Reconstruction 11.1 (2011)
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Untranslatable Realities / Eva Repouscou
Abstract: Contemporary multilingualism reflects the structure of a mutable assemblage that contains compatible and conflicting components. This paper examines the terms of translation regarding the unstable condition of social and spatial figurations. Nicolas Bourriaud’s “The Radicant” and the work of other theoreticians offer a counterpoised viewpoint for a closer examination of the efficacy of translation. In addition, an overview of certain examples of contemporary art contributes to the argument that the untranslatable is the new abstraction.
Keywords: Culture Studies; Place & Space; Visual Culture; Translation Studies
<1> The questions forwarded by this paper concern the necessity for translation. The postmodern perception of reality allows access to new structures and representations. The ability to manipulate irregular or unplanned connections between diverse components has a direct impact on social and spatial formations. “Assemblage” [1] becomes the model for productions of various scales—from artworks to urban design. Language is disposed as a component for the generation of various assemblages. Written messages, logotypes, slang, chat, a universally common vocabulary (e.g. economical terms) interfere with other systems (space, relations, philosophy) and create broader formations. The correspondence between miscellaneous systems is based on the notions of similarity and consensus. Postmodern multilingualism reflects the variability of identities, relations and spaces. Multilingual realities are not only portrayed as an image of the contemporary metropolises, but also as a metaphor for the coexistence of various codifications and forms. Translation is supposed to establish the communication between heterogeneous parts. Nicolas Bourriaud’s “Radicant” [2] offers a counterpoised viewpoint for a closer examination of the efficacy of translation. The basic argument of this paper is that multilingual formations produce a new order of familiar and unfamiliar, comprehensible and incomprehensible standards. Reality and social processes are suffused with every new figuration. The suggestion for translation is addressed to a stable condition of territories, installed entities and modes of interpretation. This paper examines the terms of translation regarding the unstable condition of social and cultural figurations. Examples of contemporary artwork underpin the argument of the relational perspective of translatable and untranslatable parts. The selected works are part of Documenta, the exhibition of contemporary art that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. In 2002, Documenta 11 focused on new practices of multilingual realities, in the form of conferences around the world. The coordination of concurrent cultural events in different geographical spaces contributes to the redistribution of centres of importance. Newly accessed and occasionally invented peripheral centres cause the subversion of the western perspective primacy. Within the theoretical context of Documenta 11 and Nicolas Bourriaud’s “Radicant,” the concept of “creolization” is considered as the most effective model for the interconnection of heterogeneous realities, identities and languages. Multilingual realities are reviewed as kaleidoscopic formations that overstep the matter of origin and establish new connections and values for the participating components.
<2> Interdisciplinary exchange is a practice intensely activated during the postmodern period. The theoretical approach in the movement of Deconstruction detects univocal and latent statements under the surface of modern narrative. The meaning of literary texts, aesthetic objects and architecture is constantly deviated and deferred through levels of misinterpretation. “Homonymity” [3] between philosophical and spatial structures is the appropriation of extratextual concepts within new irrelevant systems. Functionality is disrupted under the impact of homonymity. The various components are used as empty vessels, disposable to receive new meaning or remain meaningless. As language becomes the expression of the spectacle, the meaningless statements and the paradoxical forms contribute to the release from the necessity for translation. Untranslatable parts stand for the sublime, for the unrepresentable core of the work. The unrepresentable does not consist in a structural condition of art. It serves the redistribution of the “excluded” and the “other.” The otherness is regarded as an exotic form, a sign revealing or fabricating the depth of the meaning. The untranslated part, if reformed to the same codification system, presents the same structure and meaning. On the other hand, remaining untranslated generates a dimension of strangeness and mystery. Translating the unknown reality is not a matter of cognitive contribution but a matter of unfolding the mythical dimension. Decoding the untranslatable part implies the emergence of a temporary dominant language. When the untranslatable is reformed in the new language what is revealed is tautology.
