; la inscripción física en cada superficie particular genera inevitablemente interpretaciones contextuales que dependen de las convenciones institucionales…”8.

Las proposiciones de Weiner son claramente una versión de crítica inmanente que opera vis-à-vis las estructuras discursivas y materiales de las instituciones artísticas; pero son descritas por Buchloh como una pura deducción lógica de las premisas minimalistas y conceptuales. Prefiguran con la misma claridad el activismo simbólico apasionado de las obras de “anarquitectura” de Gordon Matta-Clark que, como Splitting (1973) o Window Blow-Out (1976), confrontaban el espacio galerístico con las desigualdades urbanas y la discriminación racial. Desde ese punto de partida, una historia de la crítica artística podría haber conducido hacia las formas contemporáneas de activismo e investigación tecnopolítica, por vía de la movilización artística que tuvo lugar en torno a la epidemia del SIDA a finales de los ochenta. Pero las versiones más extendidas de la historia cultural de los sesenta y setenta nunca adoptaron ese giro. De acuerdo con el subtítulo del famoso texto de Buchloh, el movimiento teleológico del arte tardomoderno en los años setenta llevaba “de la estética de la administración a la crítica de las instituciones”. Y esto significaba mantener una visión estrictamente frankfurtiana del museo como institución ilustrada idealizada, dañada tanto por el Estado burocrático como por el espectáculo mercantil.

Lo que los artistas que estamos analizando ponen en juego, a mi modo de ver, es una tensión irresoluble entre el deseo de convertir la “célula” especializada (así es como Brian O’Doherty llamó al espacio de presentación del arte moderno) en un potencial de conocimiento vivo que pudiera alcanzar el mundo exterior, y la consciencia de que, por contra, este espacio estético especializado es una trampa instituida como un tipo de cercamiento. Esa tensión dio lugar a las incisivas intervenciones de Michael Asher, las denuncias a martillazos de Hans Haacke, los desplazamientos paradójicos de Robert Smithson o el humor melancólico y la fantasía poética de Marcel Broodthaers, cuyo impulso oculto fue su compromiso juvenil con el surrealismo revolucionario. Lo importante es evitar reducir la diversidad y complejidad de este espectro de artistas quienes, por lo demás, nunca constituyeron un movimiento. Pero también es cierto que parte del reduccionismo proviene del enfoque obsesivo sobre el museo, sea en forma de lamento por esta reliquia moribunda de la “esfera pública burguesa”, sea mediante el discurso fetichizador de la site specificity (la intervención sobre la especificidad del lugar). Todas estas trampas parecen haber estado esperando al discurso sobre la crítica institucional, cuando surgió en Estados Unidos entre finales de los ochenta y comienzos de los noventa.

Era el periodo de la llamada “segunda generación” de la crítica institucional (en realidad, la primera en elaborar su trabajo en relación directa con este concepto). Entre los nombres habitualmente citados se encuentran Renée Green, Christian Phillipp Müller, Fred Wilson y Andrea Fraser, artistas que prosiguieron la exploración sistemática de la representación museológica, examinando sus conexiones con el poder económico y sus raíces epistemológicas que se hunden en una ciencia colonial que trata al Otro como objeto a exhibir en una vitrina. Pero a este tipo clásico de crítica añadieron un “giro subjetivo”, inimaginable sin la influencia del feminismo y la historiografía poscolonial, que les permitió tratar la manera en que las jerarquías externas de poder adoptaban la forma de ambivalencias al interior del sujeto, promoviendo una sensibilidad íntima a la coexistencia de múltiples modos y vectores de representación. Se da en este punto una convincente negociación entre el análisis especializado del discurso y una incardinada experimentación con el sensorium humano. Sin embargo, se resolvía en forma de metareflexiones sobre los límites de las prácticas mismas (en la mayoría de los casos, imitando los dispositivos museísticos o mediante performances en vídeo a partir de un guión) escenificadas en el seno de instituciones cada vez más descaradamente empresariales, hasta el punto de que se hizo crecientemente difícil mantener las investigaciones críticas al resguardo de sus propias acusaciones y devastadoras conclusiones.

