An Aesthetics of Collapse - a lecture by Jack Halberstam

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10/26/2021 Added

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On October 21, 2021, Jack Halberstam, professor of gender studies and English and director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University, delivered the lecture “An Aesthetics of Collapse” at Sheldon Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibition “The Nature of Waste: Material Pathways, Discarded Worlds.”

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[00:00:08.760]So nice to see so many people here this evening. My name is
[00:00:14.130]Erin Hanas, I'm the curator of academic engagement here at
[00:00:18.090]Sheldon Museum of Art. And it's really my pleasure to
[00:00:21.840]welcome you to this evenings lecture by Jack Halberstam in
[00:00:26.820]conjunction with the exhibition, the nature of waste
[00:00:30.240]material pathways discarded worlds.
[00:00:34.200]Before we get started, I do want to extend several notes of
[00:00:37.590]appreciation. First, to those of you here tonight, who are
[00:00:41.790]Sheldon members, Your support helps make possible events
[00:00:45.510]like this one, as well as keeping the museum running. Thank
[00:00:49.710]you so much. Thank you also to the sponsors of the
[00:00:53.370]exhibition, the nature of waste, Hixson-Lied Endowment,
[00:00:57.630]Nebraska Arts Council, Nebraska Cultural Endowment, Sheldon
[00:01:02.160]Art Association, and the University of Nebraska Lincoln's
[00:01:06.120]Daugherty Water for Food Institute.
[00:01:09.230]In addition, thank you to Katie Anania, assistant professor
[00:01:13.490]of art history in the school of art, art history and design
[00:01:17.630]at Nebraska for organizing the exhibition.
[00:01:22.440]And lastly, to all of you in the audience. Thank you for
[00:01:26.910]attending, whether you're in person or online, as we are
[00:01:30.900]live streaming this lecture as well. If you haven't yet
[00:01:34.650]explored children's fall semester exhibitions, including the
[00:01:38.070]nature of waste, I encourage you to come back to do so.
[00:01:43.770]A logistical note. Please know that there will be time for
[00:01:48.210]audience q&a At the conclusion of today's talk. So please
[00:01:53.070]hold your questions until then, and we'll pass around a mic.
[00:01:57.180]And now I'm going to turn this microphone over to Katie
[00:02:00.480]inania to introduce the evening speaker.
[00:02:10.979]Thank you, Erin. And thank you everyone for
[00:02:15.300]tuning in with us or sitting with us in this space together.
[00:02:19.470]I know it's that time of the semester and that time of the
[00:02:23.190]semester has stretched beyond you know any any. It's
[00:02:27.690]basically that time of the semester constitutes the semester
[00:02:31.050]these days.
[00:02:32.980]I'd also like to give a special thank you to the curatorial
[00:02:36.940]engagement and special events staff at the Sheldon Museum,
[00:02:40.780]especially Erin Hanas, Serafina Masters and Melissa un for
[00:02:45.760]hosting the nature of waste. And for hosting. Jack
[00:02:49.450]Halberstam is graduate seminar this afternoon. I'm also
[00:02:53.050]grateful to UNL's College of Fine and Performing Arts, and
[00:02:56.830]the School of Art, Art History and Design as well as the
[00:02:59.590]Daugherty Water for Food Institute. All of these have helped
[00:03:03.940]create rich spaces for dialogues and ideas, even in the
[00:03:07.990]geopolitical and immunological challenges of the present
[00:03:11.680]moment. This kind of trifecta of a really supportive
[00:03:15.580]College, a welcoming school and department and then a
[00:03:19.420]brilliant museum collection. Just make this a wonderful time
[00:03:23.050]to be a scholar.
[00:03:25.020]I'm also grateful to the members of my graduate seminar, hot
[00:03:28.800]messes and trash fires theories of waste in contemporary art
[00:03:32.730]and design, which we held in the spring of 2021 and helped
[00:03:37.980]co create the axes upon which this exhibition was built. The
[00:03:42.750]nature of waste came together in an astonishingly short
[00:03:46.170]eight months, and none of the intellectual work would have
[00:03:49.560]been possible without the conversations that we shared
[00:03:52.560]together in this graduate classroom.
[00:03:55.410]When helping me develop the exhibition this past spring, my
[00:03:58.860]graduate student Jack Young and undergraduate assistant
[00:04:01.920]Aster Kennedy, dove into the research on all 78 works of art
[00:04:06.690]in the show without hesitation, and they brought
[00:04:09.630]possibilities into being that I certainly couldn't have
[00:04:12.480]foreseen.
[00:04:15.090]I can think of no better place to begin to consider an
[00:04:18.720]aesthetics of collapse than an art an art museum.
[00:04:23.580]Museums, after all, are built to forestall many of the
[00:04:28.410]collapses that might come in the future. They're temperature
[00:04:32.250]controlled storage rooms promised to preserve the vulnerable
[00:04:35.640]bodies of the artworks within their travertine walls tell us
[00:04:40.440]that the museum space like a rock has a geological lifespan.
[00:04:45.810]When that enhances and extends the presence of human beings
[00:04:49.230]on the planet. Curators acquire and care for objects which
[00:04:53.430]are themselves very tiny and temporary consolidations of
[00:04:56.940]ideas. All the while being aware
[00:05:00.000]Have the uncertainties that mark the future. A museum
[00:05:04.020]purports not to waste. It positions itself to save our
[00:05:08.550]valued objects from a dystopian future. But in fact is an
[00:05:13.110]all too frail guardrail against all the dare elections of
[00:05:17.100]the past and those yet to come. And there is no theorist
[00:05:21.570]better suited to consider the queer dimensions of art making
[00:05:24.960]and arts relation to waste than Jack Halberstam. However,
[00:05:29.580]since work has addressed themes as varied as monstrosity,
[00:05:33.480]failure, trans identity, film, fine art, music and
[00:05:38.550]architecture, but always rotating around the central
[00:05:42.060]question of how might we take seriously the things cast
[00:05:47.070]aside is unserious? How might we listen closely to voices
[00:05:52.290]like Lady Gaga or Spongebob Squarepants or Maurice Sendak,
[00:05:58.860]or Freud? His work illuminates the way that these voices
[00:06:03.660]these pop stars, these cartoon characters present us with
[00:06:07.890]some of the most pressing questions about modern life.
[00:06:12.150]And so it's my privilege to introduce Jack up for this
[00:06:15.420]evening's lecture. Jack Halberstam is a professor of gender
[00:06:18.930]studies in English at Columbia University. He's the author
[00:06:22.620]of seven books, including skin shows gothic horror and the
[00:06:26.130]technology of monsters, female masculinity, the queer art of
[00:06:30.720]failure, Gaga, feminism, sex, gender and the end of the
[00:06:34.830]normal and a short book titled trans. A quick and quirky
[00:06:40.380]account of gender variants. Halberstam his latest book from
[00:06:44.610]Duke University Press is titled wild things the disorder of
[00:06:48.450]desire. Places journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus places
[00:06:52.740]prize in 2018. For innovative public scholarship on the
[00:06:56.400]relationship between gender, sexuality and the built
[00:06:59.580]environment, Halberstam is now finishing a second volume on
[00:07:03.480]wildness titled The wild beyond music, architecture and
[00:07:08.100]anarchy. And it's, I feel so fortunate to have you in this
[00:07:12.480]space to introduce some of that material. Thank you, Jack.
[00:07:25.080]Good evening. Thank you so much, Katie, for that beautiful
[00:07:29.310]introduction. Let me just plug in my slides.
[00:07:34.950]Wow, I hope you don't mind if I don't mask it's Yeah, okay.
[00:07:39.060]It's it's a drag to talk to people, we have enough barriers
[00:07:42.960]between us. Let's not put another one.
[00:07:46.350]I really want to thank the museum for hosting this event.
[00:07:50.850]And Katie, for inviting me, but also for putting that
[00:07:56.730]amazing show together the nature of waste which I toured
[00:08:01.590]with Katie, today and found really meaningful. And this is
[00:08:07.200]such an important time to be thinking about waste and ruin
[00:08:11.610]and recycling and repair. And I think that the work that I'm
[00:08:16.440]going to present to you tonight, is in direct conversation
[00:08:19.950]with the material in that show. So we'll, we'll sort of work
[00:08:25.770]through some key terms that we might want to use to make
[00:08:30.090]sense of what is now I would say, a kind of epistemology of
[00:08:35.970]collapse, that we're living within a paradigm of collapse,
[00:08:39.510]where I wouldn't take much for me to convince you that we
[00:08:43.860]are in a collapsing order of things.
[00:08:47.610]But what I'm going to argue is that that is in some ways, a
[00:08:52.380]good thing. Not because I think you know, the climate
[00:08:56.790]collapse is a good thing. But because I think that the way
[00:09:00.810]that we have been living in the world is all wrong. And
[00:09:05.400]something, you know, huge has to change in order for us to
[00:09:10.920]rethink our relationship to the environment, to each other,
[00:09:15.030]to the future and to the past. So for that reason, I'm
[00:09:19.710]calling the new work that I'm doing
[00:09:23.880]something that falls under the heading of unwielding. Now in
[00:09:27.930]queer studies, much has been made of world making. And
[00:09:32.640]anyone who's read at all in queer studies will have come
[00:09:35.340]across this term world making in the context of thinking
[00:09:39.720]about how queer cultural production, rather than you know,
[00:09:44.940]expressing defeat at the hands of homophobia tends to look
[00:09:48.960]ahead and imaginatively recreate the world. And that's a
[00:09:52.830]wonderful thing. But we're not living in the moment that
[00:09:57.330]that say Eve Sedgwick and Jose Munoz will
[00:10:00.000]Living in when they talked about welding and world making.
