THE
HEADLESS
CIT Y
CUR AT ED BY DANIEL JE WESBURY
5-20
NOVEMBER
2016
GALWAY
THE
HEADLESS
CIT Y
WELCOME
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Gavin Murphy
Galway Mayo Institute of Technology
Deirdre Kennedy
Business Owner
Margaret Flannery Galway University Hospitals Arts Trust
Ann Lyons
Community Knowledge Initiative, NUI, Galway
Lucy Elvis
126 Artist-Run Gallery
Denise McDonagh Visual Artist
Maeve Mulrennan
Josephine Vahey
Galway Arts Centre
Galway County Library
Fiona Keys
Independent Marketing & Sponsorship
Development Consultant
CURATOR
Daniel Jewesbury
EDUCATION COORDINATOR
Joanna McGlynn
Technicians
Eoghain Wynne
Marcel Badia Ferrer
Peter Sherry
David Gannon
David Callan
Aiden Reide
Mike O’Halloran
EDUCATION ASSISTANT
Hilary Morley
Carpenter
Pete Nelson
PRODUCER
Kate Howard
PRODUCTION MANAGER
David Finn
PUBLICIST
Heather Mackey
VOLUNTEER CO-ORDINATOR
Susan Roche
VOLUNTEER CO-ORDINATOR ASSISTANT
Claire Smith
VENUE MANAGER & SOCIAL MEDIA
Úrsula de Campos Sanchez
DESIGN & WEB DESIGN
DETAIL FACTORY
Design & Marketing
DOCUMENTATION
Jonathan Sammon
4
2016 FESTIVAL TEAM
THANK YOU
We would like to take the opportunity to thank our key funders,
the Arts Council of Ireland and Galway City and County Councils.
A massive ‘thank you’ to all the artists in this year’s festival. Thanks
to Renmore Barracks, Galway Mechanics’ Institute, Galway City
Library, Galway Astronomy Club. Festival Partners: Galway Arts
Centre, CCAM GMIT, NUI Galway, Community Knowledge Initiative
(CKI), Galway County Library, Galway University Hospitals Arts
Trust, the Board of 126 Artist- Run Gallery, Galway Film Centre.
Accommodation Partners: The Connacht Hotel.
Supporters: The Goethe Institut, Cork Film Centre, Citylink.
Our fantastic crew of volunteers, thank you. A very special thank
you to Oisin O’Brien Asset Management.
Daniel Jewesbury would like to thank Ulster University for their
generous assistance in producing this catalogue.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
JOIN THE #TULCA16 CONVERSATION ONLINE
PLEASE FEEL FREE TO TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS
& WE WOULD LOVE IF YOU WOULD SHARE THEM
ONLINE TAGGING #TULCA16
FUNDED BY THE ARTS COUNCIL /CHOMHAIRLE EAL AION AND GALWAY CIT Y COUNCIL. SUPPORTED
BY THE COMMUNIT Y KNOWLEDGE INITIATIVE, NUIG, GALWAY COUNT Y COUNCIL, AND GALWAY
UNIVERSIT Y HOSPITALS ARTS TRUST, THE GOETHE INSTITUTE.
© COPYRIGHT 2016 TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ART, THE ARTISTS AND THE AUTHORS.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
TULCA LTD. CCAM GMIT, MONIVEA RD, GALWAY.
W W W.TULCAFESTIVAL .COM
M: 086 845 67 73
INFO@TULCAFESTIVAL .COM
5
FOREWORD
The Headless City, curated by Daniel Jewesbury, explores the changing
position of the city by framing the real and hypothetical past with proposed
futures. The Headless City is presented in the centenary year of the 1916
Easter Rising and also with TULCA’s participation in the successful bid for
Galway 2020. The festival programme addresses the urge for change: “The
desire to transform the world is not uncommon, and there are a number of
ways of fulfilling it”. 1 Cities have changed and are continuing to change.
Many cities were transformed by capitalism during the Industrial Revolution
and are now being transformed again by capitalist industry of a different
kind. The word ‘revolution’ has appeared in everything from the front of
Dublin’s GPO to a Bollywood film. 2 The 1916 centenary has raised questions
of how far Ireland has – or hasn’t – come in 100 years. The Headless City
does not explicitly address the Rising or the centenary, but it has informed
the curator’s thinking. Through a process of defamiliarisation, many of the
artworks, performances and events address the power of the city, of people
and their right and access to being public together in a city that is becoming
more and more privatised, and the transformations of everyday spaces and
buildings. Again, Patrick Keiller reflects: “Transformations of everyday space
are subjective, but they are not delusions, simply glimpses of what could
happen, and indeed does happen at moments of intense collectivity...” 3
This festival would not be possible without the TULCA partners, who work
with artists to create and site works throughout Galway City and County.
This year, NUIG, GMIT, Galway Arts Centre, 126 Artist-Led Gallery, Galway
County Libraries and Galway University Hospitals’ Arts Trust have worked
with Daniel and some of the 2016 artists on site-specific works where both
place, people and context are of utmost importance. TULCA also has a
new venue-partner this year and also continues to work closely with Galway
2020 since its successful bid to become European Capital of Culture in
2020. The festival simultaneously looks at and acknowledges the subjective
past, present and future(s) in which it is contextualised. Of course the
festival would not be possible without the continuing support (financial and
otherwise) of The Arts Council, Galway City Council and Galway County
Council, as well as our sponsors.
6
1
Patrick Keiller (2013) ‘The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape’, in The View From The
Train (London and New York: Verso Books), p. 9.
2
Chingari: The Revolution (2016). Telugu mafia / crime film, the follow-up to Chingari (2006).
3
Keiller, p. 22.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank and celebrate everyone
involved in making TULCA Festival of Visual Art a dynamic event where
contemporary visual art practice is nurtured, promoted and connected to
Galway city and County. Thank you to the artists who have shaped the festival
with work that allows the audience to contemplate transformations in everyday
places and to consider their subjective position in The Headless City.
Kate Howard, Producer
Maeve Mulrennan, Chairperson
5 - 20 NOVEMBER 2016
GALWAY
7
VENUES
GALWAY
CATHEDRAL
THE HEADLESS CIT Y
5 -2 0 N OV E M B E R 2 01 6
8
TOURIST OFFICE
EYRE
SQUARE
BUS EIREANN
CEANNT TRAIN STATION
TULCA Festival Gallery @ The Fairgreen ,
Fairgreen Road
Monday - Wednesday: 12pm – 6pm | Thursday - Sunday: 12pm – 7pm
Galway Arts Centre ,
47 Dominick Street
Monday – Thursday: 10am - 5.30pm | Friday: 10am - 5pm | Saturday - Sunday: 10am - 5pm
Nun’s Island Theatre ,
Nun’s Island
Monday - Wednesday: 12pm – 6pm | Thursday - Sunday: 12pm – 7pm
Galway City Library ,
St Augustine Street
24 hours
126 Artist Run Gallery ,
15 St Bridget’s Place, The Hidden Valley
Monday - Wednesday: 12pm – 6pm | Thursday - Sunday: 12pm – 7pm
University Hospital Galway ,
Newcastle Road
24 hours
Dún Uí Mhaoilíosa Barracks ,
Renmore
Monday - Friday: 10am – 11am, 2.30pm – 3.30pm | Saturday: 11am – 12pm, 2pm – 3pm
Closed Sunday
EVENTS:
Galway Mechanics’ Institute ,
Middle Street
Huston School of Film & Digital Media ,
Earls Island
10
EVENTS
11
WEEKEND
ONE
FRIDAY NOV 4 TH
FESTIVAL LAUNCH PARTY
6 - 8pm
TULCA Festival Gallery @ The Fairgreen
PERFORMANCE
8.30pm
Galway Mechanics’ Institute
James Moran presents his new performance Raffle!!
Even if you don’t win something you can still spend
some time imagining what it would be like to have it in
your life – so just for a while, check out of our age of
anxiety and check your tickets instead.
Booking required, capacity is limited.
10pm
Biteclub
Finally from 10pm to late we’ll be at Biteclub, 36 Upper
Abbeygate St. dancing to the tunes of DJ Graham
Dolan with his night Express Yourself. – A tight mix of
funk soul, Hip Hop, Disco and everything in between.
12
SATURDAY NOV 5 TH
CURATOR’S TALK WITH DANIEL JEWESBURY
2pm
TULCA Festival Gallery @ The Fairgreen
Booking required.
PERFORMANCE:
BLIND SPOT BY TWO RUINS
8pm
Huston School of Film and Digital Media, NUI Galway,
Two Ruins (Jim Colquhoun, Steve Hollingsworth) will perform their new work
Blind Spot. Driving a white Citroën CX filled with fluorescent tubes around the
city, Two Ruins will perform an electro-acoustic improvisation that lasts exactly 8
minutes (the average length of the British sex act) at a variety of sites.
FILM SCREENING:
AAAAAAAAH!
8.15pm
Huston School of Film and Digital Media, NUI Galway,
dir. Steve Oram, UK 2015, 79 mins
Alpha Male Smith, and his Beta, Keith, make a move to take over a local
community. They hook up with restless Female, Denise, igniting a deadly feud
in which emotions run high and deep-seated grudges re-surface amongst the
tribe. Are we not men? Or are we simply beasts?
Shot entirely in a language of grunts and gibberish, Steve Oram’s debut feature
is a celluloid primal scream – an anarchic, hilarious, disturbing and touching look
at the human condition. Starring Steve Oram, Toyah Wilcox, Julian Rhind-Tutt,
Noel Fielding.
Booking required.
13
WEEKEND
T WO
THURSDAY NOV 10 TH
PERFORMANCE
6pm
Galway Arts Centre
In the context of his TULCA installation Boxes, Martin Sharry has produced a
new live work, What’s The Story?, to be read by an actor three times during
the festival - Thursday 10th, Thursday 17th and Saturday 19th. Martin explores
the vagaries of life, translation and punding.
FRIDAY NOV 11 TH
READING / MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
/ SCREENING
7.30pm
Galway Mechanics’ Institute
Acclaimed London author Tony White reads short stories including ‘The Holborn
Cenotaph’ – ‘Super dry, dark and funny. Glasnost for UK cops’ (Tim Etchells). At once
a satirical performance, a protest and an act of radical remembrance, ‘The Holborn
Cenotaph’ proposes a shocking new use for the high-rise tower of Holborn Police
Station in central London. Tony will also be reading from the 1999 ‘avant pulp’ novel
Charlieunclenorfolktango, and a 2014 work ‘High-Lands’, performed here for the first
time with live musical accompaniment from New Pope.
New Pope is a critically acclaimed songwriter dealing in melodic dream pop, and
sometimes folk. Onstage he is joined by Colm Bohan (drums) and Stephen Connolly
(organ/guitar) to create an immersive musical experience.
14
The evening concludes with a screening of Alan Phelan’s 2012 short Include
Me Out of the Partisans Manifesto, in which a suburban couple battle through
the apparent obliteration of their shared experience as their DVD collection
is painstakingly broken up and recycled. The film is based on a short story by
White that was originally commissioned by the Irish Museum of Modern Art as
a fictional response to Phelan’s art practice.
Tickets €5, booking required.
SATURDAY NOV 12 TH
LAUNCH EVENT
12-5pm
Galway Mechanics’ Institute
Art / Not Art (Dobz O’Brien and Fergal Gaynor) will launch their new
project, the Society for the Conservation of Politics and Public Space
(SCPPS). The Society aims to investigate and intervene in the current
shrinkage of public space, and confusion regarding the nature of politics.
It will do this from a position of tension between art and politics, prior to
the engagement of any ideology.
Nothing can be assumed of its programme or how it will choose to
organise itself.
15
Its chief concern will be with the conditions of existence of art and politics, which
overlap in the space of appearance, that is, in public space.
O’Brien and Gaynor will be present at the Institute for the day, to answer queries,
and to assist readers at the SCPPS Library, a collection of texts on art and politics,
all readable in an afternoon, suggested by the Society’s Irish and international
affiliates.
PERFORMANCE
2pm
Galway Arts Centre
Michelle Hannah presents OUTOFTHEBLU_, a durational work formed from a
sung vocal performance over a composed synth soundtrack, based on a lyrical,
collaged appropriation of the Roxy Music song Out of The Blue, and Giacomo
Leopardi’s ‘Dialogo della Moda e della Morte’ (‘A Dialogue between Fashion and
Death’). Leopardi’s text reveals the relationship between consumerism, morality
and the deathly aesthetics of the pursuit of the ‘individual’.
You are free to come and go during the performance.
PUBLIC LECTURE
5pm
Galway Mechanics’ Institute
Writer and lecturer Angus Cameron presents Capital City. All too often our
understanding of the city lacks memory. The frenetic, forward-looking, excitement
of the city makes it easy to forget the antiquity and embeddedness of its practices.
Even if we accept that the city is always a palimpsest, it is the upper layers that catch
the eye and provide the impetus for engagement. This intervention will excavate the
foundations of the ‘capital city’ – specifically the urban situation and disciplining of
money, trade, metal, spatiality, spirituality and, above all, people that appear from the
very start. The capital(ist) city is both firmly historical and thoroughly trans-historical.
But it has a point of origin in a specific place, a specific time and a particular name –
one that used to be synonymous with wealth and power: Potosí.
Booking required.
16
WEEKEND
THREE
THURSDAY NOV 17 TH
SITE-SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE INSTALLATION
Various times
Various venues
From Thursday 17th to Saturday 19th November, Conlon O’Reilly Ross’s
commission will loiter and skulk across Galway city as part of the TULCA public
programme. You are invited to join part of this performative structure at
irregular intervals, for a series of divergences. Please see the festival website
and social media for time and locations.
PERFORMANCE
6pm
Galway Arts Centre
Martin Sharry – What’s The Story? (see Thursday 10th for details)
STARGAZING EVENT / VIDEO SCREENING
6pm
The Twelve Hotel, Barna
Aisling O’Beirn has been working with groups around Galway on a speciallycommissioned new work, Light Years From Here. All of the stars in the
night sky are at different distances from the earth, ranging from the nearest,
Proxima Centauri, at a mere 4 light years away, to early generations of stars,
billions of light years from us. Depending on where we look we can see light
ranging from the start of the Islamic Hijri calendar (622) to the launch of
Sputnik (1957).
For Light Years from Here Galway residents from various ethnic and cultural
17
backgrounds contributed dates and related anecdotes that have a special
significance for them. Join TULCA and Galway Astronomical Society to find
the stars that match these dates, and watch two of O’Beirn’s recent video
works.
Meet in the car park of the Twelve Hotel. Buses 414, 424 and 524 go regularly
from Galway City to Bearna.
NOTE: This event is dependent upon clear skies. Please check the website
for updates as poor weather may change the location or time.
Booking required.
SATURDAY NOV 19 TH
PERFORMANCE
3pm
Galway Arts Centre
Martin Sharry – What’s The Story? (see Thursday 10th for details)
18
COUNTY PROGRAMME
The continuing support of Galway County Council allows TULCA to bring the
festival out from the city, and to bring participants from the county into our
main festival venues. This year, two projects will take place in the county.
On Saturday 5th November, Glasgow-based performance duo Two Ruins will
bring their mobile, electro-acoustic light show Blind Spot out to various venues
– keep an eye on our website for further details.
Meanwhile, on Thursday 17th November, Aisling O’Beirn’s project Light Years
From Here concludes with a stargazing event outside Bearna. Aisling has
been working with Galway residents of various different cultural and ethnic
backgrounds to produce a ‘star chart’. All of the stars in the night sky are at
different distances from the earth, ranging from the nearest, a mere four light
years away, to early stars billions of light years from us. The participants in
Light Years From Here selected dates that are of historical, cultural or personal
significance to them, and, working with the Imbusch Observatory at NUIG, and
Galway Astronomy Club, Aisling has found stars whose light began its journey
to earth in these same years. Galway Astronomy Club and TULCA invite you
a night of stargazing in Connemara, and a screening of two of Aisling’s films.
Book your place at the festival website, tulcafestival.com.
Our thanks to Galway County Council for the valuable support that they have
given to TULCA.
19
HOSPITAL PROGRAMME
UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL GALWAY
TULCA is delighted to continue our collaboration with Galway University
Hospitals Arts Trust. The Arts Trust funds the production of new artworks
placed within the grounds and buildings of Galway University Hospitals, and
the collaboration with TULCA allows us to bring the festival to a substantial
audience, in a non-arts setting. This is always a valuable opportunity for
artists and we’re very pleased that this year there are two TULCA projects
being supported by the Arts Trust.
