Stevenson
17.08 - 12.10.2024
To be racialized is to be placed in the condition of social debt.
– Kris Manjapra, Necrospeculation: Postemancipation Finance and Black Redress1 Manjapra, K. 2019. Necrospeculation: Postemancipation Finance and Black Redress, in Social Text, 7:2; pp. 33.
Value has to come from somewhere. If not labor, then from somewhere else—risk, temporality, circulation, and so forth.
– Alison Shonkwiler, The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification And The Limits Of Realist Fiction2Shonkwiler, A. The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification And The Limits Of Realist Fiction. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press; pp. xxiii.
In Paulo Nazareth’s Ensaio sobre peixes Vol. III (2009) [thinks on fish vol. III], a short film running for under seven minutes, the artist can be seen entering the frame from the left-hand side. His quick pacing competes with the bustling noise of the city while an unsteady handheld camera tracks him in the midst of people passing by unbothered by this social (aesthetic) gesture. Nazareth appears in a market, purchasing a fish with a newspaper in hand which he quickly transforms into a readymade serviette, sticking the fish into his mouth before embarking on a journey across the urban landscape soundtracked by human speech, moving cars, sound systems. At times we see his back; the artist has transformed himself into a spectacle. We see him and the people around him, whose gaze he does not return and their gaze becomes our problem. I begin here in order to consider the stakes and implications of such an intervention as a point of departure into a broader conversation about the artist’s sustained engagement with knowledge, history and statecraft’s global reproduction of structural precarity and vulnerability.
In Ensaio sobre peixes Vol. III (2009) money functions, like everywhere in the social field, as a mode of facilitating, in the most elementary sense, the movement and exchange of goods. This banal moment would be insignificant if it weren’t for the practical fact that it conditions the possibility of the narrative to unfold. The fish market then assumes and becomes a symbolic and material stand-in for a site of an originary crime and a commerce that inaugurates cruelty and further precipitates an epistemological crisis we know now as our modern order. The newspaper, though it is never made clear where it is sourced3 This obfuscation is important for the argument I develop below; it seems to mirror the obfuscation of not only the source and site of Law and our symbolic order, but capitalism’s obfuscation of the source of value and wealth. , seems to suggest the circulation of information and thus knowledge production, its mechanisms of valorization and mythmaking. The raw meat of the fish becomes, in a sensational fashion, the raw material that not only secures the film’s narratorial integrity and telos, but more broadly, is transformed by the artist into a crude device for the social link to cohere or to animate it.
The film ends with a near-closed door, and the camera stops tracking the artist as he, we believe, removes himself from the general social field. Though from the opening sequence, the artist appears from out of ‘nowhere’, literally, the film adheres to a linear teleological progression of narrative towards a literal closure (of a door). This forward leaping and journeying of ‘Man’ (as both the continuous movement of History and the speculative movement of thought) appears quite at odds with the work’s seemingly central critique of how knowledge is ordered, or ought to be ordered, how it proposes a rupturing of the regime of knowledge4 Though I cannot fully explore this in sufficient detail, Alenka Zupancic’s essay “When Surplus Enjoyment Meets Surplus Value” (2006) is worth consulting. It provides a useful discussion of the structural antagonism between the two of Lacan’s discourse, the hysteric and the master, in their relation to knowledge production. The former is presented in the Lacanian schema as mounting the most unflinching critique of how it produces knowledge which the latter, the master, gets to enjoy; “the master is accused of enjoying at the subject’s expense” (2006: 165). See Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, ed. Clemens, J. and Griggs, R. Durham and London: Duke University Press., its discontinuity as a normative form5We could advance a similar charge regarding the extractive use of the fish as a metaphor, a practice deep in the histories of Man’s mythmaking. For a discussion of the problems of metaphor, in its contradiction to metonymy, see Charles Gaines, 2009. Reconsidering Metaphor/Metonymy: Art and the suppression of thought, in Art Lies, 64. [Online]. Available here: <https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228029/m1/50/> [Accessed 23/09/2024].. However, the social landscape of the urban environment is productive for politics and as Nelly Richard in her essay A Border Citation: Between Neo– and Post–Avant-Garde, “[t]he mobile temporality of the street is the open and site-specific format of a work-happening that responds to the dead (static) time of [art institutionality]6Richard, N. 2004. “A Border Citation: Between Neo– and Post–Avant-Garde”, in The Insubordination of Signs Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis, trans. Nelson, A.A and Tandeciarz, S. R. Durham & London: Duke University Press; pp. 27.”.
