i. WHAT DO YOU *DO*?
I am interested in the utility of the voice, locating the word “utility” in the Marxian sense:
“The utility of a thing makes it a use-value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use-value, something useful.”
My materials are language - or rather, my works are all about the materiality of language - the externality of the sign - its existence as external, audiovisual mark that cannot be domesticated within any set of symbolic relations. My art is discursive, in the sense that I prefer to think of my identifications with myself as an “artist” not in terms of abstract generalizations, but as someone who produces discourse.
If I always have to make art through my ego rationalizations, I am only comfortable if they become part of the process and the “material” of the work, rather than something that exists as the “Other” of language, an externalized, centered, thing from which my art “abstracts from”. The latter approach - the notion that there’s a specificity of my constitution that is to be translated into a general language - leaves me feeling empty.
As far as being an artist goes, I am always still being constituted by acts of translation - I don’t mean to say that I am in a ‘premature’ state of awareness at this stage in my practice - But when I make art I always feel that I “arrive” prematurely - Who is this “I” I am speaking of?
ii: BLIND WORKBOOK
My primary concern this semester is creating discursive spaces within the spectacle in which I can explore the obscene in relation to this subject. I operate between a performance and video practice, documented through writing - I see no difference between my art practice and my writing this as both are centered around the practice of “performing” a mode of textuality for documentation, as I am documenting now - is my writing this (even if one never reads it) a performance? Or does this only become a performance only when I videotape this? My answer is a double affirmative: Yes, and yes.
Personally, I have no desire to subject anyone to obscenity - even if that were my intention it couldn’t be done because such an object would ultimately be a product of ego rationalizations. I see this way as the ‘easy way out’ insofar that I speak of the ego as a falsifying agency - under any structure or idealism mediated through it, the obscene either neutralizes or cancels itself out (a disorienting effect which I experienced in the midst of disseminating work #5). The specific idea I have of what constitutes an obscene gesture is an act of indicating something that overdetermines my experience of language - the process of developing a piece always begins with an image or fantasy that presents itself as “barred” from reality - Intuitively, this means capturing moments in which I have an obsessive investment in some abstract phantasmagorical object (see work 3) - I feel my work is at its most honest not when I manage to successfully translate these objects to practice, but when it communicates my attachment to it - my fetishism, my word lust, my art is an affirmative yes, I do hold myself responsible for my obsession, and yes, I know I am not obsessed with words themselves, but the act of writing. How could I possibly anticipate a reader, a ‘contingent presence’? You, who are reading this, but at the same time, reads this. I can never resolve this performative excess - This is I am primarily a performer regardless of the medium I use, since performance is always self-implicating, even in is conveyed as a form of self-effacement, the artist as the medium, the text as my body. If this document, this archive in which words become properly “externalized” from me, of what use would they be to me, unless they always-already exist in the past? Does this absence constitute or precede me - is it my Origin, the ‘center’ of me, which I infantilize in order to determine what is ‘inside’ me - in order to communicate the possibility of an absence?
If you are someone who maintains there that there is no way to ‘know’ the constituencies of consciousness since the best we can do is ‘speak’ of a subconscious,or if you simply don’t “believe” in a subconscious - We’ll have to agree to disagree there. I would think you’re repressing something you’ve always been doing, In dreams, unarticulated patterns in the “bodiness” of text that you refuse to account for, and understandably so - how could “you” - insofar that I am not fully accepting the implications of Man as a discursive product - believe in an essence of thin air?
Yet there is an opposite of thin air - a vacuum, and various other states that exist in between airiness and vacuum. Isn’t textuality always trapped in this ‘in-between-ness’, moving back and forth towards Speech and its Other?
Something I’ve always felt central to what I do is tarrying with objects from dreams and unconscious fixations, though I don’t identify as a surrealist. In my practice this year, I have made a conscious decision to avoid representing the unconscious as an agency within an otherworldly, timeless totality - That approach has always felt disingenuous to me because I can always revisit something I’ve made, and add meaning to it in retrospect - I’d like my work to be about the experience of obscenity-production, not a production of obscene objects that in turn serve as a hermeneutical symbol that suggests the possibility of a resolution of obscenity within a context conveyed within “body/context/narrative x”. It would be too easy to say that I am filming myself masturbating (Work #5) because I am interested in a fixed meaning in which the act of masturbation occurs - I regard this rationalization - “calling something art” (in that I believe that an artist MUST do this) - as a repression of the obscene. My writing has to be grounded in my work because I regard the “textuality” of being the only possibly framing device for the obscene.