Esta situación en la que un proceso crítico acaba por tomarse a sí mismo como único objeto condujo a Andrea Fraser a considerar la institución artística como el marco insuperable que todo lo define y que se sostiene mediante la interiorización de la crítica a él dirigido: “Al igual que el arte no puede existir fuera del campo artístico, no podemos nosotras tampoco existir fuera del campo del arte, al menos no como artistas, críticos, curadoras, etcétera. Y lo que hacemos fuera del campo, en la medida en que permanece fuera, no puede tener efecto alguno sobre él. De manera que, si no hay un afuera para nosotras, ello no se debe a que la institución esté herméticamente cerrada o porque exista como un aparato del ‘mundo totalmente administrado’ o porque haya crecido hasta ser omniabarcadora en su tamaño y alcance. Se debe a que la institución está en nuestro interior, y de nosotras mismas no podemos salir”. Fraser titula su texto con una referencia circular característica al ensayo de Buchloh que antes mencioné: “De la crítica de las instituciones a la institución de la crítica”9.

En uno de los artículos que más explícitamente perfilan las ambiciones del proyecto transform, Gerald Raunig ha apuntado hacia todas las equivocaciones sobre la práctica crítica radical que contiene una afirmación como la antedicha10. La mezcla del análisis determinista de Bourdieu sobre la clausura de los campos socioprofesionales con una confusión entre la jaula weberiana y el deseo foucaultiano de “alejarse de uno mismo” se internaliza en un tipo de gubernamentalización del fracaso que impide al sujeto hacer otra cosa que no sea contemplar su propia prisión psíquica, si bien compensado con algunos lujos estéticos. Por desgracia, todo ello añade bien poco a la afirmación paradójicamente lúcida que Broodthaers resumió en una sóla página en 197511. Para él, la única alternativa a una conciencia culpable parece ser la ceguera: ¡vaya solución! Y sin embargo, es la que Fraser elije en su intento de “defender la institución que potencialmente permite la institucionalización de la autocrítica vanguardista: la institución de la crítica”.

Sin ningún tipo de relación antagonista o ni siquiera agonística con el status quo, sin ningún afán de cambiarlo, lo que se acaba por defender consiste en poco más que en una variación masoquista de la autoservicial “teoría institucional del arte” promovida por Danto, Dickie y sus seguidores (una teoría del reconocimiento recíproco entre miembros de un grupo de afines –lo que se llama equívocamente un “mundo”– reunidos por su culto al objeto artístico). Se cierra así el bucle, y lo que en el arte de los años sesenta y setenta había sido una corriente transformadora compleja, inquisitiva y transformadora a gran escala, parece llegar a una vía muerta con determinadas consecuencias institucionales: complacencia, inmovilidad, pérdida de autonomía, capitulación frente a varias formas de instrumentalización…

Cambio de fase

Por lógica que parezca esta vía muerta, se extiende el deseo y la necesidad de llegar más allá. Lo que hemos buscado hacer mediante la colaboración entre Multitudes y transform es comenzar a elaborar algunas de las problemáticas e interrogar a algunos de los protagonistas de lo que pudiera considerarse una tercera fase de la crítica institucional. Pero nos parecía que lo más importante era redefinir los medios y los propósitos de la crítica. Recurrimos para ello a la noción de transversalidad tal como fue elaborada por la escuela francesa de análisis institucional (Tosquelles, Oury y, para nuestro interés, particularmente Guattari12). Este concepto ayuda a teorizar los agenciamientos heterogéneos que conectan actores y recursos del circuito artístico con proyectos y experimentos que no se agotan en el interior de dicho circuito, sino que se extienden hacia otros lugares. Si se definen como arte los proyectos que de ahí resultan, dicha denominación no carece de ambigüedades, ya que se basan en una circulación entre disciplinas que con frecuencia incorpora una verdadera reserva crítica de posiciones marginales o contraculturales –movimientos sociales, asociaciones políticas, okupas o centros sociales, universidades o cátedras autónomas– que no pueden reducirse a una institucionalidad omniabarcante.