[00:10:04.830]So I'm I'm going to offer up tonight and you can argue with
[00:10:08.100]me about this later a new paradigm for both queer studies,
[00:10:12.330]feminist studies, and what has been called queer ecology.
[00:10:16.950]And that paradigm is unwielding. So the argument very
[00:10:22.050]basically to give you the punchline up front is there's
[00:10:25.590]nothing good about the arrangement of power, ecology, world
[00:10:32.970]population economy, there's nothing good about these systems
[00:10:37.620]in the way that they've been established. Therefore, before
[00:10:41.310]we start thinking, in utopian terms about what should come
[00:10:45.930]next, we have to do the hard work of unmaking, this
[00:10:50.430]particular arrangement of power bodies and being Do you see
[00:10:54.900]what I mean? Like, we're ahead of ourselves, if we think
[00:10:57.990]that we are in a position to start talking about utopia, we
[00:11:01.830]are not. So let me see if I can do some of the lifting some
[00:11:07.170]of the heavy lifting on beginning to theorize unmaking the
[00:11:11.820]world on unwielding. And I'll just give you a few examples
[00:11:15.510]within this project, I'm going to end with Ursula Gwyn. So
[00:11:19.320]I'll just give you the quote that we're working towards now.
[00:11:23.280]And this comes out of an archive, mostly drawn from the
[00:11:27.840]1970s. And I'll say why in a moment, but Ursula go in
[00:11:31.650]science fiction of the late 60s In the early 70s, is very
[00:11:36.060]instructive, to me anyway, about unwielding. And so in her
[00:11:41.040]classic anarchist novel, which was not a utopian novel by
[00:11:46.470]any means. It was actually about how difficult it might be
[00:11:49.950]to live in an anarchist world. But it was also about how an
[00:11:54.540]anarchist world could put extreme pressure upon a capitalist
[00:11:59.100]world to the point of unmaking it, that in many ways is the
[00:12:03.210]meaning of dispossession. So the main character in the
[00:12:07.740]dispossessed says in this unwielding statement, those who
[00:12:12.270]build wolves, so their own prisoners, I'm going to fulfill
[00:12:14.820]my proper function in the social organism, I'm going to
[00:12:17.910]unbuild wolves. And I think you can also hear in here, a
[00:12:22.020]kind of abolitionist project, an anti carceral project,
[00:12:27.480]definitely an anarchist project of dispossession. What is
[00:12:32.130]meant by dispossession? I will tell you at the end when we
[00:12:34.950]return to the novel, but for the moment, let me just say one
[00:12:39.240]or two things about this category that I think is going to
[00:12:42.630]be the the title of the next book that I'm working on. So
[00:12:49.500]I've explained that unwielding has to mean reimagining the
[00:12:54.870]world that we live in from the perspective of taking it
[00:12:59.070]apart, taking apart what we have become, in order to do
[00:13:02.790]that. I believe that we can't go forward, because as I just
[00:13:06.720]said, we're not in a position to engage in this sort of
[00:13:09.870]utopian imagining. Therefore, we have to go back, we go back
[00:13:14.610]in my project, to the 1970s. And this is actually what the
[00:13:19.530]Bronx looked like, in the 1970s. And it was, you could see
[00:13:24.270]very similar images in 1970s, Berlin, in 1970s, Paris, in
[00:13:30.300]1970s, London, many of those cities were still bombed out
[00:13:35.670]after the Second World War. And in New York City. The
[00:13:40.410]infrastructure was collapsing. unscrupulous landlords were
[00:13:44.490]burning down apartment buildings in the Bronx, this is
[00:13:47.580]what's known as the Bronx fires in order to move poor people
[00:13:51.390]out and collect insurance money on those buildings. But at
[00:13:56.100]any rate, the city, New York City in the 1970s, was
[00:14:01.710]collapsing already. So I want to kind of go back to the
[00:14:05.490]1970s. And think about some artists who wanted to
[00:14:11.160]homeopathically work with collapse rather than against it.
[00:14:15.990]And these artists would be Alvin Bal, trop will be the main
[00:14:19.080]example that I talked about tonight, and an African American
[00:14:22.230]photographer, who took beautiful photographs of the
[00:14:26.310]collapsing piers on the west side of Manhattan. But he also
[00:14:30.660]took images of Gordon Matta Clark's
[00:14:34.230]UNbuilding works like days. And so how amazing that there
[00:14:39.690]were a set of artists in New York City in the 1970s, who
[00:14:43.320]actually engaged in what I'm calling an aesthetics of
[00:14:46.140]collapse. So why don't we go and look at some of that work
[00:14:49.680]in order to understand what it might mean to work with
[00:14:53.310]collapse rather than against it. The city of course in the
[00:14:56.850]1970s made the disaster
[00:15:00.000]decision not to go with collapse, but to build. And so we
[00:15:04.890]end up with the beginning of what we could call real estate
[00:15:08.610]ruination.
[00:15:10.950]Real Estate capital, that which was something that Gordon
[00:15:14.280]Matta Clark at least was very conscious of in his, in his
[00:15:18.780]work where he literally would bring buildings down as a
[00:15:22.800]commentary on real estate speculation. And I'll give you a
[00:15:26.490]few more examples of that as we go. But eventually, in the
[00:15:32.040]book on unwielding, I'm also going to come back around to
[00:15:35.670]some contemporary artists. And this is a piece by Adam
[00:15:38.580]Pendleton, who is a kind of
[00:15:41.940]a paint sculptor, a few like, language artist, a black
[00:15:46.440]artist who has a big exhibit right now in New York City in
[00:15:49.500]MoMA. And this painting is one of his very famous works. And
[00:15:55.920]the text in it is we are not, and for me, this is just a
[00:15:59.760]beautiful expression of the UNbuilding mechanism. So instead
[00:16:06.240]of We Are the World, you know, this kind of Universalist
[00:16:10.680]slogan that was used to in various aids groups in the 1990s,
[00:16:15.870]to raise money to end world hunger, what if we build
[00:16:20.460]something like solidarity, not through identity regimes,
[00:16:25.080]which are just feeding us right back into the voracious
[00:16:28.920]systems of Neo liberalism? But what if we were to begin by
[00:16:33.090]saying, we are not? Is there a way through? We are not, we
[00:16:38.910]are, we are not going to take on these identities that have
[00:16:41.730]been crafted for us out of capital and consumption. Is there
[00:16:45.660]a way there to unmake what we even mean by being, and that
[00:16:50.280]kind of work is very much in conversation with what's now
[00:16:53.070]called Afro pessimism. And I'm thinking here of the work of
[00:16:58.020]someone like Calvin Warren, who has a book called
[00:17:02.910]ontological terror, in which he argues that in order for
[00:17:06.750]enlightenment philosophers to theorize something like being
[00:17:09.930]some kind of body had to represent an being and that body
[00:17:13.560]was the black body. And therefore, rather than saying, Oh,
[00:17:17.040]we want to be in the way that being has been cast by
[00:17:21.360]enlightenment philosophy, which is white supremacist, Warren
[00:17:25.260]insists insistently argues for a kind of nihilism. That's at
[00:17:29.550]work here we are not. And that is the kind of project the
[00:17:33.960]world UNbuilding unmaking project of unwielding. Alright,
[00:17:38.700]finally, just to give a kind of more popular contemporary
[00:17:43.140]example, and Kay Jamison is a black. I don't know, I think
[00:17:48.330]that they are a queer sci fi writer. And I'm thinking here
[00:17:52.590]of the Broken Earth trilogy, in which we read about a world
[00:17:57.960]that is breaking apart internally. And the the this series
[00:18:03.150]of novels are all about humans who live on a world that is
[00:18:09.030]constantly breaking through a series of tremors and
[00:18:12.420]earthquakes and collapses. And then there's a kind of
[00:18:17.250]mediating group who have learned how to read the Earth and
[00:18:21.690]its movements and warn against what's coming. I kind of
[00:18:25.830]Cassandra population, if you like, and I want to, you know,
[00:18:30.390]work with NK Jameson to say we need that group of people who
[00:18:34.470]can see what's coming in order to step around some of the
[00:18:38.100]cracks in the earth and step into others. Okay, so that's it
[00:18:43.530]for unwielding.
[00:18:46.590]Let me start then digging into the politics and the
[00:18:51.120]aesthetics of collapse. I'm standing on a really weird rug.
[00:18:55.260]Yes, which keeps toppling me over. So let me move forward
[00:18:59.160]there. Alright, so collapse. I just want to get a started by
[00:19:05.430]looking closely at an image by Alvin Beltrami. Alvin Bao
[00:19:10.410]trop was a former Marine, African American gay photographer,
[00:19:17.070]who was never really that well known in his lifetime. The
[00:19:22.260]period of work that I'm interested in, took place in the
[00:19:26.130]1970s in the early 1980s, when, like many gay men, he went
[00:19:33.270]to the collapsing piers on the West Side of New York City,
[00:19:36.960]and he took pictures. In the 1990s. Douglas crimp the great
[00:19:42.630]art historian, was drawn to his work and created an exhibit
[00:19:47.640]for him, and only as he was dying of cancer. Did Belle trop,
[00:19:52.740]you know, live to see a moment within which people went to
[00:19:56.910]see his work and had something to say about it. But for the
[00:19:59.520]most part
[00:20:01.020]He took pictures that were sort of ignored in his lifetime.