Miranda Blennerhassett’s mural GUH is a major new permanent piece in
the corridor of the Endoscopy Unit, on the 4th floor of the main hospital
building. When selecting permanent works for the hospital setting the Arts
Trust considers the environment and the people inhabiting the space. As
Miranda states elsewhere in this catalogue: “I see the act of ornamenting
one’s surroundings as a benevolent creative statement. There is an inherent
generosity in the act of ornamenting that makes explicit a care and regard for
our surroundings: consideration for our environment implies a consideration
for those within it.” Miranda has created wall pieces for a large number of
sites and exhibitions, and we’re very pleased to be able to offer her the
opportunity to create this permanent piece, which we hope staff, patients and
visitors in the hospital will enjoy for many years to come.
Jane Butler is producing a new site-specific installation, Planning for the
Unconscious, at the gable of the old nurses’ home, facing University Road.
Jane is interested in ephemeral situations and interventions, and in bringing
attention to those things that ordinarily go unnoticed. The nurses’ home
is something of an anomalous site in the modern hospital development,
a building of great architectural significance whose function has been in
transition for some time. Butler’s text-based intervention, which at first glance
may appear to be some sort of construction site, invites us to contemplate
a space that has become, to some extent, part of the unseen scenery of
Galway, and to linger a while. We’re excited at this opportunity for a work
commissioned by the Arts Trust to resonate in the public sphere more
broadly, and to open new conversations about the city’s relationship with
Galway University Hospitals.
For further information contact Galway University Hospitals Arts Trust
at 091 544979 or email: [email protected]
20
21
DANIEL
JEWESBURY
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Aphrodite of the Terror (detail), plaster, 1987
Courtesy the Artist’s Estate and Victoria Miro, London
© The Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Photo by Stephen White
24
THE
HEADLESS
CIT Y:
VISIONS OF
IMPOSSIBLE
EXISTENCE
Daniel Jewesbur y
… there is lost time and there are waste lands, unproductive
expenditures, things one never gets over, sins that cannot be
redeemed, garbage that cannot be recycled. 1
The desire to transform the world is not uncommon, and
there are a number of ways of fulfilling it. One of these is
by adopting a certain subjectivity, aggressive or passive,
deliberately sought or simply the result of a mood, which
alters experience of the world, and so transforms it. 2
I try to walk without purpose, get myself lost. I’ve been trying to get lost for
some time now.
A deserted concrete shop unit, apparently never used. It can only have
been here a few years, the last city slaughterhouse stood here for 30
years from the late 1960s, after the previous one had been condemned.
Residents and shopkeepers complained. The animals’ screams and the
sawing of carcasses. The smell was appalling. Live animals could be bought
at the fair across the road and taken to the abattoir for slaughtering.
I’ve been trying to get lost for some time now.
1
Denis Hollier (1989) Against Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), p. xiv.
2
Patrick Keiller (2013) ‘The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape’, in The View From The
Train (London: Verso), p. 9.
25
THE CIT Y: A MODERN PREHISTORY
The traditional history of the city used to go like this.
We came to the city, or our parents came, or their parents, or their
grandparents, or theirs, to escape. We came to find a kind of freedom. We
exchanged ancient bonds, feudal bonds – to the land, family, the church –
for the contract of wage labour: sell your work, and own yourself the rest of
the time. A freedom with definite limits and constraints, one that had to be
purchased, but a kind of freedom nonetheless.
In Britain, cities quickly grew in the eighteenth century as rural commons
were enclosed and peasants made landless: vagabondage and itinerancy
being illegal, the only resort for this dispossessed class was to come to the
cities and feed the new industries’ demand for labour. Just as the wholesale
expropriation of rural land by a few wealthy owners created the circumstances
for the success of the Industrial Revolution, so the creation of a new urban
class, conscious of its collective power, acted as a counterbalance to the
demands and desires of the owners of industry, and the fractious, uneasy
contract of urban social democracy emerged. Throughout the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries some variant of this pattern of industrialisation and
urbanisation spread, however unevenly, to regions around the British Empire
and their competitors alike. 3
We now find ourselves stuck on the other side of this history, looking back
on a time when our place or stake in the city seemed fairly clear. The era of
industrial urbanisation has long been over in the West. The social contract
of the city has been summarily terminated. Once again we find ourselves
dispossessed, homeless, expelled from the garden (city).
And so we arrive in this thing that has been called the ‘neoliberal’ city, an
overused and underexplained term for sure, where the name of a school of
free-market economics has come to describe a mode of social organisation
whose reach goes far beyond economics. I would offer a definition of the
neoliberal city as being characterised by a number of distinct, but necessarily
interrelated things. Firstly it is no longer a city of production – of things, and
thus of easily identifiable surplus value (profit). It has been deindustrialised.
But what has come in place of industry, of actually making things? Here we
can identify four traits; the neoliberal city must be privatised; it must be
3
26
See E. P. Thompson (1968) The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin), and
Christopher Hill (1997) Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies (London: Penguin).
Ionic column salvaged from the facade of
Belfast’s ‘Orpheus’ building, now demolished
deregulated; it must be globalised;
and it must be financialised (which
is to say, assets must be capable
of being turned into financial
instruments, into speculative capital
– futures, derivatives, Collateralised
Debt Obligations and so on – in
other words, there must be credit
and there must be debt).
In combining these four essential qualities, capitalism finds new ways to
extract value from the city. But all four must be in place: it’s possible for
services or industries to be privatised but still be heavily regulated by the
state; equally, without financialisation – the creation of a debt economy – there
is no room for the creation of the kinds of spectacular profits at which the
licensed gamblers of the financial districts have become so expert, over the
last 40 years.
And so capitalism has found a way to leverage the profits of the city; merely
erecting and selling buildings, produces meagre returns, and buildings
themselves can only be replaced every so often. The city today is one
enormous, and enormously complex financial instrument, leveraged globally,
through hedge funds and investment banks that have no knowledge of, or
interest in, the physical assets that their futures and positions are derived
from.
In the large cities, this produces a situation where, as property increasingly
becomes an internationally speculated commodity, it becomes increasingly
difficult for workers on an average income to sustain themselves – to find a
home, or a job, or get enough to eat or pay bills. The large city has become
its own ‘supplement’, or ‘simulacrum’ (if you prefer) – the built city has become
a crude and inaccurate representation, simply a model, of the ‘space of
flows’ of global finance capital, in the way that a circuit diagram shows all the
27
components of an electrical circuit, but cannot show the electrons passing
through it. 4
Meanwhile in smaller cities, which likewise no longer have any meaningful
productive economy, but which do not have a comparable position in the
global financial markets, another dynamic can be found, another neoliberal
city. These are the cities of competitive branding, relentlessly jostling for the
only continuous source of profit that’s available to them, tourism. In these
spaces, history is sold as heritage (having first been cleansed of any messy
4
28
see Manuel Castells (1989) The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and
the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: Blackwell).
historical processes of struggle and conflict), a heightened pastiche of local
lifestyle is sold as culture (never has Raymond Williams’s dictum that ‘culture
is ordinary’ seemed so apt), and landscape is sold as the ‘location’ of films
and TV series. An endless cavalcade of international sporting tournaments,
festivals, Capitals of Culture and Cities of Design sees city-brands compete
with one another for the same tourist income. Meanwhile the effect is the
same: jobs, homes and with them, access to traditional social infrastructure
gradually move out of reach of the citizen. And not only our labour, but also
our leisure create profit that is expropriated from the city, expatriated to
elsewhere in the world.
‘FOR L ACK OF AN ANIMAL THEY KILL TIME’
5
The ‘Headless City’ is not a concept or theory of the city; rather, it is a kind
of container for responses to and accounts of this contemporary city. It is
a means of questioning – asking, for instance, what this current period of
transition will eventually deliver us to, and how we might have to organise our
lives. It’s a way to approach citizenship, sovereignty, duty and belonging, with
a certain futurity, but also to probe ideas from the past of how to organise the
city, or of how to organise against it, ideas that may have been repressed, or
simply forgotten. It doesn’t rely on any one theory or descriptive account, nor
does it seek to name any style or approach within art. The works collected
in this exhibition are not illustrative of a theory that goes before them; but
collectively, they can inform and shape our thinking about the city, through
their ability to make us aware of certain problems and ongoing unresolved
contradictions, by dramatising our unease about the city, or by generating
that unease; and I want to propose that they can do so more persuasively if
they are placed into certain contexts, which I’ll try to enlarge upon here.
If the figure of Georges Bataille, librarian, anthropologist, novelist and
philosopher, will loom prominently in the paragraphs to come, his entry should
be prefaced with a caveat. Bataille possesses a notoriety that comes partly
from his violently erotic surrealist novels and stories (including Story of the Eye
(1928; trans. 1979), Madame Edwarda (1941, trans. 1972), and Blue of Noon
(1957, trans. 1978)); and partly from his fleeting involvement, in the 1930s, in a
‘secret’ society that was apparently fixated with death, sex and sacrifice and
has since gained some notoriety. There have been many breathless, exuberant
appropriations, in art, literature and philosophy, of ideas that Bataille is
supposed to have espoused. Whilst it was at his posthumous bidding that the
5
Hollier, p. xv
29
notion of headlessness first came into
my own head, he is not employed here
merely ‘to shock the bourgeoisie’, but
because the structure of his thought is so
rich, so provocative, and so unsettling of
previous habits of conceptualisation and
description that he offers exceptionally
relevant ways to think about the city at a
time of radical instability. If some heads
are cut off along the way, and some erotic
impulses satisfied in the streets and lanes,
that is simply how it must be.
The most widely known of Bataille’s
philosophical projects is his theory of
the ‘general economy’. In his 1933 essay
‘The Notion of Expenditure’ (trans. 1985),
and his later and more comprehensive
book The Accursed Share (vol. 1 1967,
trans. 1989; vols. 2&3 1976, trans. 1989),
Bataille characterises capitalism, and
classical economics more generally,
as fixated on utility, productivity and
the avoidance of waste. Consumption
beyond that which is necessary to sustain
or reproduce humanity, beyond that
which is necessary to sustain production
(and necessary growth) is profligate, even
dangerous. Any loss – the destruction of
goods through reckless or immoderate
consumption, the nonproductive use of
time, or the splendid waste of resources –
is of all things that which is most difficult
to countenance in contemporary urban
capitalism; it is, literally, impossible to
‘account for’, to make good. This loss or
waste is what Bataille calls ‘expenditure’
(in French, dépense).
Following the sociologist Max Weber,
Bataille argues that, by the seventeenth
century, Protestant rationalism had
30
thoroughly discredited the morality of mediaeval economics. By the time of
the English Civil War in the 1640s, Puritanism had provided a new morality
and a set of new economic ‘laws’ for capitalism. Prior to this, the possession
of great wealth had entailed the expenditure of large sums of money on
public spectacles and festivals, or on ‘good works’: “in primitive societies …
the products of human activity not only flow in great quantities to rich men
because of the protection or social leadership services these men supposedly
provide, but also because of the spectacular collective expenditures for
which they must pay.” 6 “What differentiates the medieval economy from the
capitalist economy is that to a very large extent the former, static economy
made a nonproductive consumption of the excess wealth, while the latter
accumulates and determines a dynamic growth of the production apparatus.”
7
Bataille insists on the necessity of asserting – unrepressing – some theory of
unproductive expenditure – in order to fully understand society, and ourselves
within it.
Immediately, this account seems at odds with the description given above
of the ‘spectacularised’ city, forum of never-ending festivals, competitive
cultural display, and consumption (not least, consumption of the idea of ‘place’
itself), all with no apparent ‘end’ other than pleasure. 8 Surely these festivities
represent precisely the celebration of a form of freedom, escape, from an
era of arduous manual labour, and from the omnipresent threat of poverty or
destitution, into one of plenty and leisure? Might this not even be the dawn of
a ‘postcapitalist’ era that we are witnessing? Yet all these effortful, carefullyregulated spectacles can be only an affectation, a feint at real ‘expenditure’:
they all have a clear, even an unmistakable end, the production and increase
of the value of the city and its brand (which is to say, the value of the rents
and profits that can be derived from its real estate, since these are the
ultimate driver of all other value). As we have seen, the extraction of profit
from the contemporary city is an increasingly complex endeavour, requiring
the algorithmic innovations of a financial capitalism which demands not only
more consumption, but consumption of more and more different kinds.
Desire in the city is controlled through its commodification and temporary
satisfaction: lust, hunger, the desire for intoxication, for satiation of any kind,
can be satisfied, on demand. But if it can be provided it means that it must be
bought, which means that it can be sold, which means that its consumption
produces no loss, but in fact generates new and greater private profit,
ultimately driving more consumption, which drives more production. Thus the
6
Georges Bataille (1985) ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, in Visions of Excess, edited & translated by Allan
Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 123.
7
Bataille (1989) The Accursed Share, Vol. 1 (Brooklyn: Zone Books), p. 116.
8
John Urry (1995) Consuming Places (London & New York: Routledge).
31
moral cycle is unbroken; time is never wasted in the metropolis. Loiterers will
be moved on.
Arduous physical toil is, of course, ever-present in this thematised, spectacular
city: as a heritage display in the museum, which is most likely a former
industrial building, or on the site of a former industrial building, on rezoned
industrial land. In fact the entire city is now a museum. Denis Hollier has
famously drawn out a thread in Bataille’s writing that links the old and new
cities, in the introduction to his book Against Architecture (1974, trans.
1989). Hollier recalls two short articles or ‘definitions’ that Bataille wrote for
the magazine Documents, which he edited, in the late 1920s: one entitled
‘Abattoir’, and the other, ‘Musée’. Bataille links the abattoir to the temple,
since temples of the past were used both for sacrifice and for prayer.
But what we have is a deserted, unconscious religion: no one
ever attends the sacrifices […] ‘Nowadays the slaughterhouse is
cursed and quarantined like a boat with cholera aboard… The
victims of this curse are neither the butchers nor the animals, but
those fine folk who have reached the point of not being able to
stand their own unseemliness, an unseemliness corresponding in
fact to a pathological need for cleanliness.’ 9
This ‘unseemliness’ is what will come to be characterised, for Bataille, by the
bourgeois aversion to unproductive expenditure. The sacrificial, the orgiastic,
the wasteful, are all shameful, not to be tolerated. They are cleansed from the
city, or, in the case of the abattoirs, moved to its edges. In their place rises the
museum, where the working class and bourgeoisie alike can go to be edified
and educated, to discover an art and a history that reaffirms the beauty and
wisdom of the present order, of us, the consumers and the product, the
historical and ideological end-point, of all this delicately wrought heritage. But
even here Bataille finds room for a metaphor that reminds us of the origins
we would rather excise: “A museum is like the lungs of a great city: the crowd
floods into the museum every Sunday like blood and it leaves purified and
fresh.” 10
We can follow Hollier a little further to draw out the connection between
slaughterhouses and museums, on one hand, and the theory of expenditure
on the other. It would be simple to accept that
the slaughterhouse – the bad, the dirty, the dead – is a shameful opposite of
the museum – refined, purifying. But this is not what Bataille is asserting; in all
his writing, he strives to avoid such banal binaries:
32
9
Hollier, quoting Bataille, pp. xii-xiii.
10
Hollier, p. xiii
I am Saint Democracy; I await my lovers Adolphe Willette 1887
33
One does not exist without the other, but it does not exist with
the other either […] The question thus is one of knowing whether
a theory of dépense can work without the difference between
high and low, between dirty and clean; whether a theory of
dépense is not, first of all, a theory of the difference between
two expenditures, a proper, clean one, and an improper, dirty
one. That is the difference, when all is said and done, between
slaughterhouses and museums. And it is precisely this difference
that gets lost with the conversion of slaughterhouse into
museum, a conversion that lays money on the hypothesis that
an integral appropriation of expenditure is possible – as if it
were possible to spend and be spent without getting dirty, as
if dépense could be thoroughly presentable, spending energy
without polluting, shamelessly, nothing repugnant about it, right
at home in a public place, with everybody looking. 11
If the theory of unproductive expenditure – dépense – is not simply an
attempt to reassert or recuperate some ‘lost’ or repressed presence or
behaviour or knowledge, within the city, but rather an insistence on the
inevitability of that loss, then it becomes far more troublesome and subtle as
an idea: because it cannot be the ‘answer’ to some vague question of how
to live better or more authentically – by becoming a libertine, or a sadist,
or a glutton, by living wastefully without qualms. Instead it can only be the
insistence on the impossibility of that desire, on the necessary presence of
loss, and death, and waste, as a shadow or stain throughout the new, shining
city; and simultaneously it is the spur to us to try and live that difference more
fully, to live in that difference, with all the difficulty that suggests.
