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| Tilted Arc, Richard Serra, 1981, sculpture, steel, New York City (destroyed). Photo 1985 David Aschkenas. |
When Thomas Elsaesser delivered a lecture in Athens called Walter Benjamin, Global Cities and Living With Asymmetries during the Biennial before it closed with the party in
2011, I left there wondering why no one is looking at
the heated cultural climate in the UK and what the heck asymmetries meant. The olympics had a cultural passivity which revisited me back to Elessers overall rift in his lecture which i will discuss at the end of this.
He mentioned ‘a symmetric, antagonistic mutuality’ in Athens – a suggestion to the current crisis where there is a relationship between debt and guilt, debt and community, debt and obligation to founding a community.He described the city as being Linear, where you are living with disequilibrium. It strikes me now, where else to give this lecture than Athens but also whats happened to us talking about our political climate here and how it effects site specificity in art?
Elesser started to look at the history of cinema as the movement of speed and how this related to labour, war, and industrialization as core parts of the last 20th century in regenerating and terrorising the city. He suggested that this means cinema is predatory in these fast locations which mimics a form of attention but also trains a different form of perception . He describes cinema first uses: surveillance and military, science and medicine, censoring and monitoring and sensory motor co-ordination and now convenience capitalism. These uses also seems relevant to all forms of art and why it has changed rapidly but can create fringes on the edge of the art world and the streets.
He mentioned ‘a symmetric, antagonistic mutuality’ in Athens – a suggestion to the current crisis where there is a relationship between debt and guilt, debt and community, debt and obligation to founding a community.He described the city as being Linear, where you are living with disequilibrium. It strikes me now, where else to give this lecture than Athens but also whats happened to us talking about our political climate here and how it effects site specificity in art?
Elesser started to look at the history of cinema as the movement of speed and how this related to labour, war, and industrialization as core parts of the last 20th century in regenerating and terrorising the city. He suggested that this means cinema is predatory in these fast locations which mimics a form of attention but also trains a different form of perception . He describes cinema first uses: surveillance and military, science and medicine, censoring and monitoring and sensory motor co-ordination and now convenience capitalism. These uses also seems relevant to all forms of art and why it has changed rapidly but can create fringes on the edge of the art world and the streets.
Then he unconvincingly, in parts, started to discuss street activism from 1980-present where struggle and feeling is ‘...over-adapted to the unpredictable in the flow of events, the rapper inhabits the non-place of urban developments’ and on my notes, I really did scribble ‘what?’ Next he discussed the 20th century’s ‘demos’ where he thought the manifestation of ‘left’ or ‘right’ was still a linear type of narrative. This left or right can be also non-zone passage ways with the square in the street, the square doesn’t give you a direction to move around to other parts of the city. I started to question what the square and street represents now, demos, occupation, force...
In our cultural and political climate Elesser started to discuss the politics of mimicry and make believe. He referenced Derrida Force of Law: the Mystical Foundations of Authority specifically his idea of auto-immunity, however Elesser relates this to a new form of occupation. The ‘riots’ that hit off in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham Elesser described as a occupation of no motives, where this new occupation is a manifestation of a presence with no claims, no specific demands to ask – this is what distinguishes the street of 68 from the streets of 2012. Perhaps this is the new politics of space and demonstration?
This was a update from After olympics party (which i accidently deleted on here from the 15th August) Here is the article written by James Harkin: Why not turn the riots into a spectacle? 7th November 2011
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