[00:20:04.650]Many of them were homoerotic. But most of them were of this
[00:20:09.270]type of dark, dramatic images of the collapsing landscape of
[00:20:16.170]a post industrial waterfront. Now, why were the piers
[00:20:19.920]collapsing? At the beginning of the 1970s, those big boats
[00:20:24.450]that used to bring all of the materials into New York City
[00:20:27.060]stopped coming up the Hudson, there were new forms of
[00:20:29.610]transportation to bring goods and people into the city. And
[00:20:33.180]so all of the warehouses up and down the Hudson, fell into
[00:20:37.470]disrepair. All the people who are employed there were no
[00:20:40.860]longer employed. And at the same time, I think it was in
[00:20:44.070]1972, or three parts of the West Side Highway collapsed,
[00:20:49.350]making it almost impossible to get to the peers by any
[00:20:52.800]direct route. At that point, they became a no man's land and
[00:20:56.790]the police stopped going. And so it became a space that was
[00:21:01.830]unplaced. Now, most histories of so called gay liberation,
[00:21:08.220]trace their origins to 1968. And to Stonewall, I think that
[00:21:12.330]we should be going, in fact, back to earlier in the 60s when
[00:21:17.610]these peers began to fall down. And thinking about this, and
[00:21:22.410]policed group of queers, who were living, and roaming around
[00:21:27.090]in the peers, with drug addicts and homeless people and
[00:21:31.050]making a kind of community of the dispossessed, and that we
[00:21:35.400]have a record of because of Alvin bow drop, there are lots
[00:21:38.910]of other people who took photographs of gay men cruising in
[00:21:42.120]the piers. But to me bow chops work is really different. And
[00:21:45.450]I'm going to try to say why. Mostly, it's different because
[00:21:50.040]rather than making the piers simply into a sort of dramatic
[00:21:53.640]backdrop to gay male sex, gay male sex is just a little
[00:21:58.500]erotic feature of the drama of collapse. And in many ways,
[00:22:03.870]even though the piers are in the background, it's the peers
[00:22:09.330]that are in my reading about Trump's work, the main
[00:22:13.530]character, okay, so even in this one, if you train your
[00:22:18.420]eyes, in the very center of the painting, you will see two
[00:22:22.800]white bodies. And this is often how gay male sex is
[00:22:27.000]represented in Alvin Bell trop, as minute bodies viewed or
[00:22:32.460]spied from a distance by a voyeuristic camera that isn't
[00:22:37.230]close enough to pick out the contours of the erotic act
[00:22:41.370]itself. And instead, in these black and white schemas, you
[00:22:45.720]just have to look for the glow of flesh, in order to find
[00:22:49.650]the gay male, usually a couple that usually naked, and
[00:22:54.510]they're usually not foregrounded in any particular way by
[00:22:58.380]the camera. Now, as somebody said to me, probably the reason
[00:23:02.820]that the gay male bodies appear in this minute scale is
[00:23:07.200]because bow trop did not want to go to the piers with
[00:23:10.140]massive photographic lenses, which would have been very
[00:23:13.050]expensive, and would have made him pray to whoever was
[00:23:17.880]looking for some, something someone to rob in the piers,
[00:23:21.630]which were, as I said, quite dangerous, quite lawless. Also,
[00:23:25.890]he wasn't doing some sort of ethnographic thing he was just
[00:23:29.760]roaming around in the piers and every now and then taking a
[00:23:32.340]picture and not getting too close. So what we have is also a
[00:23:36.480]kind of investigation into voyeurism, voyeurism, that is,
[00:23:40.080]for sure, part of the pleasure of cruising at that time. But
[00:23:44.730]I want to point out, you know, the figure is there. Because
[00:23:49.380]this is in fact, the, the makeup of some 90% of all of bowel
[00:23:53.130]tops photographs, is that we get this incredible
[00:23:56.940]arrangement, usually of water building.
[00:24:02.610]These these huge metal good is collapsed in super
[00:24:08.490]interesting geometric disorder.
[00:24:12.300]And this, you know, sort of murky skyline, reminding us how
[00:24:16.860]polluted New York was at that time, and bringing us into
[00:24:21.900]what I think now looks like a really different world. And
[00:24:25.530]that's another one of the reasons for going back in time to
[00:24:28.680]find the outlines of what we might do in the future is that,
[00:24:33.150]as Robin Kelly says, in freedom dreams, just because a
[00:24:36.450]movement wasn't successful in its time, doesn't mean that it
[00:24:40.860]isn't full of raw material to be salvaged in this reparative
[00:24:46.110]mode for political visions now, right where everything
[00:24:50.580]doesn't have to be remade from scratch. So we're going to
[00:24:54.000]dig into the 1970s. Remember that the 70s were pre internet.
[00:24:59.190]So when people go
[00:25:00.000]To the peers, they couldn't like geo locate each other. They
[00:25:03.660]had to just wander and hope that they ran into someone worth
[00:25:08.100]cruising.
[00:25:10.139]But cruising itself was at that time a kind of anti
[00:25:13.169]capitalist temporality filled with frustration, loneliness,
[00:25:19.859]missed hookups, as much as anything. Many people here may
[00:25:23.339]not remember what it was like in the 70s and 80s. To go out,
[00:25:27.719]you wandered around the city hoping that you would run into
[00:25:31.139]people, a party, the happening place, but you didn't know
[00:25:34.949]you were just looking, you weren't clued in already. Because
[00:25:39.659]no one had the phones. No one was, if you weren't home, you
[00:25:42.869]didn't receive that phone call about where everyone was, you
[00:25:46.109]couldn't even call in and get your messages at that point.
[00:25:49.229]So this is a really, really different time. And photographs
[00:25:53.549]like this make me think that it's so distinct that it is
[00:25:57.479]actually another world. So let's look into this other world,
[00:26:02.429]as if it were a weird future space and meet it with the same
[00:26:07.109]curiosity that we would if what I was giving you was a
[00:26:10.409]vision of the future. Okay. All right.
[00:26:15.750]I just want to
[00:26:18.090]show this image by of course, Rachel, why treat the great
[00:26:22.800]sculptor of memorials the British sculptor to place bow
[00:26:28.230]chop, and Gordon Matta Clark's, and architectural works in
[00:26:32.520]an even larger frame. And of course, white Reid is mostly
[00:26:36.060]known for the sort of Tomb like memorials that she has built
[00:26:40.470]in Vienna, to the Holocaust. And so on. This one, however,
[00:26:45.300]it was one of the first pieces that brought her to national
[00:26:49.590]attention in 1993. It's called house and it was to
[00:26:53.430]commemorate the tearing down of a public housing development
[00:26:59.100]in miles and area of London. And what she did and this is
[00:27:03.360]very similar to some of Gordon Matta Clark's, and
[00:27:06.090]architectural gestures, she did a plaster cast of a house
[00:27:11.220]internally that was slated to be pulled down. Do you see
[00:27:14.550]what I'm saying? So this house was going to be torn down to
[00:27:17.790]demolish. And before it was torn down, she she structurally
[00:27:22.770]managed to fill the whole house with concrete, taking an
[00:27:25.860]impression of its internal contours. This is really clever,
[00:27:32.070]because it's a reminder of the fact that most of what we
[00:27:36.720]call house is nothing is nothing. It's air. It's air that's
[00:27:42.330]just been shaped by say walls and a roof. Right. And so this
[00:27:46.830]is all the empty space in the house. It ends up being a
[00:27:50.610]massive amount of space. And so like Gordon Matta Clark, she
[00:27:54.570]is the commentary on the speculative investment. That is
[00:27:59.520]real estate, like when you're buying a house you're in, it's
[00:28:03.360]like, oh, this house is 2200 square feet. Okay, so it's 2200
[00:28:09.330]square feet of nothing framed by some interesting walls in
[00:28:14.520]the ceiling. And not even usually that interesting. You
[00:28:17.880]know,
[00:28:19.650]we we have the family to thank for that for the the
[00:28:23.130]absolutely boiler plate, nature of the house that can not
[00:28:28.170]imagine any other configurations of bodies, then mommy and
[00:28:31.500]daddy in the master bedroom, which now has been renamed the
[00:28:34.680]primary bedroom. And then two little bedrooms for two little
[00:28:39.090]children, a dining room, a living room, usually some
[00:28:42.570]horrendous huge family room with a TV in it or a big can
[00:28:47.280]collection or whatever. Right. So the impoverishment of the
[00:28:52.230]family house is also what white Reid is sort of paying
[00:28:58.560]homage to or a negative homage to, I think this is a really,
[00:29:02.910]really beautiful and interesting sculpture. people hated it
[00:29:07.500]demanded that it be torn down. But in the process, she won
[00:29:11.100]the Turner Prize for this and her career was launched. But
[00:29:15.960]there's a whole bunch of people from the 70s to the 90s, who
[00:29:19.410]are doing these kinds of I'm going to call them an
[00:29:22.710]architectural statements. And that's what we're going to
[00:29:27.180]look into. Alright, so let's just dig into some of the
[00:29:33.240]material then on collapse that we can find in elfin bow
[00:29:36.900]chops work. Basically, my interest in this is to just think
[00:29:41.460]about the organic shapes that are crafted by a massive
[00:29:46.740]building as it spirals down. Like why isn't that also
[00:29:51.450]architecture in some way? If you look at some of these
[00:29:54.780]buildings, and we'll get to some good ones. These ones I'm
[00:29:58.980]interested in the very
[00:30:00.000]romantic way in which the human couple is sculpted like
[00:30:04.560]these, just to make the point that these are not all sex
[00:30:07.470]photo photos that caltrops taking, he is interested in how
[00:30:12.240]these human bodies appear. And here they appear in the light
[00:30:15.480]shaft that enters the room. But most of the photograph is of
[00:30:20.400]the play of light and dark against the interior landscape of
[00:30:24.720]an empty warehouse. What we're looking at, again, as we were
[00:30:28.080]in the white read is emptiness is space. And we're being
[00:30:31.860]trained by abou trop, to look at space and to look at it for
[00:30:35.460]its own value its own contours.
