Please RSVP: Questions on Collaborative Aesthetics, Trans-Subjectivity, and the Politics of Love

By April Durham

It’s no secret that working with others, rather than alone, on a creative project can often yield the most unexpected results, a new and surprising sum greater than the whole of its parts. Please RSVP presents a bold new theory of just how powerful collaboration can be in the making of art. April Durham argues that collaborative activity has the potential to broaden and expand an individual participant’s static identity through what she calls “trans-subjectivity.” She offers a fine-grained analysis of the ways in which personal subjectivity becomes porous and malleable during the process of shared creative labor. Durham’s concept of the trans-subjective offers a new way to come to terms with the networks, either digital or otherwise, that have developed over the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, providing a bold new frame for topics like the experience of time, community, language, and ethics. This is a crucial and eye-opening book for contemporary artists and art historians alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781512603699

Book preview

INTERFACES: STUDIES IN VISUAL CULTURE

Editors Mark J. Williams, Dartmouth College, and Adrian W. B. Randolph, Northwestern University

This series, sponsored by Dartmouth College Press, develops and promotes the study of visual culture from a variety of critical and methodological perspectives. Its impetus derives from the increasing importance of visual signs in everyday life, and from the rapid expansion of what are termed new media. The broad cultural and social dynamics attendant to these developments present new challenges and opportunities across and within the disciplines. These have resulted in a trans-disciplinary fascination with all things visual, from high to low, and from esoteric to popular. This series brings together approaches to visual culture—broadly conceived—that assess these dynamics critically and that break new ground in understanding their effects and implications.

For a complete list of books that are available in the series, visit www.upne.com

April Durham, Please RSVP: Questions on Collaborative Aesthetics, Trans-Subjectivity, and the Politics of Love

Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman, Lookout America!: The Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold War

Nathaniel Stern, Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics

Christina Braun, Thomas Hirschhorn: A New Political Understanding of Art?

Daniel Harkett and Katie Hornstein, eds., Horace Vernet and the Thresholds of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture

Meredith Hoy, From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics

James Housefield, Playing with Earth and Sky: Astronomy, Geography, and the Art of Marcel Duchamp

William Kaizen, Against Immediacy: Video Art and Media Populism

Angela Rosenthal, ed., with David Bindman and Adrian W. B. Randolph, No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity

Robin Veder, The Living Line: Modern Art and the Economy of Energy

Tanya Sheehan, ed., Photography, History, Difference

Ory Bartal, Postmodern Advertising in Japan: Seduction, Visual Culture, and the Tokyo Art Directors Club

APRIL DURHAM

PLEASE RSVP

QUESTIONS ON COLLABORATIVE AESTHETICS, TRANS-SUBJECTIVITY, AND THE POLITICS OF LOVE

Dartmouth College Press

Hanover, New Hampshire

Dartmouth College Press

An imprint of University Press of New England

www.upne.com

© 2019 Trustees of Dartmouth College

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill

Typeset in Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, Dartmouth College Press, 6025 Baker-Berry Library, Hanover, NH 03755; or email [e-mail]

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5126-0345-3

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-5126-0368-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5126-0369-9

5   4   3   2   1

Cover art developed by April Durham, featuring installation views from Terminus Nodus, Departures from the Virtual Bridge Multipoint (Pam Strugar, April Durham, Linda Parnell), 2010; detail of Em IV oil on canvas, Bryan Gorrie, 1997; floor plan adapted from Aachen Cathedral, April Durham for Hierophanic Peepshow Multipoint, 2007; chaos theory model diagram developed using protocols in The Chaos Hypertext Book, online resource; iChing diagram, Pam Strugar, 2011; handprints on wall, Pam Strugar and April Durham, Long Beach, CA, 2011.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION   Collaboration and Trans-Subjectivity (or) Attraction and Repulsion at the Same Time

ONE   Please RSVP

TWO   Time Out of Sorts

THREE   Digital Bodies, Distributed Selves

FOUR   Games of Sorrow and Invention

FIVE   A-Productivity: Labor, Love, and Rejuvenation

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I read a Master’s thesis recently where the author thanked each person for your time being next to me when I needed you. He also said that he wanted to but couldn’t mention all the people who influenced him in a positive way and made [him] feel happy. This book about collaboration is a reflection on many, many years of working in situations where those right next to me sometimes made me feel happy and sometimes did not (which I am quite certain can also be said of me for them). Still, like Alice Oswald in Memorial, her poem eulogizing the dead of the Illiad, I feel compelled to provide a taxonomy of all who participated (fell, thrived, fled, wandered) in one way or another in the development of this project and these ideas. I might provide of some a detail or two, and of others only a name. Still lest the style of collaboration I formulate herein fall short of the essential aspect to balance the individual and the group needs and desires, I wish to state the following:

