I don't spell A.R.T - sobre lugares, não-lugares, des-lugares

Comentário sobre o texto "Lugares do Que Não Tem Lugar" de Vladmir Safatle publicado no jornal Folha de Sao Paulo em 24/02/201ā

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Eu até tento mas não consigo gostar do Safatle, acho que minha antipatia começou por conta do ‘take' dele sobre música que acho  presunçoso, academicista-elitista e desprovido de qualquer vivência e pratica que não passe por aulas de piano e salas de concerto. Agora hoje acabei de ler um novo texto dele na Folha de Sao Paulo sobre “arte”. Sempre me pergunto,  por que o Safatle soa tão correto e de alguma maneira phoney pra mim? Será uma antipatia injusta da minha parte? Quem são seus reais leitores, seus interlocutores? Porque ele publica em um jornal como a Folha de Sao Paulo? Será que alguém acha isso também aí no Brasil? Talvez até eu esteja exagerando mas não consigo ‘sentí-lo’. Tem um ranço, tem algo que não consigo tirar do meu corpo quando leio suas coisas, em especial, discursos sobre música, arte & estética. A impressão que tenho é que a coisa toda fica sempre no meio do caminho em prol de uma resolução aparentemente 'delicada' e 'correta'. Sempre a mesma 'resolução'. Comento esse pequeno trecho em especial: 

Ele diz " ....  talvez seja útil lembrar que o destino da arte passa por nos mostrar como o que é desprovido de lugar, o que é desprovido de função pode expressar a insistência em um mundo outro, em uma forma outra de sensibilidade na qual a percepção das coisas não estará submetida à descrição unidimensional de sua função e lugar específicos.”

Sim sabemos disso! O que não tem lugar, o que não tem função (e está em processo ou não) produz outros 'mundos' e portanto outras sensibilidades. Outra percepção. Outros 'juízos'? Agreed. E diria ate mais, produz também o indizível, principalmente se tomarmos ou pensarmos 'arte' como uma entidade, um objeto existencial, sensual que não necessariamente precisaria se estabelecer através de relações ou funções para existir. Um 'objeto' autônomo no cosmos. Des-relacional. Isolado como uma nova presença. E caracterizado particularmente pelo seu modo de existência. "Arte" ? Uma entidade real capaz de existir isoladamente de uma experiência (withdrawal) e uma entidade sensual que "experiênciamos" (relacional, experiencial, intencional, ou solta, de-relacional, existencial, impenetrável). Penso aqui tanto nos 'modos de ser' da metafísica 'ferramental' Heideggeriana, e mais adiante, no 'weird' realismo especulativo de Graham Harman que também me vem a cabeça como uma extensão abstrata. E daí?

Mas para quem Safatle fala em seu texto? Que destino é esse hoje? Útil pra quem? Como isso funciona no Brasil? Para o seu 'leitor-artista', para curadores, para colecionadores, para as instituições? De que ‘arte’ Safatle realmente está falando? São tantas. Essa me parece a maior pergunta aqui. Hoje? Ontem? De que 'artistas'? O que significa ser artista em 2017? 

Esse sopro, essa angústia e esse não-lugar, ou melhor (des-lugar) da 'arte' (ou do 'artista' se estendermos esse raciocínio), esse espaço de não-pertencimento sem função está no ar desde que o mundo é mundo. Está no ar. E hoje, não é nem mais subterrâneo. Nada. Nem os processos. Nem os atos. Nem os movimentos. Tudo é imensamente visível. E cru, como a superfície dos sujeitos e dos objetos. E por isso incomoda. No entanto Safatle fala sobre esse nao-'lugar' sem realmente falar, sem realmente estar. Sem realmente acessar o corte, o "velado", "o wierd"; essa outra presença-aparentemente ausente nos objetos e sujeitos existenciais. Safatle permanece na superfície, sem chance de se afogar na piscina. Minha impressão é que 'mistificando' o processo (como algo intocável, oh essa grande dama.... a "arte", as "artes") Safatle responde e confirma o cansaço, a paralisia e a impossibilidade de seu objeto ( no caso aqui a "arte"). 
O destino de sua "arte" (seu objeto), mesmo pretendendo-se emancipatório me parece resignado, sem tônus. Falta algo, falta energia. Falta sexo. De onde vem sua voz? O meu problema com Safatle talvez comece na voz. Não se trata unicamente de 'arte'. Ainda sim, sabemos, que este 'des-lugar' está na pele de qualquer ‘artista’ (indivíduo, grupo, coletivo, entidade, vitalidade etc) que não tenha sido abocanhado ainda pelo mercado branco Brasileiro e pelos processos do capital financeiro. Como diria Chilly Gonzales brilhantemente e brutalmente na sua cara e em canto - 'I don’t spell A.R.T." 