[00:30:40.230]But, you know, you get these these beautiful sidings. And as
[00:30:45.780]we go through the bow chop archive, I feel anyway that I'm
[00:30:50.160]being trained to look at decay, and collapse through new
[00:30:54.990]eyes. And to look at it as a kind of aesthetic that is, you
[00:31:00.060]know, created from the implosion of the architecture itself.
[00:31:06.000]Just if you're interested. Collapse is a super interesting
[00:31:09.720]word, it comes from the Latin for call, meaning together,
[00:31:14.250]and lay be meaning to slip. And I like that idea of a sort
[00:31:18.840]of communal slippage. And that's also part of what's being
[00:31:23.580]captured in the piers, that it isn't simply one thing coming
[00:31:28.230]down. It's many things coming down all together a system if
[00:31:32.880]you like, coming down.
[00:31:36.300]His I mean, again, you could say as crimp and Jonathan
[00:31:41.610]Weinberg and others have said about Alvin bow chops work
[00:31:45.630]that these are gorgeous images of gay male sex, but you
[00:31:48.450]could look at this photograph for long minutes and not even
[00:31:52.380]realize that there is a gay male couple Epicenter engaged in
[00:31:56.850]it in an erotic exchange. And what's more, the money shot
[00:32:00.960]itself, you know, the blowjob is literally sort of cut off,
[00:32:04.770]by the girders, your visual pleasure, your pornographic gaze
[00:32:08.670]is interrupted, and that can't be an accident, image after
[00:32:13.290]image after image, how could it be that we only look at
[00:32:17.880]these photographs to say, oh, okay, there's, there's the gay
[00:32:21.120]male couple, there's the sex act. And there's a kind of
[00:32:25.500]aggrandizement of gay male sex in this reading, and also an
[00:32:31.290]inability to read beyond the charisma of the human form. But
[00:32:35.700]if we are seriously interested in the nonhuman world, and
[00:32:41.280]then shapes and aesthetics that appear in something called
[00:32:45.690]nature, or in this case, in these kinds of industrial forms
[00:32:49.860]in a state of decay, then we have to stop looking at the
[00:32:53.220]human, and look at everything around the human, and
[00:32:56.730]recognize that the human figure lends a little erotic charge
[00:33:01.740]to this dynamic image of collapse. Okay, and it is really
[00:33:09.060]amazing, in fact, to see these massive architectures
[00:33:12.720]spiraling down to earth, and for me, looking at the
[00:33:16.350]photographs over and over again, I do find something very
[00:33:20.010]dramatic, something very poignant in them. And I wonder why,
[00:33:25.500]you know, so little has been said, Therefore, about this in
[00:33:30.420]the material that exists on backdrop, do a lot of other
[00:33:34.110]people, as I was saying earlier, who were taking photographs
[00:33:36.630]of gay male sex, and the peers, and most of them were taking
[00:33:40.680]very explicit sexual photographs. It was a kind of, you
[00:33:45.120]know, we were there, we were doing this. And the peers were
[00:33:48.960]just a kind of, you know, afterthought, not so football,
[00:33:52.890]trop, the scale is really important here. The fact that the
[00:33:56.700]human figures are so small, the fact that the good is so
[00:34:00.180]big, and as you'll see, the human bodies become less and
[00:34:04.710]less lively, as we continue to look at the work and the
[00:34:08.040]material of the peers becomes more and more dynamic.
[00:34:14.280]So some of the,
[00:34:17.100]I guess the method, if you like,
[00:34:20.370]for my project in this book, derives from Jose Munoz his
[00:34:26.520]method in cruising utopia. And as I said, I part ways with
[00:34:31.080]Jose when he wants to, you know, develop these world
[00:34:35.460]building theories of the 1970s in New York City, but at the
[00:34:41.070]same time, I'm really like, encouraged and excited by the
[00:34:45.780]archive that he worked with increasing utopian while I'm not
[00:34:50.100]exactly going back to it. There are moments in that archive
[00:34:53.520]that really resonate with bow trop and again, usefully can
[00:34:58.170]be read alongside backdrops. I went
[00:35:00.000]give you a few of those moments. But the method that Munos
[00:35:03.720]lays out is this. He says my hope, my approach to hope, as a
[00:35:08.760]critical methodology can be best described as a backward
[00:35:12.090]glance that enacts a future vision. And I think you can
[00:35:15.270]already hear my indebtedness to that kind of method. When I
[00:35:20.040]say that I want to go back to a world that is no longer
[00:35:23.130]ours, in order to find the contours and shapes of a world
[00:35:27.780]that could be to come. And that's exactly what Munoz was
[00:35:32.400]doing in this work. So for example, he went back to all
[00:35:38.130]kinds of artists who are doing really counterintuitive and
[00:35:41.850]counterproductive things in the 1970s, whose work can be
[00:35:46.140]located alongside bow drops in terms of anesthetics of
[00:35:49.950]collapse. So Ray Johnson, for example, who Munos focuses on
[00:35:54.360]a lot increasing Utopia
[00:35:57.240]responded to the art world, you know, excitement about the
[00:36:01.080]happenings that Allan Kaprow and others were putting on Yoko
[00:36:05.070]Ono as well, there was this very, as he saw it,
[00:36:08.760]heteronormative emphasis on the happening on the being there
[00:36:12.480]on the doing on a kind of heteronormative shaping of these
[00:36:16.170]encounters in the city. And so Johnson humorously would
[00:36:20.100]invite people, to his nothings. And, you know, and you hear,
[00:36:26.070]I'm sure most of you have heard of happenings. But maybe you
[00:36:30.210]haven't heard of the nothing events where you were invited
[00:36:33.840]not to show up because the artists would not show up and you
[00:36:37.650]were promised that nothing would happen. Right.
[00:36:40.800]And for Munoz, these were anti performative events. He said
[00:36:46.770]that were minimalist as he put it, compared to quote, the
[00:36:49.920]overabundance that was associated with happenings and a
[00:36:53.220]really like this staging of queer encounter as minimalist,
[00:36:59.040]as opposed to the sort of abundance and capacious pneus of a
[00:37:02.850]heteronormative art scene at that moment. He claims,
[00:37:07.410]however, that the utopian orient orientation of the nothing
[00:37:11.910]lies in the way that it acknowledges lack within
[00:37:15.750]heteronormative projections of reality, and inhabits the
[00:37:20.610]lack as nothing or ephemerality. So he says, if the
[00:37:24.000]happening is the something, then the, the camp, refusal of
[00:37:29.490]its somethingness is embedded in the lack of the nothing.
[00:37:33.810]But then, instead of staying with nothing, which is what I
[00:37:36.960]want to do, I'm going to use nothing as a through line here,
[00:37:41.100]a way of sort of philosophically conjuring collapse. Munoz
[00:37:45.480]then seeks a reparative route to utopia and he says, he
[00:37:49.890]writes queer utopian practices about building and doing in
[00:37:53.430]response to that status of nothing that has been assigned to
[00:37:56.520]us by the heteronormative world. Now, this contradicts his
[00:37:59.550]earlier point that we should reinvest in nothing so as to
[00:38:03.240]counteract the abundance of the heteronormative claim of the
[00:38:06.600]happening. So I'm going to like, work with his archive and
[00:38:11.580]with him, but push against the world building the making the
[00:38:15.480]building the doing, and see what happens if we dig into
[00:38:19.110]nothing. And this will take us I promise you back to us a
[00:38:23.340]little gwynn's dispossession. Okay. So here's another
[00:38:27.120]nothing in Munoz archive, that if we stay away from
[00:38:30.960]worldbuilding, we can do more with
[00:38:34.140]and that's Fred Harco. This was a controversial chapter in
[00:38:37.800]cruising utopia. It's called the perfect shootie out of the
[00:38:41.070]window. And it focuses centrally on Fred Harco, who was a
[00:38:47.160]improvisational queer dancer in the 60s and 70s. A Speed
[00:38:51.840]Freak, not somebody who necessarily had made it in the art
[00:38:56.070]world, but who often performed at the Judson Memorial
[00:38:59.490]Church, and who one day showed up at a friend's house on
[00:39:03.330]Cornelia Street, put on some Mozart danced around the
[00:39:07.350]apartment and then did a perfect chakotay out of the window,
[00:39:11.100]which was from a fifth floor apartment, and so he fell to
[00:39:14.700]his death. So it was a suicidal leap. And Windows was
[00:39:18.870]accused of romanticizing suicide for this chapter, and it
[00:39:22.980]was a very, it was very difficult these criticisms for
[00:39:25.710]Munoz, and if you read the chapter, you'll see how he
[00:39:28.350]counteracts them at the end. I actually think he shouldn't
[00:39:32.610]counteract them. It's not about the romanticization of
[00:39:35.730]suicide. As Munoz says, it's a queer restaging of a client's
[00:39:42.510]1969 leap into the void, which of course, was photoshopped,
[00:39:46.650]because he'd kind did not leap into the void. He leapt into
[00:39:49.320]a safety net. But Fred HAKO did leap into the void and
[00:39:54.690]embrace to death in a very particular way that we can
[00:39:58.410]associate now with collapse
[00:40:00.000]With nothing not to say that this is just a death drive in a
[00:40:03.510]li Edelman mode, but that it is a refusal of life on some
[00:40:10.080]very profound level. And it may well be sometimes that one
[00:40:13.470]has to refuse life when life is greedy when life is about
[00:40:19.170]consumption when life is about environmental ruin, and so
[00:40:23.040]on. And you can almost see this jump out of the Cornelia St.