Looking back at the works I produced in the first half of 2012, I’ve realized that most of what I do, consciously or not, revolves around an attempt to diagram a logic where an element of the work/word within a discursive structure that analogizes the patterns of the very structure that contains it, mediating both the exteriority/interiority of the wor(k/d). How would I know whether something I made worked?
This is me speaking: “It works if it is obscene.”
To me, an obscene gesture happens when I frame a moment that collapses the boundaries between agency and structure. This always occurs through artificial divisions - Compartmentalizing my time, putting some distance between myself and what is specifically “artful” of my existence, distancing my conscience and my impulses - all this has allowed me to gain some insight to the condition in which I can never be fully aware of these boundaries at any given moment (though this awareness is contingent to the moment). If this is a stream of consciousness, is the boundary that contains it a dam, a sieve, or a hole?
I have identified, through my practice as a writer, two modus operandis in which I function:
a.) An exploration of Obscene as something objectifying, in a sense that it indicates something which structures subjective agency - such as the oppressive mechanisms of desire, or imaginary identification within a Big Other. The works I made centered around this strategy feels centered around the statement that I cannot say anything without designating my own state of unfreedom (see works 1, 4, 6). In order to take control of this, I provisionally dub this M.O. a “Blind” method, insofar that in call it it that, I am retroactively intefere with the primacy of Belief, and constructing an illusionary Other.
b.) The obscene as something that which has a life of its own within the structures that fail to accommodate it - an Other of language within language, that cannot be subsumed in the logic that would tame it (works 2, 3, 5) - I find this approach more problematic, as far as articulating the object my practice goes, as I’m not sure if one could tell the difference between obscene and the sublime within this scheme. In this case I am figuratively gesturing to an Other of Language BEFORE language, in the sense that I am pointing out a Real Hallucination. I call this my “Paranoiac” method, as naming it something tames the hallucination - symbolizing it as a vacuousness in the totality of symbolic reality.
I see no distinction between art and life, though I am aware that in order to produce art I have to make this distinction, both in the sense of a temporal and spatial separation - I have to divide my time in which I am performing the artist, and the performance of other tasks-at-hand. Here there is a split between my being and meaning this - on one hand, I misrecognize the in-between-states of the temporal divide which structures both the limits and discursive parameters of my art. This conflation - intentional or otherwise - is necessary in order for me to project my word at the target, the proverbial “right place at the right time”. What I aim aiming towards is a force of writing that is impossible when read as a singular, timeless totality in so far that the target of the projections are always simultaneously intuitive and structured.
Performing the blind and paranoiac artist is my way of pointing towards an obscenity in what we take for granted as ‘malleable’ in language use - A superego, or ideology in language.
Within both approaches A and B, the object I try to represent remains the same - What I am concerned with is the excess materiality of the signifier, an obscene presence, which, in my research, is located in works that deconstructs the teleological illusion of successful communication. Lacan deconstructs the goal of successful communication (which, to him, can only remain virtual) in his seminars on the Purloined Letter, illustrating the curious phenomena when the contingent locality where the signifier resides is misrecognized as a space of the “signified” (i.e. the signifier in its “destination”). You could summarize it as a tautology - The letter always arrives at its destination because its destination is wherever it arrives.
My thesis is this: Within the positivist, capitalist milieu, the Letter, insofar that it is always a state of production misrecognized as a product, is always ideological, since what it communicates is the primacy of Belief, as it communicates the logic of “What is said is always said in the Master’s terms, since the Master terms are whatever is being said.”
