spring in Vienna I (Los Angeles)

home sick ness
attacked me
today
out of the
blue sky
of spring
spring in Vienna
(who wrote this song?)

like an aftershock
of that earthquake
yesterday in the
middle of the
night that scared
me to
death

but spring in Vienna
(is it from a movie?)
when people
crawl out of
their houses
streets are
filled again
with these
people on chairs
at tables
spring
in Vienna
('Dance with the Emperor, ' that movie)

after months
of cold and dark
winter
singing birds and
people at tables
drinking coffee
sometimes beer or
white wine spritzers
drinking, laughing outside
spring in Vienna
(was made in 1941).

how to confuse ghosts

the blending of cultures starts when you see doublegangers; of people you know, but they appear in the wrong setting, on the other continent, in that other city. first signs of homesickness? I am not sure. more the accepting of your new surroundings, circumstances, and you have to reassure you that even this city can feel like home, like the known, the usual, the common.
but sometimes you run into ghosts, actually real people, that you don't expect here and who behave exactly like in this other city, in this particular scene that you know oh so well and that you wanted to escape. what to do? play the game, exactly how you used to because you know it's just a ghost and it will disappear in a second? ignore them? talk English to them (as you know, or you hope this alters not only your timbre but also what you say)? say something completely unexpected (works only if you are a very spontaneous person)? pick your nose (always a good one)?
I opted for the first and felt angry and weird for the rest of the day. How to confuse these ghosts? How can you scare them away?

reclaim "under construction"

As I am not joking in the headline/blog description and really have to figure out in which direction this blog should go - I post something that I did for another one, about a little show that I just did as part of the collective "reclamation".

notes on labor, process and repetition

02/18/10

While working on customizing all the plastic bottles we collected for the tube system, cutting plastic bags into little biscuits, binding loops together and making rope with Leonardo da Vinci’s ropemaker (an original, almost blasting our budget), we thought about the character of repetitive work. After spending hours and hours on customizing, fabricating and assembling, we went home, slept, came back and did the same for hours and hours. I spoke to one of my teachers about that I feel like doing a nightshift at an assembly line and she was interested as well as amused. Who would have thought that the process of making art could feel so unglamorous, so free of a manifestation of romantic ideas about vocation, inspiration and wild and highly gestural outbreaks of creativity?

It was much more about figuring out how to transform things into something different, with the help of what we could get in a short amount of time at low expenses, something recycled (and recyclable) and then just do basically the same transformational process over and over with our hands, our fingers, cutting, binding, fixing. However the repetitiveness of that process made us think, again, about the meditative quality of this type of work. Something that you do with your hands over and over, turns you into a machine embodying the hand movements that have to be applied. Your body becomes a machine or at least the extension of a machine. Nobody would regard work at the assembly line though as something shaped like a ritual that can transcend a mode of being that is calm, quiet and meditative. Is it the fact that being part of an assembly line process means that one is only a small part in a larger concept that is not transparent but highly dependent what comes before and after? Or is it the fact that your workpace is dictated by the machine and not by yourself? Is it just the notion of work–or something clearly declared as work–in contrast to a necessity that makes the difference? Or is it the spatial layout itself that is not at all designed to lead the way to “find” yourself?

(There are probably tons of stories about how people’s will and creativity is broken through working in a plant at an assembly line – One of German writer Hermann Hesse novels is titled “Unterm Rad / Under the wheel” from 1903 and this expression, I think, frames it quite well – a visual reference would be Charlie Chaplin ‘s “Modern Times,” 1936, the famous scene where he gets caught in these big cogwheels.)

The assembly line and its machines dictate the workpace, they are alienating the workers form the actual process of creating something through a simple spatial division, and thereby they also prevent the workers form gathering together (… probably the Marxist point of argumentation but I can’t help thinking it…..). What would be the counterpart? Or an example of repetitive work that leads to a state of meditation, of “emptying out” yourself. I think about religious and sacred rituals that involve singing, praying and making music and I think about women doing work at home, sitting around a table in big cercles (sic!) and knitting, crocheting, lacemaking, felting or whatever (you get the picture), and singing and … chatting. So not so meditative as well – it turns out to be about communication, about having a space exclusively for women that allows them to exchange information, where they dictate themselves what is done, how and when. A space that was later replaced by department stores, for a certain class, of course.