[00:40:28.110]Window as its own kind of politics of collapse, and one that
[00:40:32.370]does not need to be apologize for. And there's a number of
[00:40:36.360]books that just came out recently, actually, one by Roger
[00:40:40.680]Antrim, I think, that was just reviewed in the New York
[00:40:43.320]Times about surviving suicide and refusing to apologize for
[00:40:48.480]the suicidal act. Many ways, and I say this in wild things.
[00:40:53.700]Some suicidal ideation is intolerable to people, precisely
[00:40:58.710]because it holds within it, a deep rejection of the world as
[00:41:02.100]it is. And it's a refusal to survive in a world in which so
[00:41:08.130]few people are allowed to thrive, something like that. Okay.
[00:41:14.640]Let's return then and try to finish up on collapse. And then
[00:41:20.250]I'll I'll do two, two final pieces towards the conclusion.
[00:41:25.680]Munoz called Hopko. Sleep incandescent, I'm going to call it
[00:41:30.150]an architectural in wild and part of the an architecture
[00:41:36.180]associated with Gordon Matta Clark and Alvin Bal trop
[00:41:41.460]hawkers using the window, not as an access point to go back
[00:41:45.660]into the world. But as the portal to some great after party
[00:41:50.490]to some, it's a kind of scaffolding, if you like for dis
[00:41:54.360]appearance. A lot of this is what's happening in these
[00:41:57.570]photographs of the peers. So in one of the very few
[00:42:02.100]photographs, Alvin bow, trop actually gave a title to
[00:42:05.040]various his title collapsed architecture, it isn't any kind
[00:42:09.330]of title to do with cruising. And I believe that this is one
[00:42:12.810]of the very few images where there are no gay men in the
[00:42:18.060]viewfinder hit most of the photographs were not given
[00:42:21.840]titles, they were just collected, an archived often
[00:42:27.330]indiscriminately like this one with no particular date. I
[00:42:30.960]think most of the archive is now at the Bronx Museum. And
[00:42:35.310]there are some papers and some tapes at the Yale Binaca
[00:42:39.300]Museum. But the fact that that the one piece with a title is
[00:42:45.330]called collapsed architectures, should surely give us a clue
[00:42:49.410]to where caltrops interest lies. So look at that, you know,
[00:42:54.360]again, you saw it in the first image, I showed you, the
[00:42:57.510]little human couple in the center. But then look at this
[00:43:02.550]incredible drama, building up from the gay male couple,
[00:43:07.050]where the whole of the pier is falling back on its side, in
[00:43:11.910]a way. And then above it, you can see this sort of stock
[00:43:16.290]form of New York City skyline in the back, but it's almost
[00:43:20.550]as if that skyline is being crowded out with this incredibly
[00:43:24.450]dynamic landscape of collapse, as if that collapse is coming
[00:43:29.400]for the landscape in the background. And the to me the gay
[00:43:34.500]male couple, his serves as a an erotic punctum if you like
[00:43:39.990]to just say that there is not only an aesthetics to
[00:43:42.780]collapse, but also an erotic if we care to look for it.
[00:43:47.190]And I'll tell you what that erotic says in a moment. Here's
[00:43:50.190]another one of these images that appears without any human
[00:43:54.540]bodies. And I think this is incredibly beautiful. This is
[00:43:57.720]long before Frank Gehry is making his folds into the
[00:44:01.710]architectural
[00:44:03.840]plane.
[00:44:05.730]This is this is literally the architecture of entropy.
[00:44:10.290]Right? The pier when left alone long enough is going to
[00:44:15.420]fall. And this is what the fall looks like. And I think
[00:44:19.200]we're being educated here to become familiar with the forms
[00:44:24.510]and the shapes of collapse, shapes and forms that were about
[00:44:29.580]to be erased from the New York City landscape by developers
[00:44:33.690]who wanted to turn the city into a shiny, modern, safe
[00:44:39.420]metropolis.
[00:44:42.480]So very often human figures that are he he, you know, closes
[00:44:47.520]in on are alone, and are framed by these architectures of
[00:44:51.960]collapse very often by for example, windows with no panes of
[00:44:55.470]glass in them. portals to again this this other
[00:45:00.000]They're sort of murky worlds are beyond. Here's another one
[00:45:04.530]of windows with no glass in them, suggesting a different use
[00:45:10.290]for the window. Look how casually the human body is just
[00:45:14.490]lying there we see a torso only half a torso, we literally
[00:45:18.990]just see an ass. In fact, it's kind of a meta numerical
[00:45:22.740]representation of gay male presence. But without the
[00:45:27.570]obligatory scene of gay male sex is almost a movement away
[00:45:32.460]in some of these images from sex training you to see these
[00:45:37.470]bodies, not in motion, but in repose, in repose, that then,
[00:45:43.410]in some ways, brings building and body together, right as
[00:45:48.120]similarly inert. So if you think that's just one image,
[00:45:52.680]well, here's two more where there are human bodies just
[00:45:55.740]lying on the floor, are they alive? Are they dead? Do we
[00:45:58.980]know is this one sleeping is this one,
[00:46:03.240]just completely like drugged out or, or no longer living,
[00:46:08.190]the discarded, broken umbrella is a super interesting image
[00:46:13.050]there, I think deserves a close reading, you wouldn't need
[00:46:16.380]an umbrella inside. And yet it's open, suggesting a kind of
[00:46:20.340]spear within a sphere, a meze on a beam, but also that the
[00:46:25.530]human body arrives on the floor, alongside other detritus in
[00:46:30.660]the piers. So it's a really like, representing human bodies
[00:46:34.710]also as part of the waist within the piers, as abandoned as
[00:46:39.750]well by the city.
[00:46:42.900]And here, it's as if the architecture is trying to throw the
[00:46:45.480]bodies off. I love this angle. I think it's such an
[00:46:48.210]interesting angle, both from above, but also from the side
[00:46:53.610]that makes you unsure of whether we're on some sort of
[00:46:57.540]slant. And the images, the bodies are sort of arranged in
[00:47:02.910]some kind of community that is not necessarily erotic here,
[00:47:06.870]either.
[00:47:10.650]Okay, so what are the politics of collapse? Well, they are,
[00:47:15.870]first and foremost, not the politics of the art market, not
[00:47:21.240]the politics of the art market. They represent a different
[00:47:24.660]masculinity, like to say the aesthetics of collapses
[00:47:28.740]already, to be interested in a kind of impotence into
[00:47:34.320]something that's flaccid, something that is de tumescent,
[00:47:38.070]right, as opposed to what the art market loves, which is
[00:47:41.430]Jeff Koons and his obscene puppies that have to now appear
[00:47:45.270]outside of every art museum around the world costing
[00:47:49.080]millions of dollars to give us this pert ever erect puppy,
[00:47:53.640]promising, right promising a masculinity that will never
[00:47:57.510]fall down. This is a Viagra artwork.
[00:48:02.490]And there are millions of these architectures, phallic
[00:48:06.330]architectures that are one with an Rand's Fountainhead, the
[00:48:10.380]architectural vision, the fascist vision of a masculinity
[00:48:14.700]that goes up and never comes down. Bow trop if you like, is
[00:48:19.860]a chronicler, of masculine vulnerability of a different
[00:48:25.230]orientation to the male body, one that is not about pumped
[00:48:31.140]up pneumatic orgasmic potential, but is about quiet repose,
[00:48:38.430]inertia
[00:48:40.500]and collapse. And there there is an erotic there's an erotic
[00:48:44.040]to be had and it isn't the erotics that crimp and others
[00:48:47.040]have told us about the golden age of the 1970s. It's one
[00:48:51.330]also about the frustration and loss of cruising, the fact
[00:48:55.890]that most nights, for example, you maybe wouldn't connect
[00:48:59.910]with anyone, and you would go home alone.
[00:49:04.770]So just to close this out, then
[00:49:08.640]you I'm going to just turn to
[00:49:14.040]one artwork that I think if you wanted to know like, well,
[00:49:18.240]what would that look like in a contemporary period?
[00:49:22.080]That's great about the 1970s. What's the politics of this?