More broadley, Ensaio sobre peixes Vol. III (2009), as the oldest artwork on the show, functions to ground not only the artist’s general practice but the exhibition “INTLANZI”, in both its productive leaps and unfortunate shortcomings. We encounter a wide range of themes and political concerns as abstract and concrete as financial markets and their reproduction of crisis and dispossession; the intersections of the actuarial, the juridical and economic in manufacturing conditions of vulnerability and catastrophe; movements of money and financial instruments of global maritime trade; colonial conquest as the privileged site for the interdependence of military warfare, terror and financial speculations7The location of the exhibition, Cape Town, raises the stakes of this problem in light of the so-called ‘Red sea crisis’ following the Houthis attacks on Israel cargo ships in response to the latter’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Shipping companies resorted to going around southern Africa in avoidance of the attacks, triggering a global financial storm. See Sarah Schiffling and Matthew Tickle, 2024. Red Sea crisis: Suez Canal is not the only ‘choke point’ that threatens to disrupt global supply chains, in The Conversation. [Online]. Available here: <https://theconversation.com/red-sea-crisis-suez-canal-is-not-the-only-choke-point-that-threatens-to-disrupt-global-supply-chains-221144> [Accessed 23/09/2024]. . AIEH, EXE BABA (2024), for example, a work made up of dried corn kernels spread across the floor of the main section of the gallery, heightens, or more appropriately, maps these contradictions in ways far more expansive and indicative of the artist’s practice as aspiring to a conceptually global logic. The dried corn becomes an abstraction of land and because we can’t step on it, we therefore stand in the position of the ocean; if the corn is the land, the rest of the gallery floor (from the last grain on the edge of the work) logically becomes the surface of the sea. We, as audience, float unaware like vessels in the global chain of historical commerce.
Additionally, what this work also offers are the pleasures of a structurally impossible metaposition; the audience stands in front of and above the Earth which Nazareth has flattened and made immediately available in its totality (this is the fiction of the metaposition which can never be available to the singular human reality and field of vision). This problematic is transformed, in profound ways, by the short film of a series of swimming pool incidents which begins with images of Black bodies thrown overboard as ‘human cargo’. This world-making violence, the originary wounding, collapses the distance between (White, non-Black) leisure, commerce and racial slavery as the foundation for our modern political and libidinal economies and their reproduction of value as terror.
On Work, Sleep and Slips of the Body
In a durational performance presented on the day of the opening, Nazareth sat on a green chair in the corner of the main section of the gallery. With his eyes closed and in a relaxed posture, it became evident, upon closer inspection, that the artist might be asleep. The performance had started midday and there was no indication when it would be concluded. There are art historical precedents to Nazareth’s interventions where artists have transformed sleeping and/or rest as an object worthy of aesthetic contemplation (if not an institutional critique of the very value systems that condition what enjoys the status of aesthetic contemplation and the very ontological status and legitimacy of aesthetic contemplation writ large). We could include here, in no way exhaustive, Chris Burden’s Bed Piece (1972), Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming (1992), Mladen Stilinović’s Artist at Work (1978), Marina Abramović’s The House with the Ocean View (2002), Chajana denHarder’s Sleep (2012), and more recently, Thuli Gamedze and Abri de Swardt intervention ‘Overnight Services’ (2021). Though not asleep8 This is a critical point for the discussion I advance below. , we could add here Tracey Rose’s Span II (1997), for reasons I hope will become clear below. The latter, perhaps together with Gamedze and de Swardt, and Stilinović (at least for its title), share a comparative structure with Nazareth’s gesture, that is, a critical engagement with labour, work (the latter as critically distinct from the former) and time9 It is beyond the scope of this present text to exhaust the connections and divergences between these interventions. Stilinović is ‘obviously’ asleep, or we imagine him to be, whereas Rose and Gamedze and de Swardt active labour on an engagement with the institution, they work on a critique and sleep seems to be temporarily deferred..
