Thursday, January 26, 2017

EP 83 RADIO 11.8.16

In the wake of an election that solidified our country’s many disconnects, we invited our authors to share their responses to the hatred triggered by Trump.
The intention of this project is two-part: (1) to create a time capsule for our gut reactions to this political season, a collection we can return to when we feel complacency or forgetfulness settling; (2) to make use of the unique capacities and freedoms of the essay to explore the dichotomies of bipartisanship, and to integrate personal responses with societal facts.
with Susanne Paola Antonetta, Diana Arterian, Dan Beachy-Quick, Steve BensonLaynie BrowneJulie CarrNicole CooleyMatthew CoopermanJennifer Kwon DobbsThom DonovanLeora FridmanAnna Gurton-Wachter, Joseph Harrington, H.L. Hix, Aby Kaupang CoopermanJH PhrydasBt ShawJessica Smith, Sasha Steensen, Sophia TerazawaTony Trigilio, and Nicole Walker

Friday, January 20, 2017

"Post-recognition" and art questionnaire

—How have and do artists position themselves beyond recognition?
—Does the artist have a privileged role to play in seeking a society beyond the recognition of the State?
—In what practical ways do artists function beyond the State: e.g., through what daily economic, social, and extra/legislative practices and modalities?
—How do the formal qualities and content of art works reflect the problem of post/recognition?
—Is there an aesthetics of “direct action” and extra-legal political actions that intersects with the problems and questions of aesthetic discourse?
—Inasmuch as State recognition relies on the concomitant recognition of the marketplace (capital) and the university, how might artists exist without currently dominant markets and liberal institutions?
—Should art have a different social function than it currently maintains and/or aspires to? 
—Can strategies that we associate with non-Statist political blocs and subjectivities—e.g., mutual aide, group self-determination and governance, practices of everyday resistance and collective insurgency—be pursued through an art practice and/or aesthetic discourse?
—To what extent is art history/contemporary aesthetic discourse categorically embroiled with recognition politics, thus beholden to political formations and subjective enunciations determined by the politics of the Neo/liberal State?

Monday, January 02, 2017

from The Camp (or Camp Amerika)


The camp extends everywhere
comprising the exceptional jouissance

of suffering’s hyper-visibility, and general
dishonorment, and natal alienation

and gratuitous violence, but also en-
compassing what we do everyday

without interruption
                                    while our wills

to this public sentiment called progress
and participation and democracy

survive the president being cooler than
any who preceded him, this coolness 

being precisely what should have worried us
while I.C.E. was being built-up.

The camp is a function of constitutionality
and not giving a fuck really except when

it concerns us to do so.
                                    It is otherwise un-

concerned with freedom, except the freedom
to not be fucked with by others and to critique

identity selectively (Locke 101).
It views our freedom in other words negatively,

freedom being the denial of others' capacity to
fuck with us but it also views our freedom

positively,
                 retaining notions such as universal

human rights and the public sphere when
we know quite well (or we only pretend not to)

whose interests these conceptions serve and
who gets excluded by the practice of law.

Like the Black Codes did not endure, or the
flesh, or we did not know exactly where the

detainees were interned,
                                      though they transmit no

sound and how can you listen anyway to some-
thing no one wants to hear because it would take

more than ears to hear it,
                                        by which I mean, one

would have to act in the world as though they
had registered social death as fundamental, as

though they had ears with which to see the musique
concrete of forced feeding.

As if one’s conscience itself were on mute—that’s
what it feels like to live in the camp which is

everywhere and yet no place in particular,
sensing only our differential places within it,

distinguished by the whiteness of mobility, and

wealth, and history—by the capacity of art, of poesy.