I can’t help thinking about the gender implications our work has/had: we were in between or doing both, construction work and handicraft, the drafts as well as the fine mechanics. I had weird (for me who never liked knitting and crocheting and who doesn’t want to change her mind because all of a sudden it’s “right” and good and hip to reappropriate these techniques or to do as much as possible yourself!!) fantasies about knitting a vest with these plastic bag threads.

So these hours and hours of unusual manual labor lead me more to a close examination of the here and now and its conditions and context than bringing me to state of mind with a transcendental possibility. (This is my very personal field report and Kyoung and I had different opinions on that!!). Maybe because I agree with Karl Marx again or at least I am sceptic about any religious implications that just lead to a concealment of the actual conditions of society. On the other hand he saw everything through the lense of class oppression and this is a very limiting stance … still he and Friedrich Engels imagined a society without work (or at least this type of work that puts one “under the wheel”) where everyone is free to educate one’s mind and as little as Marx had women in mind, there is really wonderful book by Engels where he tackles the “problem” titled “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,” 1884.

So I am torn between longing for a transcendental experience that can be gained through meditation and asceticism and the desire to take action that can come out of an empty mind, but of a clear one tough. And before I get caught in my own notes I just state again that we did all kind of work and that we were performing engineers, and construction workers and this is precisely what I like about art, that it is a performance, a proposition, an idea to pass where all the “intervening steps” to quote Sol Lewitt, the “founder” of conceptual art, are “of interest”, the “scribbles, sketches, drawings, failed works, models, studies thoughts, conversations … those that show the thought process of the artist are sometimes more interesting than the final product.”

In this respect what we produced is: a dysfunctional system to water a garden – two layers – an inside and an outside – that were supposed to be connected – but even the planning of the connection was so difficult that now, as they are disconnected, it makes sense to me to leave them in that state. we are left with a very sculptural piping system, a ladder with an extension that stands on its own – as a formally as well as conceptually interesting piece of art – a beautiful garden in the backyard of the gallery and the question of what to do with this post-apocalyptic system. whatever we decide, for me it is clear that we have to adapt to the process and preserve an openness of the piece that was unpredicted and that will involve, again, manual labor to perform it.

Strike and Teach: remark

Streiken und Lehren

Was so viel heisst wie "Strike and Teach" (stimmt nicht ganz, aber die urgency, die das ganze so bekommt, gefällt mir besser).

So there's a strike at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (the University of Vienna joined in on thursday noon as I just learned). The school is occupied by its students, by students, by students and teachers. Against? Against the so-called Bologna-process that means the introduction of a three-phase model like that in the (not only United States) with bachelor–master–phd. Of course this does not only mean a change in terms of curricula but also involves the whole structuring and decision-making process of the universities which already changed into entities with partial legal capacity; senates were introduced, the students were forced back in every step of a possible decision making process be it the policies of a specific institute be it commission-work for hiring professors etc. ...

By now the b-m-p model has been introduced at almost every university in Austria. But this is an art school and this strike is apparently against a system that considers education as good that is consumable like everything else, something you can and should invest in because you speculate on the return on investment (ROI) and on further interest that pays back–here, again in the US, this is a bit contorted as you take a credit to invest in something that has to help you in the future to pay that off–still, we're talking economic terms, or even commercial terms as we would still be able to find economic theories that regard education as common good, as public good, that should neither become scarce nor unaffordable for certain parts of the population. Again: this is not so much about the fear expressed from the economic side that the bachelor degree could be completely useless in finding a job–or from the academic side where the bachelor degree is the horror-scenario of every distinguished institute proud of its prominent researchers; for this discussion is an old one. In the 1980ies they changed from phd to a master-phd model and everybody was in full commotion.

This is about the penetration of all areas of life with economic and commercial principles, with an ideology that considers everything consumable and wants every process to be rational and goal-oriented. So of course, there has to be a strike at art school; where else if not there? But these protests do not only reveal the ideology behind a re-structuring process but also the ideas that still infuse art schools in my opinion: making them into a weird hybrid between romanticism and modernism–or better showing how modernism was infused with romanticism and we ourselves still are? (sorry for my grammar and syntax) the romantic notion of the artist standing apart from bourgeois society mixed with the very modernist idea of the avant-garde artist who can and should change society through art, a somewhat schizophrenic situation.