TOWARDS, AND AWAY FROM, THE
‘HEADLESS CIT Y ’
So why ‘headless’, particularly? What does this suggest, what does it mean?
I’ve mentioned the secret society that Bataille became involved in during the
late 1930s, which grew out of another magazine he edited, entitled Acéphale.
An acephalous being is literally one without a head. In the first article of the
very first edition of Acéphale, Bataille wrote:
11
34
Hollier, pp. xiii-xiv.
The world to which we have belonged offers nothing to love
outside of each individual insufficiency: its existence is limited
to utility […] The advantages of civilisation are offset by the way
men profit from them: men today profit in order to become the
most degraded beings that have ever existed […]
Human life is exhausted from serving as the head of, or the
reason for, the universe […]
Man has escaped from his head just as the condemned man has
escaped from his prison. He has found beyond himself not God,
who is the prohibition against crime, but a being who is unaware
of prohibition. Beyond what I am, I meet a being who makes me
laugh because he is headless; this fills me with dread because he
is made of innocence and crime […] He is not a man. He is not a
god either. He is not me but he is more than me: his stomach is
the labyrinth in which he has lost himself, loses me with him, and
35
in which I discover myself as him, in
other words as a monster. 12
From one angle then, the Headless City
is a possibility, a hope or a provocation.
If architecture and spatial order are
the ‘prison’, in which rationality and
productivity find their apotheosis, the
Headless City is no more than a series of
escape routes, ways to think differently, to
think difference in the city, to escape the
impossibility of existence. And one can
plan an escape that involves no travel; or
rather, one may travel infinite distances
without leaving one’s home.
Anti-rationalism is inseparably
linked in Bataille’s thought with antiinstrumentalism, as we have seen, and
we shall return later to other concepts
through which he sought to struggle
against totalising thought.
I have indicated that the Headless
City is not merely an illustration
of Bataille’s challenging and farreaching ideas. Other writers
have approached the trope of
‘headlessness’ in the city and
have not valorised it in the same
way that he does. The architect
and urban theorist Bruno Taut,
who went on to build some of the
first examples of Modernist public
housing in Berlin in the 1920s,
published an influential book
entitled Die Stadtkrone, or ‘The
City Crown’. 13 In this text Taut
36
12
Bataille (1985) ‘The Sacred Conspiracy’, in Visions of Excess, pp. 179-181.
13
The full text has been reissued in German with new essays: Taut, Scheerbart et. al. (2003) Die Stadtkrone
(Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag); the full text is available at http://www.tu­­­‑cottbus.de/theoriederarchitektur/
Archiv/Autoren/Taut/Stadtkrone/Taut1919a.htm.
urgently advocated a return to more rational urban planning ideas: as he saw
it the development of the city in the modern era had taken it too far away from
a scale and an orientation that was sensitive or useful to its inhabitants. It’s
worth quoting at length from Taut to give some indication of the predicament
that he felt the modern city faced, and the solution that was required.
Throughout every great cultural epoch, the constructive will of
the time was directed at one ulterior, metaphysical building.
The narrow concept of building construction applied today
is a complete inversion of what it was in the past. A minster,
a cathedral above a historic city; a pagoda above the huts
of Indians; the enormous temple district in the square of the
Chinese city; and the Acropolis above the simple houses of
an ancient city – all show that the climax, the ultimate, is a
crystallized religious conception. This is, at once, the starting
point and the final goal for all architecture. Its light, radiating
onto each building, down to the simplest hut, demonstrates that
[buildings] can fulfil the simplest practical needs and still possess
a shimmer of such a conception’s glory […]
The mirror of the old city image is true, pure, and unclouded.
The greatest buildings were derived from the highest thoughts:
faith, God, and religion. The house of God governs every village
and small city just as the cathedral reigns majestically over large
cities […] The cathedral, with its truly inappropriate nave and
even less practical tower (purpose as a basic need), remains the
actual city crown. Despite the strong political independence of
the old city, the town halls, civic buildings, guild houses, and
so many others subordinate their beauty and glory, as do the
multicoloured jewels that surround a sparkling diamond […] 14
He goes on to eulogise the garden city movement and its ideal of providing
green space for ordinary urban workers. In a section entitled ‘Torso without a
Head’, he writes:
Healthy apartments, gardens, parks, nice paths, industry,
businesses – everything healthy, well-ordered and comfortable
An edited translation was published some years ago: Taut (2009) ‘The City Crown’, transl. Ulrike
Altenmüller & Matthew Mindrup, in Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 63 no. 1, pp. 121-134. This
translation is available online at http://socks-studio.com/2013/09/28/bruno-taut-the-city-crown-1919/.
Finally, the same translators have just published the first full English text of Taut’s book: Taut (2016) The
City Crown, eds & transl. Altenmüller & Mindrup (Abingdon & New York: Routledge).
14
Taut (2009) pp. 122-123.
37
for living. A school here, an administration building there, all
laid out beautifully in a romantic or classical style. Yet, can all of
our life’s needs be fulfilled by comfort, ease, and pleasantness?
The whole can dissolve like snow in the sun. Is there no head?
Has this torso no head? Is this our image, our spiritual condition?
We look at the old cities and must say wearily: we have no [firm]
footing […] 15
Finally, he begins to describe his ideal city plan, which has much in common
with the rational utopias dreamed of by Fourier and others in the nineteenth
century: separate districts for residential buildings, industry, leisure, business
and public administration are laid out around a central square, in which stand
the main public buildings, higher than all others in the city which lies at their
feet. These buildings are the opera, the theatre, a community centre and
meeting halls. Around them are laid restaurants and bars and other lesser
public buildings, including a museum and library:
In the new city, mass storage of anything that’s old and all sorts
of questionable new things does not take place, as today’s
museums unfortunately exhibit in abundance. Living art requires
no stockpiling at all; here it should no longer eke out in the
museum a miserable existence, but cooperate and adjust itself
throughout the whole. 16
The new Christianity, for Taut, is socialism: an ordered, rational, rigorous
socialism, in which everyone, quite literally, must know their place. And within
this new faith there is one whose calling is higher than all others:
The architect must remind himself of his high priest–like, godly
profession and try to awaken the treasure that sleeps in the
depths of the human mind. In complete self-abandonment, he
must steep himself in the soul of the human population and find
himself and his high profession by giving – at least as a goal – a
material expression to what slumbers in all mankind. As it was
at one time, a talismanic built ideal should again arise and make
people aware that they are members of a great architecture. 17
For Bataille, the acute, apocalyptic hopelessness of the 1930s, marked by the
38
15
Taut (2009) p. 124.
16
Taut (2009) p. 129.
17
Taut (2009) p. 126.
unstoppable ascendancy of fascism and the apparent inevitability of another
terrible war, were caused by structures of thought that circumscribed and
constrained all politics, on both left and right: both fascists and Marxists had
inherited a deterministic, mechanistic view of history and political processes,
aimed at total ‘solutions’ to which humanity must be enslaved. Bataille found
that, however much fascism and Marxism rooted their appeal in struggles in
the material world, nonetheless they still cleaved to a transcendent utopianism
that was thoroughly detached from it, and which, moreover, was thoroughly
utilitarian. “Whether it be anti-Semitism, fascism – or socialism – there is only
use […] Those freed from the past [i.e. socialists] are chained to reason; those
who do not enslave reason [i.e. nationalists and fascists] are the slaves of the
past […] Nevertheless, life demands to be freed no less from the past than
from a system of rational and administrative measurements.” writes Bataille
in an article in the first issue of Acéphale (in which he reclaims the radical
philosophy of Nietzsche from the fascist ‘Judases’, including Nietzsche’s own
sister, who had laid claim to him). 18
There are some perhaps unexpected, and perhaps tenuous connections to
be made between Taut and Bataille. Taut illustrated his original text with
several figures of the ‘city crowns’ that he revered: Ang Kor Wat, the Acropolis,
and also a seventeenth-century engraving of Nôtre Dame in Paris. One of
Bataille’s first published pieces of writing was a paean in praise of Nôtre Dame
in Rheims, his home town (the two cathedrals are roughly contemporary, and
are the two prime examples of the high French Gothic style). This text, written
before Bataille’s dramatic break with Catholicism, eulogises the cathedral,
burned by the Germans during the First World War, as the resonant heart of
a people, one whose beating cannot be silenced, even by partial destruction.
Moreover, in his later assessments of productive and unproductive
expenditures, Bataille cites cathedrals – with their ‘truly inappropriate’
architecture and proportions as examples of the kind of unnecessary, wasteful
expenditure to which the Reformation brought a stop.
Taut’s Headless City is a problem; but it’s one that planning, and rationalism,
put to the service of ‘the people’, can solve, and the Architect, no less than
the city He builds, is at the pinnacle of this great enterprise.
There have been others for whom headlessness has been shown to be more
of a problem than an opportunity.
18
Bataille (1985) ‘Nietzsche and the Fascists’, in Visions of Excess, pp. 184-193.
39
“Acephale 2 Jan 1937”
https://monoskop.org/File:Acephale_2_Jan_1937.jpg#mediaviewer/
File:Acephale_2_Jan_1937.jpg
40
“Acephale 3-4 Jul 1937”
https://monoskop.org/File:Acephale_3-4_Jul_1937.jpg#mediaviewer/
File:Acephale_3-4_Jul_1937.jpg
41
THE HEAD OF THE PEOPLE
The original French title of Hollier’s book is La Prise de la Concorde, ‘The
Taking of the [Place de la] Concorde’. This is a site that had a dramatic and
immediate resonance for Bataille as it’s the place where an entire social order
was swept away in an instant, when Louis XVI was decapitated on the 21st of
January 1793. The cover of this catalogue shows a contemporary engraving
of the scene; on the left (back cover), the guillotined head of the former king
(known simply as Louis Capet since the abolition of the monarchy the previous
September) is held aloft in front of crowds of cheering revolutionary soldiers.
On the right (front cover), taller than any of the buildings in the background
because of the perspective from which it’s been represented, stands an
ominous stone plinth, devoid of any statue or inscription (it looks as if a tablet
may have been wrenched from its side). The only structure in the foreground
that is as tall as this plinth is the guillotine itself.
At the time of Louis’s execution, the square was known as the Place de la
Révolution. It had, from its original laying-out in the 1750s, been the Place
Louis XV, but on the 11th of August 1792, the equestrian statue of Louis
XV at its centre was torn down and the square was subsequently renamed.
When Louis Capet, the grandson of that monarch who, even after his death,
had been so symbolically deposed, came to meet his own popular justice
six months later, the eyewitness engraver did not miss the symmetry of the
occasion. The empty plinth, compositionally awkward and given rather more
prominence than the sensational business of the day to the left, stands as a
mute witness to this inauguration of the sovereignty of the people. The head
of the king is shown not primarily to the crowds below, but to this blank stone
edifice, which seems like nothing more than a tomb.
The Place de la Concorde was so renamed by the National Convention after
the end of the Terror, in its final act before dissolving itself in 1795. Bataille
felt that the site had an almost sacred resonance, because here, blood had
been shed, a great moment of sacrifice had taken place, and in that blood
had been anointed a new order. The blood of the sovereign, the supreme
and divine ruler, had been necessary to install this new sovereignty of the
masses, not because of any pseudo-religious symbolism: quite the reverse.
Bataille believed strongly that the blood and sacrifice sublimated in Christian
ritual had its origins in the same pre-Modern conception of a continuum of
the clean and the dirty, the pure and the evil, the sacred and the profane, by
which he was so fascinated. The dualism at the core of Modernity, enshrined
42
most clearly in the dialectic that permeates its philosophy, must always seek
to banish the inferior, to distance it definitively from its opposite. In this act,
since such complete erasure must always be impossible, there is necessarily
a repression of the dirty, the impure, and the undesirable, a wishful thinking
which in turn is always threatening to break apart under its own weight, and
to reveal the death and corruption that is at the heart of all apparent order,
inseparably, ineradicably.
Regina Janes writes about what the cutting off of heads (or ‘decollation’ as
she prettily calls it) represented, socially and politically, during the French
Revolution, and how in turn it came to be represented, in contemporary
prints.
When the people cut off and displayed the head of a ‘traitor’,
they made the ‘sovereignty of the people’ more than a pretty
compliment. They enacted that sovereignty by exercising a
traditional prerogative of the sovereign […] By the period of the
Revolution, the display of severed heads had long been one
of the commonest ways a European sovereign displayed his
power to his subjects […] Simultaneously he asserted his right
to violence and showed his subjects one consequence of their
tampering with his order […] When the sovereign displays a
head, he displays it not to his equals but to his people. They are
the objects of that display, both as raw material and as audience
[…]
The lesson of the heads is that there has been a fundamental
change in social hierarchies and the distribution of power. Article
3 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen declared
that the people were ‘the source of sovereignty’. Taking a head
transforms the menu peuple [common people] from the passive
‘source of sovereignty’ to the active executor of sovereign power.
19
Janes writes also about the way in which the guillotine – humane, efficient,
machinic, an instrument of the state – eventually makes decapitation and the
display of heads a more orderly and even useful activity, how it removes this
business from the artbitrary will of the people themselves, who executed it
with swords, pikes and bayonets, to their newly legitimate agents, the state
power. The essential content is retained, but the festivity and disorderliness
19
Regina Janes (1991) ‘Beheadings’, in Representations, No. 35, p. 24.
43
– the ‘promenade’, as she calls it – are
quietly dispensed with. She finds the same
repression in certain histories of the early
years of the Revolution, and remarks, drily:
“Removing the promenade removes the
celebration and denies the perpetrators of
violence their pleasure. It also removes the
threat explicit in the action.” 20
Sovereignty was another of Bataille’s most
enduring concerns, and he conceptualised
it rather similarly to expenditure, that’s to
say, in the immediate context of that which
it is not. If we return to his description of
‘the bourgeois world’ in The Accursed
Share, Bataille observes that Calvinism and
capitalism find mutual attraction in one
another because each spared the other
from considering things that they would
rather not. While religion was spared the
business of “profane calculation”, since this was now subjected to the laws of
economy, capitalism was spared from having to be subject to any “limits given
from the outside”, and this is by far the more interesting point for Bataille.
21
Capitalism limits itself to the problems posed by things, and it reduces
everything to the status of a thing in order to deal with it. This is familiar
enough from any number of critiques, old and new. Bataille takes these further
when he says: “But even if the solution of the problems of life – the key to
which is a man’s not becoming merely a thing, but of being in a sovereign
manner – were the unavoidable consequence of a satisfactory response to
material exigencies, it remains radically distinct from that response, with which
it is often confused.” 22
44
20
Janes, p. 24.
21
Bataille (1989) The Accursed Share, Vol. 1, p. 129.
22
Bataille (1989) The Accursed Share, Vol. 1, p. 131.
In the posthumously published third volume of The Accursed Share, Bataille
dedicates a whole work to this question of sovereignty. He takes forward the
assertion that the satisfaction of material need is not sufficient to grant true
sovereignty:
Let us say that the sovereign (or the sovereign life) begins when
the necessities of life are ensured, and the possibilities of life
open up without limit. Correspondingly, the sovereign is the
enjoyment of the possibilities that utility does not justify. What is
beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty. We may say, in other
words, that it is servile to envisage, from the first, the duration
of time – to employ the present time for the profit of the future,
which is what we do when we work. What is sovereign, in effect,
is to enjoy the present time without having anything else in view
except this present time. 23
To be sovereign, for Bataille, is not merely to cut off the sovereign’s head and
wear his crown; but to cut off our own heads, and to do so not out of a sense
of grim utility, but in order to see what may grow in their place.
ENDLESS UNREALISTIC DEMANDS, OR,
MEET ME AT THE RETAIL PARK
Benjamin Noys, writing about yet another of Bataille’s complex and muchdebated concepts, ‘base materialism’, sets out to explain something that
should be familiar by now: that when Bataille engages in some philosophical
project, he does not do so on its already established methodological terms.
Base materialism (“a materialism not implying an ontology”) is an insistence
on the omnipresence of the low, the shameful and the dirty, in contrast to
the finer aspirations of political thought and philosophical enterprise, which
hopes to banish or surpass these things. 24 But the base is neither simply the
‘opposing pole’ of the good and the fine – this is most definitely not simply
an inverted dialectic – nor merely a prescription for libidinous, dionysiac
indulgence.