In talking about his practice, Jasper Johns was particularly adapt at bringing this tautological silliness into play:
(Fool’s House, Comic from Carbon Marrow #2)
When Johns installed doors on the compartments containing body parts arranged over a Target painting, he is suggesting the impossibility of you ever “reading” the work as a totality, though he is interested in the work as a totality - as an external “thing” that is always read. I find Johns’s both sublime and obscene, since, as discursive products, they exist in a state of being unable to not mean (this inability, framed as ‘art’, being the works discursive utility).
Consider the Obscene in the case of Target with Plaster Casts (1955). The obscene must be differentiated from the sublime - it is not a representation of what exceeds the product’s ability to communicate, but rather, the decisions in which one chooses colors, symbols, layout contingent to the obscene material dimension that disrupts the illusion of an absolutely “free use” of language. Consider how easily T.W.P.C. can be censored because of the door - someone could demand that certain doors - the plaster cast of the penis - to be closed, thus sexualizing the material while desexualizing John’s aim, which is always involved in a reading of your act of ‘seeing’. You may censor a portion of the work, made irrelevant through John’s taxonomical arrangement of the material, which desexualizes our apprehension of the metaphorical - Your perception of the penis both as a body part, and a representation of that body part are framed.
Here’s an analogy to further shed light over the silliness and profundity in John’s decision to include doors on the painting - let’s suppose you have experienced some trauma revolving around a specific body part - Let’s say, you lost your nose in an accident with a buzzsaw, and the sight of the nose cast was what offended you. Wouldn’t the fact that there is door to the compartment containing the cast just as meaningful to you? How does Johns indicate this seemingly phantasmagoric state in which a penis become interchangeable with a nose? As far as compartments frame a taxonomical imperative - a “Body”, and the reduction of the taxonomical to the obscene materiality of its divisions - a “Body-ness”, doesn’t John’s work always contingently succeed in pointing out you are stuck between the choice of repression, or a blindness to the object-hood of his symbols?
What Johns achieved the combination of sculptural and formal painting is something which lends easily to performance (since Johns is an artist who always deals with the “performance” of looking at some level). The phantasmagoric state of the textual, obscene image has been temporalized by an artist no less than Bruce Naumen, who references Johns’s Painting and Two Balls at least three times in his body of work, demonstrating three different states of “textuality” in the Male testes:
Two Balls Between the Floor and Ceiling with Changing Rhythms (1967-68, 10 min, b&w, sound, 16 mm film on video), Naumen spatializes the object/metaphor, narrativizing the performativity of the gaze. This is further developed in Bouncing Balls (1969, 9 min, b&w, silent, 16 mm film on video). How this work “frames” itself as a performance depends on your decision in whether to see the hand that moves the testicles up and down in the video as the subject of his performance (the significance being in his act of indication) or that that the hand is something, by virtue of being connected to a body off camera, literally indicates itself a “thing with balls”, of which you’re only seeing partially - In projecting these recordings in slow motion, highlighting the materiality of the frame, Naumen highlights the dilemmas of the gaze: As something that exists as archive, are the balls to be seen as real balls, or symbols? Is what you are watching obscene in the sense that the slow movement of the hands communicates the materiality of the frame, or because of the symbolic currency Naumen’s balls carry? Is it not obscene because it is ‘just a symbol’ created by the artist, who made a purely taxonomical decision in the choice of using balls, or because Naumen anticipates you as a viewer who thinks there is nothing inherently shocking about revealing a “real” penis anyway? Such overdeterminations between intent/ structure will persist as far as the viewer is always implicated within the work, regardless of what facet of the artist’s experience are repressed and/or willfully ignored when he sees Balls. Ditto with Black Balls (1969, 8 min, b&w, silent, 16 mm film on video) in which Naumen paints his balls black - is it an act of marking (in the sense that the performance is archival) or does the performance hinge on recording an act of painting? Like the doors on John’s Target with Plaster Casts, does Naumen mark the possibility of the obscene, or record the obscenity of the mark?
iii. REVERSE ENGINEERING MY INABILITY TO BE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CARTOONIST
“If we suppose with Marx that in bourgeois society labour power has become a commodity in which labour is consequently reified, then the expression ‘hobby’ amounts to a paradox: that human condition which sees itself as the opposite of reification, the oasis of unmediated life within a completely mediated total system, has itself been reified just like the rigid distinction between labour and free time. The latter is a continuation of the forms of profit-oriented social life.”