In an essay by Mai Wegener, Why Should Dreaming Be A Form of Work?, she reminds us that those who do not work “are in confrontation with the notion of free time, which, for them, stands for a devalued time, freed of its meaning and purpose10Wegener, M. 2015. “Why Should Dreaming Be A Form of Work?”, in Jacques Lacan: Between Psychoanalysis and Politics, ed. Tomšic, S.ˇ and Zevnik, A. London and New York: Routledge; pp. 164. ”. Work stands in contradistinction to what she calls “debt”, or more pointedly in a psychoanalytic register, “desire”, a certain excessive (anti)social phenomenon embodied by subjects who do not trade their time for work11 Ibid., pp. 164.. Wegener proposes a reading of the centrality of work in psychoanalysis and the system of its founding father, Freud. Wegener draws parallels between work, the psychic economy of the unconscious and enjoyment under the capitalist order and its organization of production. More pressing, for Wegener, “[a]ll varieties of political power are keen to ensure that regardless of what is going on, work is never interrupted” until it encounters its structural opposite (and limit), desire, that which “cannot be governed or kept in check12 Ibid., pp. 166.”. The space of dream becomes a privileged space to articulate the utility of a theory and critique of work in its relation to enjoyment. “The dream”, according to Wegener, “takes its capital from the unconscious desire13 Ibid., pp. 170. ”, that is, the day’s repressed psychic material. “The aim of dream-work is thus to bring the unconscious desire past censorship14Ibid., pp. 168.”, allowing the dreaming subject to come face to face with the structure of its own desire and symbolic castration in contrast to capitalism’s founding and foundational illusion, or what Wegener calls “the promise”, that we can all possibly occupy the position of the master/capitalist “if we know how to reinvest and accumulate surplus-enjoyment […] someday nothing will be lacking15Ibid., pp. 178.”. What I am interested in is how Wegener, similar to Samo Tomsic in The Capitalist Unconscious, systematizes the relation between the social field of commodities and the formal processes of the unconscious. For Tomsic, this gap is articulated by Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism that “stands above all for a specific transformation of desire within and through the implementation of the capitalist worldview in social and subjective reality16Tomsic, S. 2015. The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan. London and New York: Verso; pp. 88. ”. This move by Marx, “the intertwining of the social form and the commodity form”, mirrors a similar schema (in its conceptual logic), the Freudian move, viz., “the intertwining of the worldview mechanisms and the unconscious mechanisms of satisfaction17 Ibid., pp. 92.”. What becomes important is the structural relation and interdependence between the formal operations of work in the waking and dream worlds; the former, which Tomaž Krpič in Dreaming as Performance, by way of Merleau-Ponty, calls “genuine consciousness18 Krpič, T. Dreaming as Performance: An Attempt to Explain the Phenomenon of the Inner Mental Theatre Stage, in didaskalia. [Online]. Available here: <https://didaskalia.pl/en/article/dreaming-performance> [Accessed 22/09/2024]. ”, the space of the subject of cognition, and the latter, the ungovernable space of unconscious desire.
