ELLIPSIS

i know you got charm and appeal.
you always play the field.
i’m crazy you are mine.
as long as the sun continues to shine,
there’s a place in my heart for you.
that’s the bottomline

(- so let’s face it, it interests us. after all it’s our field; a battle ground? a playground?)

email to mirene
and thinking about borders and places. to me home works IV was inspiring for two reasons:
1, that you, kati and i were spending time together within a frame that generated thinking and that we rediscovered a desire and a need to act; ghost dance project, the article for exit and a possible proposal of a writing workshop for a.a.. we seem to have taken up some threads that were already there in london, and now they have developed into different directions. it adds people to place and borders and i really think the environment within or outside of academia is extremely important, i.e. i believe in collaboration and collective reflection (alongside solitary studies, if wanted)
2, the complete interdisciplinarity of the event (home works) was a great statement. interdisciplinarity between disciplins and between peoples practices. not for the sake of interdisciplinarity, but because it showed that what you are not necessarily what you do.

point 2 became much more apparent when coming from and going back to a danish context, where the borders are kept quite strict. many artists still believe that art historians are people who never succeeded to become artists or that art historians are in desperate need of artists to interpretate wildly over something which is quite banal; there’s still the idea of the art historian as someone who lives from artists (like these animals) and that even though this is a close cirquit relation, it’s not regarded as 1 organism, but 2 really seperate things. what we have is the role of the art historian as a mediator and not as a producer… not as someone who creates a thing on its own (as they tried to teach us at goldsmiths) and thereby there’s no possibility of generating anything new that might have the potential of being political.
this environment is of course killing together with academia, where one cannot experiment with new forms of text (should one?). one can only experiment with ones research as i try to do with my archive. but this archive cannot be incorporated into the academic text i’m writing.

place/borders/people – borders are there for people to cross them and experience new places/contexts… should we try to eliminate any border between theory and practice..? i’m not sure, but i know it’s necessary to have a space for this elimination/playfulness etc. should it be within academia? – yes, why not. it will give a serious space for such proposals to unfold.

the political – agency. some of the texts mentioned in the beginning (Roland Barthes: barthes on barthes Ranciere: politics of aesthetics, benjamin: the author as producer, sedgwick: paranoid reading and reparative reading, or, you’re so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you, okwui enwezor: the artist as producer in the time of crisis) relate to the political through either openness or creation of the new/creation of an abruption to make people take a stand. the text itself has a potential, which the artwork has as well.
regarding the new and liberalism i think the discussion after brian holmes‘ lecture at home works was interesting, because it touched upon the need of creating new possible dreams for people with the dilemma of having neocapitalism and liberalism incorporating these dreams immediately. and it asked the question, should we produce the new for the sake of the new? and what if the new is worse than the old?