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224: For Serra: One Place After Another Is Never the Same Place
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This course/reading group will take place twice and on two different days (see below for days and times). For the first meeting we will converge in(side) one space of the Serra’s “Symmetry” in which we will perform a close reading of and discuss Miwon Kwon’s essay-cum-chapter “One Place After Another” and a brief section from Fredrick Jameson’s The Logic of Late Capitalism on the Bonaventure Hotel. And, as optional readings (because I will be bringing them up) Douglas Crimp’s “Re-Defining Site Specificity” and Hal Foster’s “The Un-making of Sculpture,” both in Richard Serra (October Files). For the second meeting in(side) Serra’s “Symmetry,” on a different day (see below for days and times), and in a different space, we will perform a close reading of and discuss Amelia Jones’s “(Post)Urban Self Image,” which critiques the “blind spots” of Kwon’s and Jameson’s essay and chapter section and moves out toward a feminist-postcolonial-poststructuralist reading of space/place and so-called “site specificity”. Also during this second meeting we will perform a close reading of and discuss Amelia Jones’s “The Televisual Architecture of the Dream Body” — which is a movement away from the mentalities foregrounded in “Octoberist” (art) historical writings. Now, as optional readings (because I will be bringing the ideas up) Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “The Intertwining — the Chiasmus”. In using the two spaces of “Symmetry,” for two (or more) different views (asymmetry) of space and so-called site specificity, it is hoped that a certain productive and crucially needed antagonism will be foregrounded and philosophically engaged. All of the readings will be available on-line, but one may wish to buy the texts (respectively), Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another, Fredrick Jameson, The Logic of Late Capitalism, Hal Foster and Gordon Hughes, eds., Richard Serra, Amelia Jones, Self/Image, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible. Another Place: In the spirit of the readings and discussions, we will all (if you wish) re-converge at the Bonaventure Hotel (in the revolving bar!) in order to continue the dialogs or go on other “lines of flight” — after the last meeting of this reading group. Date: October 19 and 26, from 12-2 (2 meetings) |
11 Comments
This class has been scheduled.
Date: October 19 and 26, from 12-2 (2 meetings)
Location: “Sequence” at LACMA
Teacher: Robert Summers
Limit: 15 people
Fee: $15
Please stay posted (on the lookout via an email) for the readings to be posted on-line, but I would urge you to buy the books: skylight bookstore and MoCA has them all.
Please have the first readings done (Kwon and Jameson) done before class on the 19th. You may also want to read the “optional” readings.
Thank you, Robert
The first reading is posted: Miwon Kwon’s “One Place After Another” . This was published in October Journal in 1997. It is crucial that you also read the chapter of the same title from her book, which will be up in a few. We will be discussing both on the first day of the meeting — as well as the selection from Jameson. (The “optional” readings will be of help too — for a deeply engaged discussion.)
Stay tuned for daily updates.
As ever, Robert
PS: See second post below for link to the Miwon Kwon essay from October Journal.
texts uploaded:
Miwon Kwon’s “One Place After Another”
http://aaaarg.org/one-place-after-another-excerpt
Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” Pages 38-45.
http://aaaarg.org/postmodernism-excerpt
I forgot to post the link to the Kwon essay from October Journal: http://aaaarg.org/miwon-kwon-one-place-after-another-notes-on-site-specificity
It is crucial that you read both the essay and the chapter (”One place After Another (excerpt)”. These should be read along with the Fredrick Jameson essay (Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” Pages 38-45.
Thanks, Robert
i posted another version of Miwon Kwon’s “One Place After Another” b/c the original was cut off:
http://aaaarg.org/one-place-after-another-excerpt-3
Please go to aaaarg.com for all the readings (as PDFs) listed above for this reading group. Later today, or early Saturday, I will be emailing the group some optional “readings” (really short ones — mostly notes and email exchanges which refer back to the first meeting) for THIS Sunday, which is the last meeting: sad.
-Robert
PS: questions? concerns? comments? please email me at robtsum@gmail.com
The following are now available:
The Intertwining-The Chiasm
written by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
http://aaaarg.org/the-intertwining-the-chiasm
(Post)Urban Self Image
written by Ameila Jones
http://aaaarg.org/selfimage-excerpt
May everyone please email me there email address who is taking the class? I would like to send you some notes and questions and comments from last week. Please email Robert at robtsum@gmail.com : ASAP if possible.