Não há tanta diferença entre ‘artistas' hoje e especuladores imobiliários, gentrificadores ou business men & women. Todos os ‘escolhidos' participam dessa economia, gostam desse rush, 'criam' em função disso. Gostam dos números. Gostam de 'funções'. Posições. Escalas. Gostam dos jantares, das fofocas…. em suma são 'funcionais' na medida - you get my drift. Geralmente são artistas medrosos, arrogantes, repetitivos, pomposos e cheios de auto-piedade. Portanto nesse contexto  (que não é e nem nunca será um contexto de 'vulnerabilidade real', principalmente se pensarmos no Brasil). Quem faz "arte" no Brasil?  

Quem tem medo é porque está protegido, não? 

Assim como a ‘Arte’ (a grande personagem do texto de Safatle), 'artistas' hoje têm uma função-padrão. Clara, definida, caracterizada. Fechada em si. Um papel bem definido na escala numérica, capitalizada e colonizada de seu espaço e tempo de atuação. Seus afetos foram infantilizados. Igualados, simetrizados aos de seus sponsors e opressores. Nesse caso, não interessa tanto se a 'arte' volta-se a si mesma, reconstruindo o aspecto de sua auto-referencialidade e tornando-se seu "proprio objeto" ou  quando se atualiza em "engajamento"  e em função social como Safatle descreve exemplificando a dinâmica em dois modos, duas saídas que restaram. Mas que diferença isso faria para o monstro?  Para o capital? Para a coisa? Para o mercado branco? Para "Arte"? Para sua ontologia?

Não precisamos lembrar como se formam 'artistas escolhidos' hoje e também não precisamos ir a fundo na obviedade e decadência brutal das escolas de arte, das universidades, das galerias comerciais, dos museus ou das salas de estar de dondocas, colecionadores, curadores, galeristas e artistas. Assim como robôs de pintos moles num plot ficcional ruim, 'artistas'  compram 'sensibilidades' na mesma medida em que curadores compram 'discursos' e vice versa. Não há muita distinção. Assim como o texto de Safatle, por sua vez, se desdobra na ‘função' de formalizar (já normalizando) um ‘destino’, um novo 'medo' mediano para então definir o 'lugar' ou 'não-lugar' natural da 'arte', produzindo então uma outra nova função no próprio sistema que o filósofo aparentemente (e 'delicadamente') expõe. Não consigo pensar em outra lógica. Essa é a missão.  A retórica de Safatle simula movimentação mas é fechada em si e portanto contra-contracultural. Por isso é un-sexy. Não goza. Me parece sempre destinada a continuar re-iluminando as mini-certezas de uma inabalável e amendontrada classe Brasileira mal-educadamente bem 'educada', semi-erudita e bem comportada.

A pergunta que nao cala é:

Como se 'liberar' disso Safatle? 

Como livrar o corpo do ódio?

Como nao ser hipócrita?

Como nao ser elitista?

Afinal (no final) que 'liberdade' é essa? Que arte é essa? Que vida? Que afronta?
Who put you in prison?

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Comentário sobre o texto "Lugares do Que Não Tem Lugar" de Vladmir Safatle publicado no jornal Folha de Sao Paulo em 24/02/2017

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BBC TV-STUDIO TALK – G. P-Orridge's lost UK archives

"It was a cynical commentary.... like most of my work always has been.... on hypocrisy and arrogance and pomposity" 

'I was not surprised that it was taken into court....given the climate of our times which is basically one of insidious repression. The separating of individuals,  the separating of minorities.... and most of all the discrediting of freedom of thought as an option'. 