<3> The complex of tautology and mythology is strongly connected with the procedures of reception and decoding. Tautology and mythology constitute the mapping device for the interaction between concept and materials. The compatible interrelation of material and dematerialized content addresses itself to a trained observer. Correlation between incompatible systems (natural world, philosophy, science, language) is assured through direct appropriation and not by reducing or encoding. Physical forms often remain incomplete or vague so that various interpretations may occur. Every translation adds new mythological content to the initial draft. Tautology is the reproduction of the given reality without the interference of any narrative dimension. Mythological process receives the “empty real” [4] and forms new notional devices. The process of myth is the semantic shift, the re-use of meanings as forms for the creation of new meanings around a new concept. This operation concurs, however, with the tautological aspect, which attempts to adduce the real, historically framed, fact. Tautology is the basis of mythology. If tautology is the draft of the raw material of reality (in the given format), mythology is the container of the concept adapted during the socialization processes of the raw material. Mythological structures placate and alleviate the initial incomprehension of the given materiality, revising it in accordance with common sense. While mythology reflects de-politicized discourse, tautology engenders political notions as it frames the unmediated and self-evident fact containing every internal antagonism.
<4> Multilingual realities are configured as discrete worlds within the universe. The example of the cityscapes by Bodys Isek Kingelez demonstrates this dimension: Bodys Isek Kingelez, from Congo, fabricates models of contemporary cities. These models do not serve as simulacrums but as micrographic utopian spaces between the western imagery and the mythology of “otherness.” The extreme cityscapes such as the New Manhattan City 3021, made in 2001-2002, and the Kimbembele Ihunga (Kimbeville), made in 1994, compose an architectural futurology that reflects accurately the structure of a contemporary city. The utopian dimensions lie on the denotations for free, just and peaceful societies. The general impression drawn by the models of Kingelez is inarguably referring to the familiar urban images, but in approaching closer the constitutive pieces, the volumes and the forms are excessive: thin towers, wheel-shaped buildings and conical structures. The variety of colours and shapes depicts the naive morphology of folkloric art. The models are made from reused everyday materials such as paper, plastic and tinfoil. The manufacturing of the models contains the idea of the assemblage. The mix of different textures, colours and references reflects the mixture of different interpretations and meanings. Parks, highways, stadiums and monuments are represented in eccentric and playful versions. The creation of different worlds within the world reflects the impression that there are various forms within an overall order of things. The cities by Kingelez express the intention of Documenta 11 to trace the quest for a new Utopia related to intercultural configurations. The essence of this utopia lies in the conformation of elements originated from the anthropogenic context. Instead of creating an imaginary world, the new utopia suggests a game between the actors and the materials of the present word.
<5> Abstraction, according to Wilhelm Worringer (Empathy and Abstraction, 1908), is the expression of the mental agoraphobia that the individual senses in confronting the unapprehensible world. This defensive reaction leads to abstract practices in art. Late modernist abstract expressionists established the exploitation of the expressional tools as forms. They produced patterns irrelevant to nature and experience, opening the way to a new representational system. Bourriaud connects the modernist internationalism with the common language that was established by the abstract painting. Also, Werner Haftman, art historian and director of the first three Documenta since 1955, enthrones abstraction as a language that connects global and diachronic values. The language of abstraction objects the figurative surface while gradually conforming to the manipulation of space and the reproduction of social events. The inclusion of new levels of “unknown” is always the challenge of creation, of art and thought. After 1960, the action is transported to the real territory of everyday life. Everything is known, familiar and banal. The appropriation of existing forms, the framing of known situations, reflects a new mode of tautology and a new attitude towards modern narrations. In the social field a new unknown area concerning relations, identities, institutional definitions, and communications becomes the subject-matter of artistic projects. Simulations of familiar activities, relocation or refurbishing on existing spaces reproduce or assimilate the structure of the event. The society-engaged cultural practices focus on the exploration of identities and differences. The expressive tools of conventional art are replaced by the communicational practices between subjects and collectives. The unknown field of social interrelations becomes the new abstraction. Whether in cinema, literature, or visual arts, this multilingual coexistence reflects the flirt with the unknown. Multilingual realities representations are the new abstraction of expression. Representation always leaves something concealed, untranslated. The reader, the spectator, the user become the administrators of the procedure and the meanings.