Also, this sunday we will return to Miwon Kwon’s book chapter and Jameson on the Bonaventure for roughly 1/3 of the class. The remaining time will be turned toward Amelia Jone’s essay — where more attention will be given to her essay “(Post)Urban Self Image” from her text _Self/Image_ — all of these and more are posted on aaaarg.org
But, again, please email me so that I may email you some material (very short reading, and optional). Again, my email is robtsum@gmail.com
Thanks ever so much, Robert
Here is a recent “e-conversation” that resonates with some of the issues and ideas brought up in the last meeting. We will return to some of these issues and ideas at the next meeting — tomorrow (or today, depending when you read this) October 26, 2008 at The Public School at LACMA (”in” Serra — all innuendos intended):
Public School (at LACMA) Reading/Discussion Group:
“One Place After Another Is Never the Same Place”
Robert Summers, “Facilitator”
“E-Conversation”: From Kwon to Nomadism to the Fling and Back Again
NOTE: This an “email conversation” between two masked thinkers (the names of the two interlocutors have been omitted) on art and politics. It has not be edited; hence, grammar and spelling errors—because I did not want to change the “tempo” of the exchange, or have it polished, but rather keep its lines of flight, its urgency of though, etc. There are many “lose ends”—but this can be seen as productive, as leading to other conversations on art and politics, theory and its use, and art and sex(uality) and the social.
Some of the questions and comments in this “e-conversation”—given they arose from an essay (see the link to it below)—may spark (many) other ideas and formulations that resonate with the readings and discussions in The Public School’s (at LACMA) “One Place After Another Is Never the Same Place” reading/discussion group.
Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 12:46 PM
b,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2479/is_1-2_34/ai_n17216247/pg_1
Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 2:43 PM
a,
thanks. i just skimmed it: it would, it seems, be interesting to read this in relation to
guattari’s idea of molecularity and the deluezoguattarian idea of imperceptibility — as well as some of ranciere’s arguments re: the aesthetic regime = the politics of aesthetics.
-b
Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 3:00 PM
b,
yes i think he’s drawing from all of that. it seemed to be an expression of your questions during the first bourriaud class (”why does this need to be art? “, etc.)
…
it occurred to me that it would be interesting to see kwon’s essay in relation to dilettantism. in fact a reading group on dilettantism itself would be better. do you know good readings on topical promiscuity?
-a
Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 3:05 PM
a,
i am a little brain dead: can you further explain on 1. kwon and dilettantism and “topical promiscuity”? “topical promiscuity” seems like it can be a modality of queer work …. but maybe give me more of an example a longer question?
hmmm … dilettantism and “topical promiscuity” both resonate with “queer” …
-b
Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 4:58 PM
b,
kwon opposes brief flings with a place (read: topic) to longer and more sustained investments in a place (read: topic, again). i actually think it’s not simply an analogy, but that traversing the exhibition circuit, doing little projects along the way, necessarily overlaps with a certain dilettantism (these little projects won’t just be flings with a place, but also with some topic/ subject).
and this resonates with the internet itself which flattens information so that we can navigate from music to scans of medieval texts to celebrity gossip to quirky historical facts.
it sounds great, but it also a symptom of our ADD culture, so i am ambivalent. this kind of mobility is good, but who has it? i don’t know how to put it, exactly — on the one hand, it does sound queer, but on the other hand it sounds like a recuperation of queer too. (not so much queer, but a western, privileged form of experience)
-a
Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 5:36 PM
a,
to just jump to the end (of your email) and to come back later (and in another email), can’t anything become recuperated and/or commercialized and/or commodified? with regard to “queer” … i mean, in part it (if it is indeed an “it”) has been commercialized andcommodified — for example, “queer eye for the straight guy” and “queer as folk”. also, the deal with gay marriage is a recuperation of the gay or lesbian subject to be more like a heterosexual couple. it doesn’t radically rethink kinship and other modes of being with others. i think foucault would agree — as would deleuze.
i wonder if we take foucault seriously and think of life as an art, then this can be a radical art project — whatever that may mean or look like, and if only temporarily. so, i wonder about this temporary, which is in the “in-between” of your email — and if not outright rejected by kwon.
so, again, i wonder if we can go back to foucault and his essay “friendship as a way of life” — i think we have to always reinvent and renew, if you will. more than this, i think we have to come up with another way to describe and discuss things and situations (so, invent new [languages and/as] weapons, as deleuze calls for): indeed, the terms, adjectives “new” and “reinvent” are part and parcel to late capitalism (and modernism), which shows the extraordinary power of late capitalism, and the extraordinary work “we” have to do to reinvent new weapons.
