1Multitudes : Is modernity (y)our aftermath? For D12, modernity haunts our common planetary horizon like a zombie, caught between death and life. How do you feel about modernity’s fate with respect to its universalism qua totalitarism / antitotalitarism refrain: nostalgic, compromised, critical, terrified or still yearning for postmodernity? In light of your participation / non-participation in D12, how do you wake up from post / modernity’s night of the living dead?
2Claude Closky : Ism od ern it y (y) o ur aft erm ath! F ord 1 2, m od ern it yh a unts o urc omm onpl an et ar yh or iz onl ik e az omb ie, c a ughtb etw e end e ath andl if e. H owd oy o uf e el ab o utm od ern it y’sf at ew ithr esp ectt o its un iv ers al ismq u at ot al it ar ism/ant it ot al it ar ismr efr a in: n ost alg ic, c ompr om is ed, cr it ic al, t err if i ed orst ill ye arn ingf orp ostm od ern it y! Inl ight of yo urp art ic ip at i on/n on-p art ic ip at i on ind 1 2, h owd oy o uw ak e upfr omp ost/m od ern it y’sn ight ofth el iv ingd e ad!
3Elke Krystufek : Is modernity (y)our aftermath? Feminism is our polymath. For D12, modernity haunts our common planetary horizon like a zombie, caught between death and life. How do you feel about modernity’s fate with respect to its universalism qua totalitarism / antitotalitarism refrain : nostalgic, compromised, critical, terrified or still yearning for postmodernity? Yearning for postpatriarchy with Xabier Arakistain hopefully curating D13. In light of your participation / non-participation in D12, how do you wake up from post / modernity’s night of the living dead? Modernity and postmodernity are not relevant for me as a female artist because they do not reflect female living conditions to a necessary extent.
4Ricardo Basbaum : I am happy that in the 21st century we finally live in the present, for the present: it is a relief not to live with the revolution as our unique future. I am happy to work in the present, for the present. The revolutions have been « micro », for the last decades, and it is clear to me that art should intervene in that « microspace »: microrevolutions which implode (instead of exploding) and change our immediate surrounding (art & life). Remember that the present in / of art (I mean, of an artwork, an art gesture) can be measured in years, decades, centuries: art constitutes the present.
5Anita di Bianco : Finally we arrived in Cambridge in the afternoon, were given tea and then dined with the president of the society and some of his friends. It was very pleasant and after dinner we went to the lecture room. It was a varied audience, men and women. Gertrude Stein was soon at her ease, the lecture went off very well, the men afterwards asked a great many questions and were very enthusiastic. The women said nothing. Gertrude Stein wondered whether they were supposed not to or just did not. The day after we went to Oxford. There we lunched with young Acton and then went in to the lecture. Gertrude Stein was feeling more comfortable as a lecturer and this time she had a wonderful time. As she remarked afterwards, I felt just like a prima donna. The lecture room was very full, many standing in the back, and the discussion, after the lecture, lasted over an hour and no one left. It was very exciting. They asked all sorts of questions, they wanted to know most often why Gertrude Stein thought she was right in doing the kind of writing she did. She answered that it was not a question of what any one thought but after all she had been doing as she did for about twenty years and now they wanted to hear her lecture. This did not mean of course that they were coming to think that her way was a possible way, it proved nothing, but on the other hand it did possible indicate something.
6From « After the War — 1919-1932 » in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, 1933.
7Liam Gillick : It’s the day before closure of the experimental factory…
8Jimmie Durham : Dear Readers,
9May I begin by asking your forgiveness; first because I will write quite autobiographically which can be boring and can also be a case of special pleading. I do offer a case of special pleading however. My second reason for asking your forgiveness is that I am not well-educated nor well-informed (although in some instances this might serve me well simply because I might not be so mis-informed as some).
10What I know of modernism or modernity mostly comes through poetry. In English language it seems that T.S. Eliot is the father of modernism, along with his uncle or godfather, Ezra Pound. But the poetry of T.S. Eliot is stupidly bad schlock. It is also crazily moralistic with no real morals and anti-Semitic. I cannot think why it was ever thought to represent a move towards a better future. It seems to me only the dirty past with more idiotic rhymes and rhyme schemes. The poetry of Ezra Pound ought to embarrass anyone from the US: he was a typically loud-mouthed arrogant crazy elitist in the name of fascistic democracy.
11How to wake up from post-modernism’s night of the living dead? For a long long time everyone said no more novels, no more narrative stories but in the past twenty years or so writers from the third world have engaged all of us with marvelous novels… I do not know much about modernism in art but post-modernism often feels like the night of the living dead in fact. Just like writers, artists can change the situation simply by taking themselves more seriously as artists (by which I do not mean making « serious » art). It should be in the production of art that the artist is the first intellectual source of meaning.