<6> The concerns of Jean Baudrillard in 1968 [5] about a self-managing and automated material world echoed the thought that the new technological reality deprives the user from intimate kinesiology and behaviour. At the same time and as a response to this preoccupation, both pop art and audience-involved practices of art investigate the relation between collectives, objects and spaces. Cultural practices, especially after 1960, are specified as immaterial dispositions and conceptual processes while in the following decades they proceed to society-engaged projects. The conformance of existing and new techniques, the assimilation of figurative input within the conceptual process, the event-like structures are all resulting in a modification of the “disenchanted” connection between the beholder and objects. Materiality, spectatorship and perception are altered and enhanced [6].
<7> Contemporary cultural constructions consist in the correlation of loosely associated events, extracts from unmediated factuality and intercessions of various narrative perspectives. This morphology is the outcome of the transformation of objecthood, materiality and representation that occurred in the early 1960s. The constructions of conceptual art consisted in the unfolding of the specific object into spatial generality. The sensory dynamic is transferred from the reflexive physical object to an enhanced experience of space. The condition of materiality opened up to enfold the heterogeneous materials and forms, conceptual procedures, linguistic signals, public actions and human relations. This inclusion is obvious in the production of contemporary objects. Their description does not locate on a final physical form but extends on a range of conditions such as the following: imaginary projections, the appropriation scenario, the political statement, the mode of use, spoilage, and discard. All these conditions enhance the physical form and enlarge materiality. The establishment of concept within space configuration subverts conventional typologies. Public, urban, natural, and institutional space becomes the converged content, form and material of contemporary practices. Land art and public art decline formalistic production and proceed to conceptual dispositions within the given spatial context. These productions consist in reinterpretations of the given reality. The functionality of space is disrupted in favour of a ritual canalization of conceptual formations.
<8> The status of the contemporary spectator is reshaped. The expanded and shapeless subject reflects the multiplicity and dematerialization of the art object. The monologue and the prescribed viewpoints of the modern narrative are destabilized and dissolved in multiple discourses, interpretations and spectatorships. The audience takes on a functional role by contributing subjective impressions that modulate the artistic procedure. While the romantic observer upholds an internal incitement towards the stimulus of illusionary fabrications (empathy), the subject of the functional spectatorship is engaged in reciprocal activation between the interlaced objects and spectators. Contemporary spectatorship involves the intertwinement of everyday life perceptions and the activations within the artistic context. The embodiment of ample theoretical and critical evidence leaves no room for reviews or aspects that can be detached from the unified art and life experience. The line between object and subject or between insiders and outsiders is blurred. The art project is molded in the shape of an event, either as the sudden impact of disorder (as described by Jean-Francois Lyotard) or as an alternative reality—an interstice—where the unexpected and utopian may occur (as described by Nicolas Bourriaud). In any case the spectator holds a pivotal position within the contemporary production of the art event as manager of the artistic process and modulator of meanings. Space of display is also transformed into a vessel that accommodates the eventuality and the polysemous structures of spectatorship. Rather than merely entailing mandatory action, spectatorship involves any kind of reaction, including silent observation, pause or detachment. The constraint of “interaction,” sustaining the prefiguration of a linear and predictable subject, is superseded by the enhanced condition of functional spectatorship.
<9> The example of “Eclipsis” by Gonzalo Diaz, presented in Documenta 11 in 2002, is characteristic for the different levels of translation, comprehension, and functional spectatorship. The installation by Gonzalo Diaz involves a small room containing a projector and a blank display area. The visitor enters the room and casts a shadow on the blank wall. The shadow reveals the phrase “Zum Herzen Deutschland zu kommen, nur um das Wort Kunst unter dem eigenen Schatten zu lessen.” The German text, when translated, implies nothing more than the common reality: “To come to the heart of Germany only to read the word art under your own shadow.” The incorporation of the visitor in the procedure is intense, whether the text is translated or not. There is no further narration reserved and revealed when the written phrase is translated. Translation discloses the foundation of the work that is tautology. The silent dimension of language is a suggestion different from translation. The linguistic stimulus contains multiple expressions. The visual perception of the linguistic signs becomes the object of experiments in post-formalistic art. The words and the phrases receive spatial dimensions conceivable by the general audience.