[00:49:26.130]We could look at the work of Cameron Rowland, who's an
[00:49:28.170]African American artist, who as in this work from 2018
[00:49:32.160]Depreciation is completely committed to draining the value
[00:49:37.470]out of the art market much in the same way that those images
[00:49:40.830]of bow trop and Gordon Matta Clark's cut seem to so in this
[00:49:45.810]piece, for example, Roland documents how he buys some land
[00:49:50.160]in South Carolina that was formerly a plantation and he buys
[00:49:54.120]the land. He removes everything from the land, he grows
[00:49:57.090]nothing there. He builds nothing there and he drains
[00:50:00.000]The value of the land down to nothing. Okay? Remember that
[00:50:03.750]nothing the nothing's of Ray Johnson here it is, again in an
[00:50:07.560]act that he calls depreciation. So that instead of making
[00:50:11.640]things that the art market can get rich on rowland's work is
[00:50:15.690]always about trying to leech value out of the art market.
[00:50:20.190]And he literally puts loans he, he gets our museums to agree
[00:50:27.990]with lawyers to put liens on their buildings, such that they
[00:50:34.110]will be drained of all value within 50 years where he puts
[00:50:37.620]one such lien on the ICA in London, which is filled with
[00:50:43.050]mahogany that was called from slave labor. So Cameron Roland
[00:50:48.330]says, you know, this mahogany, you don't own this mahogany,
[00:50:51.660]so I'm going to put, I'm going to loan you this mahogany,
[00:50:54.720]and they drew up a contract. And the iasca agreed to it. And
[00:50:59.160]because that loan is never being repaid, eventually the ICA
[00:51:03.120]his value will come down to nothing. He's done the same
[00:51:05.820]thing for Moca in our like, this is like this is a huge
[00:51:09.780]project. He got a MacArthur for this never was a MacArthur
[00:51:13.260]better well spent, by the way.
[00:51:16.470]But this is what is at stake in a politics of collapse if
[00:51:20.460]you like it isn't just like, oh, let me show you some images
[00:51:23.310]of collapse. It's also somebody jumping out of a window.
[00:51:26.820]It's also someone refusing to make work for the art market.
[00:51:31.320]It's also someone draining value out of the art market.
[00:51:35.160]That's where collapses going. Alright, I know we're running
[00:51:38.400]out of time, we're back to nothing.
[00:51:41.880]Nothing works as Gordon Matta Clark and his his great,
[00:51:47.490]beautiful sculpture days and as photographed by oven
[00:51:50.670]backdrop. Alright, and today you have Grindr, so sorry,
[00:51:55.440]right, this instead of this gorgeous world of cruising of,
[00:51:59.280]of, you know, this a temporal landscape of frustration, and
[00:52:05.490]then intimacy. Now you you've got an app for it. You have
[00:52:10.110]the whole algorithm for gay male desire has been uploaded,
[00:52:13.890]so that you can just locate each other and make billions of
[00:52:17.250]dollars every five minutes for Grindr. So that's why we're
[00:52:21.420]going back instead of forward, because who knows how to get
[00:52:24.510]out of BS logics. Alright, I have two piece, I'm very aware
[00:52:29.610]that we're, you know, we've been here for a little while. So
[00:52:32.520]just give me like five minutes on this text so that we can
[00:52:36.750]think about women in the space of the peers. And then we'll
[00:52:40.560]return as promised to us, Sheila go in, by way of
[00:52:43.320]conclusion. Okay. So I was, you know, as I was doing this
[00:52:47.430]research, I'm like, wow, it's, it's but it really is all
[00:52:50.160]about men, because of course, the pairs were very dangerous.
[00:52:53.190]They were not a place that women could go very easily. And
[00:52:56.820]then I remembered one of my favorite queer films of all
[00:53:00.060]time, Times Square. And I always ask how many people have
[00:53:03.510]seen Times Square?
[00:53:06.150]Two, because this is the greatest queer film never seen,
[00:53:10.260]okay? Which is crazy, because it was made by the same people
[00:53:14.100]who made Saturday Night Fever, Robert Stigwood, was the
[00:53:17.070]producer. And he just was like, let me do a girl version of
[00:53:21.540]Saturday Night Fever is gonna be two girls, and they're on
[00:53:24.870]the run in New York City and having all of these adventures
[00:53:27.720]with a punk soundtrack instead of a disco soundtrack. It's
[00:53:30.660]gonna be amazing. And he gets this director Alan moil, to
[00:53:33.900]agree to make the film, two unknowns in the role of the two
[00:53:37.410]girls. This is Nikki who's a street kid. And she meets up
[00:53:42.360]with Pammy, who is the rich kid, daughter of a local
[00:53:49.770]politician who is in the mayor's office and has been
[00:53:53.250]assigned to the committee on gentrification in New York
[00:53:58.890]City. I kid you not. So Pammy and Nikki meet up in a psych
[00:54:03.690]ward. And Nikki says, Hey, let's get out of here puts on the
[00:54:08.400]Ramones, I want to be sedated. And off, they go to the very
[00:54:13.200]place that they've been warned always to stay away from
[00:54:15.990]Times Square Times Square. And they doubt empower me
[00:54:19.590]downstairs in one of the red light clubs, they make
[00:54:23.490]community with the pimps and the hookers and the dances and
[00:54:27.330]all the things that young girls are supposed to be warned
[00:54:30.300]against. They go and do to show that though those
[00:54:34.500]communities have safe for them, whereas the communities that
[00:54:37.620]they were living in, at home were the places of precarity
[00:54:42.480]right. So this is super interesting. Film. It's a beautiful
[00:54:45.900]friendship. The the punk soundtrack is amazing Patti Smith's
[00:54:51.300]pissing in a river. And because the whole thing, what's not
[00:54:55.080]to like, people didn't like it. The film went nowhere. And
[00:54:58.290]you can almost never see this
[00:55:00.000]film anymore. Amazingly, in the middle of the film, there
[00:55:04.710]are scenes of the peers. And this is because Nicki and Pammi
[00:55:09.990]make a home for themselves in Pier 56. right by where Gordon
[00:55:14.280]Matta Clark had cut days and right where Alvin bow trop who
[00:55:18.900]is taking photographs. And this film was made in 7879. So
[00:55:22.980]it's right around the same time, it is probably some of the
[00:55:26.790]best footage of the peers. I don't even know of other film
[00:55:32.520]footage of the peers from that time. I don't know how they
[00:55:35.370]got permission to film there. But amazingly, you have this
[00:55:39.000]footage, and it features two girls in this kind of love
[00:55:43.260]lesbian utopian romance and I want to give you the sort of
[00:55:47.640]climactic scene of that union in the piers.
[00:56:16.470]Warning cutting
[00:56:27.600]the price
[00:56:33.690]me come on over to that.
[00:56:39.270]That's all.
[00:56:42.300]Like freakin
[00:56:44.580]you pat me shaky, I'll ask you for my name. Just screaming,
[00:56:50.610]screaming as loud as you can,
[00:56:53.670]you know, like this?
[00:57:22.440]That scene is so beautiful to me. And Nikki says, Don't you
[00:57:28.320]see this is the place, this is the place. So it's all about
[00:57:32.370]the police. It's about making home in this ruined,
[00:57:38.070]collapsing structure, which is exactly what they do. They
[00:57:40.860]make a little apartment for themselves out of broken
[00:57:43.200]furniture and things that other people have, you know, left.
[00:57:49.110]And then the fact that the peers are a kind of echo chamber
[00:57:54.540]for them calling to each other, this cycle of recognition
[00:57:58.560]that has nothing to do with their parents, with the city,
[00:58:02.790]with government, but is like you call me I'll call you you
[00:58:07.140]call me I'm here for you, you're here for me. And that cycle
[00:58:11.040]of sort of girl support is really beautiful. And that last
[00:58:15.000]scene of the the noise of those names echoing through the
[00:58:18.090]peers is another. I feel like it's another one of these sort
[00:58:22.920]of cultural texts that transforms appears into this
[00:58:26.190]community of the dispossessed. All right, speaking of which,
[00:58:30.510]let's conclude then go by going back to Osceola gwynn's The
[00:58:35.070]Dispossessed. And again, for anyone who hasn't read this
[00:58:39.120]amazing book, which has come back into style recently,
[00:58:42.330]partly because people are so dissatisfied with governance
[00:58:47.730]and state, you know, the state, that there's a kind of deep
[00:58:52.860]interest in anarchy right now. And so people going back and
[00:58:56.550]rereading dispossession. For those of you who don't know,
[00:59:00.360]this is about two planets, one that's kind of Earthlike
[00:59:04.770]called Arras and then a breakaway planet called Honorius.
[00:59:10.560]That where people who have been influenced by the teaching
[00:59:13.770]of teachings of an old woman called odo, who is the
[00:59:17.670]anarchist thinker in the book, go to live, and they leave
[00:59:21.810]the capitalist planet and they go to this other planet.
[00:59:24.420]However, the protagonist Chevak, as a physicist who's made
[00:59:28.560]incredible breakthroughs into a theory of simultaneity, and
[00:59:32.850]there's much we could do with that, but we won't do it right
[00:59:34.980]now.
[00:59:36.360]And his breakthroughs are so significant that the capitalist
[00:59:38.970]planet says we want to fly you to earth so you can tell us
[00:59:43.260]about your research. So he gets to the capitalist planet,
[00:59:46.380]and he's amazed he can't believe it. It's beautiful, it's
[00:59:49.710]wealthy. There's incredible food to eat wine to drink.
