----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- hi again! i'm glad that renate picked up on failure and its relations to collaboration. i'm quite interested in failure right now, especially how it's recently been taken up in queer theoretical works like jack halberstam's "the queer art of failure." halberstam argues that failure is a crucial component of queer aesthetics, since queers having been failing to conform / adhere to various normalizing impulses for quite some time. halberstam describes failure as a style, a way of life, for queers. here, queer failure is about realizing the potential and other possibilities that open when one doesn't attempt to align with standardized / mainstream notions of success.
being attuned to this kind of failure seems rather crucial when collaborating because failure is always occurring. the collaborative process takes its twists, turns, bumps, diversions, and embracing those moments of failure during the collaborative process is what pushes the work further (for me, at least). in the mask-making workshops i've led, the moments of failure have been powerful learning experiences that help me continue to develop these workshops, almost more so than when the workshop goes perfectly (but perfectly has never really happened, of course). i guess what i'm getting at here is that it's really worth embracing those moments of collaborative failure, even if they're painful and difficult. as for the issues of aloneness vs collaboration that ana and renate have brought up, it seems like these two are never really completely detached. the longer i am a practicing artist, the more and more i fully realize just how collaborative art-making is, even if the project isn't explicitly collaborative--from receiving critique and feedback, material help / support, finding exhibition sites...the list can go on and on. even during a collaborative workshop, for example, the creative constraints mentioned previously could be thought of as individualized parts that an artist has pre-determined before the collaborative process begins, so you have both aspects at work here. i'm not that interested in debating whether collaboration or working alone is "natural" or not; we all come to that through our specific social and cultural situatedness. i see no problem with an artist withdrawing to work alone; i enjoy thinking of that gesture as a collaboratively antagonistic relation to sociality. johannes, thanks for your message and questions! i'm really drawn to the mask as an artist because it resides on a blurry boundary between practical use and a more utopic/transformative demand: the mask can aid in practically cloaking oneself from a variety of surveillance devices, but the mask in protest today--from anonymous and black blocs to pussy riot solidarity protests and the zapatistas--is also about positive collective transformation. on this front, the mask is a utopic refusal to be normatively legible, to be represented by the state...there is a commonizing impulse at work with the mask. i see it as a kind of aesthetic, creative, performative exodus that attempts to imagine an exit out of the current socio-political situation. in this sense, i find theoretical work on opacity by philsophers like edouard glissant and nicholas de villier incredibly compelling and useful. their writing insists on a kind of ontological/ethical/politica/creative opacity at the individual and relational levels...and in the midst of global, obsessive drives to standardize how human presence is calculated, parsed, and interpreted by technologies like biometrics and gps, theories of opacity seem so incredibly important and highly needed. also, i'm deeply influenced and moved by much transgender scholarship on the admission and regulation of gender by biometrics and surveillance technologies. work by dean spade and toby beauchamp really expose the violence transgender people encounter with reductive approaches to identity, like biometrics. dean spade has a powerful conception of critical trans resistance that focuses on the idea of transformative justice that is, again, more utopic and impractical, such as prison abolition. but taking such a stance is critical, and i hope the masks i am collectively developing in these workshops are gesturing toward such transformative visions. but you are right, johannes, you can't wear this mask when you're at a border checkpoint--a location where you would absolutely want to. so as an artwork, it's important for the mask workshops to help everyone involved envision and construct a utopic proposition that blurs the relations of practicalities and utopic--perhaps "impossible"--demands. you might think of something like theatre of the oppressed workshops here as a correlation. the interventions we perform are more speculative and creative--but they are certainly real, public, and create tangible disturbances. there are several groups of people / organizations that i want to do these workshops with, and undocumented persons are important to include. but such things take time, as i begin by developing relationships with people instead of just cold-calling them about a workshop. one element of this workshop that has actually been a struggle is color! the masks are always 1 solid color (those creative constraints, again!). but if the masks are about getting out of the normative traps of identity by collectivizing, using colors like black, yellow, and white become troublesome because the masks can be reduced to blackface, yellowface, whiteface. this is an on-going issue that is always addressed in the workshops, and we try to decide on color collectively. but i am still searching for a creative constraint that can offer a way to work with color sustainably, throughout many workshops. _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