Furthermore, the first fundamental problem for Nazareth’s staging of sleep inside a commercial gallery pertains to time; the gallery will have to close at some point. I use this basic point to consider the limitations of thinking his intervention as constituting some radical rupture on borrowed time for it can never escape the matrix of the gallery’s operational mechanism and its capacity for generating and extracting value (from the artist). So Nazareth’s sleep is less leisure and more labour, a commodity-generating labour19The gallery’s website now features a photograph of the performance.. His performance then performs a certain working that feigns leisure and rest.
What does it mean then to be ‘asleep’ and yet to be working? That is, to sleep a sleep that is work, a sleep that is a production of value (to be extracted [by Stevenson Gallery])? His sleeping is and generates value as labour.
One of the ways in which the performance, or the art-work, implicates the viewer is less his presence as absence but the temporal dimension of this performance; the contemplating figure is asked to stick around and ‘waste’ (or more fittingly, ‘spend’ it in the marketplace of contemplation, i.e, the gallery) their time for as long as the artist spends his (sleeping). The fundamental fiction of Nazareth’s art-work then turns out to be the piece’s capacity to be as long as the audience can ‘afford’ to stick around. The audience’s watching, literally ’spending’ time, is a waiting that is always already a loss. It is a waiting without gain[ing meaning, truth], making the whole exchange, if we can even call it that, quite “structurally perverse”, to borrow a phrase from Lorenzo Chiesa20Chiesa, L. 2015. The First Gram of Jouissance: Lacan on Genet’s Le balcon, in The Comparatist, 39; pp. 10. .
Nazareth nevertheless elevates a supposedly ordinary and anodyne experience and ritual into a privileged status of the object of (aesthetic) contemplation. What the viewer really ‘consumes’ is the artist’s time and this exchange is constitutive of a bond; they really bond over this expenditure where time is the material (the raw stuff of labour). (The point is: it would be conceptually unrigorous and politically lazy to suggest that the artist’s gesture of ‘rest’ undermines the extractive capitalist demand that we/he Work!21This mirrors Jacque Lacan’s injunction from the superego to us, to Enjoy! that which the subject is structurally barred from. when he is literally working. For the former to be possible, we would have to read his sleep as metaphor, thus opening up a different problem22Again, I offer Gaines’ Reconsidering Metaphor/Metonymy. ). Because of the artist’s removing himself from the social link (this is what sleep achieves in spite of the body’s materiality), or what Krpič calls the performer’s “disconnection from his or her social environment23Krpič, Dreaming as Performance, n.p.”, and because the audience ‘gets nothing’ (in both senses of this phrase: i.e, I get no meaning from this exchange and I, more importantly in a non-contradictory way, get to enjoy this nothing as a gift), his performance hint at an attempt24I think this attempt fails and perhaps this is the success of the work! to critique the hole in signification, the gap in which meaning fails to cohere and become whole. The success of the work is how it exposes the failure of language and the cost of rest (as always already work).
Further, Nazareth’s body demonstrated quite (inconsistent) involuntary bodily twitches (or what I’m calling ’slips of the body’) which could be read as the psychic economy of the performance) as fundamental (and necessary) moments of the work-ing (of art). Nazareth ‘performs25I do sense now the silliness of my continued use of this category. ’ his own act of dreaming and this constitutes “the misperformative phenomenon of a sleeping performer26Krpič, Dreaming as Performance, n.p.”. What then necessitates Nazareth’s desire to transform his sleep into an event, or to render it ‘public’ (the scare quotes matter because this is a peculiar public since it is a public within the White private property of Stevenson gallery); is it merely to perform an enjoyment of rest or an act of the spectacle of dreaming in full view of an audience? And what does this yield? As denHarder once remarked on her performance Sleep (2012) cited above, “the best way to be yourself completely is to go to sleep27 Simon, R. 2012. Corcoran exhibit is simple but difficult: An artist, asleep, in Los Angeles Times. [Online]. Available here: <https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-xpm-2012-jul-27-la-na-nn-corcoran-gallery-sleep-20120727-story.html> [Accessed 22/09/2024].”.