i think that kwon is un-appreciative, to put it poorly, of the fling, the topic, the nomadic, but these seems to be the way of any art historian that overtly or covertly desires the stable (read: long lasting, non-ephemeral) object.
here is what i wrote re: the last paragraph of both kwon’s essay in october and in her book _one place after another_:
Kwon states, “Today’s site-oriented practices inherit the task of demarcating the relational specificity that can hold in tension the distant poles of spatial experiences described by Bhabha. This means addressing the differences of adjacencies and distances between one thing, one person, one place, one though, one fragment, next to another, rather than nvoking equivalencies via one thing after another. Only those cultural practices [isn't Kwon being prescriptive and limited other possibilities and potentialities?] that have this relational sensibility can turn local encounters into long-term commitments and transform passing intimacies into indelible, un-retractable social marks …”
Kwon’s argument ultimately argues for contemporary cultural practices that stand a ‘relational sensibility,’ as the only means of ‘demarcating the relational specificity,’ that a queer project would be attempting in its work to think through and beyond. Kwon goes on to argue that ‘[o]nly those cultural practices that have this relational sensibility can turn local encounters into long-term commitments and transform passing intimacies into indelible, un-retractable social marks.’ Yet it is precisely in refusing the necessity of these effects and transformations (in the forms of identification, permanence, and legibility) that certain spatial, social, and visual practices can be understood as queer. Indeed, queer forms of spatiality, sociality, and visuality are constituted through ‘local encounters’ and ‘passing intimacies’ that do not require any further development or recording for their full force to be felt. Such forms put into question the values that are ascribed to ‘long-term commitments’ and ‘unretractable social marks,’ and argue for the legitimacy of social, sexual, and visual promiscuities (the potential invested in the singular multiplicity of whomever, whatever, wherever), as modes of pleasure and survival, and the possible grounds for an ethics that operates without assured futures and codified parameters”.
Another line of flight …
One place after another is never the same place and it is in this repetition (with a difference) that “should” be celebrated as the singular multiplicity that is continuous and without goal or aim but always in movement: nomadic.
so, i think we just have to be extraordinarily self-conscious and remain hyper-critical of what “we” are doing and how “we’ are going it, but this is not protection from its (eventual, inevitable) consumption by late capitalism or “ADD culture”.
i think what you raise is really interesting. i should think about it more. i will get back to you, but, in the meantime, what do you think of what i wrote? does it make sense? i mean life and the objects and events in it are precarious and never fully under ones control …
-b
Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 9:20 PM
b,
by recuperation: i think that what i meant is that “the fling” and promiscuity are normative encounters (for the last 30 years or so, but particularly over the past 15). there is nothing particularly queer about them from my perspective. i would also like to read foucault’s friendship essay in this light, and i think he would say that the fling is just as
scripted/ structured as a marriage between an older man and a young woman. Promiscuity has become its own institution — it doesn’t particularly require invention or thought.
so i am for the moment ok with the word commitment, because for me it suggests sustained thought and constant rethinking. and you make some good points with respect to the kwon passage, but at the same time i read her more openly to be encouraging non- normative encounters. i think one place after another in the context of the international biennial/ art fair circuit is a normative encounter and i think kwon is holding herself in opposition to most art criticism here through her reading of site-specificity.
i read the article as ambivalent (hence the questions: does she think nomadic is good or bad? i don’t think she is placing a value judgment, as much as we want her to). nomadic and committed are respectively superficial and nostalgic. kwon claims to be nomadic, herself. i read it as her wanting to discover a way of turning the encounters into commitments, which as i described is simply a ‘more thoughtful form of encounter’ or something. not turning one night stands into marriage, but into friendship.
another way that i think about it is how many art spaces offer classes and workshops. i always found them problematic because they never “added up” to anything. it was one class after another, each starting over. maybe this is how a school can be different: it can generate friendship and provide a platform for enriching, sustaining, challenging, and rearranging that friendship. i think this can work at both a social and topical level.
i have to reread your email again …
-a
Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 10:19 PM
a,
i would very much like to keep this dialog going, given it is (and will) help me think through almost 20 years of so-called queer theory. and i hope will aid you in your thinking through so many issues in the art world/s and its various (temporary) spaces and places.
i agree, to a point, that the fling and promiscuity are more acceptable in general nowadays, but this is ONLY with regard to geographic location (los angles is not irvine is not new york city is not kansas city is not washington dc is not detroit is not houston etc.) and one’s position in the world. here i would like to make some points:
i would disagree with your assessment of foucault; i do not think that the fling necessarily be as structured as many relationships that currently exist. i think we should think of what would a “queer(ing)” fling look like or be — if only temporarily and always moving so never being able to become normalized, like say “gay” marriage or a hetero or homo fling. maybe put the fling into a sling? where would that line of flight take us once pulled and released? l’avenir: the future to-come. the unknowable, and thus the un-commodifiable — again if only temporarily.
btw, i think we are having several conversations, but they all seem to intersect at points — connect and disconnect at certain points: we should embrace the point/s and forget the line, if you will.