The first to see was James Tobias, who offered direct and serious critique while encouraging imagination. Generous with time and ideas, you insisted upon the rigor of creative expression and sticking to the formidable task of husbanding the imagination, to make a path that others might also tred. You stood by Alice and watched the trick pony I tried to ride run faster, until you eventually taught me to farm in rows without losing my ability to fly.

Then Marguerite Waller, like a wind-murmur began a current of engagement and belief that allowed one note, much neglected, of confidence in the ability to change the course of the wind. Wishing and searching together, she showed me many ways to join with multitudes of others and to see anew how awkward expressions of justice really might, like a wind-murmur, become one long note, growing in intensity and reaching the ear of the collective.

Sabine Doran, a perfect friend, always the advance guard for dedication and concentration, moving out and out with the princes in tow, nudged the thinking and the practice in the kindest and firmest way possible. Lovely scrambled eggs at Easter and building Lego ships without the proper plans, granted access to a different, soothing reality to ease the pain of transition.

Like a good axe in good hands, Jeff Sacks made the deep cuts into bafflement and yet retained the wonder.

After the fact, Theda Shapiro, sharp eyes and hard breath-joined with the encyclopedic knowledge of the West and its artifacts to remind me there is always a knife to hone, a building to excavate, a site to question.

And Pam Strugar, in the act of turning words around the lathe of her curious mind, felt our way through the darkness of difference and rendered an unusual knowledge that expected all of life to be a study in aesthetics, a clanging in the soul as it burst into the open, not so long after stars align and cushions turn a curious version of faux snakeskin green.

Lest one forget that her territories must remain intact, Linda Parnell floated in a bath of colored water far above the clouds. Her fears and hopes exemplary sites of inquiry, like a blow upon the ear that reverberates for the ages. Dancing in the grid of moonbeams, she flits away post-cryptic utterance, bewildered.

Small and dark and lean and lovely, Dessislava Dimova came striding into the alley in Nantes and gave a young girl’s perspective on collectivity. Free education and other opportunities did not make up for sharing a bedroom because the state said she must. Caravans and Baba Yaga, trips to Paris and the gym, my sister-friend may we always be a little restless.

Michelle Naismith, foxy and deep, stripes on Skype, the slow, strong appeal

Douglas Park, poetics spinning, the repetition inspires while it renders me insensible

Christine Laquet

Merryn Singer

Nico Dockx

Helena Sidropoulous

Sandy Quedrus

Clementine Deliss launched a thousand mercenary ships conveying criminal information.

Shared images of the mind and heart, Olive Martin was tireless until she grew weary.

In her studio on Figueroa, before the changes and in advance of Peru, Christie Frields took even the smallest cup of tea seriously and pushed me with her perpetually positive perspective.

Long-time sister-friend Juliet Conlon shared her family and her generous embodiment in a way that could speak in tongues. And then a storm came spinning by.

Sharon Suhovy, mad and miraculous

Mimi Long, orderly and thoughtful

Heidi Brevick-Zender, fluent and beautiful

Thomas Scanlon, classical with tea

Tanya Rawal, bending backwards over mountains of summer squash and mango pickles to demonstrate her relentless mind-body acrobatics as I sip a chai tea her mother made on her last visit and that we kept hidden for just this moment, when the last of the jasmine has withered on the tiny deck overlooking the condo next door.

Wobbling wagon-load of ideas and books, images and associations Damien Airault carries on in 50 square meters, because it’s worth it.

Periscoping mothers as if it was June and a birthday party was being hammered by the clanging of a clock, Kate Alexandrite made playtime a legend and was a miracle to boot.

About the same time, Bryan Gorrie, the lucky rabbit, knowing he was wanted by wolves kept stepping through the doors of the unknown, green eyes shining, brown hair curling around my heart.