12Martha Rosler : When the lights of civilization threaten to gutter out, I prefer often to take refuge in science fiction, the vin ordinaire of speculators in futures. One ponders people imagining the same mistakes only in other space / time continua, with other presuppositions about the flickering interplay between organismic heritage, upbringing and context. The horizonless eternal present that is the nightmare of skeptics of modernity is temporarily suspended in the laws of the imagined worlds and times. In my participation in Documenta, I have played dodge ball with photography, using it as a trenching tool to excavate the truth that everyone already knows but which is perpetually swept under the rug along with the rest of the dust and dirt.
13Meanwhile, the future may still be there, or not. Other factors, not susceptible to our control, are likely to play a role.
14Anita Fricek : In the light of my participation / non-participation in D12, this is how I wake up from the totalitarism / antitotalitarism of post / modernity’s night of the living dead: by means of the radical girlie perspective.The radical girlie perspective is embodied in one of my works, in which the rigidity and freedom of modernism — both in its aesthetics and institutions- are explored.
15The source of the painting is a photo found in an internet archive showing two girls in the bathroom of a kindergarten, dated 1978. The painting analyses and interprets the original image and sets the elements in full motion by means of the composition. The image of a bathroom was chosen because it is one of the sites that stages the most dramatic encounter between bodily functions / openings and the policies and rituals, thus ideologies of pedagogic institutions — like eating, washing, sleeping, defecating — the sites of dormitories, dining halls, shower rooms. It is where the institution inscribes itself most effectively and potentially violently into bodies, and can thus be a trigger place for the most transformative acts.
16The painting interlocks two pictorial perspectives: the « Egyptian perspective » — rectangular geometric elements lying flat on the painting’s surface, and describing the architectural features of the institution as well as their abstracting function (in a restrictive, utopian or simply descriptive / diagrammatic sense). And secondly the central perspective introduced by the circular shapes of the bathroom mirrors. It is the girls’ vision that uses the circular shapes as tools in order to spin into their own self defined reality. The central perspective is therefore sucked into the insistence of the girls’ spiraling vision that provides support within the fragmentation of the mirrors as well as within the collapsing perspective: the bathroom floor, it seems to recede. The seriality of the mirrors’ ellipses rushing into a single focal point set off echoes of circles that balance the mirrors’ fragmentary nature and continue to interweave the composition throughout. Most compelling, because of the discovery the taller girl makes on the far left: her head is reflected without the rest of her body; it bounces off the ceiling on a rope. Within the context of the pedagogic institution she is Manet’s Olympia, decapitated by Mondrian. It is the pumping force of the circles’ arabesques that both reveals and revitalises the workings of the scenario, just like an image medicine or a neutralising device, which also informs the stance of the girls’ postures. The circular machine is the girls’ awareness of conditioning social mechanisms as well as their hyper-concentration, which generates a lightness and playfulness suitable to them. The central perspective cutting into illusionary space, setting off waves of circles, is the necessary radical counterbalance to the supposed neutrality and functionality of anti-illusionist space. Via the Renaissance’s scientific rationality to the absolutist eye of the Baroque, the central perspective is pirated here by a girlie vision that enacts its concentrated beam in order to intersect with modernity’s tales of totalitarianism / antitotalitarianism. Depicted by the rectangular geometric elements of the institution’s architecture, those elements, characterised by a flat figure / ground relationship, refrain from the illusion of deep space. They refer back to themselves, the surface and frame of their support. Deceivingly objective or plain functional those minimalist bars speak about abstracting mechanisms and fragmenting machineries, about utopias and anti-utopias, often with totalitarian overtones. The girls’ answer is their singularised vision which overcomes self-reflexivity by producing desire and intention to such an extent that the focused beam collapses onto itself to set off imprints of circles that open up into waves and arabesques, reaching and touching throughout space. The girlie vision incorporates a baroque movement that acknowledges modernity’s institutions as her given ground, detects its hang ups, and then shoots off her concentrated beam for the collapse to happen in order to intertwine with the components present. The radical girlie perspective is a spin-out-machine that embraces conditions given in order to crystallise with all its elements. The girlie spin-out-machine is a mechanism to face, neutralise and finally re-code memory. It is the seeing-machine of Olympia’s powerful gaze, rebooting the system of her conditions. There is also flowery motives, bubbly patterns and a phallic shape — a rococo tangent.
17If institutions inscribe themselves into bodies via the mechanisms of their organisational structures, then utilizing the body as an instrument to reflect upon those imprints is useful. Painting can be used to project found images back onto a white screen via the artist’s body. Within this process elements are selected, deleted, reassembled, transformed. The artist searches and finds images that are screenshots of collective memory, scans them in the light of their potentials and deadlocks, throws them into the spin-out-machine and projects them back, until all elements are set in motion and activate each other. In this way the original images undergo a revitalisation program. The markings on the screen indicate the diagram of this performance and are the traces of a body’s knowledge of rhythm and balance.