When base materialism tears down the ‘metaphysical scaffolding’
which had entrapped us it does not leave us liberated from all
constraints or free to dissolve into the flux of base matter or
23
Bataille (1989) The Accursed Share, Vols. 2 & 3, p. 198.
24
Bataille (1985) ‘Base Materialism and Gnosticism’, in Visions of Excess, p. 49.
45
in that commonly desired contemporary space, a temporary
autonomous zone. This is not because it is a form of political
realism that accepts things as they are but because it abolishes
the paradox of a limited space of freedom by ruining any closed
‘liberated’ space. It is actually the most unreasonable and
unrealistic political demand, which is not a Utopian demand
(which is always for another space or an Other space, a u-topia).
This is what makes it so damaging to the limits of radical politics,
especially those academic political radicalisms which lay claim
to the name of materialism […] It is a radical thought of freedom
that exists at the limits of the claim to be radical because liberty
is itself unstable, it is not a place we can occupy or a position we
can monopolise.” 25
This elusive, inconclusive point is as good a conclusion as I can find at
the moment. I’m going to walk again, to subject myself to the city, to its
architecture that is my destiny and its tidy graves from which I sprang. I will
waste time in the city, and in time the city will waste me.
A clique of judgemental sunbathers have congregated, naked, in the little
churchyard outside St. Nicholas’s. Some tourists have become involved in a
drunken fight beneath the Lynch window, one of them insisted that the story
was true, and a tour guide broke his jaw.
A retail park has closed down because the traffic outside has been at
a standstill for seven weeks. The shops are being turned into creative
workspaces, all the unwanted goods have been moved into the biggest unit
and turned into a monumental museum.
The city is sprawling outwards, and now everything is the city, everything
feeds the city, really, not in a metaphorical sense. It is turning itself inside
out, squatting angrily on its hinterlands and exposing the necrosis at its core.
Somewhere, at an Applegreen, some truckers have just killed a goat. They are
cooking it in pieces on an Aldi disposable barbecue.
25
46
Benjamin Noys (1998) ‘Georges Bataille’s Base Materialism’, in Cultural Values, vol. 2 no. 4, pp. 514-15.
ARTISTS
Dispatches from Futureland - 2015
SOL
ARCHER
T ULC A FEST IVAL GALLERY
AT T HE FAIRGREEN
Automation has moved sites of logistics and transit further from
cities, and from the communities historically built up around
them. Unseen machinery moving through day and night, perfectly
choreographed, at perfectly measured speed, unspeakable sizes
removed from their relation to the human body.
Rotterdam has the largest port in Europe, carrying 500m tonnes
of cargo per year, through the labour of only 2,400 workers. In the
delta of the Maas river a huge area of new land, the Maasvlakte,
is under construction. Built to house fully automated terminals,
removing human bodies from the corridors of transit, at its heart
is Futureland, a tourist visitor centre. Dispatches from Futureland
follows an abstract cycle, in which a woman leads us through the
desolate peripheries of the docks, climbing on partly installed
infrastructure. A couple operate an immersive simulator, flying over
the completed project as it will be in 2033; machinery operates
without human intervention; tourist boats and buses glide through
the harbours. Police and dock workers perform a staged stand off,
both sides filming and photographing, all while the algorithmic ballet
of container transit continues day and night.
50
ART /
NOT ART
MECHANIC S’ INST IT UT E
SCPPS - The Society for the Conservation of Politics and Public Space
Saturday November 12th 2016 will see the launch of The Society for the
Conservation of Politics and Public Space (SCPPS), at the Mechanics’ Institute,
Galway City, Ireland.
Founding members Fergal Gaynor and Dobz O’Brien will be present at the
Institute for the rest of the day, to answer queries, and to assist readers at
the SCPPS Library, a collection of texts on art and politics, all readable in an
afternoon, suggested by the Society’s Irish and international affiliates.
The Society aims to investigate and intervene in the current shrinkage of
public space, and confusion regarding the nature of politics. It will do this
from a position of tension between art and politics, prior to the engagement
of any ideology.
Nothing can be assumed of its programme or how it will choose to
organise itself.
It will position itself ahead of, within or behind social movement as it sees fit.
Its initial building blocks will be individuals who care about the political
and / or its relation to art, rather than any set ideas or aims.
Its chief concern will be with the conditions of existence of art and politics, which
overlap in the space of appearance, that is, in public space.
It will practice art, or politics, or something else.
It will be an accomplice of memory.
51
‘Two Shapes Three Colours’, dimensions
variable, gloss paint, Facebook EMEA
Headquarters, Dublin, 2015
I work with a variety of
mediums such as installation,
animation and printmaking to
engage with the relationship
between art and architecture.
Through various techniques
UNIVERSIT Y HOSPITAL GALWAY
I explore the subjects of
contemporary architecture,
urban design and the role
of ornamentation. At the
centre of this practice is a desire to pay attention to details that are otherwise
overlooked. Architectural idiosyncrasies give our environments their political,
societal and aesthetic identities and as such this process requires receptiveness
to my surroundings and consciousness of my actions within them.
MIR ANDA
BLENNERHASSET T
In the work for TULCA I am considering the purpose of architectural
ornamentation and the construction of pattern. I see the act of ornamenting
one’s surroundings as a benevolent creative statement. When applied to
objects and structures the elemental human action of creating pattern
functions as a way of assigning value and meaning. There can be an inherent
generosity in the act of ornamenting that makes explicit a care and regard for
our surroundings: consideration for our environment implies a consideration for
those within it. Through the work of the craftsperson or artist the introduction
of beauty, harmony and symmetry to an environment shows appreciation for
the collective humanity of members of that society. The level of consideration
for others in any large group of people dictates how that society will function.
52
The place known today as Speakers’ Corner began life as a place for
public executions, in particular the notorious Tyburn Tree. The first record
of execution at Tyburn is in 1196.
The Tyburn Tree consisted of a triangle of crossbeams supported by
three uprights, allowing for multiple hangings along each crossbeam.
Situated in the north-east corner of Hyde Park, this place for state
executions derived its name from a brook, which runs beneath Brook
Street: Tye Bourne. The junction of Tyburn Road (now Oxford Street) and
Tyburn Lane (now Park Lane) provides its precise location. The Tyburn
Gallows was erected in 1571, and stood alongside the Tyburn Stream
until 1759, when the official place of execution for felons was moved to
Newgate Prison, the site now occupied by the Old Bailey.
The executions gave much opportunity for public theological debate.
Speakers’ Corner evolved from these speeches, which attempted to
explain, justify and or simply give meaning to a life or lives. And so
Tyburn developed into a political arena for public debate and discussion.
The defining principles of Speakers’ Corner – an early example of the
‘public sphere’ – are rooted within the culture of the Tyburn Tree.
Tybum Tree Series #10,
2006
RICK
BUCKLEY
GALWAY ARTS CENT RE
53
My Soul Soars Enchanted,
recycled vinyl mesh, 2016
JANE
BUTLER
UNIVERSIT Y HOSPITAL GALWAY
The distinctive Art Deco nurses’ home at Galway University Hospital
stands proudly amongst the newer buildings. Over years of change
and transition at the Hospital, the nurses’ home has dominated the site
becoming one of the most recognisable buildings in Galway.
Planning for the Unconscious is a subtle intervention at the nurses’ home,
made in response to the idiosyncrasies of this contested space, where it
attempts to reveal small parts of history that may have been overlooked
or lost over the last 80 years.
54
R ACHAEL
C AMPBELLPALMER
T ULC A FEST IVAL GALLERY
AT T HE FAIRGREEN
Methods for Egress,
QSS Gallery, Belfast 2016
Photo by Tony Corey
Rachael Campbell-Palmer’s explorations of materiality describe
our relationship to the contemporary urban environment. She
experiments with groupings of objects that refer both to the
industrial and the hand-crafted. The proportions of her freestanding
forms situate the viewer directly, so that we consider how we move
around the work, and how the work occupies its space.
Campbell-Palmer is intrigued by the possibility of the surfaces of
buildings retaining a cultural memory within their ‘skin’, in the same
way a cast form displays memory of its fabrication. The hollow-cast
structures act like a facade or membrane; the trace of activity in the
mould, from the process of their creation, is visible in their exterior.
The choice of materials dictates a tone and outcome of the work
that is solid and static, yet these are transient surfaces created by
transitional processes that will continue to change.
The work takes influence from the built landscape of CampbellPalmer’s native Belfast, but has qualities of the archeological, of ruins
or relics, of a vestige of a culture. Both Modern and neoclassical
architecture can be unearthed, but in this reimagining, the memory
of one has become ingrained in the identity of the other.
55
Conlon O’ Reilly Ross’s
collaboration has been informed
by a series of problematic projects
during overlapping directorships
at Catalyst Arts. Malingering
anomalies of public space and the
protocols which create them act
as a framework to be dismantled
and reconfigured. In the absence
of a municipal space in which to
be without purpose, their projects
seek to alleviate the burden of
expected behaviour.
CONLON
O’REILLY
ROSS
VARIOUS SIT ES - CIT Y CENT RE
Site Visit II, Research Image, 2016
56
Liam Crichton creates large-scale sculptures and installations that
investigate physical space. Containing references to and elements of a postminimal realisation, his aesthetically-driven and predominantly site-specific
work is often characterised by a dialectical approach that challenges
traditional perceptions and cultural environment. In an abstract, systematic,
reductive process, Crichton breaks down the impression of the familiar
to its bare essence. He operates through a non-linear, conceptual-formal
vernacular sculptural praxis.
PRESENCE // ESSENCE // TRANSCENDENCE
THROUGH THE TRAVERSE OF NOW,
I STAND IN WHAT IS NOTHING AND NOWHERE.
A PURGATORY STATE,
THE PAST AND FUTURE BECKON SIMULTANEOUSLY;
ABSTRACT REALMS THAT GIVE RISE TO FEELING AND THOUGHT.
THIS IS YOUR PASSAGE AND YOU AREN’T FREE FROM NOW.
LIAM
CRICHTON
SLEEPER, installation view, 2016
T ULC A FEST IVAL GALLERY
AT T HE FAIRGREEN
57
Moving Space, video still, 2013
SINEAD
CURR AN
GALWAY ARTS CENT RE
This film Moving Space reflects on and questions what a ‘home’ is
in postmodern society. Themes of isolation, stereotyping and living
on the margins are explored. The home presents itself as a version
of what Michel Foucault calls a ‘heterotopia’, a space that contains
many layers of meaning. Moving Space is a kind of a narrative escape
in a self-contained world within the urban.
58
The sun swallowed in holes is a sculpture/projection piece that comprises
two small looped projections. One shows footage of a street lamp in the
Claddagh area of Galway City, projected through a small upright piece
of picture-frame glass that splits and reconnects the lamp image. The
other projection comprises a series of quotes from the first chapter of
Desmond Hogan’s acclaimed 1976 debut novel The Ikon Maker.
The opening chapter of this short novel begins at the Claddagh with
a woman called Susan, a returned emigrant, describing particular
memories from her life in Galway and London. This first chapter proposes
a specific type of lost-ness – that of an emigrant when he or she comes
back to the place that they first left.
The sentences and sentence fragments chosen for this work are ones
with evocative image-making qualities of their own, while also relaying
the headlessness of leaving and returning to home.
Thank you to the Lilliput Press, Dublin.
ADRIAN
DUNC AN
The sun swallowed in holes,
video installation, 2016
GALWAY ARTS CENT RE
59
IAN
HAMILTON
FINL AY
GALWAY ARTS CENT RE
Ian Hamilton Finlay
28 October 1925 - 27 March 2006
The art of Ian Hamilton Finlay is unusual for encompassing a variety of
different media and discourses. Poetry, philosophy, history, gardening
and landscape design are among the genres of expression through which
his work moves, and his activities have assumed form in cards, books,
prints, inscribed stone or wood sculptures, room installations and fully
realised garden environments.
Common to all of Finlay’s production is the inscription of language words, invented or borrowed phrases and other semiotic devices - onto
real objects and thus into the world. That language inhabits, for Finlay, a
material or real dimension gives rise to the two seemingly opposed but
signal characteristics of his work.
On the one hand, Finlay has always been acutely sensitive to the formalist
concerns (colour, shape, scale, texture, composition) of literary and
artistic modernism. On the other hand, a committed poet and student
of classical philosophy, he has also always recognised the power of
language and art to shape our perceptions of the world and even incite
us to action.
60
The movement of words and language into the
world has been most fully realised by Finlay in
his now famous garden, Little Sparta, set in the
windswept Pentland Hills of southern Scotland.
Begun in 1966 when Finlay relocated with his
family to the site, an abandoned farm, Little
Sparta is a deliberate correction of the modern
sculpture garden through its maker’s revisiting
the Neoclassical tradition of the garden as a
place provocative of poetic, philosophic and
even political thought. (Rather than a ‘retreat’,
Finlay described it as an ‘attack’).
At the heart of all the varied materials and
forms through which Finlay’s invention flows are
his prints, cards, booklets and proposals. These
works bear an especially intimate connection
to Finlay’s activity as a poet. Meaning, in the
purely non-literal or figurative sense, is more
obvious as such in Finlay’s paper works than in
his three-dimensional pieces which often have
an irresistible physical presence. This meaning,
which can be suggestively open-ended, is
arrived at through metaphor – through the
coupling, on a single page, of unlike terms
which are brought to behave as shifting,
multivalent ‘pointers’.
Among Finlay’s predominant themes are the
relation between Nature and Culture; the Sea
as an instance of Nature’s sheer power and
problematic beauty; (Neo)Classicism, with its
attendant aesthetics, philosophy and politics,
as the defining type of Western culture; and the
French Revolution as an especially rich instance
of Neoclassical thought and forms married to
pastoral (gardening) imagery.
Urn Column,
1986/2016
Prudence Carlson
61
SORSHA
GALVIN
VARIOUS SIT ES
Desire Paths, 2016
The paths and roads of our cities can confine our movements
and determine our destinations. When inhabitants ignore these
established routes, new pathways begin to form and these
spontaneous movements formally change the landscape. These
paths become self-reinforcing and as more people use them, they
are eroded further making them more visible. These walkways are
known to architects and philosophers as ‘desire paths’, as they
reflect the needs and desires of the local people. Galvin will create
a number of temporary interventions in the Galway landscape
inspired by these paths, celebrating their unique material qualities
and their rebellious nature.
62
Observing the everyday though contextual consideration, curiosity
and innovation.
‘Untitled (With)’ is a generative, interactive audiovisual work –
fluorescent tube lights are installed, responding to the space. Using
physical electronics and programming they are transformed into a
live, interactive, conductible orchestra. Each tube light is sampled
live within the space and tuned to select and project certain
frequencies responding to where viewers stand to observe the work,
building gradually the longer they wait. As more viewers respond
through observation, more harmonies build, gently transforming the
sound of this piece.
Through this work I seek to challenge viewers learned behaviour,
reasserting what is possible within the everyday through reimagining and transformation.
www.vimeo.com/154877425
www.soundcloud.com/helenahamilton/untitled-with
HELENA
HAMILTON
N UN ’S ISL AND T HE AT RE
‘Untitled (With)’
Platform Arts Gallery, Belfast, 2015
63
OUTOFTHEBLU_ is a work formed from a sung vocal performance
over a composed synth soundtrack, based on a lyrical, collaged
appropriation of the Roxy Music song Out of The Blue and Giacomo
Leopardi’s ‘Dialogo della Moda e della Morte’ (‘A Dialogue between
Fashion and Death’). Leopardi’s text reveals the relationship between
consumerism, morality and the deathly aesthetics of the pursuit of
the ‘individual’.
Presenting myself as a genderless presence all in white, I stand
meditatively in the corner, wearing blue Calvin Klein make-up on
my hands and feet, and blind frosted contact lenses, with my back
to the viewer, enacting a ritual descent into the ‘dark matter of pop’.
A projection of a single blue 35mm slide is placed in an automatic
projector which is projected through an empty Calvin Klein Eternity
perfume bottle, distorting the light and glass of the ‘eternal’ fragrance
with the colour of the blue slide; this is matched to the shade used by
the British Conservative Party.
MICHELLE
HANNAH
GALWAY ARTS CENT RE
64
OUTOFTHEBLU_,
performance, 2015-16
Between The Walls is a poetic, dystopian work in progress about
the city of Berlin, where I have lived for the last twelve years. Berlin
changes a lot; it grows, and becomes more and more denselypacked. Since the fall of the Wall and reunification, space has
become much more expensive, many more new buildings have
appeared, and many more are still more to come. Open views
disappear in the city. Between The Walls is a walk through the dying
space of the city and about finding a space in-between, in daydreams, or just in whatever happens to be in front of you.