INTRODUCTION   COLLABORATION AND TRANS-SUBJECTIVITY (OR) ATTRACTION AND REPULSION AT THE SAME TIME

Aesthetics, Relationality, Love

For nearly fifteen years, I participated in and organized a collaborative artists group called Multipoint. It developed out of my experience during an art residency at the École des Beaux Arts de Nantes in France, where I and the nine other people involved decided to see what might come of a self-managed artists’ working group after the curator who had invited us resigned. This took place at the turn of the twenty-first century, when it was increasingly stylish for European artists to revisit the collectives of the 1960s in an attempt to renew politics that might provide an antidote to the problems of global capitalism. As the one American involved, I had a different relationship to collectivity than the Western European children of the May 1968 uprisings or the Eastern European children of late Soviet communism: at the time, I retained an adolescent fascination with the Bolsheviks, and while I do not personally know a national history characterized by shared labor, I did have as a backdrop to my youth the horror-romance stories my grandmother told of my grandfather’s involvement in the U.S. labor movement of the 1920s, when he may have worked with Eugene Debs and during which he might have had his hand cut off and subsequently replaced with a hook.

While uncanny, disturbing, and perhaps failed (on some levels), the two-year experience working with the group in Nantes left me with the sense that specific types of collaboration could give rise to heretofore unimagined forms of provisional, situated community. Despite the concomitant anxiety and instability (or perhaps because of it), I believed that collaborative creative practice might allow contingent, egalitarian, and supportive groups of creative participants to leave aside the well-known paths of resistance that directly oppose power, and forge different ecologies of relation that are poetic, flexible, and recuperative. I felt that collaboration could not be taken on without careful, rigorous, devoted investigation, as the flexible contingency of what developed from my experience, and what I argue for in the following pages, has to be crafted by the participants if it is to slip aside from hegemony and escape the trap of repeating the power relations it resists. Recuperation had to mean something beyond (while remaining within) normal flows of productivity that already have captured affect along with material, embodied labor. Thinking-being could not be producing-being—but I’ve never been interested in antiproductivity because I like making things and doing things. I could also not care less about the nonproductive, which sounds like a particular form of laziness that gets worked out as another form of productive resistance defined by what it does not do relative to industrial measures. Could what we were doing be a-productive: a sort of into/to/toward that implies something is afoot without knowing where that something might end or what it might create?

For the next decade or so I proposed this problem to artists I knew from art school, others I met at openings and workshops, and people I did not know but who came recommended by those close to me. I thought an egalitarian form of governance could be unpacked in various ways, from diverse perspectives, such that it could afford participants new forms of agency in relation to one another and the space, institutions, and given context forming the immediate environment in which they worked. Although we made a lot of really great art over the fifteen years the group existed, the individual professional and familial bonds did not always bear up under the pressure of shifting power relations, unclear labor roles, varying desires for recognition and responsibility, slim supporting resources, and difficulty in communicating both the banal needs for tools or money and the more complicated needs for the emotional space to be heard or try something new or express dissent. Still, as illogical—even insane—as it might be, I retain belief in the actual (not just abstract) power of creative people to think beside and through the crisis of being misunderstood, and forge community without the express need for unity or even prolonged maintenance.

In Nantes, some colleagues became friends and some irritants; I am sure the same could be said of me. In Los Angeles, some of my friends became enemies, while others grew weary of the project and drifted away. The relationships that arose in the exchanges from 2001 to 2016 were intimate in a way that was fraught with perverse desire—for a territory never held, for a place always offered, for a voice arising beyond the strangulation of fear. They were also gritty with the need to maintain a level of engagement that exhausted even as it inspired. One of the most committed member artists, Pam Strugar, put it plainly at a talk we gave at Cal Poly Pomona in 2010: There’s a reason those old painters worked alone in their studios! Collaboration is HARD.¹ Yet the very difficulty that pushes the individual unimaginably beyond her comfort zone, into the indeterminate, disordered contingency of the group, gives rise to questions that are key when considering how to fabricate community beyond the power relations and hegemonic discussions around which discourse about equality, freedom, and justice revolves. Based on the movement engendered by sensation (or affect) and the transgression of predetermined limits of subjectivity, the type of collaborative practice of concern for this study engages the logics of chaos without necessarily requiring reconciliation to those of cosmos. That is to say, the situated ecologies of community discussed here reserve individual subjectivity in all its complexity, even while they consider and question collective ways of generating and transforming individual being, especially the being arising from a temporary, situated network, and wonder how subjectivity transformed by distribution across that network engenders a form of love that redefines the terms of political engagement. Of particular interest is the way in which the edges of the individual self remain active, just as they fail to cohere entirely when the interaction of group or network or community grows more intense: in this unseemly gap, the singular subject begins a movement across individual bodies and identities in an extraordinary process of transformation that this study calls trans-subjectivity.