<10> Contemporary production of art or of any other significant product consists of a sequence of properties and interrelations. The outcome involves immaterial and transient procedures that are not orientated towards one final physical object. Immaterial configurations correspond to the untranslatable parts of the procedure. Contemporary cultural products encompass the dialectical convergence between diverse representations and linguistic entities. The criticism lies on the transitory formations of this interplay and not on firm translations. As the alteration from one language to another presupposes the solidness of the certain languages, the preservation of untranslated parts ensures the fadeless quality of multilingual formations.
<11> The example of contemporary art practices and especially the condition of art since the “dematerialization of the art object” [7] can be applied to further categories of reflection and production. Relations and experiences form the main object of contemporary practices while materials and forms become subsidiary components to the overall procedure. The constitution of contemporary artworks offers the grounds to develop new criteria for the evaluation and the experience of diversity. Linguistic exchange offers a fluctuated and precarious indicator concerning the comprehension of the respective reality. Contemporary practices enable the conjunction of the different and incompatible aspects of reality and include every stance of criticism within the body of the work.
<12> A further exploration of translation is attempted through an overview of Bourriaud’s essay on translation, “The Radicant,” published in 2009. Bourriaud’s call for translation reflects the necessity for reciprocal activity of understanding and mainly of accepting. Bourriaud talks about the sudden inclusion of the periphery within the contemporary art field. The concept of the “radicant” relies on the theories of Victor Segalen, who wrote his “Essay on Exoticism” in 1919. Segalen introduces the “exote,” the figure of the traveler and the explorer. The “exote” has the ability for empathy, meaning the assimilation of new elements [8]. For Bourriaud empathy is the ability to translate. The product of this procedure is a multiform entity comprised by elements that maintain their properties and morphological features. Those entities produce a new aesthetic based on heterogeneity and difference. The “aesthetic of diversity sketched by Segalen [is] the coexistence of points of view within a multifocal space in which each framing is modified by the one that precedes or follows it” [9]. According to Bourriaud, it is modernism that established the importance of the root. But contemporary modernism rejects radicality and introduces the “radicant” figure. The “radicant” is the subject that develops new roots while installing in new temporary territories. For Bourriaud this figure coexists with the necessity for translation.
<13> The dominant western point of view establishes the frames that define the otherness and builds the scenarios that sustain theories of exclusion of different cultural identities. The problem is centred in the production of diverse criteria and discourses instead of one common scope of criticism. Translation, for Bourriaud, is more than an arrangement between different cultures. Translation goes “beyond the peaceful and sterile coexistence of reified cultures (monoculturalism) to a state of cooperation among cultures that are equally critical of their own identity” [10]. Also, “translation always implies adapting the meaning of a proposition, enabling it to pass from one code to another, which implies a mastery of both languages but also implies that neither is self-evident. The gesture of translation in no way prevents criticism or even opposition” [11]. Contemporary “radicants” carry portable cultural equipment and adjust in new environments: “Culture today essentially constitutes a mobile entity, unconnected to any soil” [12].
<14> Bourriaud suggests that the solution does not come from the coexistence of autonomous cultural entities but from the cooperation between multiple cultures. This cooperation is possible through the practice of translation. The altermodern is concentrating the general idea of Bourriaud for the new condition:
What I am calling altermodernity thus designates a construction plan that would allow new intercultural connections, the construction of a space of negotiation going beyond postmodern multiculturalism, which is attached to the origin of discourses and forms rather than to their dynamics. It is a matter of replacing the question of origin with that of destination [13].
<15> For Bourriaud, translation is a matter of ethics and aesthetics. The question about origin is disrupted into a multiplicity of questions about destinations and potentialities. The centers of reference and criticism are multiple. The languages participate in intercultural patterns. The main problem is that the existing centers of influence operate in a constraint manner in order to reinstate new balances. Translation represents a device that serves specific viewpoints and modes of interpretation. The “exote,” instead of translating to a dominant language and order, can assimilate new cultural attributes by judiciously coexisting in new spaces. The concept of “creolization” reflects the condition of “interform” as defined by Bourriaud [14], meaning the intermediate condition between different environments. This “interformal” structure of creolization is the product of a historically particular coincidence. It is likely that different conditions and different installations generate something else.