[00:59:55.500]There's sex in abundance. There's he has
[01:00:00.000]intellectual so you know ownership of his his thought he
[01:00:04.110]doesn't have to share it with the community. He has
[01:00:06.570]servants, he has an office, he has privacy, all the things
[01:00:10.680]he doesn't have in the Annika state he has on planet, this
[01:00:15.300]Earth like planet. But after a few months, he becomes
[01:00:18.960]completely disgusted by capitalism and its abundance makes
[01:00:25.710]him literally sick.
[01:00:28.380]And at that moment, he is contacted by an underground
[01:00:31.110]resistance movement that want to bring the capitalist state
[01:00:34.200]down. So they asked him to come and speak at a rally and his
[01:00:40.500]the cover of the first edition of the book. And this is what
[01:00:43.980]Chevak says to the people gathered in protest of the state.
[01:00:48.600]He says to them, we know that there is no help for us, but
[01:00:51.960]from one another, but no hand will save us if we do not
[01:00:54.810]reach out our hand. And that the hand you reach out is as
[01:00:58.320]empty as minus, you have nothing. You possess nothing, you
[01:01:03.720]own nothing, you are free. All you have is what you are and
[01:01:08.580]what you give. So this idea that you can only be free by not
[01:01:13.890]having and not owning is the meaning of dispossession, and
[01:01:19.230]is the state to which collapse should bring you. So I want
[01:01:24.870]to end with this idea. And with this beautiful image of
[01:01:29.910]somebody with whom I collaborate a lot boy child doing a
[01:01:33.300]handouts. And in the handouts in a way, there's no music,
[01:01:38.130]there's no sound. And he's just dancing in a way that is
[01:01:43.200]that empty hand being stretched out. And he also sort of
[01:01:46.830]talks about these dances as the gesture of the empty handed.
[01:01:51.690]So we'll we'll end with that. And thank you for listening.
[01:02:09.480]Thank you so much. That was really amazing, inspiring. I
[01:02:14.550]imagine that there might be some questions from some people
[01:02:18.870]in the audience.
[01:02:29.280]Thanks for a wonderful talk, my mind is going a million
[01:02:31.980]miles per hour. I have a real an honest question about about
[01:02:37.650]utopia, right? Because in the profound anarchist tradition,
[01:02:41.400]utopia is not a romantic thing is a pragmatic thing that we
[01:02:44.610]do everyday. Right? In the tradition of LeGuin. Right? So
[01:02:48.720]talking about like, when under this process, I feel like
[01:02:51.420]your work really breaks with a certain tradition of critique
[01:02:54.810]and in the construction, right, your own worlding IFC or in
[01:02:59.220]another real must that right, in I see world making in what
[01:03:03.630]you just presented, I think the building of worlds, that
[01:03:07.200]tradition of the construction would have preferred really
[01:03:09.510]deep rather than Ursula LeGuin. Right. I mean, they read
[01:03:13.440]we'd prefer what is that tradition of the construction of
[01:03:17.490]critical theory of the 90s, let's say, referred Philip deck,
[01:03:21.150]right, rather than a, this process, or Octavia Butler, or
[01:03:26.340]Glorian, Salwa, all of them would have seen for them to, to,
[01:03:30.840]to to to naive, right. And now that certainly in both, I saw
[01:03:34.650]that you were mentioning the musical community. So this
[01:03:37.950]party's does, right, there's so much well making, I am
[01:03:41.460]wondering, then, I mean, how much of these aesthetics of
[01:03:45.390]colabs is not just a hangover that we still have from from,
[01:03:50.460]from, from critical theory, that it's a convention to not be
[01:03:54.240]able to accept huttopia as the scores, right? Because that
[01:03:59.760]the world ended for in many places many years ago in 1492.
[01:04:03.120]The world ended for a lot of people, right? Yeah, yeah, just
[01:04:05.850]do their thing. Yeah. But thank you, thank you so much. I
[01:04:08.670]inspired and thinking about a million things. Yeah, thank
[01:04:12.270]you. Well, that's That's exactly right. But that's why I'm
[01:04:15.690]holding back from utopia because we don't, I'm not sure we
[01:04:20.010]have the option of Utopia anymore. We, as you say, for many
[01:04:25.140]indigenous peoples, the world ended in 1492 and earlier for
[01:04:29.550]others, and we may not be able to indulge the luxury of
[01:04:35.160]utopia.
[01:04:37.020]But we might be able to tear things down, you know, a lot
[01:04:41.160]and then allow for another world to decide, like another
[01:04:46.380]world is possible, okay. But this one has to get out of the
[01:04:50.580]way in order for that to happen. That's one thing. But the
[01:04:53.940]other thing I was thinking about, you know, in another
[01:04:56.070]version of this, I'm make much of Veronica Gago.
[01:05:01.199]Beautiful work in feminist International, where you're how
[01:05:05.909]to change everything where she's making the same argument
[01:05:09.449]that I'm making, which is in the Met in a way anesthetics
[01:05:12.419]have collapsed because she's saying, it's not that we want
[01:05:15.389]to get people to do something. We want to stop the world.
[01:05:19.859]That's literally the slogan of the feminist groups that are
[01:05:24.359]are uniting to bring about a general strike. And the slogan
[01:05:29.789]is stop the world. And I think that this language of
[01:05:34.649]stopping nothing, dispossession, the sort of the the
[01:05:40.109]language that is disruptive depreciation, the disruption of
[01:05:45.869]the accumulative and extractive models of capitalism, that's
[01:05:50.759]what we have to work towards and Gago his book is amazing,
[01:05:54.329]because she even has like a project. And it's a general
[01:05:59.009]strike, which is not oriented simply around people who are
[01:06:02.489]working and they stop working. Her point is, most of the
[01:06:06.659]world is not necessarily working. All the women who are at
[01:06:10.469]home doing domestic labor or taking care of babies, all the
[01:06:13.799]kids who who don't work, or the people who can't work,
[01:06:17.609]because they're disabled, all the folks who are forced into
[01:06:22.019]or have chosen sex work over other work but can't unionize.
[01:06:25.709]So her point is that the general strike has to be beyond
[01:06:29.339]what has been considered industry or working class. And it
[01:06:32.849]has to include all of these groups. It is in hoods.
[01:06:35.789]Transversal. That's is that utopian? Yes. But in that same
[01:06:41.099]negative register that I think I'm building. So I think,
[01:06:45.059]really, the tradition comes out of Latin America, much more
[01:06:47.969]than Europe. But I really liked what you said about how in
[01:06:51.329]this in the 90s, when you had Jameson and others who were
[01:06:55.829]thinking about Utopia critical utopias it was Philip dick.
[01:07:00.749]It's it Stanley Robinson. It's a kind of male sci fi
[01:07:06.389]tradition. And I do like Octavia Butler's work as well. But
[01:07:10.739]some of Octavia Butler's work can be very heteronormative,
[01:07:13.679]as in Parable of the Sower.
[01:07:16.260]And very little of it has any kind of utopian element, it
[01:07:21.450]wouldn't be right to classify it as utopian. So, you know, I
[01:07:25.830]only like these two books by Ursula going to be honest with
[01:07:28.890]you only, like dispossessed in the Left Hand of Darkness. I
[01:07:31.980]don't like the others. It's, I'm, I'm absolutely just
[01:07:34.680]picking these two out from the Hainish cycle,
[01:07:38.190]the fantasy stuff, the earth, see the dragons, whatever, you
[01:07:42.930]know, and she was pretty dissatisfied with her own
[01:07:46.290]anarchist. She calls it an ambiguous utopia. And I think
[01:07:50.220]that's what you and I are talking about here? Yeah.
[01:08:00.090]Yeah, this is an amazing talk.
[01:08:03.570]I'm trying to wrap my mind around. Like I'm there are people
[01:08:07.380]who are attracted to ruin and like interested in that, and
[01:08:10.560]I'm one of them. Okay. And I think
[01:08:14.880]I'm trying to wrap my mind around why that's so attractive.
[01:08:18.420]And I was starting to think that the isolation and the like,
[01:08:24.630]left aloneness of the peers. That actually reminded me of
[01:08:31.500]the isolation of last year, during like the heart of the
[01:08:36.660]pandemic. And for me, personally, that was around like,
[01:08:41.820]gender and like not having to deal with the construct and
[01:08:44.910]all the bullshit and like, other people bringing that on,
[01:08:49.170]and you see that with Nicki and Patti, especially in of
[01:08:53.520]course, all the guys having sex being like, yeah, we get to
[01:08:55.950]come here and be left alone. What I end, the safety of the
[01:08:59.820]house and the space and all that, you know, kind of playing
[01:09:03.360]in what I don't understand is, how does that reconcile with
[01:09:09.900]the mutual aid impulse of anarchism?
[01:09:14.370]How do we like if I'm safe alone?
[01:09:19.110]From say fist alone, or with my most dear How do we build
[01:09:25.080]that community? I mean, I sort of do it but like, I really I
[01:09:29.040]don't know how that happened. Look, that's a really good
[01:09:31.470]point that you're making. Okay, this the peers seem to be
[01:09:35.490]just full of isolated lost souls wandering around in the
[01:09:40.530]ruins It's so romantic. We love to see this but do we want
[01:09:44.250]to live it you know?