Estos proyectos tienden a ser colectivos, incluso cuando tienden a sortear, operando en redes, las dificultades que entraña el colectivismo. Sus inventores, que han crecido en el universo del capitalismo cognitivo, se ven lanzados de forma natural al interior de funciones sociales complejas que aferran en todos sus aspectos técnicos, totalmente conscientes de que la naturaleza secundaria del mundo se ve actualmente modelada por formas organizacionales tecnológicas. En casi todos los casos, es su compromiso político lo que les hace desear proseguir sus precisas investigaciones más allá de los límites de una disciplina artística o académica. Pero sus procesos analíticos son al mismo tiempo expresivos, y para ellos toda máquina compleja está inundada de afecto y subjetividad. Cuando estos aspectos subjetivos y analíticos se entremezclan en los nuevos contextos productivos y políticos del trabajo comunicacional (y no sólo en metareflexiones escenificadas únicamente para el museo) podríamos hablar de una “tercera fase” de la crítica institucional, o mejor aún, de un “cambio de fase” en la esfera pública que antes conocíamos, un cambio que ha transformado en extenso los contextos y modos de la producción cultural e intelectual en el siglo XXI.

El monográfico de Multitudes, que será publicado a su vez en varios idiomas en la revista web transversal, incluye el texto de Eyal Weizman arriba mencionado; un texto de Claire Pentecost sobre los criterios de un bio arte crítico, que reflexiona sobre trabajos de Eduardo Kac, Critical Art Ensemble y Brandon Ballangee; un examen de las “prácticas instituyentes” a cargo de Gerald Raunig, que acerca su mirada a la intervención urbana Park Fiction en Hamburgo; un texto mío que explora el recientemente acuñado género finance art en el trabajo del grupo Derivart, el performer Michael Goldberg y el proyecto Capturing the Moving Mind; un texto de Suely Rolnik que observa las relaciones transgeneracionales entre el abandono del espacio museístico por parte de Lygia Clark y el movimiento fluido entre el adentro y el afuera de las instituciones que hoy practican artistas de orientación política en Brasil; y, finalmente, dos ensayos filosóficos, a cargo de Stefan Nowotny y Alice Pechriggl, que exploran “el doble significado de la destitución” en el ámbito político y los “poderes (de)formativos del afecto” en el imaginario colectivo. El propósito de todo ello no es proclamar la existencia de un movimiento (lo que comúnmente hacen los críticos de arte profesionales), sino, en su lugar, esbozar un campo de problemas y llamar la atención sobre un tipo de práctica exploratoria que, sin ser nueva, surge con cada vez más urgencia. Antes que ofrecer una receta curatorial, lo que queremos es arrojar nueva luz sobre los viejos problemas de clausura de las disciplinas especializadas, sobre la parálisis intelectual y afectiva y la alienación de cualquier capacidad de establecer procesos democráticos de toma de decisiones que dicha clausura provoca, especialmente en una sociedad tecnológica altamente compleja. Las formas de expresión, intervención pública y reflexividad crítica que se han desarrollado en respuesta a tales condiciones se pueden caracterizar como extradisciplinares, pero sin fetichizar la palabra a expensas del horizonte al que busca apuntar.

Al tomar en consideración este trabajo, y en particular los artículos que tratan asuntos tecnopolíticos, probablemente habrá quien se pregunte si no hubiera sido interesante evocar el nombre de Bruno Latour. Su ambición –como se hizo bien claro hace dos años en la forma de una exposición y un libro de unas 1.072 páginas, cuasi enciclopédicos– es la de “hacer las cosas públicas”, o para ser más precisos, elucidar los encuentros específicos entre objetos técnicos complejos y procesos concretos de toma de decisiones (sean de jure o de facto políticos). Para ello, afirma, se debe proceder mediante “pruebas” establecidas de la manera más rigurosa posible, pero al mismo tiempo de forma necesariamente “desordenada”, como son las propias cosas del mundo13.