As a theory of the subject, trans-subjectivity does not supplant other work on the topic, but rather cooperates alongside all the ways in which the subject arises, takes form, is performed, changes, and exercises varying degrees of nurturance of itself in relation to others (i.e., agency). Trans-subjectivity appears as a frequently unacknowledged force within the context of intense interactions, and leverages the resulting disintegration of discrete boundaries between individuals to generate tangled-up, impalpable currents of subjectivity that cooperate with but exceed the limits of discrete identities and individual bodies. Breakdown of the unique subject under the tyranny of a Stalinist or Maoist regime eradicates traits that distinguish one from the other in an effort to enforce general categories of manageable camaraderie. Other types of collective engagement that leverage individual creativity as a tool for contemporary industrial productivity are faulty in the way they force emotional enthusiasm for exploitation thinly cloaked as play (e.g., team building, collaborative problem solving at work, affective labor). Coercive and brutal, collaboration that manages the development of subjectivity so it can be appropriated for industrial labor is surpassed in violence only by the insidious and outright capture of subjectivity necessitated by information-age capitalism, where programmatic choice is fed back to users as individuality and liberation.

Of interest here is a knotty, messy process of creative collaboration that hesitates before the tangle of relations that form art practices committed to the processes of inquiry and the interruptions of accident, despite a tendency to hold to hierarchies and telos taught in school and internalized as natural or right. The mangle of practice described in the production of knowledge in the sciences by Andrew Pickering plays out in creative collaboration as a messy breakdown in the logics, communication styles, and normative relational systems that inform the performance of identity and embodiment.² The mangle then forms a jumbled, tangled press of selves and gives rise to the process of trans-subjectivity. As it arises in collaborative creative networks, this process differs from compulsory forms of managing the subject through dominion in that, during the processes where trans-subjectivity stirs (intensity, discord, elation, arousal), the blurred boundaries of the self become part of the flexible performativity of systems that produce not only identity but also being. Capitalism might collect and deploy the aftereffects of what Michel Foucault called the care of the self,³ but the being-doing that feminist science scholar Karen Barad calls intra-activity forms an interstitial zone in which the conditions for resisting those currents can play with the conditions in which they reside.⁴

Drawing on the ideas of physicist Niels Bohr, Barad describes an agential realist ontology where relational forms of being develop from a performative account of the production of material bodies.⁵ In short, bodies and identities, mobile and contingent subjectivities, and the very situations of material existence are produced through the performance of relational gestures or "intra-actions … [that] enact agential separability—the local condition of exteriority-within-phenomena."⁶ Performance of actions (not discourses) produces human and nonhuman materiality without inherently certain, quantifiable boundaries that represent universal positions. Beyond the ties of biology and history, aside from the linguistic determinacy of identity, bodies and associated subjectivities form in local, evolving networked relations. The ability to know and to engender subjectivity is a continual process of intra-action between those bodies, orchestrated by those relations. Interactivity allows users to participate in modifying the form and content of a mediated environment in real-time⁷ where the users engage with digital systems to produce an environment. Intra-activity is not about information flow or the way that one body or gesture activates another in an algorithmic arrangement of data; it is a consequential, and thus ethical, participation in which actions create existence: a particular, local, and contingent commingling of self and body, mind and material, intellect and intuition. Active creativity folds in every form of matter as the microbial, the organ, and the consciousness all contribute to the constitution of bodies and subjectivities as tangled-up, interconnected actors. Intra-action then engenders the surprises that require detailed attention to ongoing, situated ethical constructs to understand and care for the self in those networks.

