The French Paradox

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La Vie en Rose de Anne Lise Coste /Tu m’Accompagneras à la plage de Valentine Schlegel

22/06-29/09/19 CRAC Sète

As the Summer draws to a close, I visited Sète’s CRAC which has a double entry. One by way of Anne Lise Coste’s painting project La Vie en Rose and the other by way of a Valentine Schlegel retrospective which recasts these objets de déco and these props as an artistic adventure.

I had the misfortune to go left and find myself dragged through a faux naïve reappropriation of painting in it’s forms and critical thinking in the form of instagram comments placed with hope of attracting followers. So what is it that makes me so dismissive of this work, is it the dishonesty? the political correctness? the technique or lack of? Well lets do some Anne Lise, pardon my French.

First room is decorated with a childish scrawls that are possibly a literal translation of the neon sharpie maquette made on the inside of an empty kebab box at 3h in the morning. These artist never sleep, always working. Between scrawls there is just enough information on Felipe Gomez Alonzo, to elude to Trumps desire to build a wall, dehumanise Latin American migrants and failure of America as the land of dreams. Luckily I can read English, unluckily, I don’t appreciate the cultural appropriation of foreign narratives in order to remind us of the migrant crisis while we pat ourselves on the back for being aware of what is happening in the colonies (the USA, you know what I mean) while simultaneously shaking our heads how cruel this other version of us is with the real other. What’s wrong with Flight to Egypt as a metaphor for our current reflection on migration. At least that would be both shocking and amusant, possibly creating the dialogue that social media defends, while it floods us with information and reduces our reactions to a heart.

Maybe I didn’t get the joke. The Berlin Wall, the west bank, the Peace Walls in Northern Ireland have at least given us some decent graffiti. They have attempted to engage with the public by communicating messages in an aesthetic manner with which people identify. Anne Lise Coste lacks the virtuosity that all the greats from New York to Amsterdam by way of Toulouse have shown us. She lacks the daring and the volume of pixodors and the install lacks the ampler of Katherina Grosse. There are also two benches in the room but they’re on the other wall and they will not interfere with the scrawls.

Next is the clin d’oeil to the space itself a square room filled ceiling to floor with childish paintings. Mummy’s private gallery on a giant freezer box. The paintings are rough and ready, stapled to the wall, a painted jacket here a cheap square frame there. The references are fast and easy Mondrian, the use of primary colours is deserving of a gold star, PLOUF, I saw Christian Marclay’s exhibition in the MACBA, it was very good, 0601138811, for those of you who aren’t franceophiles thats the artist’s phone number. These paintings are raw and direct produced out of disdain for the very thing they are, painting. This energy doesn’t break the wall, it lacks virtuosity, legerté and fundamentally meaning.

Perhaps the best thing about an exhibition on a fridge door is the cold beer waiting behind it. Here we have finger paintings with sticks the artist found by the side of the road. The sticks are all from the same tree and have been cut with knives. Yes they are more interesting than the stuttered single lined finger paintings. Where’s that beer, seriously, I am dying here.

Upstairs is a video from and of the Biascamamo family Montage et Pêche à la Traïne dans le Passé à Sète and the tent they lived in on the beach. It’s a far cry from their practices but it does remind one that being an artist is not simply a question of producing objects but a way of life. Valentine Schlegel is presented an artist through the costumes she designed, the models of chimneys she produced, the pottery she threw, the knives she owned and Christian Desse the students she had. Anne Lise Coste answers the formal question of painting with an intelligence that makes her naïvety with regards to painting insupportable (I do love a good support/surface joke). The disdain with which she treats the object and the lack of subjectivity in the action merely amplifies the daring and the subjectivity which Schlegel, the Biascamamo and Desse invest in their practices.

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Wallpaper

Wallpaper was the first choice of any consequence which I made. I must have been 12 or 13 when I choose it. Mum swallowed hard and bit her tongue. I saw from her face that I had made the wrong choice.

She had wanted me to choose the wallpaper for my bedroom, of course she had previously made a selection from which I could choose. The room, I had grown up in, had red and white vertical stripes and her selection reflected her previous choice and the bedsheets which were not under discussion. The sheets were white, red, black and dark green, some had stripes, others were monochrome and some even had large drawings. She was a teacher and this was a lesson. She wanted me to learn how to limit my choices and to live with the consequences of them.