- Adorno, Culture Industries
I started drawing as a hobbyist. While I was developing a zine practice, I had the vague idea that I would ‘draw from the subconscious’ - It was a way of doing autobiography without ‘revealing too much’ - Looking back at the comics I produced, I always felt I revealed too much anyway, not because I still subscribed to the naive belief that I was channeling incestuous pure, latent content, but that I was revealing the points at which I was the most blind to my constitution as a gentrified, chinese-Malaysian subject.
Eventually I grew to appreciate this ‘nakedness’, and by the last issue of Carbon Marrow I produced, the editing became part of the work itself, the way words in Basquiat’s pictures become ‘painterly’ when crossed-out (Above: Pages from Carbon Marrow #3 - Drawn 2005, Crossed out in 2010)
By intervening with the original art, I meant to emphasize the flatness of the medium without disguising its appearance as something produced/consumed) As far as articulating why I would feel guilty about editing myself goes, I have no idea, since I ‘intended’ the edits anyway, by deciding that my comics would be about subconscious…
Allow me to riff on the subject of guilt for a while. I offer this piece of biographical information not in order to say anything definitive (i.e. my art is about-this-or-that-experience). You are free to make connections if you must, but ultimately, this connection-making is not what my art is about. However, I must admit that as far as feeling guilty goes, other Chinese people have always, at one point or the other, given me shit for not being “Chinese” enough - This still frustrates me, though I often joke that they themselves have no idea what being Chinese actually means, except when they speak of it in opposition to being Malay. There is a tyranny in one’s disposition as ‘the Chinese in Malay’, which still persists even when the 1 Malaysia slogan prematurely resolves these opposition with a self-contradictory “homogenized plurality” - meaning that I have as much stake in Malay-ness just as Other would have a stake in my Chinese-ness. I’ve found that the identity of the gentrified Chinese that developed throughout the Mahathir era seem to always exist in a space abstracted from the real dynamics of the Malaysian experience, which is why I’m always wary about identity politics and any talk that revolves around ‘Asian values’. It’s not like I have much to complain about anyway - The burden is actually heavier in for my Malay friends, as the identity of the sovereign Malay middle class is more explicitly caught up with the construct of the Nation State itself. Stereotypes do carry a lot more weight in this context, and the persecution in terms of that follow may seem harsher. A friend of New Village, the poet Jamal Raslan, has written a piece where he speaks out against being stigmatized for his use of english when writing poetry:
“You say I’m not a Melayu (Malay) like you -> You regard me as some Melayu who has forgotten his roots -> It’s funny you said that, because we seem to be coming from the very same education system & go through the same Malaysian socio-political experience -> but after that experience, you then divert into these typical stereotypes of Malays who stereotype other Malays unlike you, without realizing that you are contradicting yourself (i.e going gung-ho about Malayness etc but you neglect one of the core pillars of being Malay which is Bahasa Melayu -> and after all that you still want to insist on me being a “traitor” or “lupa daratan” (forgetting where he came from) because of my perceived identity -> well, know what? You’re wrong because the one who’s losing themselves in their own selves are you -> so now what about you?”
The subject of this poem, the Malaysian who misrecognizes himself within ideological constructs colored by Mahathirism and the New Economic Policy are not the antagonist but the victims, as my Malay friends (and in a lesser extent, me) were when persecuted by people confused about their identity, unwilling to create themselves and choosing to “lose themselves in themselves” when they asset the purity of their identifications in opposition to people ‘like them but not like them’ - There’s a sense that we are in a silent consensus that there exists a greater, unnamed - since naming it cures the symptom - symptom which persecutes us *through* these people. I am addressing a tendencies occurring among polemical poets who “personify the symptom”, as I’m interested in grappling with the question of whether the voice of the ethical poet ‘arrives’ at the people, or penetrates them (i.e. treats them as a byproduct rather than a subject) in order to name symptom itself - this is a universal subtext in the performance of poetry which I don’t feel I have to belong to any identity or nationality to be able to appreciate.