Intra-action and the generation of being point to a form of care that necessarily must detach from hierarchies of social or political power, as every gesture, consideration, question, and current of desire forms an instance of care that can translate into a complex relational-political system. If the boundaries of the self do not hold, then the process of becoming the self (now excessively intricate and complex) necessarily occurs in response to the open movements of affect without the ability to make claims to territory. This is the process of trans-subjectivity: it can detach, however momentarily, from the various systems of power involved in its capture and management. As desire, conflict, joy, misunderstanding, pleasure, and discomfort build, trans-subjective processes give rise to unexpected potentials for individuation through the exercise of curiosity around difference that is at the same time reconfiguring the known self. Thus, fragmentation and ruin are viewed as processes differentiated from failure or instability, which forever loop back into pathologies of the self and inadequate attempts to gain advantage over the other. Although processes of trans-subjectivity may or may not produce outcomes normally considered desirable, they are important for the way in which they grant alternative forms of subjective movement that might develop problem solving or expand creative capacity on the one hand (perhaps the lesser hand), but that also, on the other hand, provide new ways of thinking about ourselves and our relations to each other, the material world, the things we make, and the ethical constructs in which we operate.

This transgressive personhood is given the name trans-subjectivity, not because it is rooted in gender fluidity, even though gender appears as one process among many. Rather, it is thus called because, besides the need to define identity, know embodiment, and develop as individuals who partake in collective experiences of life, there are moments when the intensities of creative, shared labor thoroughly disrupt normative rules and logics of being and behavior, and as a result a singular, solid, volitional self garners the capacity to become porous to the affective, identificatory movements of any other, similarly permeable subject, such that limits are confounded, commingled, made contingent, and remade. The self-imposed and self-regulated activities of paranoid hegemony fall away and the sense of self expands in unimaginable ways, however temporarily or unnervingly. Foucault’s care of the self is recast as a shared process wherein the efforts of the individual collide and combine with the labor and affect generated by the group, so that both open to trajectories, or lines of flight, that foster, reveal, and renew the movements of becoming, individually and collectively.⁸ Even though subjectivity is normally considered the purview of philosophy and psychology, care of the self for Foucault and in this study includes the material considerations of the body as an actor in relational networks that involve minds, emotions, histories, and bodies. Fostering opportunities for trans-subjectivity to activate and to act constitutes a political act that might be described as the queerest form of love, where love is not limited to desire or care and definitely not territorialized by a stable couple; instead, love as it appears here recasts terms like vulnerability, pathology, and failure to engender a sort of power to move in different directions from those of oppression—ones that might just diffuse and disrobe the authoritarian, autocratic, oppressive control of power as we know it in government, legal structures, employment situations, domestic relationships, and the hegemonic surveillance of everyday life.

Love, Trans-Subjectivity, Politics

From 2007 to 2010, I organized a new configuration of the collaborative group Multipoint U.S. We met in Riverside, California, and made two major installation works: The Heirophanic Peepshow (2008) and Terminus Nodus (2010; Figure 1). At first we were six and by the time we finished the first artwork we were three. While working on Terminus Nodus, the three of us were all in transitional places in our lives: one healing from a life-threatening illness, one mourning a dying parent, and one recovering from the recovery of a beloved addict. We asked ourselves: If the world as we knew it ended, would we still make art? We approached the question from the trajectories of science fiction, Jungian analysis, Soviet film, and the architectural detritus of what Ignacio Sola-Morales called the terrain vague.⁹ In June 2010, we installed a beautiful artwork in the Riverside Art Council’s gallery in a shopping mall and again at the Kellogg Gallery at Cal Poly Pomona that included projections and sculpture and sound. It used all the elements we found fascinating, from the sets of Star Trek to the wasted spaces of the abandoned developments in cities adjacent to Riverside after the 2008 market crash. It had the tidy-obsessive quality of a hoarder’s backyard alongside the outrageous glitter of the drag show. Some visitors came multiple times, to just lie on the floor and advance one or another of the slide shows, bathe in the light of a provisional structure, and feel the vibrato of the sound piece. The awkward relationship of the parts to the whole and the mash-up of aesthetic styles reflected the beauty and tension of the working relationship, where solutions were not easy and discomfort could hardly be expressed.

FIGURE 1   Terminus Nodus. Multipoint (Pam Strugar, Linda Parnell, April Durham). Installation view. Riverside, CA. 2010. Photo courtesy Pam Stugar.

Balanced on the edge of destruction, the working relationships within the group often recalled a lovers’ triangle where desire and frustration could not be expressed directly for fear of destroying the entire desiring social structure. Commitment to the project and in some ways to the idea of a collective that balanced the needs of the individual and the needs of the group forced us to carry on despite tension and aggravation. A high level of professionalism bound us to one another, but we also shared a fraught sort of intimacy that told the tale of a politics of love in more detail and closer to the actual