What I chose was a pattern of vertical lines with a wide white stripe cut with a thin red one framed by a dark green stripe about half the white’s width repeated ad nauseam. Mum explained to me that this pattern created an optical illusion which could result in people feeling unwell. I understood what she was implying and that made me resolute in my decision. This wallpaper was the closest thing to Nirvana in the selection available to me, it disorientated people, It would I hoped, make them sick and it was what my parents neither liked, wanted nor understood. That was exactly what I wanted.

That wallpaper made me feel inebriated throughout my adolescence. Those walls became a monument to bourgeois defiance. To the dandy those walls simply slipped away opening the surfaces to the possibility of been something more than background. Maybe it was here in the faint dawn light where I became a painter.

I left that bedroom, that house and Ireland when I was 18. Since then I have slept and lived in many spaces and cases. This book is a selection of some of the beds where I have closed my eyes. Each time I wake I tell myself the story of those choices which have led to this bed on this morning and I know I am the actor but who’s the director in this story? Was I really free, competent and/or me to make those choices? Were they my decisions or am I just telling myself a story to get myself out of bed?

In the background there’s a greek chorus of birds singing, chirping, narrating.One day I will learn greek and figure out if this is a tragedy or a comedy. (Two feet on the boards enter stage centre)

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Macaroni and Cheese: the question of Europe as a State

Like a baguette out of the oven, warm, crisp, fresh and very French, Emmanuel Macron is a simple delight. He wants to make a new Europe, a Europe that is effective and able to act. However like a baguette his vision is blindly French with no place for soda bread or dunkel brot or Obwarzanki. The European State which he eludes to is a unitary Republic. That’s no easy sandwich to make and think this casse-croute may turn out to be more of a casse-tête.

Sovereignty means a population freely exercising its collective choices, on its territory. And having sovereignty means been able to act effectively. (Simms &Schade, 2018 after Macron, La Révolution)

The pit in which Macron wants to lay the foundations for the new temple are our identities and histories. Referring to Europe as having a population is to either embrace whole heartedly ethnic cleansing or déracinement (as practiced by the Soviets with their jewish and germanic populations) or to convert history into a commodity which can be alienated from populations.

This idea of sovereignty requires us to identify as European and part of a wide, disparate, multicultural population whom have diverging sometimes contradictory histories that are part of living memory. The idea of territory like that of bread, pain, pão, chleb, brat etc, is different not simply because of local traditions but as a result of the territory and the challenges it poses or posed and the solutions which best fit the populations which have chosen to live with them.

This brings us to the idea of choice, which act like a substitute for liberté. Bread is so much more complicated than the choice between a baguette and a flute? These populations which make up Europe, are they different because they live in different territories? Or are the territories different because of the people living in them? Fundamentally for us, why do people choose to be different?

The solution to building a unitary state can be found in a solid set of values around which the population and the territory can be built. This has been the model of the République. Creating a collective identity from different ethnicities is not a new project, it was essential to the Soviets and to both the Austro-Hungarian and British empires, they all however seem to fall apart when the spoils of war ran out and the question of the future moved from the international scale to a more regional one. The French built theirs on the  idea of the Roman citizen taking responsibility for their destiny, assimilating or annihilating any populations, territories or cultures which stood in their way. The French Revolution and the period that followed are clear examples of how history can be written and rewritten to justify who we are. Britain, France and Germany have different names for this period, as the events which are not disputed are interpreted very differently.

Why do we need a European State? The traditional answers are integration and to overcome the perceived democratic deficit. Macron plays upon external threats, China, the USA and Russia as well migration and terrorism. This is a good strategy for framing a unitary, centralised state which needs to act swiftly and effectively across its territory. This was the mindset which dreamt up the fifth Republic. The problem being that such systems are incapable of dealing with the complexity of internal struggles within the system. This leads to the creation of alternative systems and more often than not, the alienation of the population from the state itself. If Macron’s own rise to power isn’t proof enough of that, it is simply that you do not wish to read this narrative.

Politics has moved beyond the political party, into a world where citizens are/feel powerless to redefine their roles beyond consumers of social media and reality TV. Politics has become part of this entertainment, built from ongoing stream of superficial narratives whose values are measured in clicks and sponsorship. This question of sovereignty can only be asked once we understand what citizenship is? Why build a European state if we are just to become subjects in someone else’s story.