As far as drawing attention to the poet’s USE of words go - I feel that words are problematic because the act of choosing words and not others will always remain, on some level, an autobiographical response to a complex set of problems - Allow me to call this a response to poetry amidst the politicized facets of being, if you will. ‘Poetry’ is the problem at the heart of word: “When the poet’s personifies a symptom, can the “person” whom the poet constructs have a choice of whether he can break free from the symptom?”
iv. THE POLITICS OF THE VOICE
The division of self is infinitely interesting in itself.
I do have never felt compelled to ‘properly integrate’ my conscience (Marxist) and my tendencies (Undecided) - The price I had to pay for this is a feeling of guilt following whatever I do as “art”.
I’ve begun to accept this state of guilt as an not an abhorrence, but the very impossible center of my art itself. I find this perversity meaningful.
As far as the obscene goes - I’m using this placeholder to try an conceive of an ‘other’ of production, say, in the archetype of an outsider artist who is ‘unaware’ - unable to make the distinction between the product of his labor and his being as labor, or even, the an artist-activist who deliberately tries to collapse these distinctions through a series of interventions in culture.
The Performance is an analogue of production - when I say “perform” I mean a play with the materiality of language, localizing the body of the speaker inside, yet outside it. Performance exists in that uncanny space which assumes a division between “labour” and “being” while simultaneously deconstructing it - I find an inherent absurdity in the injunction of a subject to ‘express himself’, since whatever the performer produces can is the performer “in himself”. This “in himself” is simultaneously the most boring and most interesting about the unreadability of expression. If one should describe the performance a state in which a performer ‘demonstrates’ his constitution, this demonstration would be ultimately tautological, since performance itself is a state of constituting production. What I am more interested in is the Other of production - phantasies of fragmentation (or compartmentalization, in the context of production) that constitutes the moments in the performance when the performer loses his agency and lapses into the production of “demonstrativeness”. To perform, in this sense, is to masturbate, to compartmentalize yourself as a self-satisfying entity who “meets himself” within a dialectic of production and consumption. The performer is both a consumer (in the sense that one ‘uses’ body or verbal language) and producer (in the sense that one creates themselves through these languages). The term ‘between’ leisure and labor is pleasure - If labor power is involved in the production of *use value*, as Marx wrote, does masturbation produce use-value?
Adorno suggests that leisure time is an illusion of sorts - a ’ the division of labor and leisure that structures the artist’s mode of discourse production is a process of delimiting what is inside and outside the work, since the division that a work ‘as it is produced’ (its authority) and ‘as it is consumed’ (the deferral of this authority) is what structures the work’s meaning. This conceptual scheme helps me determine whether I have produced something meaningful. An ‘honest’ performative statement, to me, is one that effaces itself beyond it’s self-enclosed illusion of teleological “arrival” (I say “beyond” both in the sense of its placement “the statement is not assumed to have arrived ‘beyond’ the context of its production, in the sense of its displacement that I am conveying the word as it is being displaced Outside the context of its production in order for it to be able to participate in some “generality” of language use). I judge any artistic statement I make, may it be through Drawing, Performance, or Video, as having achieved its performative goal when its use-value and exchange-value are intertwined, rather than distanced from each other. Needless to say, the context of production changes along with the medium, something which I am willing to accept at the expense of a self-identical language, or a ‘stylistic’ coherence, running through my body of work (which I find to be rather superficial concerns when put in the wrong contexts.)
As far as my voice as an artist goes, I am deeply suspicious of creating something immediately recognizable as ‘mine’, without at letting the viewer grapple with the dialectalization of use and exchange value conveyed through performance (I have the tendency to think of artworks as a byproduct, rather than the “content” of labour). I feel compelled to react against artists who turn a blind eye towards what I feel is a consumerist-ideological distancing of the material and the discursive that prematurely resolves one term for the sake of the other - If your criteria for the textual value of art is centered on the notion of a discursive artist as someone who ‘discovers’ aporias in language in order to meaningfully engaging with the materiality of our existence (thus resolving an unspeakable material excess through exchange value) or the notion of the artist as someone who engages with language because he needs to successfully coordinate his material practice in order to reflect his particular idealisms, it is likely that I will make it my duty to challenge your preconceptions insofar that they both lend themselves too easily to the ideologizing logic of commodification.