<16> For Nicolas Bourriaud it is within ambiguous and inter-local places (airports, shopping malls, Chinatowns in western cities) that the “radicant” moves and connects to a wide geography [15]. The “radicant” is a subject specially adapted to constant movement and to development of new roots in each new space. Bourriaud suggests that movement is a new mode of living; thus, space is considered as a static entity, a ground for the implantation of new roots. As a result, the amorphous and blank space of contemporary globalised territories lodges the possibility for intercultural formations and for an alternative modernism.
<17> Another point of view, presented by Hans Ibelings [16], is that mobility is a communicational strategy that conserves much of the production in an unmaterialized form. When not compulsively relocated, the condition of mobility is a phenomenon attached to prosperous individuals. Ibelings refers to the various theories that accompany the phenomenon of globalization. The most recent theory, adapted by Bourriaud, affirms that globalization can be aligned with the tactics of creolization, which he states is the fairest model for intercultural compositions. According to Bourriaud, there are two ways to confront the dangers of a monoculture: the attachment to national identities and the Caribbean model of creolization that is the intersection of various heterogeneous components and identities.
<18> The exhibition Documenta 11, in 2002, is focused on ethnogeographical matters. In the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century, there is tension deriving from anti-globalization movements. Political and cultural actions concentrate in Genoa, against the summit G8 in 2001, establishing new forms of cultural activism. Anti-terrorist politics, migration and economic irregularities provoke mass unrest that derives from a broader anthropological source. Documenta 11 proposes the interaction between different cultural and anthropological backgrounds in order to re-examine the relation between western and non-western identities. Okwui Enzwezor, art director of the eleventh Documenta, creates a team of five curators based in different countries. Parallel conferences take place in the different platforms and finally join in the final platform of Kassel. The synopsis of the disparate events is the question for new modes of criticism responding to the multiple forms of art. Platform 3 is entitled “Créolité and Creolization.” Two different languages are used in the title to refer to the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity. The fourth platform has the form of a workshop and takes place in Santa Lucia, the Carribean island. Dieter Lessage, author of the essay “Cultural Resignation Today: On Over-Identification and Overstatement” [17], states that “this unfolding of the Documenta on different platforms was clearly meant to delocalize Documenta somewhat, in order to increase its commitment with global issues and break with the occidentocentrism of the arts world” [18]. Walter Robinson, editor of Artnet Magazine [19], disagrees with the poetic envelope in which the poverty and misfortune of developing countries are presented. The stereotypical portrayal of the developing countries as exotic places, where even violence, poverty and disease are presented in a distant and scenic way, reflects the monocentrism of the western perspective. Robinson also criticizes the ability of the platforms of Documenta 11 to invent new politics for altering the global culture.
<19> In his article, Dieter Lessage explores strategies of resistance and practices of identification with the institutional order. Documenta 11, according to Lessage, is a critique of globalization and western hegemony. The platforms in Vienna, Berlin, New Delhi, Lagos and Santa Lucia in Caribbean delocalize Documenta but not in a critical way. This fabrication of new centres aims to generate multiple points of view and sources of discourse. Moreover, these conferences took place in institutional spaces under the western influence, while the main goal of this Documenta was to question the presidency of the western world, meaning the power of the one and only language, of the one and only reality. This concept becomes the main form of many following artistic events. But promoting multiplicity and proposing interrelations and translations do not deplete the dominant positions. The otherness is constantly reformed through new terms of interrelations. If the intention of the western centres of influence is to promote multivocality it does not mean that the “other” is a firm condition (nationality, identity, sexuality). The condition of “otherness” is constantly redefined.
<20> Postmodernism is characterized by generosity concerning the reception of the “otherness.” For Bourriaud this generosity is a gentle expression that conceals prejudice. The same is stated by Saskia Sassen when she points out the difference between “generosity” and “charity” [20]. Contemporary anthropology is described by a global, social, and economic regularization and the intense mobilization of people towards developed areas. The withdrawal of specificities and heterogeneities frames uniform and prescribed social entities, relationships and processes. For Henri Lefebvre and Nicos Poulantzas (1975 and 1978), temporal and spatial transformations integrate with productive relations. Poulantzas points out in 1978 the analogy between social homogeneity and spatial segmentation. Fragmentation of space—such as locations of work, residence, and education—coordinates and distributes absolute social identities and functions. Lefebvre notes that the relations of production have a social existence as they are spatially hypostasized: they are projected and inscribed on space and at the same time space reformed according to the social processes [21].