What we must not lose sight of is this: (the artist’s) rest in the gallery will always constitute labour, work, because in the gallery one works on one’s rest (and this is the fundamental principle of the fictional (anti)social field we call the white cube). But more pressing, at least within Jacques Lacan’s instructive discourse, rest is not “the way out of capitalist discourse” and will not “constitute progress, if it happens only for some28Lacan, J. 1990. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. New York, London: W W · Norton & Company; pp. 16.”, and not all of us.
The point it seems, from the standpoint of a critical abolitionist project, is not to carve out ‘elsewheres’ or autonomous ‘outdoors’, for we are way past this point, where we discover alternative commodities and infuse them with value but to radically abolish the very structure of capitalist abstractions and their capacity for engendering the fetishisation of the commodity form, be it ‘here’ or in the imaginary ‘elsewheres’. I call it abolitionist because the stakes are higher in an order characterised by what Kris Manjapra calls Necrospeculation, “a concrete abstraction, a way of conceiving of value production, surplus and social accounting actualized through racial expropriation and war29 Manjapra, Necrospeculation, pp. 31.”. According to Manjapra, “death making and the ability to keep conquered, incarcerated, or occupied peoples in the “state of injury” become, in themselves, productive of value30 Ibid., pp. 33. ”. These systems of capitalist reproduction of vulnerability constitute strategies “to financialize social death and to transfer that surplus into new imperial futures31Ibid., pp. 36.”. This relational dynamic borne of structural exposure to harm and value, risk and certainty, draws our attention to what Alison Shonkwiler recently called “the social uncertainties and precarities that result from the expansion of financialization over multiple domains of life32Shonkwiler, A. The Financial Imaginary, xi. ”.
Coda (for now…)
Black conceptual strategies and tendencies, or Black contemporary art more broadly, admittedly deeply captive to market forces and White and non-Black spectatorial pleasures and enjoyment, stands, I contend, in a rather strange position of being able to pose the most radical and potent critique of the speculative dimensions of racial capitalist abstractions. However, as Lorenzo Chiesa remarks, “the unveiling of the obscene side of a constituted order is not sufficient to cause the demise of order as such33Chiesa, The First Gram of Jouissance; pp. 11. ”. However, Nazareth’s practice has taken seriously the legacies of conceptualism, particularly those rooted in, but irreducible to, the Latin American political and (art) historical experience of racial slavery, colonial domination and imperialism. As a critique of the systems of elitist artistic production and meaning-making, these conceptualist tendencies, as seen in Ensaio sobre peixes Vol. III (2009), tends to “spill out”, to use a Luis Camnitzer phrase, as radical activity that attempts to “directly affect and change political conditions34Camnitzer, L. 2007. Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation. Austin: University of Texas Press; pp. 18. I am not particularly convinced by art’s capacity to “change political conditions”. What I think art is most productive at, at least at the level of politics and criticism, is perhaps reorienting the status of our tools of interpretation. I am guided here by Frank B. Wilderson III’s position in his essay Grammar & Ghosts: The Performative Limits Of African Freedom, where he reformulates this problem as thus: art is less “the very essence of” structural change but rather “an accompaniment to it” (2009:121). Additionally, Samo Tomsic provides a useful reading of Marx’s famous formulation of the theory/praxis conundrum in his 11th thesis on Feuerbach, “‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’”. He writes, “Marx ’s final thesis in fact questions the dichotomy between thinking and action and conditions the actual change of the world with the change of the form of interpretation, thereby articulating a demand for a new form of philosophy that would account for the change” (2015: 94). See Wilderson, B. 2009. Grammar & Ghosts: The Performative Limits Of African Freedom, in Theatre Survey 50:1; 119-125; Tomsic, S. 2015. The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan. London and New York: Verso.”, or at best illuminate what Nelly Richards describes as a “certain discordance in the formulation of the relationship between art and society35Richard, A Border Citation, pp. 30. ”.