Sunday, February 27, 2011

Lost Questions, forgotten answers

Been browsing through old texts of mine, in preparation for a new text on ruins (yet another). Amongst old texts and even jotted down dreams and lists of notes for talks I found these answers to questions that I have absolutely no memory of ever answering. I guess from the heading  they are for one of the magazines produced for Documenta 12. I kind of like my first answer, and wonder why my second answer feels angry (?). By the third I seem to have given up.


Multitudes / documenta 12.
Andreas Angelidakis

Is modernity (y)our aftermath?
For D12, modernity haunts our common planetary horizon like a zombie,
caught between death and life. How do you feel about modernity's fate
with respect to its universalism qua totalitarism/antitotalitarism
refrain: nostalgic, compromised, critical, terrified or still yearning
for postmodernity? In light of your participation/non-participatio
n in D12, how do you wake up from post/modernity's night of the living
dead?

The trick is to keep sleeping, never wake up. Modernism is of course terrified and compromised and nostalgic and these are not modern times. The Myspace generation doesn’t have time for ideals or big concepts or long texts and boring intellectuals who publish magazines and design buildings and worry about whether god is in the details or less is more or less. They want to inhabit images and listen to the past and look at patterns and have many friends that they never interact with, and they don’t like to speak on the phone because it is too direct and too immediate. They like postmodernism because it is 80’s and it reminds them of shopping malls and television.


Is bare life your apocalyptic political dimension?
If bare life deals with that part of our existence from which no
measure of security will ever protect us, how do you feel in your real
life with regard to your participation/non-participation in D12?
Tortured, lyrical or even ecstatic? Is the concentration camp a useful
paradigm for you? How can bare life be experienced by an audience?
(Did you ever read Agamben in a state of exception? Crying or
laughing?)

What is this question. Bare life is terrible and the audience always has their bare life to live, and it is stupid and torturing for everybody. But how can you consider your life in regards to an art exhibition, it would be the most pathetic thing to do.  But then exhibitions are important, especially if you are not part of them and you wished you were, and then you are in the next one and it is all crap anyway. And buildings take so much time and you loose yourself in the process. There should be a way to avoid all process, to have instant result, instant failure and never wait. God is Speed.


What is to be done after the D12 Bildung programme?
Will your participation/non-participation help you not to feel lost
between the devil (didacticism, academia) and the deep blue
sea(commodity fetishism)? Did reading Schiller make you feel romantic?
Have you walked through Habermas's public sphere? Are you sharing
Rancière's distribution of the sensible? Would you still prefer to fly
with Deleuze & Guattari?
Develop as you wish, with or without reading
list.


It’s up to you. Everything could be done, and this could still be a forgettable experience. Or you could change your life. For me answering these questions was a slightly clarifying experience. I just got out of the tub, am bored in a hotel in Geneva, have to design stuff and these questions feel far away and also close.

1 comment:

vassilika said...

You finally gave up because you was invited to answer to silly questions..i really dislike the pseudo-intellectual personna that some guys use to inforce their pathetic ego!