ANNA
HOMBURG
GALWAY ARTS CENT RE
Between The Walls 06,
Photo print on Fuji Crystal DP mounted
under acrylic glass, 2011
65
Church of the Dunes, video still, 2015
HELEN
HORGAN
Blessed City, heavenly Salem,
N UN ’S ISL AND T HE AT RE
Vision dear of peace and love,
Who, of living stones upbuilded
Art the joy of heaven above,
And with angel cohorts circled,
As a Bride to earth dost move. 1
In May 1662, a clandestine agreement was made between the French King
Louis XIV and a number of English Benedictine Nuns to grant the foundation
of an abbey in British-occupied colonial Dunkirk. Five months later, in a state
of financial instability, Charles II sold Dunkirk back to the French.
[…] [the abbey] was situated outside the gates of the town, facing the shore
front. The price demanded for the site was 13,236 livers (£10,000 in old
money)... a sum that would have appeared exorbitant, had it not been for a
tract of sandy lane or dunes which was included in the purchase. 2
Occupying an ambiguous strategic point of both physical advantage and
vulnerability, Dunkirk (from “dun(e)” dune and “kerke” church) has long been
a site of shifting favour; providing settings for both war and refuge at the
gateway between Europe and the UK. Church of the Dunes was shot on the
shorefront at the described former site of the Benedictine Abbey in June
2015.
1 ‘Hymn for the dedication of a church’ by Anonymous, in ‘A History of The Benedictine Nuns!
of Dunkirk’ with a Preface by D.B Wyndham Lewis (1957) courtesy of The LFTT Library
2 A History of The Benedictine Nuns of Dunkirk’ with a Preface by D.B Wyndham Lewis! (1957)
courtesy of The LFTT Library
66
Hughes’s work is predominantly sculptural, utilising expendable
materials from modern mass production systems. Often developed for
specific sites, materiality is central to the work and both found objects
and purchased industrial products are utilised. Colour is prominent, in
particular colour that is innate to materials.
Reflecting on consumerism, and focusing in particular on the
intersection between the individual and the structural within the realm of
consumption, Hughes strives to humanise the seemingly dehumanised
behaviours linked to materialism. Her materials include polystyrene,
wood, and plastic, amongst others. Switching the importance of form
over function the component elements are playfully reworked through
removal, addition and recasting, to disguise or reveal appearances.
Diverted from the homogenous manufacture of industrial products,
materials and objects begin to mimic each other and other things. A
process of fluid and gestural physical engagement is used to activate
‘machine-finished forms’ and force them out of an inertia.
Just as mass-produced goods are utilised physically, titles are found and
borrowed from a number of typically mass-media sources.
HELEN
HUGHES
T ULC A FEST IVAL GALLERY
AT T HE FAIRGREEN
For the men in charge of change,
installation detail, 2016
67
Delhi Fog, black and white
photograph, 2005
PATRICK
JOLLEY
GALWAY ARTS CENT RE,
T ULC A FEST IVAL GALLERY
AT T HE FAIRGREEN
Patrick Jolley’s work spanned film, photography and installation. He was
profoundly interested in the ordinary and its proximity to the horrific,
and in how little can be done to stop the one turning into the other. Like
Beckett, he saw acceptance and humour as tools to be used to survive
life – even to enjoy it. He did not believe in the possibility of escape, or
rather he saw all attempts at escape as doomed to failure and therefore
not worth the candle. Neither explanation nor comfort formed any
part of his repertoire. The influence of Eastern European and Russian
literature are clear; also the tragic and bloody history of the twentieth
century. India interested him deeply because of the open proximity in
which the animal and the spiritual sides of human nature exist.
The film Corridor (2009) draws on cinema’s use of the corridor as a
symptom of restlessness and entrapment. Here in Jolley’s film, corridors
suggests an architecture of impermanence, an endless system of
passages where progress is rendered an illusion and relationships resist
any settled sense of kinship.
68
Lady Liberty Destroyed (for Margaretta D’Arcy) is based on the final
iconic scene in Planet of the Apes (1968) when the protagonist (and
the viewer) finally realises that they have been in the United States all
the time.
All our cities are nodes now, mere switching addresses for the
movement of capital to light-speed. But the network architecture
hides a cloaked hierarchy. We live in Empire’s feeder cities, our bodies
moving in thrall to the packet-data thirst of London and New York.
Galway AD 3978. The spacecraft hurtles through time to crash. You
disembark, to find a landscape ruled by silverbacks with monkey-mind.
Humanity is a legend far left behind. Feature-length, you battle long
and hard through sci-fi odyssey. Then, in your final scene - on a beach
at the perimeter, you chance upon an Ozymandian ruin. Fall to your
knees. In awe at the great reveal. This city too was built on Empire;
and Empire can always fall.
LOITERING
THEATRE
LOIT ERINGT HE AT RE .ORG/
PROJEC TS/HESTON ’SFOLLY/
69
Gridlock examines the city as metaphor for system design, control
mechanisms, network and flux.
The structure of the city affects the life within it and influences how
social dynamics evolve. Today, we are entering an age that sees
increasing global connectivity, and a parallel virtual world is emerging
with an infrastructure that is in constant flux. The cybernetic cultural
theorist Manuel Castells wrote of the ‘space of flows’ that would
‘reconceptualise new forms of spatial arrangements under the
new technological paradigm’. In his treatise, virtual space does not
supersede physical space, rather there is an increasing interdependency
of both, as seen in the rise of global megacities worldwide that act as
physical nodal points of the commercial and technological infrastructure
upon which global communication capability depends. No longer
spaces of dwelling, these megacities expand and function as machine
for the global economy and communications system. The modern urban
dweller becomes more akin to a machine operative. This transient and
nomadic worker moves freely along the flows of information, trade and
exchange, yet exists without a
connection to place. A paradox
emerges in the modern psyche
that sees a telepresence that
shrinks geographic distance and
time, yet uproots our solid sense
of place.
DAVE
MADIGAN &
MÉADHBH
O’CONNOR
126 ART IST- RUN GALLERY
70
Gridlock, installation detail, 2014
JULIE
MERRIMAN
GALWAY ARTS CENT RE,
126 ART IST- RUN GALLERY
Compiler III - Typewriter carbon film on paper,
2015
For The Headless City, I considered the potential of the city from
the point of view of the architect and the engineer. The drawings
are part of a new series of work that continues my research into the
drawing languages and methodologies of other professions. Currently
I am examining early analogue reprography devices, developed to
reproduce the drawings of architects and engineers, circa 1840; during
this period, photography was also in its infancy and I am researching
links between the development of the two processes.
There are two strands to this work: Housing Area, which examines
architectural information, describing possible housing districts, and
Compiler, which examines engineering data, proposing mechanical
and structural adaptations. The information in these drawings acts
as a factual beginning but of equal importance are the situations
and nuances created by the drawing process, which involves working
through strips of typewriter carbon film. There is a rhythm to this
material as it transverses the paper that my drawn line both activates
and interrupts, creating a slippage in the imagery that is important to
the reading of this new work.
71
Raffle!!
JAMES
MOR AN
MECHANIC S’ INST IT UT E
Raffle!! is both a show and a raffle.
Raffles are a type of game, like gambling but not really gambling. In a raffle
you buy a ticket and hope to win a prize. It’s a chance for a bit of fun. I’d like
for us all to have a bit of fun. I think we deserve it.
It’s good to be present but it’s also hard and sometimes it’s nice to get out
of your head a bit. It’s nice to read books or look at videos or scroll and click
the internet.
Raffle!! is really just like these things, I think. What I like about raffles, I think,
is that even if you don’t win something you still spend some time imagining
what it would be like to have that particular something in your life. It’s as if
half the fun of a good juicer or NutriBullet is just thinking about how you’d
eat more healthily if you had a good juicer or NutriBullet and whether you’d
put it beside the fridge or the microwave.
So Raffle!! is a bit of fun, a chance to check out of our age of anxiety and to
instead check your tickets.
72
Classical orders proliferate in Western cities (and indeed beyond),
imbuing buildings such as law courts, banks, government buildings
and academic institutions with esteem and grandeur. Despite
being built since the eighteenth century, this ubiquitous style cites
antiquity, evincing a sense of timelessness and purity. Aesthetically,
they function as signifiers of power and prestige. I recognise them as
architectural societal ‘introjects’, bestowing inherited values onto their
denizens. However, as rehashed pastiches of ancient Greek and Roman
architecture, I also view them as unreliable translations. A set of arbitrary
aesthetics, removed from their original meaning, around which we twine
the fictions of our contemporary life.
For Deflated Capital, I took latex casts of various architectural details of
a Georgian period building on Dawson Street, Dublin. Normally these
Grecian columns stand solid and erect. However, after the plaster is cast
in an unsupported latex mould, the pillars became flaccid and deflated.
While faded Georgian grandeur is particular to the history of Dublin,
recent international political developments have also reminded us of the
inevitable sunderance of empires. Aesthetics of permanence last longer
than the power they aspire to represent.
DOIREANN
NÍ GHRIOGHAIR
N UN ’S ISL AND T HE AT RE,
T ULC A FEST IVAL GALLERY
AT T HE FAIRGREEN
Deflated Capital
plaster, pigment, MDF & wheels,
2016
73
The star BD+42 a G0 V is in the Andromeda constellation, 100 light years
from Earth. The light seen from this star by us, now, was emitted 100
years ago, at the time of the Easter Rising.
All of the stars in the night sky are at different distances from the earth,
ranging from the nearest, Proxima Centauri, at a mere 4 light years away,
to early generations of stars, billions of light years from us.
To look at the night sky is to look into many pasts simultaneously.
Depending on where we look we can see light ranging from the start of
the Islamic Hijri calendar (622) to the launch of Sputnik (1957).
Cultures across the world have used the stars to tell the time, plan land
use and speculate about the future. People have long used the stars to
navigate and stargaze.
The project Light Years from Here involves a range of Galway residents
from different ethnic / cultural backgrounds who contributed dates and
related anecdotes that have political / historical or cultural significance.
The Centre for Astronomy in NUI Galway helped to identify stars related
to the dates to make up the ‘Light Years from Here’ star chart and
stargazing event.
AISLING
O’BEIRN
Perseids Metre,
digital drawing, 2016
74
GALWAY ARTS CENT RE
Mirror, Map & Crystal Pyramid,
Thread on Fabriano Paper, 2015
MARTINA
O’BRIEN
GALWAY ARTS CENT RE
The term ‘Anthropocene’ is used to define Earth’s current geologic time
period as being human-influenced, or anthropogenic, based on global
confirmation that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and
other earth system processes are being altered by humans. Mirror, Map &
Crystal Pyramid explores the genre of Anthropocene fiction by connecting
together an image of the downfall of Valhalla, a step-by-step guide to
making an origami paper crane, and a geometric model of a crystal
pyramid structure. In Norse mythology Valhalla is an enormous hall ruled
over by the god Odin, to which half of those who die in combat travel
upon death. O’Brien worked with paper traditionally used for copperplate
engraving, etching and woodcut printmaking, utilising thread as an
actor to form lines. This process weaves a sense of forced association
across a negative space to connect the disparate parts of the triptych.
The fragility of the materials used here plays an important role in the
work, contradicting the permanence and reproducibility of conventional
printing, and bestowing the work with a more temporary status.
75
Archiwik.org is a new online wiki that takes as its starting point writer
Georges Bataille’s ‘Architecture’ article, first published in the journal
Documents in 1929.
Though a mere three paragraphs in length, Bataille’s article has had an
outsized influence on architects, artists, and writers, particularly since
the general rediscovery and reassessment of the author’s work in the
1970s. Writing primarily of the monumental public buildings of the
French church and state, the text explores the ability of architectural
form to manifest social hierarchy and political power - and to affect and
convey that power to those who walk in its shadow. For Bataille, only
through escaping form itself can we slip the architectural injunction.
Archiwik.org invites contributions that take the spirit of Bataille’s article
as a starting point for a wide-ranging approach to its ostensible subject,
architecture and urban design. Built using MediaWiki, the same opensource wiki engine that powers Wikipedia, anyone is able to contribute
to the site - the creation and editing of articles does not require special
software or coding experience.
MARK
OR ANGE
Archiwik.org,
screen capture, 2016
76
ARCHIWIK .ORG
Gifted Water, video still, 2012
ÚNA
QUIGLEY
GALWAY ARTS CENT RE
Úna Quigley thinks about how film and the body can be composed and
cut in order to ask questions about perception, sexual difference and
social constructs.
Gifted Water is an experimental film based on a short story by the
artist. Informed by a character who has multiple personalities, the artist
directed dancer Sheena McGrandles as she was permeated by different
spaces and personas. McGrandles’s work at the time was concerned
with “doing” and queering the body, with an attempt to disturb it and
the space it inhabits. The character is narrated by her imaginary male
voice until she appears in drag at the end.
Gifted Water was filmed in Teufelsberg, a former listening station built
on the ruins of Berlin.
77
JANE
R AINEY
Lost Beneath The Pastel Sky,
Oil on Canvas, 2016
126 ART IST- RUN GALLERY,
T ULC A FEST IVAL GALLERY
AT T HE FAIRGREEN
These paintings take the landscape as a departure point, describing
loosely knitted narratives and events, with the beginning, the end
and the transgressive or progressive middle, folding in on each other.
The works are always in a state of flux, living somewhere in-between
representation and abstraction, depicting things that are of this world
but also not of this world, a post apocalyptic habitat, where systems have
collapsed and they balance on a fine line between chaos and structure.
Within the paintings tangible things you can almost touch collide with
unrecognisable abstract marks that are very much involved and about
the act of painting. The worlds are suspended in time, with no sense
of gravity, living within a liminal space, hovering in-between reality
and fantasy. Technically the paintings are constructed on a series of
opposites, thin glazes are contrasted with luscious thick globular paint,
abstracted marks are juxtaposed with representational rendered images
of landscapes and things beyond recognition, a gradient of paint can be
read as a sky, a blob of paint a rock or a vortex into another world, these
pictorial interventions lead to an overall uneasy and strange reading of
the work, prompting the viewer to question that not all is what it seems.
78
My work focuses on the impact the economic and political climate
has on our urban and natural surroundings. Cities and nature expand
and shrink, through war, natural disasters and loss of cultures. More
and more though, cities and nature are being treated as currency in
an explosive market for natural resources or real estate, and there is
a complete disregard for the iinhabitants. Refugee camps are turning
into new (temporal) cities, cities are being gentrified and nature is still
disappearing at an alarming rate.
The fragmentary architectural and natural elements in the work refer to
the different transformations our cities and environments are constantly
undergoing. Building, unbuilding and rebuilding our realm creating a
gentrified world.
Future Architecture
Refugee camps are being set
up as a ‘city’ of temporary
structures. Sometimes though
the camps are there for years,
turning into more permanent
constructions.
FRED
ROBESON
GALWAY ARTS CENT RE
Rebuilding 1,2 & 3
- concrete, bamboo,
print, acrylic, 2015
79
MARTIN
SHARRY
GALWAY ARTS CENT RE
A collection of cardboard boxes,
dimensions variable.
A text, which will be read within the
gallery space on certain days.
With thanks to Francis Matthews
for videography.
Boxes, installation plan, 2016
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MHAIRI
SUTHERL AND
DÚN UÍ MHAOLÍOSA BARR ACK S,
RENMORE
PRONTO, production still, 2016
Photo by Jordan Hutchings
My practice often explores the archaeologies of military environments and their
intersection with contemporary life. PRONTO was originally created as a sitespecific performance and film as part of the Radio Relay programme. ‘Radio
Relay’ is a schedule of new artworks co-commissioned by 14-18 NOW, the UK’s
arts programme for the First World War centenary, and Golden Thread Gallery,
Belfast. PRONTO was choreographed with young cadets from local schools
and performed at Grey Point Fort, Bangor, a restored WW1 military base in
June 2016.
PRONTO presents related strands and aspects of conflict connected across
time and events. The narrative spoken by the cadets is that of a 17 year-old
‘boy’ soldier, from his notes written a few hours before ‘going over the top’ in a
WW1 battle. The soldier was underage, as were many thousands of those who
volunteered and signed up, including young people from Ireland. The narrative
is performed by the cadets using the ‘People’s Megaphone’, a form of public
address whereby groups of protestors repeat a speaker’s message so that
everyone can hear and are involved in passing on the message. This has been
recently used in the public demonstrations of the ‘Occupy Movement’, which
enables people to communicate when other forms of amplified communication
have been banned.