<21> While the theories of space before 1960 configured a passive physical object or a mental construction, contemporary theories present space as multifunctional and interlinked with human processes [22]. Ibelings uses the term “supermodernist” to describe the contemporary condition. Social and aesthetic formations are neutral, ahistorical, transparent and uncertain. These qualities shape a new spatiality: “After the explicitly defined spatiality of postmodernism and deconstructivism…the boundless space is no dangerous wilderness or frightening emptiness, but rather a controlled, vacuum…a safe container, a flexible shell” [23].
<22> The contemporary individual is presented as a wanderer who moves from space to space. In contrast to this mobility, space is reduced to intermediate stops. These spaces, according to Marc Auge, lose their meaning because they are not appropriated by anyone. Such spaces thus constitute “non-places” and include airports, hotels, supermarkets, shopping malls, petrol stations, etc. [24]. The “non-places” are described by Marc Auge as those unfamiliar and unhistorical spaces of contemporary geography. The “non-places” also constitute implements of eventuality and massive diversity and they host the “radicant” subjects according to Nicolas Bourriaud. The “radicant” is the traveler who develops new ephemeral roots in every new place. The traveler who inhabits various places impersonates a full range of contemporary itinerant masses, either refugees or tourists. Bourriaud recollects contemporary mythology of nomadism so as to manufacture the “radicant” persona. However, he fails in two points:
<23> The first failure is that the involuntary mobilization of populations, immigration in contemporary terms, does not relate to nomadic tradition, travel culture or urban wandering. Contemporary immigration is actually a symptom not representable within the social institutionalization. This symptom stands as the implication of otherness and heterogeneity of un-fragmented space.
<24> The second failure is that Bourriaud employs a specifically activated subject to a continuous motion but implicitly suggests a static space that welcomes the ephemeral roots. Space constitutes a passive and neutral background sustaining ephemeral installations. The roots of the new inhabitants grow in a changing territory and for this reason they are unstable or ephemeral.
<25> The “radicant” is a figure as valid as questionable. The habitation of space always constitutes an ephemeral installation in a wider chronological and ecological context. The institutionalization of inhabitants as the indigenous, as foreigners, as transients or as invaders reflects a monarchical distributional system of identities and viewpoints. On the other hand, the “radicant” persona reflects impossibility as each installation on space is radical—though ephemeral—to the extent that it transforms the constitution of both space and inhabitant.
<26> For Bourriaud spatial and social coexistence of otherness consists in the destabilization of the roots. Bourriaud proposes translation as the practice that dilutes absolute origins and generates transient formats and languages among heterogeneous systems. The figurations that result from these procedures are described as the combination of the special attributes of every component. When the “radicant” moves to a new soil, the existing entities are connected together with bonds of origin. The concept of origin is constantly redefined, and the new installations are inscribed as new histories that will develop a new relation to the origin. It is a difficult venture to erase all origins. The problem should focus on the enhancement of the condition of origin and the topological reformation of the rooted and the incoming entities.
<27> Jacques Derrida refers to the notion of hospitality by distinguishing two kinds: conditional hospitality and unconditional hospitality [25]. While the first is the standard procedure defined by law and judicial procedures, the second is given bountifully without seeking any determination of identity and origin. This unconditioned hospitality is independent from interlinguistic processes. The silence is activated as possible modality of speech. The Derridian “silence” is addressed to the overturn of the legislative process of establishing identities and backgrounds and prescribing the social and spatial distributions. This silence suggests the alternative location of otherness without control mechanisms of the origin and social status. The “radicant” subject is not bound to identify as “other” when installed in the new space. For Derrida, unconditional hospitality means not to request anything related to origin. The request for reciprocality between locals and newcomers is inconsequent. This unconditional hospitality contrasts the idea of alternative modernity as a constructive negotiation of cultural specificities and codes. The translation settles differences and distances to a secondary level of communication while the removal of language in unconditional hospitality allows the coexistence of compatible and incompatible systems self-organizing socially and spatially.