Tengo para mí que hay algo definitivamente interesante en la máquina probadora de Latour (aun cuando tiende, inconfundiblemente, al productivismo académico de la “interdisciplinariedad”). La preocupación por cómo las cosas se modelan en el presente y el deseo de interferir constructivamente en los procesos y decisiones que las modelan caracterizan a quienes ya no sueñan con un afuera absoluto ni con el año cero de una revolución total. Sin embargo, basta tomar en consideración a los artistas invitados a nuestro número de Multitudes para observar las diferencias con Latour. Por mucho que uno lo intente, el oleoducto Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan de 1.750 kilómetros no puede reducirse a una “prueba” de nada, si bien Ursula Biemann ha logrado comprimirlo hasta constituir una de las diez secciones de sus Archivos del Mar Negro14. Atravesando Azerbayán, Georgia y Turquía antes de desembocar en el Mediterráneo, el oleoducto constituye el objeto de decisiones políticas aun cuando sobrepasa tanto la razón como la imaginación, implicando al planeta entero en la incertidumbre política y ecológica del presente.

De forma similar, los corredores paneuropeos de transporte y comunicación que atraviesan la antigua Yugoslavia, Grecia y Turquía, filmados por quienes participaban en el grupo Timescape iniciado por Angela Melitopoulos, son el resultado de uno de los procesos de planeamiento infraestructural más complejos de nuestra época, llevado a cabo a nivel transnacional y transcontinental. Pero estos proyectos económicos, diseñados con precisión, son al mismo tiempo inextricables de la memoria de sus precedentes históricos, y conducen inmediatamente a una multiplicidad de usos hoy en día, entre los que se cuenta también la autoorganización de protestas masivas que resisten conscientemente a la pretensión de manipular la vida cotidiana mediante procesos de planeamiento. Los seres humanos no tienen por qué desear ser la “prueba” viviente de una tesis económica ejecutada de arriba abajo con instrumentos sofisticados, incluso instrumentos mediáticos para distortionar sus proprias imágenes y afectos. La enseña insistentemente portada por una activista anónima, blandida frente a las cámaras de televisión durante las manifestaciones contra la cumbre de la Unión Europea en Tesalónica en 2003, lo dice todo: CUALQUIER SEMEJANZA CON PERSONAS O ACONTECIMIENTOS REALES ES ININTENCIONADA15.

La historia del arte ha emergido en el presente, y la crítica de las condiciones de representación se ha desbordado hacia las calles. Pero en el mismo movimiento las calles han tomado su lugar en nuestras críticas. En los ensayos filosóficos que hemos incluido en nuestro proyecto de publicación, institución y constitución siempre riman con destitución. El enfoque específico sobre las prácticas artísticas extradisciplinares no significa que hayamos olvidado la política radical, ni mucho menos. Hoy más que nunca, toda investigación constructiva tiene que enseñar una nueva resistencia.

EU Summit in Thessalonica (Angela Melitopoulos and Timescapes, Corridor X)

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Gracias a Gerald Raunig y Stefan Nowotny por su colaboración en este texto y en el proyecto en general.