“queer” is always in flux; it isn’t stable and when it is i wouldn’t think it very queer, given the etymology of queer comes from the indo-european word “twerkw”—which also yields the german “quer” (traverse), the latin “torquee (to twist), so to twist (and turn), so queer is always a movement — an action — and a “violent” one at that. i want to read “queer” through deleuze and others who have theorized movement, flows, currents, etc. in other words, we should, to cite butler, remain critically queer and keep it moving and turning.
the above written, yes everything, in one way or another, is scripted and staged — which is to say structured — and remains within the pulsations and flows of power, but to keep “queer’ moving is to always make those structures unstable, which, of course, is a deconstructive maneuver. i am very interested in thinking “queer” as a modality of deconstruction and vice-versa (so derridian practices as always-already “queer”)
i think that prop 8 (the california constitutional ban on “gay” marriage), which may very well pass (it is very close in the polls — and so close to election day and a similar amendment passed several years ago) and the whole fiasco with clinton’s affair/fling and now edwards demonstrates that the fling and promiscuity is only acceptable in some circles/locations, and they are very small, also the concept of “gay” and “lesbian” marriage is still very much a threat — just look at all the panic — as articulated in some parts of the media — as well as political and religious circles — it causes so many people that such “gay” subjectivities and enactments will promote certain flings/promiscuities that are less than heterosexual, which is still the norm.
i find it interesting that in this discussion of art and its institutions are being conflated with sex and sexuality: freud would argue the artist is sublimating, on many levels, sexual drives — i am sure the same is true for the art historian/critic.
i really do not see how kwon is “openly encouraging non-normative encounters” — you will really have to show me where that is in the text. i still feel that here last paragraph is overtly conservative. and she is enacting the art historian who knows what is and will happen. i am sure that things beyond any ones control takes place in the most conservative, normative, capitalistic spaces, institutions, etc. i do not think that we can know in advance what can happen in any place — even, or because of, one place after another. seriality is always open to iteration, which is open to difference — even a “queer” difference in the most normative of spaces/places.
also, how to think commitment otherwise? how to think “fidelity” otherwise? i guess, what i am getting at, but not the only think i am getting at is i find your reading rather conservative. what do you find of, or “in”, my reading and commentary?
more to follow …
-b
Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 10:57 PM
b,
you wrote “any place — even, or because of, one place after another. seriality is always open to iteration, which is open to difference”
disconnected points:
i am going to sleep, but above quote i think is the point:
we all understand that repetition necessarily implies difference; but the way capitalism produces sameness in different places threatens this difference. here, i share kwon’s concern that we really are looking at one place after another.
irvine isn’t kansas city, but by the same token los angeles isn’t los angeles. or to put it another way, the art world’s miami is a lot closer to new york than suburban miami.
“accepted” and normative aren’t identical. i maintain that in every place i’ve lived or traveled to, promiscuity is the norm.
in the paragraph you’ve cited: kwon opposed invoking equivalencies, which is an argument for criticality and particularity, for close reading rather than deploying
pre-packaged thought, pre-judgments. i think you’re unwilling to accept that she’s updating to take a position that is probably close to the one you hold. or at least that’s how i read it, and i never try and get it right, i just try and get it productive for me.
maybe fidelity is a better word than commitment, less loaded
-a
Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 11:18 PM
a,
i am willing to admit that it is very difficult for me to read kwon. i am willing to be re-opened and re-examine what she is arguing.
-b
PS: more to follow …
Dear One-Place-After-Another Folks,
Thanks ever so much for your time and input — your brilliant and cutting insights and antagonisms. I hope you enjoyed the reading/discussion group (which was too short!) as much as I did, and I hope you got something out of it — or will, in the future to-come.
As ever, Robert
Robert Summers, PhD/ABD
Art History + Critical Theory
Department of Art History
UCLA
e: robtsum@gmail.com
e: robtsum@ucla.edu