Not everyone wants the same sandwich and few of us want the same sandwich everyday.

An alternative exists, it is real and it has potential. The multipolar theories put forward at the end of history, have been used by Lula in Brazil, effectively counterbalancing US influence in South America and the developed world’s influence in the southern hemisphere. Europe doesn’t need a unified state but citizens who identify with it and understand the power of difference. The power to create a society of coexistence which breeds innovation and diminishes alienation. This multipolar position operating on international, national, regional, corporate, NGO, universities and citizen levels is more than enough to stand up to, deal with and challenge the barbarians at the gates.

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How do we build our awareness of the world?

The answer is quite simple our senses which we educate. Abstract thought allows us to understand the world beyond our immediate senses i.e. Things we have not seen touch, tasted smelled nor heard. This is where the medium comes into play. Media conveys sensory experiences which I may not have been experienced personally.

That is a nice way of describing contemporary art, however it describes far more. Those things which we call the media are extensions of our senses which allow us to create an abstract image of the world beyond that which we have experienced. Traditionally at least in Europe the media have been integrated into our perception of the world with the everyday activities such as reading the newspaper, listening to or watching, documentaries and history as a school subject have allowed people to form opinions of things which are beyond their experienced world. At the moment in Europe and North America we are questioning social media whose independence and participation gave it credibility, popular support and a following. However the advent of ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’ and general gossip have created questions around the credibility of social media and the algorithms which automated searches use to produce user specific content which can reinforce misinformation.

The power of democracy is found in it’s ability to create consensus. Democracy does not make the best decisions but it makes decisions which generally the majority accepts. The internet created a commons where democratic ideas could find a new voice and social media is at the heart of this. Social media is the free speech of which 68 dreamt, everyone has a voice, everyone can be heard. But is anyone listening? They hear what they want to hear and the noise where human rights abuses in China, the use of teargas against protestors in France, kittens lip syncing to Beyoncé, Centre Pompidou’s latest exhibition, Messi’s goal last night, ‘I Can See Clearly Now’ by the Hot House Flowers and ‘Why Investing in Water is Essential’ are all on the same level. We have access to and are knowledgeable of more information but this information is unstructured and the complexity of our everyday decision trees prevents us from using this information in any possible way  which could be more effective than the application of superstition. Will boycotting Coke inhibit American Imperialism other than symbolically?

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Cock Size

Economists traditionally use Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to measure economic progress. If GDP is rising, the economy is good and the nation is moving forward. If GDP is falling, the economy is in trouble and the nation is losing ground. From a strictly numerical perspective, GDP provides an easy-to-follow indicator of economic health. From the perspective of a citizen living with the day-to-day realities of life, GDP can be rather misleading.

Now imagine GDP means cock size, how relevant is that to understanding a healthy economy.

Investopedia. Does High GDP Mean Economic Prosperity? http://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/genuine-progress-indicator-gpi.asp#ixzz4YsqGgGtA Follow us: Investopedia on Facebook

[lostchav-blog]

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IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM

Criticism gets a bad name as hindsight defeatism and finger pointing negativism. It involves defining a issue and then taking it apart in terms of history, actors, cultures or whatever narrative suits the issue. It’s a means of separating acts from motivations and making sense of things. This ‘making sense’ is the attribution of meaning and the contextualisation of it in the present. In other words criticism is a process of creating new meaning.

The problem solution model while associated with positive thinking can be perverse when things stop making sense. Finding a solution to a problem allows one to move beyond the problem in the present but because one has failed to understand how the problem has arisen, it will reappear perhaps in a different form. Recent elections have produced some ridiculous episodes of this type of thinking Russian hacking led to Donald Trumps election when the weakness of the democratic candidate should be investigated. French political parties are also involved in this thinking believing they need to unite in the face of rising extreme right when they need to understand why people are attracted to the extreme right.

At this point in time, criticism is necessary to understand our society’s relationship to the economy. This problem solution dynamic just allows us to move from one crisis to another. The economy is not an absolute but a system for the distribution of resources to the members of society. The biggest danger to an economy is alienation because that is the failure of the system to distribute the necessary resources either physically, psychologically or potentially to it’s members.