But I don't think people should be surprise.... I don't think people should expect to see overt attacks on the status quo from artists. Since my case most artists are a bit like civil servants....they want to get their study and commission and they want to get ready for a job at the art college and their bursaries..... and they don't want to rock the boat because they scared of what can happen....  

extracts from BBC TV-STUDIO TALK – G. P-Orridge's lost UK archives.

I'll have my computer talk to you or my 21 st century bicycle

1984" Apple Macintosh commercial

In 1984, Riddley Scott directed a big-budget ($900,000) television commercial, "1984", to launch Apple's Macintosh computer.^[Scott filmed the advertisement in England for about $370,000; which was given a showcase airing in the US on 22 January 1984, during Super Bowl XVIII, alongside screenings in cinemas.^[ Some consider this advertisement a "watershed event" in advertising and a "masterpiece". Advertising Age placed it top of its list of the 50 greatest commercials

Steve Jobs presenting the first Mac in 1984
January 24, 1984: Apple founder Steve Jobs presented the first Macintosh computer. The Macintosh 128K.

Macintosh 1984 Promotional Video - with Bill Gates.
This is an edited version of a promotional video produced by Apple Computer in 1984 to launch the Mac. Surprisingly, Steve Jobs does NOT make an appearance in this video. It is BILL GATES that we see extolling the virtues and future of the Mac.

1981 Nightline interview with Steve Jobs

Ted Koppel, Bettina Gregory, and Ken Kashiwahara present news stories from 1981 on the relevancy of computers in every day life and how they will affect our future. Included are interviews with Apple Computer Chairman Steve Jobs and writer David Burnham.

Graham Harman & Mark Fisher in conversation

Some Answers To Graham -  originally published in January 2010 on K Punk.

Graham raises some interesting questions in respect of Capitalist Realism:

One of the critical remarks in the book is that academics are now crushed with bureaucratic paperwork obligations. As a result, the competitive injunctions of neoliberalism, when imported into academia, have paradoxically increased the worthless red tape that capitalism was supposed to eliminate. He’s definitely right in some way, though I guess my view on it is a bit more complicated. For one thing, Mark is writing from a British context, and my sense is that it’s far worse in the UK. Not only does everyone in British academia seem to be strangled by evaluative paperwork, but the British system is of course much more centralized when it comes to funding. There is obviously no such thing as a national research assessment for American universities. We simply have far too many institutions– thousands of them, and they are of too many differing levels of faculty expectations. There is a broad mix of public, private, religious, and even expatriate American universities. And of course even our public universities are organized on the state rather than national level. So, in the American context there is not the periodic nationwide Angst found in Britain, in which careers might instantly vaporize as the result of someone’s outside assessment. Even the question of “who will be the evaluators this time?” seems to cause ulcers in the UK, and understandably so.
For another thing, I’m one of those who actually likes to write annual reports, progress reports, grant proposals, etc. They do me a world of good, and neither are they entirely extra-academic… I usually gain much clarity about my own projects from these exercises.
In fact, my big complaint is that no one seems to read the damn things! Never once have my Department Chairs given me written feedback on 

MARK I'm not in a position to comment directly on the experience of working in American universities, and I would defer to others who have worked there if they find that their experiences do not match mine in the UK; and I certainly do agree that, instead of the long-forgotten Third Way, Britain has reached a worst-of-all-worlds scenario, in which a former centralized bureaucracy has reinvented itself as a metastatizing rhizome, and a simulated market has been used to impose hyper-precarious conditions on workers. But my feeling would be that the issue of centralized funding only inflects things slightly differently in the UK and the US. As I point out in the book, funding in Britain is increasingly 'decentralized' in any case - in the college that I worked, it was the soon-to-be-abolished Learning and Skills Council's directives which were used as a pretext for "deleting" the philosophy and religious studies provision. Furthermore, the institutional pathologies I discuss in Capitalist Realism arise from decentralization. What I am pointing to is a situation in which the intermittent "inspection" gives way to an audit culture in which evaluation becomes embedded into the everyday fabric of work. In such conditions of generalized anxiety, one is almost nostalgic for the former "periodic nationwide angst". Decentralization reaches its properly Kafkaesque conclusion when everyone becomes their own auditor, all of the time. The situation that Graham describes - no-one reading progress reports - is surely routine. Their addressee, after all, is no-one - the no-one that is the market Stalinist big Other. The report, like the door in Kafka's parable, was meant only for you.