When I perform the artist, I am neither a materialist or an idealist - I am against drawing any sort of line in order to judge a congruence or lack of congruence between relations of exchange in language and the relations of exchange in the material. Judging art’s value in terms of this ‘synchronicity’ is dependent on false opposition which means that the artist will always be always, unwittingly, creating exchange value for and against itself - this capitalistic tautology is something I wish to avoid when dealing with the discursive. I don’t think the discursive is abstracted from production, it IS production - When an artist finds his materials in language he gestures towards an ouroboros snake in which one signifying/productive element contained in the discourse is exteriorized (expelled into or located in the materiality of language), framing the network of relations in which value arises. I am interested in the performativity of discourse-production.
“It is clear, firstly, that the exchange of activities and abilities which takes place within production itself belongs directly to production and essentially constitutes it. The same holds, secondly, for the exchange of products, in so far as that exchange is the means of finishing the product and making it fit for direct consumption. To that extent, exchange is an act comprised within production itself. Thirdly, the so-called exchange between dealers and dealers is by its very organization entirely determined by production, as well as being itself a producing activity. Exchange appears as independent of and indifferent to production only in the final phase where the product is exchanged directly for consumption. But there is no exchange without division of labour, whether the latter is spontaneous, natural, or already a product of historic development; private exchange presupposes private production; the intensity of exchange, as well as its extension and its manner, are determined by the development and structure of production. For example. Exchange between town and country; exchange in the country, in the town etc. Exchange in all its moments thus appears as either directly comprised in production or determined by it. The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production predominates not only over itself, in the antithetical definition of production, but over the other moments as well.” (Marx)
Art exists in the liminal space between production and its Other, where the artist tarries with one mode of production that always dominates the entire system that structures its process. This is why I’m obsessed with the obscene, as that enigmatic pleasure of art/text that becomes its own self-devouring noumenon of production. In this sense, I don’t have any reason to make the value statement that something made for mass consumption (i.e. entertainment) is less meaningful that something which resists language. The obscene of entertainment is just as inherent in art. If performance analogizes production, one who performs will always be marked by a perversity in the sense that the analogue becomes a product of itself. In the performance, this reveals itself in moments that serve to indicate a condition of freedom, yet also suggest something that structures the inexpressibility of the product. The dangers in the commodification of the performer’s voice, as I understand it, is NOT conveyed through the naive (insofar that it is undialectical) reading of Marx: That use value becomes “corrupted” through exchange value. This reading stems from an inability to picture production of language as a totality - which is possible as long as we embrace the obscene, admitting that the Word is-always-already “corrupted”; The naive reading presupposes that a performative statement properly “arrives” when detached from the labor of performance, since it assumes that the product of the performance is something “Other” than performer. The obscenity in the commodification of art is not due to the existence of exchange-value in itself, so much so as it is how, as Debord put it, “usefulness has come to be seen purely in terms of exchange value, and is now completely at its mercy. Starting out like a condottiere in the service of use value, exchange value has ended up waging the war for its own sake.”
As far as reflecting on my art from a Freudo-Marxist framework goes, I am interested in a gestalt figure of the obscene superego, the “ideology of pleasure” that splits me as a subject of being and a subject of meaning - it is the very condition of my symbolic existence. Making discursive art, for me, is not the Other of production (as far as it discourse exists in a virtual space that barres its object outside it), but it is always caught up in the Other of language, since everything “signified” (consumed, taken pleasure of, registered as symbolic) in this sense maintains that even though what neo-pragmaticists call “post-metaphysical” language has no existence outside of exchange value, we must always speak of language as though some part of it (Lacan’s Big Other) as transcendental, for it to be properly ‘language’, in its socialized form. The artist is a problem, as talking about materiality of language is a negative operation that cannot allow itself to be subsumed by the materiality of its USE, since the user himself exists within the relations of symbolic exchange.