<28> The necessity for an intermediate factor that connects multilingual realities is deriving from the need to adjust the unknown to the standards of the familiar reality. This adjustment reduces the qualities of the incomprehensible reality to an institutionally practical form. Translation can only affect on the secondary communicational level of social and cultural entities. The structure of the contemporary entities is based on the convergence of components of undiminished difference. This is neither an ethical nor an aesthetical matter; it is the outcome of historical processes concerning subjectivity and social identities. The untranslatable multiplicity reflects a new kind of society. Differences are as apparent as the visible seams of a patchwork. Personal and collective identities are defined through various connections and interactions between individuals, spaces and events. Social entities are fluctuated while the political devices become more and more theatrical. This theatricality derives from the ineffectivity of traditional institutional roles to contribute to the dynamics of society. The identification with fixed social roles and positions is constantly reproduced while all identification with firm categories is precarious. Contemporary dynamics are located in the multiplicity of realities: multiple centres, multiple idioms, multiple cultures, and multiple ways. The silent consent and the unconditioned participation will specify the new realities and the new interpretative modes. The new utopia is based on the different aspects of reality. The disruption to multiple realities offers ample space for the development of “otherness.” Postmodern theories established the possibility for redistribution of discourses and viewpoints. This shift is fundamental for the constitution of contemporary cultural constructions, objects, texts, spaces. The viewer, the reader, and the user are part of a procedure with various options. The idea of translation is a two-way process between firm entities. The communication between incompatible entities is realized only through the flexible distributions in space and in the flow of events. The organic entities are replaced by the poly-assemblages with visible seams. Those seams reveal connections, interactions, and antagonisms. The intertwinement of heterogeneous and contradictory components constitutes the new pattern in thinking and creating.
Notes
[1] “Assemblage” is the term used in art practices after 1960 to describe the joining of different materials and forms into three-dimensional constructions. Assemblage is also the translation for the term “agencement” by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, used in the 70s to describe the conceptual connection between statements and states of affairs.
[2] Bourriaud, Nicolas. The Radicant. New York: Lukas & Stenberg, 2009
[3] Homonymity is referred to by Ibelings to denote assumed affinity between two uncommon disciplines in Ibelings, Hans. Supermodernism. Architecture in the Age of Globalization. Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 1998. p.23
[4] Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970
[5] Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. London: Verso Books, 2005
[6] Reference to the “disenchantment of the world” by Max Weber
[7] from Lippard, Lucy. Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. London: Studio Vista, 1973
[8] Bourriaud, op.cit. p.20
[9] Bourriaud, ibid. p.66
[10] Bourriaud, ibid. p.28
[11] Bourriaud, ibid. p.30
[12] Bourriaud, ibid. p.34
[13] Bourriaud, ibid. p.40
[14] Bourriaud, ibid. p.153
[15] Bourriaud, ibid. p.73
[16] Ibelings, op.cit, p.64
[17] Lessage, Dieter. “Cultural Resignation Today: On Over-Identification and Overstatement.” In Cultural Activism Today. The Art of Over-Identification. Bavo Rotterdam: Episode Publishers, 2007. p.88
[18] Lessage, ibid. p.93
[19] Robinson, Walter. “Monster Mash.” Artnet. Reviews. 2002. Web. 28 Nov. 2008. <http://www.artnet.com/magazine/reviews/wrobinson/robinson6-7-02.asp>
[20] Sassen, Saskia. “Micronimics- Interview.” Spectacle Archive. 2010. Web. 21 April 2010. <http://www.spectacle.co.uk/archive_production.php?id=673>
[21] Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso Books, 1989
[22] The term “multi-locality” (poly-topicité) is used by Mathis Stock to describe the correlation of different practices in multiple locations. Multi-local living is related to geographical individualization that is autonomous spatial trajectories within mutable geographical sites. Stock, Mathis. “L’hypothèse de l’habiter poly-topique : pratiquer les lieux géographiques dans les sociétés à individus mobiles.” EspacesTemps.net. Textuel. 26 Feb. 2006. Web. 12 June 2010. <http://espacestemps.net/document1853.html>
[23] Ibelings, op.cit, p.62
[24] Auge, Marc. Non Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. New York: Verso Books, 1995
[25] Derrida, J., & Dufourmantelle, A. Of Hospitality. trans. Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000
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