So am I supporting a system by attending an art school that follows the b-m-model and where you have to pay a lot to enter it? Yes and no. (oh how will I get out of this??). I decided to study here because I got the opportunity (and I worked for that) and then because I wanted to stay. I chose this particular school in this country exactly because of the cultural differences, because of not being in Europe, because of a language that I understand but I don't have to learn specifically, because of the relative smallness of the school, of its variety of departments, that seemed to encourage a more interdisciplinary approach to studying, because of the fact that it was far off from a straight way into academia. And as far as some of these things "worked out" for me pretty well others didn't but that is obviously not the answer to the question.

I am aware of the fact that I am in a system that I don't support from an ideological point of view, not at all. I am aware that I am privileged by being able to afford it. And I am aware of this contradiction but I have to work with that (not live) and what is interesting now that I am here is: how to perform this system, what are the pockets, what are the holes that allow something else? "Self-organized learning," I declared to a friend (who is Austrian) the other day, but he reminded me of the fact that I entered a system that is precisely not about this possibility of studying/learning and that I shouldn't be so snotty. Point taken, I thought, but is it really a point?

There are these two approaches around all the time: you pay a lot so you have the power to demand a lot–intensity, experience, knowledge, practice–as a student you seemed to have bought the right to be turned into a well trained creative artist whether that is possible or not, into an artist who knows how to surf the art world. You evaluate your teachers and courses, and they have to deal with you in an open, encouraging manner (that I have never experienced in a school in Austria I must say and I am bit reluctant to believe that it is only for the money!!) as you are somehow in control. But this is a system that is organized tight, attendance lists, assignments, etc... rules that define exactly how you may or may not fail etc... so you can demand a lot if you play to their rules. Basta. difficult to introduce your work pace, to subvert assignments, just to do differently? yes, but still I think my questions are worth considering–and the concept I just talked about was a bit followed by what was called "studium irregulare" at the University of Vienna in former times (as I think it doesn't exist anymore..).

So what are the pockets, how to perform the system? (and the answers will look like questions to you but they are answers, believe me.) What are the strategies that could be used? collaborations, groups, every work is a collaborative, collective project, where the authorship gets blurred? refusal of any thoughts about a market driven audience? re-enactment of crucial periods/points in canonization of works, strategies, theories? and then deconstructing them? deconstructing school a little bit in every work that you do? re-appropriate learning? deterritorialize learning? through setting up not only one blog but a network of blogs where it is never clear how updated and accurate information is? Through just changing the classroom? Through setting everyone in a different physical state? Be annoyingly critical about the content, strategies etc. that are taught? Quote without referencing, displace without stating the origin and even less the end? Re-appropriation of the processual? Introduce a playfulness that is not hippie, not hipster, but fierce and loud? Adjust your voice so that nobody ever knows who is speaking and from where? Simply ignore things that are taught? And how am I doing this as a teacher? (that was unexpected, wasn't it?).

Still the stucture, the administration is formed by ideology at the same time it infuses th politics of its execution, of teaching and leraning. At my little art school, there are these boards and committees where students are involved like the senate, there student affairs office, and a couple of others but I don't have the slightest idea how they are really organized and how the decision making processes are executed when there are budget cuts, new teaching positions, new offices to be formed. there seems to be no space that is students' only run–no, maybe the courtyards between the buildings, there seem to be small patches that resist regulation, but still it's THE campus–no budget that is in students' hands only. And again this IS a small school, placed like a sattellite to this vast city.

About a month ago there were strikes at USC (university of southern california), at all its branches if I remember that correctly. Teachers demonstrated against budget cuts and had to convince their students of this cause. I don't know if they were successful, I think this term is not even appropriate.

Paralyse Stillstand Awe

the stages I went through when I just looked at my little blog and realized that my last entry was in march!!! Meine Herren, how could this happen? too much thinking about how to start it again, what to write and not sounding too: bemüht, insignificant, vain, shallow, complicated, theoretic, etc...
these are the stolpersteine (repeat that. after me.), the hurdles. and the design. I want an image like a drone.

I will fix that.

Am I

thinking about language in spatial categories? ja!
words in spatial settings? ja!
stories to tell? nein.
fiction? vielleicht.
modes of narration? ja.
masquerade? auch.
mockery? definitely.