Traducción de Marcelo Expósito, revisada por Brian Holmes y Joaquín Barriendos

Notas

1 “La personalidad flexible. Hacia una nueva crítica cultural” se publicó en castellano en Brumaria 7. Arte, máquinas, trabajo inmaterial, diciembre de 2006, así como en transversal: máquinas y subjetivación, noviembre de 2006, en publicación multilingüe (http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/holmes/es); “El póquer mentiroso. Representaciones de la política / Políticas de la representación” se publicó en castellano en Brumaria 2, primavera de 2003, y en inglés y alemán en Springerin: Picture Politics, enero de 2003 (http:// www.springerin.at/en). [El archivo completo de textos de Brian Holmes en varios idiomas se encuentra en el sitio web Université Tangente (http://www.u-tangente.org).]
2 Multitudes, nº 28, primavera de 2007 (http://multitudes.samizdat.net); transversal, abril de 2007 (http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal); la nota informativa sobre el contenido de la colaboración se ha publicado en tranform (http://transform.eipcp.net/correspondence/11731061419).
3 Robert Smithson, “Cultural Confinement” (1972), en Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996; Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (expanded edition), University of California Press, Berkeley, 1976/1986.
4Véase la introducción a la antología ReadMe!, Autonomedia, Nueva York, 1999. Uno de los mejores ejemplos de crítica inmanente es el proyecto Name Space de Paul Garrin (págs. 224-229), que buscaba reelaborar el DNS (domain name system) que constituye a la web como un espacio navegable.
5 Véase Brian Holmes, “L’extradisciplinaire”, en Laurence Bossé y Hans Ulrich Obrist (eds. y curadores), Traversées, catálogo del Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2001.
6 Eyal Weizman, “Walking through Walls: Soldiers as Architects in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”, en Radical Philosophy, nº 136, marzo-abril de 2006. Una nueva versión del artículo, revisada tras la invasión israelí de Líbano en el verano de 2007, forma parte de la mencionada publicación conjunta Multitudes/transversal (véase supra nota 2).
7 Véase Stefan Nowotny, “Anticanonización. El saber diferencial de la crítica institucional”, publicación multilingüe en transversal: Do you remember institutional critique?, enero de 2006 (http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0106/nowotny/es).
8 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “El arte conceptual de 1962 a 1969: de la estética de la administración a la crítica de las instituciones”, traducción de Carolina del Olmo y César Rendueles, Formalismo e historicidad. Modelos y métodos en el arte del siglo XX, Akal, Madrid, 2004, pág. 192.
9 Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique”, en John C. Welchman (ed.), Institutional Critique and After, JRP/Ringier, Zúrich, 2006.
10 Gerald Raunig, “Prácticas instituyentes. Huir, instituir, transformar”, publicación multilingüe en transversal: Do you remember institutional critique?, enero de 2006 (http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0106/raunig/es).
11 Marcel Broodthaers, “To be bien pensant… or not to be. To be blind” (1975), en October 42: Marcel Broodthaers. Writings, Interviews, Photographs, otoño de 1987.
12 Félix Guattari, Psychanalyse et transversalité: essais d’analyse institutionnelle (1972), La Découverte, París, 2003 [para una recensión en castellano, véase el capítulo “El análisis institucional”, en el prólogo de Marta Malo de Molina a su edición de textos Nociones comunes. Experiencias y ensayos entre investigación y militancia, Traficantes de Sueños, Madrid, 2004, accesible en ; Félix Guattari et al., La intervención institucional, Folios, México, 1981; Juan C. Ortigosa (ed.), El análisis institucional. Por un cambio de las instituciones, Abierto Ediciones, Madrid, 1977, con textos de Guattari entre otros].
13 Bruno Latour y Peter Weibel (eds.), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2005.
14 La vídeoinstalación Black See Files de Ursula Biemann, realizada en el contexto del proyecto Transcultural Geographies, ha sido expuesta con el resto de los trabajos de este proyecto en el KunstWerke (WK) de Berlín en 2005-2006, y posteriormente en la Fundació Tàpies de Barcelona en 2007. Véase el catálogo B Zone: Becoming Europe and Beyond, Anselm Frank (ed. y curador), KW/Actar, Berlín, 2005, así como el sitio web de Biemann, .
15 “Any similarity to actual persons or events is unintentional”. La vídeoinstalación Corridor X de Angela Melitopoulos, así como el trabajo de otros miembros de Timescapes, ha sido expuesto y publicado en B Zone, citado supra, nota anterior. Véase también el sitio web de Angela Melitopoulos, .

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brian holmes
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Jose Llano
Arquitecto, Diseñador de Delitos & Coreografo del Deseo
editor aparienciapublica
www.aparienciapublica.org
http://aparienciapublica.blogspot.com/

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