I should point out right away that most of the experiences I recount in Capitalist Realism didn't take place in universities, but in a Further Education college teaching 16-19 year olds. My impression is that the situation in British universities is bad and worsening, but it is as nothing compared to what is happening in Britain in primary, secondary and tertiary education. Here, bear in mind, teachers and lecturers have up to thirty hours of teaching to do every week. If on top of this, you are required to continually record what you are doing and "evaluate" your practice, the strain is unbearable.

I grant that some benefits can occasionally be derived from performing some of these bureaucratic operations; but this is an idiosyncratic side-effect of procedures which are universally imposed. (I should point out something that I don't think is that clear in the book, namely that I'm not opposed to bureaucracy per se, only its lunatic excrescences. A coming political task, I think, will be to invent new kinds of bureaucracy.) It could in fact be argued that the only possible subversion of auditing procedures is to perform them in the way that Graham does, with sincerity, given that the expected situation is cynical compliance ("I know this is nonsense, but nevertheless I have to along with it"). My team leader and I tried to treat bureaucracy in that way for a while, hyperconforming with all the auditing procedures, but eventually I snapped. For one thing, we were facing a situation in which while, our wages were going down in real terms, we were nevertheless being asked to take on an increasing workload of additional "administration". There's a kind of fallacy involved in applying neo-Taylorist practices to education, which is that they are cost-free. They are certainly cost-free to the employer, who gets to contract out their auditing processes to their worker; but they are not cost-free to the worker, who, not only find themselves doing more work for the same (or less) money. But their biggest cost to the worker is in energy. Energy that could have gone into reading about one's subject, preparing lessons or even simple convalescence was instead diverted into these auditing activities. Far from improving performance, far from these activities being merely a waste of time, the very fact of doing them makes it harder to perform your job properly.

Graham notes that there is still a tendency for "non-performing academics" to get away with it. No doubt this is true, and will probably always be true, in any system - and it's evident to everyone now that is not only in the academy or public services, but also in business. There are then two questions: how successfully do auditing regimes root out poorly performing teachers? And how efficient is it to impose these procedures on all teachers? For me, it's clear that poor teachers are not rooted out by these auditing procedures which - by definition - do not register how good you are doing your job, but how good you are at representing your practice according to the aesthetic protocols of the audit. Some of the most inept teachers I know were very good at filling in the forms - why wouldn't they be? And in terms of university work, we have to consider the massively conservative effect that initiatives such as the Research Assesment Exercise and its successor produce by their sheer existence alone - they have empowered precisely the "careerist sandbaggers" that Graham rightly derides in Prince Of Networks, producing a climate of anxiety which favours unchallenging work.

Graham makes another important point:

In the USA there are plenty of hideous aspects of applying the business model to everything. But there is also a freewheeling “entrepreneurship” aspect to it, in which capitalism doesn’t just mean number-crunching management, but also means a free-for-all in which ambitious outsiders may well come from nowhere to win the day.

But much of my critique comes from the perspective of entrepreneurship. It is precisely the tendency towards entrepreneurial thinking that is blocked by the imposition of these neoliberal initiatives. Freewheeling entrepreneurs aren't filling in performance reviews. This is one of the supposed ironies I identify in Capitalist Realism. I say "supposed" because it is crucial not to accept neoliberalism on its own terms - as if its true aim was delivering better conditions for the entrepreneurial spirit. This is a cover for its real project, which you don't have to be a vulgar Marxist to recognise is a redistribution of wealth and resources to the rich. (In the year that I was made redundant - for "economic" reasons - the college Principal - now calling himself a Chief Executive Officer, naturally - was earning well over 100 grand.) The real aim of neoliberal bureaucratic initiatives in education is to (1) make a case for increased managerialism (2) weaken and demoralise workers and (3) engender more "critical compression" in the public space.lic

sphere.