maybe a little OT, but interesting
maybe a little OT, but interesting
"Some days I flip through certain art magazines:
glossy paper, squeaky clean, repetitions and very few
differences, but it doesn’t matter. These papers are made
to put one in the mood, like certain soft drugs. And in
the mood, one discovers a particular kind of omnivorous,
but levelling, visual sophistication. All things become
equally appreciable once delicately placed on the white
rectangle of their pages, the forms and colours travel
from the white cube to this new square and they have
everything to gain there.
One mustn’t believe that the vision of the world of
these papers excludes radicality, even in its explicitly
political form. But this radicality is only a shadow of
‘what one should detect of it’, and never an expression
of what it is possible to do with it. It is inevitably a
question of taking distance from this radicality, not
because it’s needed to show that we do not go along with
it, but because the problem isn’t even one of hearing its
message, one must simply judge its tone. And the tone is
always monotonous or excited.
Why are you shouting, damn it, if we know that
things are the way they are? We already know: stop yelling!
Disappear or turn into your image, so we can turn down
the sound or put some music on instead, if necessary.
These papers don’t have their own voices, but that’s
how they would speak if they started to speak, and
it is not even because of cynicism, but because of lack
of experience. The authors of articles, who consider
themselves clever theoreticians, anti-conformist or
disabused intellectuals, ignore the ways words affect
bodies to the point of generating the ordinary miracle of
mobilisation and the extraordinary one of insurrection.
These articles are a form of disguised pornography,
in so far as whenever we are dealing with the least
communicable moments, when everyone is bare and
everyone is the same, and all the bodies are indistinctly
breathing together, we can say whatever we want about
it because we always already know what we want to see
there. It’s this violence that is as obscene, superficial and
brutal as an identity check."
-Claire Fontaine, from Human Strike Has Already Begun
http://www.postmedialab.org/human-strike-has-already-begun-other-writings-claire-fontaine-0