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Choice isn’t Freedom

American TV shows have a tendency to reduce freedom to choice. Choice can be a good example of freedom but it is not a replacement for it. Freedom is both dangerous and daunting, it is a sphere of action where one can articulate one’s potential and possibilities. These can range from annunciation of a perception to the realisation of an object.

However the possibility to buy a coke isn’t freedom. Here in exile on the Frontiera Agricola, choice is something I would kill for. I suddenly understand why Americans can get so confused, without the trappings of civilisation, or the objects with which I can identify, freedom looses it’s meaning. What I would do for a tea pot in the morning and a cool night and a smokey single malt.

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Automation

We talk about the rise of robots what do we mean by this. Automation takes away jobs and I can make our lives easier. However do we really want to be doing these jobs? What should we be doing with our lives? Nobody questions the logic behind a kettle or toaster and the role they play in creating unemployment. Their current absence in my life has made me lose time which could be spent doing things which I find more meaningful.

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Deleuze / Gautary

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Biting the Hand that Feeds You

Thatcherism didn’t teach people that greed is good nor did it teach people about charity, that they should decide what should be done through the allocation of the resources which they control. What Thatcherism did was create the conditions where this was the rational thing to do as self interested actor.

The problem is most selfish pricks think that they are the resources they control are spent on satisfying short term, easily definable in monetary terms desires as other larger desires are much harder to qualify and the satisfaction they afford is brief, dubious and unreliable. As anyone who has every tried to organise a threesome should know.

Then they asked these people who brought up to be selfish pricks whether or not they wanted to be in Europe. And guess what? Just because you can read the FT, doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a pickle and marmite sandwich, with a pint a scorcher of a day looking out from the shores of Brighton, thinking this is heaven who wants to eat frogs legs on black pumpernickel bread with beetroot jam! Why would Thatchers children do as they were told; decide what you want and go out and get it. This is what Britain is all about.

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Apologising

I thought about this opinion piece. Why not give them your narrative, as a child of Thatcher and simply explain where you came from.

The desire for upward mobility which can explain your parents divorce, your father being the product of this greed is good perspective, off in a mobile home in New Zealand covered in honey with native birds eating off him. Your mother is the reaction to these broken promises sticking to the  same contract patiently waiting for what she was promised and dreaming of yesteryear rather than tomorrow where she knew where her place was. Nan’s pickle sandwiches and in a cigarette stained front room.

Your education, there is so much to say about this. It’s like trying to eat healthy in Iceland. The first person narrative of that time and the world view it creates is extremely important to the Brexit vote.

Your jobs: putting together those crates and the incentive scheme, that was skewed in favour of the guy with the pile of chiselers. Working as a driver and how those jobs are just going to disappear. Working as a tradesman, what happened to that work, how was your attitude to work different to Eastern Europeans (I never talked to you as a person about this but what pride did you take in fitting kitchens).

The irony is that perhaps Europe allowed you to get a distance physically and through education and support with this past. However it taught you to be rational articulate your values here. (I would put local food security and measures adapted to local situation now that politicians can no longer blame Europe).

Britain in Europe does make sense for me nor my family. This can be your twist, the problem isn’t Europe but the elites which it empowers in Britain and to whom not only are we marginalised financially, physically, educationally, linguistically, culinarily but most importantly aspirationaly.

Do I need to apologies for the future I want to give to my children.

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Video Games

Our society is built upon the idea of tit for tat in a potentially infinite number of interactions. Put in other terms, we are reasonable because you never know what the future holds.

However, America’s obsession with the post-apocalypse within their popular fiction, Walking Dead, The 100, The Last Ship, proposes another vision for humanity and they are steadily working towards that vision. The difficult question is how we humans behave in a society without a future where there is no civilisation to guide interpersonal interaction.

The greatest source of data on this question is found in video games, specifically ones without predetermined end goals such as the grand theft auto series. I think this could be worth taking a look at.

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From Inside the Walls

The thing about walls is that they block the view. Once you’re behind them, you have to imagine what it’s like on the other side. As time goes by, imagining becomes more difficult and we become more reluctant to engage in it.

The problem with building walls as a deterrent against thieves assumes that thieves are merely opportunists or that there is a softer target. The result is people will build higher and higher walls and the would be thieves will either find means to scale these walls or become contractors specialised in walls or security.