PRONTO was produced for ‘Radio Relay’ a co-commission by 14-18 NOW, the UK’s arts
programme for the First World War centenary, and Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast.
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The Profane Illuminations,
performance, 2014
T WO
RUINS
VARIOUS SIT ES - CIT Y CENT RE
The Profane Illuminations,
performance, 2014
“Flesh dissolved in an acid of light…”
‘X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.’ dir: Roger Corman (1963)
In a Classic Citroen CX (the embodiment of an obsolescent utopian
gesamtskunstwerk) the artists perform, within a lattice of neon tubing in
the interior space of the vehicle. We want to invoke a sense of the uncanny
through the conjunction of flesh and technology, the voyeuristic gaze of an
audience and the libidinal conjunction of futures past as we take the viewer
on a proprioceptive* journey through the body/car as stage set, as material
and as sound.
Each performance will begin with an explosion of light as the neon-tubing
is switched on by a timer and the ‘proximity oscillators’ we will be wearing
will begin to create a soundscape as they interact with the neon. The
performance will last exactly eight minutes† before plunging into darkness
and the car will then move on to the next site.
* This alludes to the way our sensual bodies ‘extend’ themselves to include machines.
† The average amount of time it takes a British couple to have sex.
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Oben 11, black and white
photograph, 2014
DIANE
VINCENT
GALWAY ARTS CENT RE,
126 ART IST- RUN GALLERY
It’s thirty-six degrees. A dry desert sun burns the roof.
From up here the vast empty ground seems endless.
The heat and the wind touch my skin.
I open a door,
the background noise of the city fades away.
With my eyes closed I see an ocean of weightless light rays –
dancing, floating…
I trust my body.
I’m here.
For several years I climbed numerous rooftops to make pictures, over and over
again. I felt deeply attached to these strange, unknown and obscure places.
I explored my city from a different angle and I photographed architectural
situations up there being fascinated by the vastness and expanse as well as
its limitation by moments of blocked sights. Eventually I realised that I had
compiled a personal map - an imaginary walk in another dimension.
83
Getting to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t, which
has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with
simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden
in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding
ourselves over and over.
It is not seductive. This is one of the unsettling things. You don’t feel like
you’re entering into any of the standard unspoken and/or unconscious
contracts you normally enter into. This is unsettling because in the absence
of such an unconscious contract we lose some of the psychic protections
we normally (and necessarily) bring. That is, if we know on some level
what it wants from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us
choose how much of ourselves we give away to it. The absence of point or
recognisable agenda, though, strips these subliminal defenses.
LEE
WELCH
GALWAY CIT Y LIBR ARY
84
Tony White, St Mary Redcliffe,
Bristol 2012
Photo by Max McClure
TONY
WHITE
MECHANIC S’ INST IT UT E
London author Tony White reads from his fiction including The Holborn
Cenotaph (‘Super dry, dark and funny. Glasnost for UK cops’ – Tim Etchells).
At once a satirical performance, a protest and an act of radical remembrance,
The Holborn Cenotaph proposes a shocking new use for the high-rise tower
of Holborn Police Station in central London. High-Lands draws on research
conversations with the artist Stuart Brisley that took place at his home in
Dungeness in August 2013. Both The Holborn Cenotaph and High-Lands were
outcomes of a loose collaboration with Stuart Brisley and Maya Balcioglu,
and Dr Sanja Perovic of King’s College London, that was made possible by
White’s appointment as Creative Entrepreneur in Residence in the French
Department at King’s in 2013, funded by Creativeworks London. High-Lands
was commissioned by London Fieldworks and Resonance 104.4fm and was
first broadcast live from Outlandia in August 2014 as part of the Remote
Performances project supported by Arts Council England, Nevis Landscape
Partnership (Heritage Lottery Programme), Oxford Brookes University, Live Art
Development Agency (LADA), and Edinburgh Arts Festival.
85
86
FILM
SCREENING:
A A A A A A A AH!
DIR . STEVE OR AM,
UK 2015, 79 MINS
HUSTON SCHOOL OF FILM
& DIGITAL MEDIA
“Alpha Male, Smith and his Beta, Keith, make a move to take over a local
community. They hook up with restless Female, Denise, igniting a deadly
feud in which emotions run high and deep-seated grudges re-surface
amongst the tribe.
Are we not men? Or are we simply beasts?
Shot entirely in a language of grunts and gibberish, Steve Oram’s debut
feature is a celluloid primal scream - an anarchic, hilarious,disturbing and
touching look at the human condition.”
Steve Oram as Smith
Toyah Willcox as Barbara
87
PUBLIC LECTURE:
ANGUS
C AMERON
MECHANIC S’ INST IT UT E
CAPITAL CITY
All too often our understanding of the city lacks memory. The frenetic,
forward-looking, excitement of the city makes it easy to forget the
antiquity and embeddedness of its practices. Even if we accept that the
city is always a palimpsest, it is the upper layers that catch the eye and
provide the impetus for engagement. This intervention will excavate
the foundations of the ‘capital city’ – specifically the urban situation and
disciplining of money, trade, metal, spatiality, spirituality and, above all,
people that appear from the very start. The capital(ist) city is both firmly
historical and thoroughly trans-historical. But it has a point of origin in a
specific place, a specific time and a particular name – one that used to
be synonymous with wealth and power: Potosí.
88
89
GEORGES BATAILLE
JIM COLQUHOUN
EXCERPTS FROM
THE NOTION OF
EXPENDITURE
Georges Bataille, 1933
I. THE INSUFFICIENCY OF THE PRINCIPLE OF
CL ASSIC AL UTILIT Y
Every time the meaning of a discussion depends on the fundamental value of
the word useful – in other words, every time the essential question touching
on the life of human societies is raised, no matter who intervenes and what
opinions are expressed – it is possible to affirm that the debate is necessarily
warped and that the fundamental question is eluded. In fact, given the more
or less divergent collection of present ideas, there is nothing that permits one
to define what is useful to man. This lacuna is made fairly prominent by the
fact that it is constantly necessary to return, in the most unjustifiable way, to
principles that one would like to situate beyond utility and pleasure: honour
and duty are hypocritically employed in schemes of pecuniary interest and,
without speaking of God, Spirit serves to mask the intellectual disarray of the
few people who refuse to accept a closed system.
Current practice, however, is not deterred by these elementary difficulties,
and common awareness at first seems able to raise only verbal objections
92
to the principles of classical utility – in other words, to supposedly material
utility. The goal of the latter is, theoretically, pleasure – but only in a moderate
form, since violent pleasure is seen as pathological. On the one hand, this
material utility is limited to acquisition (in practice, to production) and to the
conservation of goods; on the other, it is limited to reproduction and to the
conservation of human life (to which is added, it is true, the struggle against
pain, whose importance itself suffices to indicate the negative character of
the pleasure principle instituted, in theory, as the basis of utility). In the series
of quantitative representations linked to this flat and untenable conception
of existence only the question of reproduction seriously lends itself to
controversy, because an exaggerated increase in the number of the living
threatens to diminish the individual share. But on the whole, any general
judgment of social activity implies the principle that all individual effort,
in order to be valid, must be reducible to the fundamental necessities of
production and conservation. Pleasure, whether art, permissible debauchery,
or play, is definitively reduced, in the intellectual representations in circulation,
to a concession; in other words it is reduced to a diversion whose role is
subsidiary. The most appreciable share of life is given as the condition –
sometimes even as the regrettable condition – of productive social activity.
It is true that personal experience – if it is a question of a youthful man,
capable of wasting and destroying without reason – each time gives the lie
to this miserable conception. But even when he does not spare himself and
destroys himself while making allowance for nothing, the most lucid man will
understand nothing, or imagine himself sick; he is incapable of a utilitarian
justification for his actions, and it does not occur to him that a human society
can have, just as he does, an interest in considerable losses, in catastrophes
that, while conforming to well-defined needs, provoke tumultuous
depressions, crises of dread, and, in the final analysis, a certain orgiastic state.
In the most crushing way, the contradiction between current social
conceptions and the real needs of society recalls the narrowness of judgment
that puts the father in opposition to the satisfaction of his son’s needs. This
narrowness is such that it is impossible for the son to express his will. The
father’s partially malevolent solicitude is manifested in the things he provides
for his son: lodgings, clothes, food, and, when absolutely necessary, a little
harmless recreation. But the son does not even have the right to speak about
what really gives him a fever; he is obliged to give people the impression that
for him no horror can enter into consideration. In this respect, it is sad to say
that conscious humanity has remained a minor; humanity recognises the right
to acquire, to conserve, and to consume rationally, but it excludes in principle
nonproductive expenditure.
93
It is true that this exclusion is superficial and that it no more modifies practical
activities than prohibitions limit the son, who indulges in his unavowed
pleasures as soon as he is no longer in his father’s presence. Humanity can
allow itself the pleasure of expressing, in the father’s interest, conceptions
marked with flat paternal sufficiency and blindness. In the practice of life,
however, humanity acts in a way that allows for the satisfaction of disarmingly
savage needs, and it seems able to subsist only at the limits of horror.
[…]
II. THE PRINCIPLE OF LOSS
Human activity is not entirely reducible to processes of production and
conservation, and consumption must be divided into two distinct parts. The
first, reducible part is represented by the use of the minimum necessary
for the conservation of life and the continuation of individuals’ productive
activity in a given society; it is therefore a question simply of the fundamental
condition of productive activity. The second part is represented by so-called
unproductive expenditures: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction
of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity
(i.e., deflected from genital finality) – all these represent activities which, at
least in primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves. Now it is
necessary to reserve the use of the word expenditure for the designation of
these unproductive forms, and not for the designation of all the modes of
consumption that serve as a means to the end of production. Even though it is
always possible to set the various forms of expenditure in opposition to each
other, they constitute a group characterised by the fact that in each case the
accent is placed on a loss that must be as great as possible in order for that
activity to take on its true meaning.
This principle of loss, in other words, of unconditional expenditure, no matter
how contrary it might be to the economic principle of balanced accounts
(expenditure regularly compensated for by acquisition), only rational in the
narrow sense of the word, can be illustrated through a small number of
examples taken from common experience:
1. Jewels must not only be beautiful and dazzling (which would make the
substitution of imitations possible): one sacrifices a fortune, preferring a
diamond necklace; such a sacrifice is necessary for the constitution of this
necklace’s fascinating character. […]
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2. Cults require a bloody wasting of men and animals in sacrifice. In the
etymological sense of the word, sacrifice is nothing other than the production
of sacred things.
From the very first, it appears that sacred things are constituted by an
operation of loss: in particular, the success of Christianity must be explained
by the value of the theme of the Son of God’s ignominious crucifixion, which
carries human dread to a representation of loss and limitless degradation.
3. In various competitive games, loss in general is produced under complex
conditions. Considerable sums of money are spent for the maintenance
of quarters, animals, equipment, or men. As much energy as possible is
squandered in order to produce a feeling of stupefaction – in any case with
an intensity infinitely greater than in productive enterprises. The danger of
death is not avoided; on the contrary, it is the object of a strong unconscious
attraction. Besides, competitions are sometimes the occasion for the public
distribution of prizes. Immense crowds are present; their passions most often
burst forth beyond any restraint, and the loss of insane sums of money is
set in motion in the form of wagers. It is true that this circulation of money
profits a small number of professional bettors, but it is no less true that this
circulation can be considered to be a real charge of the passions unleashed
by competition and that, among a large number of bettors, it leads to losses
disproportionate to their means; these even attain such a level of madness
that often the only way out for gamblers is prison or death.
[…]
III. PRODUCTION, EXCHANGE, AND
UNPRODUCTIVE ACTIVIT Y
Once the existence of expenditure as a social function has been established,
it is then necessary to consider the relations between this function and
those of production and acquisition that are opposed to it. These relations
immediately present themselves as those of an end with utility. And if it is
true that production and acquisition in their development and changes of
form introduce a variable that must be understood in order to comprehend
historical processes, they are, however, still only means subordinated to
expenditure. As dreadful as it is, human poverty has never had a strong
enough hold on societies to cause the concern for conservation – which
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gives production the appearance of an end – to dominate the concern for
unproductive expenditure. In order to maintain this preeminence, since power
is exercised by the classes that expend, poverty was excluded from all social
activity. And the poor have no other way of reentering the circle of power than
through the revolutionary destruction of the classes occupying that circle – in
other words, through a bloody and in no way limited social expenditure.
The secondary character of production and acquisition in relation to
expenditure appears most clearly in primitive economic institutions, since
exchange is still treated as a sumptuary loss of ceded objects: thus at its base
exchange presents itself as a process of expenditure, over which a process
of acquisition has developed. Classical economics imagined that primitive
exchange occurred in the form of barter; it had no reason to assume, in fact,
that a means of acquisition such as exchange might have as its origin not the
need to acquire that it satisfies today, but the contrary need, the need to
destroy and to lose. The traditional conceptions of the origins of economy
have only recently been disproved – even so recently that a great number
of economists continue arbitrarily to represent barter as the ancestor of
commerce.
In opposition to the artificial notion of barter, the archaic form of exchange
has been identified by Mauss under the name potlatch, borrowed from the
Northwestern American Indians who provided such a remarkable example of
it. Institutions analogous to the Indian potlatch, or their traces, have been very
widely found. 1
The potlatch of the Tlingit, the Haida, the Tsimshian, and the Kwakiutl of
the northwestern coast has been studied in detail since the end of the
nineteenth century (but at that time it was not compared with the archaic
forms of exchange of other countries). The least advanced of these American
tribes practice potlatch on the occasion of a person’s change in situation
– initiations, marriages, funerals – and, even in a more evolved form, it can
never be separated from a festival; whether it provides the occasion for this
festival, or whether it takes place on the festival’s occasion. Potlatch excludes
all bargaining and, in general, it is constituted by a considerable gift of riches,
offered openly and with the goal of humiliating, defying, and obligating a
rival. The exchange value of the gift results from the fact that the donee, in
order to efface the humiliation and respond to the challenge, must satisfy the
1
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On potlatch, see above all Marcel Mauss, “Essai sur le don, form archaîque de l’échange” in Année
sociologique, 1925. Translated as The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans.
I. Cunnison (New York: Norton, 1967).
obligation (incurred by him at the time of acceptance) to respond later with a
more valuable gift, in other words, to return with interest.
But the gift is not the only form of potlatch; it is equally possible to defy rivals
through the spectacular destruction of wealth. It is through the intermediary
of this last form that potlatch is reunited with religious sacrifice, since what
is destroyed is theoretically offered to the mythical ancestors of the donees.
Relatively recently a Tlingit chief appeared before his rival to slash the throats
of some of his own slaves. This destruction was repaid at a given date by the
slaughter of a greater number of slaves. The Tchoukchi of far northwestern
Siberia, who have institutions analogous to potlatch, slaughter dog teams
in order to stifle and humiliate another group. In northwestern America,
destruction goes as far as the burning of villages and the smashing of flotillas
of canoes. Emblazoned copper ingots, a kind of money on which the fictive
value of an immense fortune is sometimes placed, are broken or thrown into
the sea. The delirium of the festival can be associated equally with hecatombs
of property and with gifts accumulated with the intention of stunning and
humiliating.
[…]
It is the constitution of a positive property of loss – from which spring nobility,
honour, and rank in a hierarchy – that gives the institution its significant
value. The gift must be considered as a loss and thus as a partial destruction,
since the desire to destroy is in part transferred onto the recipient. In
unconscious forms, such as those described by psychoanalysis, it symbolises
excretion, which itself is linked to death, in conformity with the fundamental
connection between anal eroticism and sadism. The excremental symbolism
of emblazoned coppers, which on the Northwest Coast are the gift objects
par excellence, is based on a very rich mythology. In Melanesia, the donor
designates as his excrement magnificent gifts, which he deposits at the feet of
the rival chief.
The consequences in the realm of acquisition are only the unwanted result – at
least to the extent that the drives that govern the operation have remained
primitive – of a process oriented in the opposite direction. “The ideal,”
indicates Mauss, “would be to give a potlatch and not have it returned”.
This ideal is realised in certain forms of destruction to which custom allows
no possible response. Moreover, since the yields of potlatch are in some
ways pledged in advance in a new potlatch, the archaic principle of wealth is
displayed with none of the attenuations that result from the avarice developed
at later stages; wealth appears as an acquisition to the extent that power is
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acquired by a rich man, but it is entirely directed toward loss in the sense that
this power is characterised as power to lose. It is only through loss that glory
and honour are linked to wealth.