So private walls are a metaphor to the problems confronted by collective decision making. Given Brexit, terrorism and Trump, there is an urgency not to find a solution but to understand the decision making that has driven people to create the world in which we are. Alienation leads to disenfranchisement and it is not a theoretical problem, it is Brexit, terrorism and Trump.

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Os Muros

In Brazil occupation define's property and  the question of the commons is still being fought. In Europe the commons have been divided up and sold off, Margret showed the way, turning the tenants of council flats into homeowners and then Tony turned the intangible commons into an artificial market converting the guilt of the colonial legacy into the purchasing of carbon credits.  On the Frontera Agricola, scarcity is yet to be felt and there are both physical and intangible objects which have yet to defined, categorised and owned.

Here in this small town of Colinas do Tocantins, I'm amazed at the amount of walls around both private properties and public institutions, even those in public housing build walls too. The main reason cited is security from thieves and kidnapping. The implications are that the community is unable to provide security to it’s members and that certain members have and others want what they do not have. As a result members invest less in the community as they need to invest in their own security. On the other hand they feel or are disenfranchised and engage in illegal activities such as larceny in order to fulfill their needs and realise their potential.

This is the American vision of the gated communities, here there isn’t even communities each home becomes a castle. In Europe, we created one large gated community, so that those within the community can share in and enjoy the commons such as the intangibles of liberté égalité and fraternité and the tangible ability to walk home without fear of being robbed, raped and murdered.

The current terrorist situation questions this whole vision. Bringing the existence of the commons into question and the role of the state. Isis use of Internet as a tool against our society questions our private use of this commons. How does one balance the enjoyment of the commons by the majority and the use of it by a minority to destroy these very commons? In as mundane a question as access to platforms and trains and the spontaneity which they afford us allowing the free movement of people to be a reality.

There are two simple answers in my opinion, increased security and the destruction of the commons or a serve restriction in their uses. This is a Caliphate with a different uniform and has the twofold cost of increasing taxation or decreasing public spending on other common goods and restricting our activities making life more difficult. The other option is attacking the question of alienation and trying to solve the problem of disenfranchisement within our societies. The problem with integration in Europe is not the periphery but the core which has underlying issues which have not been dealt with. What can we do about the people who believe their best option in life is to kill as many people as possible creating as much terror as possible before they themselves are killed realised from this world?Ｏｓ　Ｍｕｒｏｓ

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The Frontera Agricola in the Studio

Often residencies and trips indirectly influence the work but they are rarely meaningful in the place from whence I come, Europe. I want to change this with Colinas, the Frontera Agricola and Brazil.

This Frontera Agricola is on the edge of civilisation and is being exploited in order to maintain our economic system in Europe. Its existence and its relationship with Europe are similar to colonialism without the responsibility of civilisation. Colinas has been an Irish Mission for 40 years and part of an international network of marginalised communities who have been the subject of an Irish civilising project.

When I return to Europe I would like to do a series of studio talks in order to create a context for  the work. Colonialism, globalisation and the civilising mission are the paradigms, I would like to use to light the work and create a conversation about the meaning of these painted objects, I will be working on.

Colonialism is a duality of us and them. The centre is defined in opposition to a periphery. This periphery is a projection of the centre’s unconscious, it includes not only far off places but all who are marginalised and exists in the shadow of the centre. The centre expands its control through the concept of progress which is made possible through exploitation of the periphery. Exploitation in the form of goods and services are exchanged for the knowledge of how to use them, civilisation.

Globalisation is an a global interdependent economic system which encourages financialisation of economic activities in order to export costs and import profits. The effect is to centralise power into financial centres who thus control decisions through capital flows. The justification for this system is found in the peace that economic interdependence encourages in order to function efficiently. It is however violent when dealing with those who are involved in non financial economic activities. This is often confused with the democratic peace theory while it discourages interstate conflict, it does not encourage intrastate peace.

Civilising mission comes from the time of empire and the desire to homogenise territories. It is a fundamental part of exploitation because it aims to normalise behaviour. In colonialism it makes exploitation easier and justifies it morally and in globalisation it creates new markets by the expansion of the concept of centre and thus a threat to the system. The civilising mission can be a bridge between us and the other. The  various churches are also vectors of civilisation as is Europe, through their norming of behaviour they increase potential actors.

[chad-keveny]

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