[…]
IV. THE FUNCTIONAL EXPENDITURE OF THE
WEALTHY CL ASSES
[…]
More or less narrowly, social rank is linked to the possession of a fortune, but
only on the condition that the fortune be partially sacrificed in unproductive
social expenditures such as festivals, spectacles, and games. One notes that
in primitive societies, where the exploitation of man by man is still fairly weak,
the products of human activity not only flow in great quantities to rich men
because of the protection or social leadership services these men supposedly
provide, but also because of the spectacular collective expenditures for which
they must pay. In so-called civilised societies, the fundamental obligation of
wealth disappeared only in a fairly recent period. The decline of paganism led
to a decline of the games and cults for which wealthy Romans were obliged to
pay; thus it has been said that Christianity individualised property, giving its
possessor total control over his products and abrogating his social function. It
abrogated at least the obligation of this expenditure, for Christianity replaced
pagan expenditure prescribed by custom with voluntary alms, either in the
form of distributions from the rich to the poor, or (and above all) in the form of
extremely significant contributions to churches and later to monasteries. And
these churches and monasteries precisely assumed, in the Middle Ages, the
major part of the spectacular function.
Today the great and free forms of unproductive social expenditure have
disappeared. One must not conclude from this, however, that the very
principle of expenditure is no longer the end of economic activity.
A certain evolution of wealth, whose symptoms indicate sickness and
exhaustion, leads to shame in oneself accompanied by petty hypocrisy.
Everything that was generous, orgiastic, and excessive has disappeared;
the themes of rivalry upon which individual activity still depends develop
in obscurity, and are as shameful as belching. The representatives of the
bourgeoisie have adopted an effaced manner; wealth is now displayed behind
closed doors, in accordance with depressing and boring conventions. In
98
addition, people in the middle class – employees and small shopkeepers –
having attained mediocre or minute fortunes, have managed to debase and
subdivide ostentatious expenditure, of which nothing remains but vain efforts
tied to tiresome rancour.
Such trickery has become the principle reason for living, working, and
suffering for those who lack the courage to condemn this moldy society to
revolutionary destruction. Around modern banks, as around the totem poles
of the Kwakiutl, the same desire to dazzle animates individuals and leads them
into a system of petty displays that blinds them to each other, as if they were
staring into a blinding light. A few steps from the bank, jewels, dresses, and
cars wait behind shop windows for the day when they will serve to establish
the augmented splendour of a sinister industrialist and his even more sinister
old wife. At a lower level, gilded clocks, dining room buffets, and artificial
flowers render equally shameful service to a grocer and his wife. Jealousy
arises between human beings, as it does among the savages, and with an
equivalent brutality; only generosity and nobility have disappeared, and with
them the dazzling contrast that the rich provided to the poor.
As the class that possesses the wealth – having received with wealth
the obligation of functional expenditure – the modern bourgeoisie is
characterised by the refusal in principle of this obligation. It has distinguished
itself from the aristocracy through the fact that it has consented only to
spend for itself, and within itself – in other words, by hiding its expenditures
as much as possible from the eyes of the other classes. This particular form
was originally due to the development of its wealth in the shadow of a
more powerful noble class. The rationalist conceptions developed by the
bourgeoisie, starting in the seventeenth century, were a response to these
humiliating conceptions of restrained expenditure; this rationalism meant
nothing other than the strictly economic representation of the world –
economic in the vulgar sense, the bourgeois sense, of the word. The hatred
of expenditure is the raison d’être of and the justification for the bourgeoisie;
it is at the same time the principle of its horrifying hypocrisy. A fundamental
grievance of the bourgeois was the prodigality of feudal society and, after
coming to power, they believed that, because of their habits of accumulation,
they were capable of acceptably dominating the poorer classes. And it is right
to recognise that the people are incapable of hating them as much as their
former masters, to the extent that they are incapable of loving them, for the
bourgeois are incapable of concealing a sordid face, a face so rapacious and
lacking in nobility, so frighteningly small, that all human life, upon seeing it,
seems degraded.
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In opposition, the people’s consciousness is reduced to maintaining
profoundly the principle of expenditure by representing bourgeois existence
as the shame of man and as a sinister cancellation.
V. CL ASS STRUGGLE
In trying to maintain sterility in regard to expenditure, in conformity with a
reasoning that balances accounts, bourgeois society has only managed to
develop a universal meanness. Human life only rediscovers agitation on the scale
of irreducible needs through the efforts of those who push the consequences
of current rationalist conceptions as far as they will go. What remains of the
traditional modes of expenditure has become atrophied, and living sumptuary
tumult has been lost in the unprecedented explosion of class struggle.
The components of class struggle are seen in the process of expenditure,
dating back to the archaic period. In potlatch, the rich man distributes products
furnished him by other, impoverished, men. He tries to rise above a rival who
is rich like himself, but the ultimate stage of his foreseen elevation has no more
necessary a goal than his further separation from the nature of destitute men.
Thus expenditure, even though it might be a social function, immediately leads to
an agonistic and apparently antisocial act of separation. The rich man consumes
the poor man’s losses, creating for him a category of degradation and abjection
that leads to slavery. Now it is evident that, from the endlessly transmitted
heritage of the sumptuary world, the modern world has received slavery, and has
reserved it for the proletariat. Without a doubt bourgeois society, which pretends
to govern according to rational principles, and which, through its own actions,
moreover, tends to realise a certain human homogeneity, does not accept without
protest a division that seems destructive to man himself; it is incapable, however,
of pushing this resistance further than theoretical negation. It gives the workers
rights equal to those of the masters, and it announces this equality by inscribing
that word on walls. But the masters, who act as if they were the expression of
society itself, are preoccupied – more seriously than with any other concern – with
showing that they do not in any way share the abjection of the men they employ.
The end of the workers’ activity is to produce in order to live, but the bosses’
activity is to produce in order to condemn the working producers to a hideous
degradation – for there is no disjunction possible between, on the one hand,
the characterisation the bosses seek through their modes of expenditure, which
tend to elevate them high above human baseness, and on the other hand this
baseness itself, of which this characterisation is a function.
100
In opposition to this conception of agonistic social expenditure, there is the
representation of numerous bourgeois efforts to ameliorate the lot of the workers
– but this representation is only the expression of the cowardice of the modern
upper classes, who no longer have the force to recognise the results of their own
destructive acts. The expenditures taken on by the capitalists in order to aid the
proletarians and give them a chance to pull themselves up on the social ladder
only bear witness to their inability (due to exhaustion) to carry out thoroughly
a sumptuary process. Once the loss of the poor man is accomplished, little by
little the pleasure of the rich man is emptied and neutralised; it gives way to a
kind of apathetic indifference. Under these conditions, in order to maintain a
neutral state rendered relatively agreeable by apathy (and which exists in spite of
troublesome elements such as sadism and pity), it can be useful to compensate
for the expenditure that engenders abjection with a new expenditure, which
tends to attenuate it. The bosses’ political sense, together with certain partial
developments of prosperity, has allowed this process of compensation to be,
at times, quite extensive. Thus in the Anglo-Saxon countries, and in particular in
the United States of America, the primary process takes place at the expense of
only a relatively small portion of the population: to a certain extent, the working
class itself has been led to participate in it (above all when this was facilitated by
the preliminary existence of a class held to be abject by common accord, as in
the case of the blacks). But these subterfuges, whose importance is in any case
strictly limited, do not modify in any way the fundamental division between noble
and ignoble men. The cruel game of social life does not vary among the different
civilised countries, where the insulting splendour of the rich loses and degrades
the human nature of the lower class.
It must be added that the attenuation of the masters’ brutality – which in any case
has less to do with destruction itself than with the psychological tendencies to
destroy – corresponds to the general atrophy of the ancient sumptuary processes
that characterises the modern era.
Class struggle, on the contrary, becomes the grandest form of social expenditure
when it is taken up again and developed, this time on the part of the workers, and
on such a scale that it threatens the very existence of the masters.
[…]
Reprinted, with kind permission of the University of Minnesota, from Georges Bataille
(1985) Visions of Excess, translated and edited by Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press), Vol. 14 of the series Theory and History of Literature, edited by
Wlad Godzich & Jochen Schulte-Sasse. English translation © 1985 by the University of
Minnesota.
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FOOD FOR THOUGHT FOR CROWNED JUGGLERS.
Let impure blood water our furrows.
Monday 21 January 1793 at quarter past ten in the morning, on the Place de la Revolution,
previously named Louis XV.
The tyrant fell under the two-edged sword of the Laws. This great act of justice dismayed
the aristocracy, vanquished royal superstition and it creates the Republic. It confers a great
character on the national convention and makes it worthy of Frenchmen’s trust… It was in vain
that an audacious faction and insidious orators used all the resources of calumny, charlatanism,
and chicanery; the courage of Republicans triumphed: the majority of the convention remained
unshakable in its beliefs, and the genius of intrigue bowed to the genius of Liberty and the
ascendancy of Virtue.
Extract from the third letter of Maximilian Robespierre to his constituents.
102
L
ouis was king, and the Republic is founded. The great question with which you
are occupied is settled by this argument: Louis has been deposed by his crimes.
Louis denounced the French people as rebels; to punish them he called upon the
arms of his fellow tyrants. Victory and the people have decided that he alone was
a rebel. Therefore, Louis cannot be judged; he has already been condemnded, else
the Republic is not cleared of guilt…
A people does not judge as does a court of law. It does not hand down sentences,
it hurls down thunderbolts; it does not condemn kings, it plunges them into the
abyss; such justice is as compelling as the justice of courts…
As for me, I abhor the death penalty dealt freely by your laws; I have neither love
nor hate for Louis; I hate only his crimes. I asked for the abolition of the death
penalty from the Assembly which you still call Constituent. And it is not my doing
if the first principles of reason seem to them moral and political heresy. But you,
who would never invoke those principles in favour of so many unhappy men whose
misdeeds are less their own than those of the government, by what fatal chance
do you remember them only now when you plead the case of the greatest of all
criminals? You ask for an exception to the death penalty for the only man who
could make that penalty legitimate. True, the death penalty in general is a crime
since, following the unchanging principles of nature, it can be justified only in
those cases where it is vital to the safety of private citizens or of the public. Public
safety never calls for the death penalty against ordinary crimes because society
can always prevent them by another means and render the guilty man incapable
of doing further harm. But a deposed king, in the midst of a revolution as yet
unsupported by just laws; a king whose very name draws the scourge of war on the
restless nation: neither prison or exile can render his existence indifferent to the
public welfare. And that cruel exception to the laws can be imputed to his crimes
alone.
Regretfully I speak this fatal truth – Louis must because because the nation must
live…
As for Louis, I ask that the National Convention declare him, from this moment
on, a traitor to the French nation, a criminal toward humanity. I ask that for these
reasons, he give an example to the world in the very place where, on the 10th of
August [1792], the martyrs of liberty gave their lives; and that this memorable
event by consecrated by a monument destined to nourish in the hearts of all people
a sense of their own rights and a horror of tyrants; and to nourish in the spirit of
tyrants, a salutary terror of the justice of the people.
Maximilien Robespierre, from his speech of 3rd December 1792 in the National Convention.
103
EXCERPTS FROM
THE
OBELISK
Georges Bataille, 1938
THE MYSTERY OF THE DEATH OF GOD
A ‘mystery’ cannot be posited in the empty region of spirit, where only words
foreign to life subsist. It cannot result from a confusion between obscurity and
the abstract void. The obscurity of a ‘mystery’ comes from images that a kind
of lucid dream borrows from the realm of the crowd, sometimes bringing to
light what the guilty conscience has pushed back into the shadows, sometimes
highlighting figures that are routinely ignored. From Louis XVI’s guillotine to
the obelisk, a spatial arrangement is formed on the PUBLIC SQUARE, in other
words, on all the public squares of the ‘civilised world’ whose historical charm
and monumental appearance prevail over everything else. For it is nowhere
but THERE that a man, in some ways bewitched, in some ways overtaken by
frenzy, expressly presents himself as ‘Nietzsche’s madman’ and illuminates
with his dream-lantern the mystery of the DEATH OF GOD.
104
THE PROPHECY OF NIET ZSCHE
“Have you not heard,” cried Nietzsche, “of that madman who lit a lantern in
the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: ‘I
seek God! I seek God!’ – As many of those who did not believe in God were
standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked
one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he
afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? – Thus they yelled and
laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither
is God?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us
are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea?
Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we
doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now?
Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually?
Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down?
Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath
of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in
on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing
as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell
nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is
dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
‘How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was
holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death
under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us
to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we
have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we
ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? THERE HAS NEVER
BEEN A GREATER DEED; AND WHOEVER IS BORN AFTER US – FOR THE
SAKE OF THIS DEED HE WILL BELONG TO A HIGHER HISTORY THAN ALL
HISTORY HETHERTO.’ ” 1
[…]
1
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 125, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House,
1974), p. 181.
105
THE OBELISK
Clausewitz writes in On War: “Like the obelisks that are raised at the points
where the major roads of a country begin, the energetic will of the leader
constitutes the center from which everything in military art emanates.”
The Place de la Concorde is the space where the death of God must be
announced and shouted precisely because the obelisk is its calmest negation.
As far as the eye can see, a moving and empty human dust gravitates around
it. But nothing answers so accurately the apparently disordered aspirations of
this crowd as the measured and tranquil spaces commanded by its geometric
simplicity.
The obelisk is without a doubt the purest image of the head and of the
heavens. The Egyptians saw it as a sign of military power and glory, and just
as they saw the rays of the setting sun in their funeral pyramids, so too they
recognised the brilliance of the morning sun in the angles of their splendid
monoliths: the obelisk was to the armed sovereignty of the pharoah what
the pyramid was to his dried-out corpse. It was the surest and most durable
obstacle to the drifting away of all things. And even today, wherever its rigid
image stands out against the sky, it seems that sovereign permanence is
maintained across the unfortunate vicissitudes of civilisations.
The old obelisk of Ramses II is thus, at the central point from which the
avenues radiate, both a simpler and a more important apparition than any
other; is it not worthy of renewed astonishment that, from remote regions
of the earth and from the dawn of the ages, this Egyptian image of the
IMPERISHABLE, this petrified sunbeam, arrives at the center of urban life?
THE OBELISKS RESPOND TO THE PYR AMIDS
If one considers the mass of the pyramids and the rudimentary means at the
disposal of their builders, it seems evident that no enterprise cost a greater
amount of labour than this one, which wanted to halt the flow of time.
The Egyptian pharoah was surely the first to give the human individual the
structure and the measureless will to be that set him upright above the surface
of the earth as a kind of luminous and living edifice. When individuals – long
after the era of the great pyramids – have wanted to acquire immortality, they
have had to appropriate the Osirian myths and the funeral rites that formerly
had been the privilege of the sovereign. For it was only to the extent that a
considerable mass of power had been concentrated in a single head that the
106
human being raised to the heavens his greed for eternal power, something
that had surely never taken place before the pschent designated the head of
the pharoah to the holy terror of a vast populace. But once it did, each time
death struck down the heavy column of strength the world itself was shaken
and put in doubt, and nothing less than the giant edifice of the pyramid was
necessary to reestablish the order of things: the pyramid let the god-king
enter the eternity of the sky next to the solar Râ, and in this way existence
regained its unshakable plenitude in the person of the one it had recognised.
The existing pyramids still bear witness to this calm triumph of an unwavering
and hallucinating resolve: they are not only the most ancient and the vastest
monuments man has ever constructed, but they are still, even today, the
most enduring. The great triangles that make up their sides ‘seem to fall from
the sky like the rays of the sun when the disk, veiled by the storm, suddenly
pierces through the clouds and lets fall to earth a ladder of sunlight’. Thus
they assure the presence of the unlimited sky on earth, a presence that never
ceases to contemplate and dominate human agitation, just as the immobile
prism reflects everyone of the things that surrounds it. In their imperishable
unity, the pyramids – endlessly – continue to crystallise the mobile succession
of the various ages; alongside the Nile, they rise up like the totality of
centuries, taking on the immobility of stone and watching all men die, one
after the other: they transcend the intolerable void that time opens under
men’s feet, for all possible movement is halted in their geometric surfaces: IT
SEEMS THAT THEY MANTAIN WHAT ESCAPES FROM THE DYING MAN.
THE ‘SENSATION OF TIME’ SOUGHT
BY GLORY
A moving perspective, represented by the shadows and traces of the
successive generations of numberless dead, extends from the banks of the
Nile to those of the Seine, from the angles of the pyramids to those of the
monolith erected before the Gabriel palace. The long span that stretches
from the Ancient Empire of Egypt to the bourgeois monarchy of the Orleans –
which raised the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde ‘to the applause of the
immense crowd’ – was necessary for man to set the most stable limits on the
deleterious movement of time. The mocking universe was slowly given over to
the severe eternity of its almighty Father, guarantor of profound stability. The
slow and obscure movements of history took place here at the heart and not
at the periphery of being, and they represent the long and inexpiable struggle
of God against time, the combat of ‘established sovereignty’ against the
destructive and creative madness of things. Thus history endlessly repeats the
immutable stone’s response to the Heraclitean world of rivers and flames.
107
But from the development of this changing perspective over the centuries, a
specific result that dominates even the monstrous accumulation of forms has
come to light: the boundaries raised in opposition to the atrocious ‘sensation
of time’ were tied to this sensation in exactly the same way that all work is
tied to a sensation of ‘need’. Whereas ‘need’ and poverty endlessly use up
the results of useful labour, the interminable obstinacy of men eventually
managed to distance from communal existence the ‘sensation of time’, and
the shameful malaise it introduced. Moderation and platitude slowly took
over the world; more and more accurate clocks replaced the old hourglasses
that retained a funereal meaning. The grim reaper went the way of all other
phantoms. The earth has been so perfectly emptied of everything that made
night terrifying that the worst misfortunes and war itself can no longer alter its
comfortable perception. The result is that human striving is no longer directed
at powerful and majestic limits; it now aspires, on the contrary, to anything
that can deliver it from established tranquillity. Everything indicates that it
was impossible for man to live without the ‘sensation of time’ that opened his
world like a movement of breathtaking speed – but what he lived in the past
as fear he can only live now as pride and glory.
[…]
HEGEL AGAINST THE IMMUTABLE HEGEL
[…]
Even Hegel describing the movement of Spirit as if it excluded all possible rest
made it end, however, at HIMSELF as if he were its necessary conclusion. Thus
he gave the movement of time the centripetal structure that characterises
sovereignty, Being, or God. Time, on the other hand, dissolving each center
that has formed, is fatally known as centrifugal – since it is known in a being
whose center is already there. The dialectical idea, then, is only a hybrid of
time and its opposite, of the death of God and the position of the immutable.
But it nevertheless marks the movement of a thought eager to destroy what
refuses to die, eager to break the bonds of time as much as to break the law
through which God obligates. It is manifestly clear that the liberty of time
traverses the heavy Hegelian process, precisely to the feeble extent that
Socratic irony introduced into this world an eternal Being imposing man.
108
THE PYR AMID OF SURLEI
Nietzsche is to Hegel what a bird breaking its shell is to a bird contentedly
absorbing the substance within. The crucial instant of fracture can only be
described in Nietzsche’s own words:
“The intensity of my feelings makes me both tremble and laugh … I had cried
too much … these were not tears of tenderness, but tears of jubilation …
That day I was walking through the woods, along the lake of Silvaplana; at a
powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei I stopped … ” 2
Nietzsche’s thought, which resulted in the sudden ecstatic vision of the
eternal return, cannot be compared to the feelings habitually linked to what
passes for profound reflection. For the object of the intellect here exceeds
the categories in which it can be represented, to the point where as soon as
it is represented it becomes an object of ecstasy – object of tears, object of
laughter … The toxic character of the ‘return’ is even of such great importance
that, if for an instant it were set aside, the formal content of the ‘return’ might
appear empty.
In order to represent the decisive break that took place – freeing life from the
humilities of fear – it is necessary to tie the sundering vision of the ‘return’ to
what Nietzsche experienced when he reflected upon the explosive vision of
Heraclitus, and to what he experienced later in his own vision of the ‘death
of God’: this is necessary in order to perceive the full extent of the bolt
of lightning that never stopped shattering his life while at the same time
projecting it into a burst of violent light. TIME is the object of the vision of
Heraclitus. TIME is unleashed in the ‘death’ of the One whose eternity gave
Being an immutable foundation. And the audacious act that represents the
‘return’ at the summit of this rending agony only wrests from the dead God his
total strength, in order to give it to the deleterious absurdity of time.
A ‘state of glory’ is thus deftly linked to the feeling of an endless fall. It is
true that a fall was already a part of human ecstasy, on which it conferred the
intoxication of that which approximates the nature of time – but that fall was
the original fall of man, whereas the fall of the ‘return’ is FINAL.
2
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, section on Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans, W. Kaufmann (New York:
Random House, 1967), p. 295.
109
THE GUILLOTINE
“The very stone that earlier had sought to limit storms is now nothing more
than a milestone marking the immensity of an unlimitable catastrophe …”
Near Surlei, a rock in the form of a pyramid still bears witness to the fall of the
‘return’ …
Only protracted futility – attached to servile or useful objects – can today
shelter existence from the feeling of violent absurdity. The great dead
shadows have lost the magical charm that made their protection so effective.
And when an extreme chance wills that they still make up the center of
destiny, they protect only to the extent that there is daily indifference.
The obelisk of Luxor has, after a hundred years, become the measured navel
of the land of moderation: its precise angles now belong to the essential
figure that radiates from its base. But the timelessness given to it is due to the
absence of any intelligible affirmation: it endures by virtue of its discreet value.
Where monuments that had clearly affirmed principles were razed, the obelisk
remains only so long as the sovereign authority and command it symbolises
do not become conscious. There was some difficulty in finding an appropriate
symbol for the Place de la Concorde, where the images of royalty and the
Revolution had proven powerless. But it was contrary to the majesty of the site
to leave an empty space, and agreement was reached on a monolith brought
back from Egypt. Seldom has a gesture of this type been more successful; the
apparently meaningless image imposed its calm grandeur and its pacifying
power on a location that always threatened to recall the worst. Shadows that
could still trouble or weigh upon the conscience were dissipated, and neither
God nor time remained: total sovereignty and the guillotine-blade that put an
end to it no longer occupied any place in the minds of men.
This is the deceitful and vague response of exalted places to the fathomless
multitude of insignificant lives that, for as far as the eye can see, orbit around
them – and the spectacle only changes when the lantern of a madman
projects its absurd light on stone.
At that moment, the obelisk ceases to belong to the present and empty world,
and it is projected to the ends of time. It rises, immutable – there – dominating
time’s desperate flight. But even while it is blinded by this domination,
madness, which flits about its angles in the manner of an insect fascinated
by a lamp, recognises only endless time escaping in the noise of successive
explosions. And there is no longer an image before it, but it hears this noise of
successive explosions. To the extent that the obelisk is now, with all this dead
110
grandeur, recognised, it no longer facilitates the flight of consciousness; it
focuses the attention on the guillotine.
The Place de la Concorde is dominated, from the height of the palace
balustrades, by eight armored and acephalic figures, and under their
stone helmets they are as empty as they were on the day the executioner
decapitated the king before them. After the execution, Marly’s two horses
were brought from the nearby forest and set up at the entrance to the exalted
places, before which they rear without end. The central point of the triangle
formed by the two horses and the obelisk marks the location of the guillotine
– an empty space, open to the rapid flow of traffic.
NIET ZSCHE/ THESEUS
The pure image of the heavens, the purified image of the king, of the chief,
of the head and of his firmness, this pure image of the sky crossed by rays,
commands the concord and the assurance of those who do not look at it,
and who are not struck by it; but a mortal torment is the lot of the one before
whom its reality becomes naked.
The purified head, whose unshakable commands lead men, takes on in these
conditions the value of a derisive and enigmatic figure placed at the entrance
to a labyrinth, where those who naively look are led astray without guidance,
overcome with uneasy torment and glory. It is the ‘breath of empty space’ that
one inhales THERE – there where interpretations based on immediate political
events no longer have any meaning; where the isolated event is no more than
the symbol of a much greater event. For it is the foundation of things that has
fallen into a bottomless void. And what is fearlessly conquered – no longer
in a duel where the death of the hero is risked against that of the monster, in
exchange for an indifferent duration – is not an isolated creature; it is the very
void and the vertiginous fall, it is TIME. The movement of all life now places
the human being before the alternatives of either this conquest or a disastrous
retreat. The human being arrives at the threshold: there he must throw himself
headlong into that which has no foundation and no head.
Reprinted, with kind permission of the University of Minnesota, from Georges Bataille
(1985) Visions of Excess, translated and edited by Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press), Vol. 14 of the series Theory and History of Literature, edited by
Wlad Godzich & Jochen Schulte-Sasse. English translation © 1985 by the University of
Minnesota.
111
A TOPOGR APHY
OF THE
PHANTOM
CITIES
Jim Colquhoun
112
A DELIRIOUS L ABYRINTH
Something that changes our way of seeing the streets is
more important than something that changes our way of
seeing paintings. 1
The simplest means of articulating time and space, of
modulating reality, of engineering dreams. It is a matter
not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing
an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing
influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of
human desires and the progress in realising them. The
architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying
present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means
of knowledge and a means of action. The architectural
complex will be modifiable. Its aspect will change totally or
partially in accordance with the will of its inhabitants… 2
In Constant Nieuwenhuys ‘New Babylon’ cities have been
literally ‘raised up’, propped precipitously on vast stilts.
His visionary architectural formulations were intended to
free the human subject from every form of ‘inhibition’ or
‘false consciousness’.A new and radical subjectivity would
be invoked by the floating ambiences of these vagabond
structures. The creation of ‘situations’ would be the order
of the day; the alienation brought on by the material
processes of capital accumulation would be swept away.
No more the ‘Dignity of Labour’, rather the construction
of a delirious labyrinth of mobile spaces, atmospheres,
environments that serve to negate the concept of a
bounded subjectivity. In a sense, within these boundless
spaces history would finally come to an end as humanity
began to explore the limitless possibilities of a true
freedom, outwith the constraints of morality or law.
1Guy Debord (1957) ‘Report on the Construction of Situations and on the
International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organisation and Action’,
trans. Ken Knabb, available at The Bureau of Public Secrets, http://www.
bopsecrets.org/SI/report.htm.
2Ivan Chtcheglov (aka Gilles Ivain) (1953) ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’,
trans. Ken Knabb, aavailable at The Bureau of Public Secrets, http://www.
bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm.
113
They wander through the sectors of New Babylon seeking new
experiences, as yet unknown ambiances. Without the passivity
of tourists, but fully aware of the power they have to act upon
the world, to transform it, to recreate it. 3
The order and control imposed by the modern metropolis
would be replaced by the erotic and playful possibilities
embodied by the Wild Wood. But what may be missing from
Constant’s ludic(rous) utopianism is, according to John Berger,
a sense of the tragedy inherent in the ‘human condition’.
Perhaps once we manage to abolish death, we will be able to
inhabit his endlessly shifting precincts, free from the shadow
of imminent extinction.
EROTIC SPACE
I could tick off on detailed maps the ruins and the rocks, the
bends in the road and the clumps of trees where someone
looking through binoculars could have stumbled across the
quiverings of a minute two-headed
silhouette 4
Historically the woods are where most country folk were
conceived. As housing was often crowded with relatives day
and night – the only respite being in the dark heart of the
forest – getting fucked and licked with the feel of rough tree bark against
your flesh must have been a common enough sensation in the past. I can
remember as a boy watching a couple shagging in the woods close to
where I lived. At first I thought it was a white polythene bag billowing in the
breeze, until I realised it was a pale Scottish arse ploughing up and down
amongst the ferns. Similarly I have an edenic memory of strolling hand in
hand through some woods with a girlfriend, completely naked, playing at
Adam and Eve. Sex in the woods is not like it is in the confines of our centrally
heated bedrooms; curious insects buzz up to check out the delicious suite
of new olfactory delights on offer, wayward branches insinuate themselves
into inappropriate crevices and curious local fauna watch as you make the
beast with two backs, oblivious to the fact that all that fizzing erotic energy is
triggering a reaction all around. The boundaries between us and the
3Constant (1974) ‘New Babylon’, available at Not Bored, http://www.notbored.org/new-babylon.html.
4Catherine Millet (2003) The Sexual Life of Catherine M (London: Corgi Books), p. 108.
114
world become porous then, as we almost literally interpenetrate with our
surroundings. Perhaps in the midst of quiet woodland ordinary behavioural
norms tend to fall by the wayside, as the spirit of the Horned God – Cernunnos
– triggers our most primordial desires. Is it that feeling of submersion a forest
can engender, as if we are wandering around at the bottom of the sea? Is this
how we forget ourselves? Is this how we give ourselves license to commit acts
both beautiful and terrible? As the lizard brain, sitting (mostly) quiescent at the
top of our spines begins to rouse itself, is it any wonder that desire sometimes
transmutes into murder, Eros to Thanatos, that the woods can so easily be
transformed into the abattoir? If we go into the woods to lose ourselves,
then perhaps we also desire to weaken the ties of an irksome and outmoded
morality? How often then are the blood-soaked rituals of our Druidic forebears
replayed in unconscious simulation?
115
THE PLEASUR ABLE NEGATION OF
SPECTACUL AR SPACE
Work binds us to an objective awareness of things and reduces sexual
exuberance. Only the underworld retains its exuberance. 5
There are sections of the city that have been excised from the official ledger,
that have managed to evade the all-seeing fish-eye lens; these ‘blink and
you’ve missed them’ non-places attract their own kind of flora and fauna, their
own sub-species – feral children, hollowed-out men, sleeper cells waiting out
the slo-mo apocalypse, doomed drinking schools, sexual outlaws staging
erotic tableau amongst the Himalayan Balsam and the Giant Hogweed.
What is the attraction of these places, these edgelands? Is it that, in having
been designated as commercially and aesthetically worthless they have
slipped beyond the gaze of officialdom and into the embrace of the spatially
disenfranchised (which is all of us)? In these places we are given license to
deviate, to test the boundaries of sexuality, thresholds of pain, intensities of
pleasure and the accompanying warping of social relations.
Even in the most densely populated cities there are zones of disappearance.
Like HG Wells’s mysterious doorway, you will find these places when you
need them, places where the private and the public become blurred as,
unconsciously, you and your cohorts attempt the pleasurable negation of
spectacular space.
These spaces are always there and usually hidden in plain sight. You will find
them at the conjunction of a series of dead railway lines, or nestling in the
midst of the re-forgotten industrial site behind that rotting fence, or in a line of
dense bushes and scraggly trees beside a busy road, or in the grue-encrusted
gloom of a rotting building at the end of a rarely used lane. These sites
5Georges Bataille (1986) Erotism, Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights), p. 155.
116
abrade and rupture the secular power of our over-lit shopping precincts,
themed drinking barns, officially-sanctioned mating emporia and other classriven entertainments, giving us instead a shadowy and illicit stage on which to
play out scenes of sexual abandon and almost religious ecstasy.
LUDIC TIME
Act so that there is no use in a centre. 6
Historically then, this is the sense in which the vocation of Utopia lies in failure;
in which its epistemological value lies in the walls it allows us to feel around
our minds, the invisible limits it gives us to detect by sheerest induction, the
miring of our imaginations in the mode of production itself, the mud of the
present age in which the winged utopian shoes stick, imagining that to be the
force of gravity itself. 7
6Gertrude Stein (1997) Tender Buttons (Minneola, NY: Dover Publications), p. 43.
7Fredric Jameson (1994) ‘Utopia, Modernism and Death’, in The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia
University Press), p. 75.
117
Meanwhile Constant’s artificial paradise encircles the globe – there is no end,
no beginning, Humanity has crossed the threshold into a zone beyond time,
or rather, beyond local parochial conceptions of time. Perhaps, if we desire,
we might briefly re-inhabit ‘linear’ time, only to slip back into a kind of oceanic
oneness, where creative play is unbounded by structure of any kind. We may
choose to impose rules for brief (or long) periods, but these will be entirely
self-imposed, life as a game with no set rules, everything being malleable.
Within Ludic Time the concept of separation will become meaningless. The
destruction and alienation secreted by modernist notions of progress towards
social and technological perfection will dissolve, as we move beyond an
antiquated and outmoded linearity, and once again time becomes a medium
that is open to individual and collective interpretation. Ludic Time is the
time of Pan the pagan avatar of nature, of wilderness, of sexual frenzy, who
embodies the urge to break free of the constraints of an artificial and selfdefeating morality. Pan urges us to smash all rational thought in a welter of
lustful ****- and ****-hungry polymorphous perversity! Or, as the sage has it…
DO WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW
118
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