[01:09:46.320]But this is where I refuse the separation between Gordon
[01:09:51.780]Matta Clark and Alvin Bao trop that people like crimp insist
[01:09:55.170]on and Matta Clark. I didn't go into Matta Clark because of
[01:10:00.000]wasn't really time. But he's this Chilean
[01:10:04.980]comes out of a Chilean immigrant family, his his father,
[01:10:08.190]Robert domata, was very, very famous artist, he, he grows up
[01:10:13.740]in New York City, goes to architecture school at Cornell,
[01:10:18.390]and then decides that as a trained architect, he wants to
[01:10:21.660]unbuild things. And he goes to the piers, and he literally,
[01:10:27.510]padlocked, put a padlock on the area, where he was working
[01:10:30.570]to cut these pieces out of the side of the piers, and then
[01:10:35.010]out of the floor, because what he wanted to do was to bring
[01:10:38.160]light shafts into the piers and have them bounce off of the
[01:10:41.130]water, and then revolve around the room and create something
[01:10:44.010]else. But he also had a kind of, again, a utopian vision for
[01:10:48.630]the piers, as and Matta Clark was the person who said, Why
[01:10:52.770]is architecture wasted on the wealthy, we need architecture
[01:10:56.730]for people who are living in more modest housing that where
[01:11:00.570]architecture could really do something special, where you
[01:11:03.990]don't pay a nominal leg, but you're living in some space
[01:11:07.740]that has been beautifully designed.
[01:11:11.280]So his vision of the piers was more mutual aid, and then
[01:11:15.780]cruising. And it was that that this would be a kind of
[01:11:20.130]shared public space, he had fantasies of that whole area,
[01:11:25.140]turning into a kind of public park for everybody. But people
[01:11:29.160]like Douglas crimp thought that he was he was cast as a
[01:11:32.820]homophobe, because he made some disparaging comments about
[01:11:36.120]the s&m gay man and the piers. And because he put a padlock
[01:11:40.530]on the area where he was working. But I think, you know, he,
[01:11:45.360]I think that you have to read these two figures together,
[01:11:49.830]and think their projects together. And then you can get into
[01:11:53.610]like both
[01:11:55.470]the community made up of strangers, which is what bow drops
[01:11:58.770]of photographs are documenting, and then the opening up of
[01:12:02.520]space to everyone, which is what Gordon Matta Clark's work
[01:12:05.730]is doing. And I think through those two aesthetic gestures,
[01:12:09.840]you do open onto a sort of mutual aid space. That isn't
[01:12:14.400]there is isolation, but there's also a kind of solidarity,
[01:12:18.990]help, you know, you help me I help you ethos, as well. And I
[01:12:23.310]think that's, that's very much at work there.
[01:12:45.120]I am drawn to how you describe the aesthetics of collapse,
[01:12:49.710]as bringing the body and the building together. I'm curious
[01:12:54.330]if the aesthetics of collapse can apply to the body itself.
[01:12:58.050]So I'm kind of reminded of the cyborg Manifesto by Donna
[01:13:01.260]Haraway, and how
[01:13:04.260]how thinking of the body of cyborg can help to deconstruct
[01:13:07.260]some of those Cartesian dualities that are so
[01:13:12.540]pesty
[01:13:14.460]breaking down male and female body in mind. So is there is
[01:13:18.960]there a kind of a post humanist potential to the aesthetics
[01:13:22.200]of collapse as it might apply to the body? Well, you know,
[01:13:25.560]when you started speaking, I was, I thought you might go in
[01:13:29.220]the direction of kind of disability understanding of
[01:13:32.460]collapse, where we don't just think of spaces in terms of
[01:13:35.730]able bodies in the way that they may move through them, and
[01:13:39.300]then cast the disabled body as a place where the body has
[01:13:42.780]failed or collapsed. And it no longer appears as in the
[01:13:47.070]realm of aesthetic appreciation, when in fact, these kinds
[01:13:51.660]of images can train us to look differently at collapse, and
[01:13:54.840]to recognize our all of our impending collapse in the these
[01:14:00.330]slow, winding, spiraling images of these buildings. So I
[01:14:06.120]think yeah, she wants to go for Yeah, the etymology of
[01:14:10.620]collapse, like you talked about really? kind of highlights
[01:14:14.850]that is it? Yeah. Kind of a togetherness. Yes, togetherness.
[01:14:17.940]Exactly. Which goes back to the mutual aid as well.
[01:14:21.660]So I do think that, I mean, I do think it's about collapsing
[01:14:27.480]bodies as well. And that's what makes it sort of resonate,
[01:14:31.260]as Mel was saying, in this moment of isolation and pandemic
[01:14:35.310]and,
[01:14:36.630]you know, we've seen all too well, how all to scarily, how
[01:14:42.900]quickly bodies can collapse. And and how those collapses are
[01:14:46.890]orchestrated across a population, not individual bodies,
[01:14:50.670]like the collapse of under COVID. was about the fact that we
[01:14:55.620]are connected even if we are all separated in our homes. You
[01:14:59.550]know, when
[01:15:00.000]Once the virus takes hold within a population, everyone's at
[01:15:04.260]risk in some way, whether you stay home or not. And we all
[01:15:08.070]know people who don't even know how they got COVID. And
[01:15:11.070]that's because isolation ultimately is impossible you do
[01:15:14.580]live on a planet with others, we we will go up or down
[01:15:17.970]together. And yet, we have such an impoverished political
[01:15:21.630]language to think about being together. You know, that's
[01:15:26.100]Veronica galgos. Point, let's rebuild the language, because
[01:15:30.060]it's so stuck on identity. So the queers are doing this, and
[01:15:33.690]this group's doing that, and the feminists are doing the
[01:15:36.330]other. And then oh, then the feminists and the trans women
[01:15:39.660]are at odds, and then that becomes its own drama. But what
[01:15:43.230]about these transversal relations, which are, in the end,
[01:15:46.890]the only way to oppose the massive power of global
[01:15:53.160]capitalism? And then the ways in which it works through
[01:15:58.260]crises like COVID? I mean, who was even surprised to find
[01:16:02.580]out that, in fact, the stock market did very well, under
[01:16:06.300]COVID, right? You remember, when COVID started, everyone's
[01:16:09.540]Oh, my gosh, what's gonna happen to the economy? Nothing,
[01:16:12.960]because
[01:16:15.000]wealthy people were stuck at home and not spending money
[01:16:18.450]jetting around the world, and so put all of their money into
[01:16:21.690]the stock market and universities like mine, and now saying,
[01:16:24.870]hey, you know, how we projected that we were going to lose
[01:16:27.030]all this money? We didn't, we did really? Well, you know. So
[01:16:30.540]it's like,
[01:16:32.700]we, we who are not the 5% of the population, who are going
[01:16:39.990]to profit up every single crisis that comes along, we do
[01:16:44.610]have to think in terms of what possibilities there are in
[01:16:49.980]collapse for us, where the US is a very big us, not the
[01:16:54.510]little us who identify with each other. And I'm really
[01:16:58.590]interested in the political projects that are trying to
[01:17:01.320]develop languages for that. And,
[01:17:05.190]you know, it is to our advantage, in some ways to bring this
[01:17:10.560]economy down, in many ways, because this economy is mostly
[01:17:15.270]not the economy that most of us are engaged in, it is mostly
[01:17:19.020]a stock market and real estate, speculative economy. So when
[01:17:24.480]you're being scared with stories of economic collapse, who's
[01:17:28.980]really going to benefit? And who's going to lose? Well,
[01:17:31.650]that's the kind of thing that we have to ask. But I really
[01:17:34.740]do like that question in terms of like, really orienting us
[01:17:38.100]towards thinking about bodies that are collapsed, or will
[01:17:41.040]collapse and how we also think about spaces in relationship
[01:17:45.540]to those bodies. It's a really nice
[01:17:48.750]question.
[01:18:08.700]Thank you so much. And I am holding on to when you say like,
[01:18:13.470]what possibilities come out of
[01:18:17.430]like, collapse, right? And I see some like threads about,
[01:18:22.230]you know, with your work on failure and like, what, what,
[01:18:25.980]what, what can how can we see it differently? Or just now
[01:18:29.790]when you said,
[01:18:31.830]like, about language for togetherness, right? So I'm holding
[01:18:35.820]on to these because
[01:18:38.310]unwielding or language, like, you know, I was at a panel,
[01:18:42.780]you know, a year or so ago about like, destroying the world.
[01:18:46.350]It was a theory panel that was like, it was just like the a
[01:18:49.530]bunch of theorists say at MLA saying, Let's destroy the
[01:18:52.710]world. Okay, right. So, I'm sure MLA always comes through.
[01:18:57.240]Yeah.
[01:18:58.800]So just as someone who's, like, experiencing so much
[01:19:04.260]hopelessness, yeah, I was trying to hold on to the hope in
[01:19:09.750]like it those that lit the language of possibility, even
[01:19:12.930]though I hear your resistance to utopia and world making, I
[01:19:18.450]at the same time, I'm not sure if I can live without it. In
[01:19:23.040]I know, in particular, I mean, I feel like it's been it's
[01:19:26.550]not just COVID it was before that there's a kind of where I,
[01:19:30.930]you know, I'm, I'm, I'm jumping out the window, you know,
[01:19:34.800]and they're in that I want to figure out, you know, so it's
[01:19:37.590]kept trying to think about in the start, I was like, Is this
[01:19:40.500]like a hit rock bottom, and then you can transform kind of,
[01:19:46.200]you know, like, I'm trying to find it so in a sense I'm
[01:19:49.380]asking, do you have hope, and and can you give us any?
[01:19:56.850]No, and no
[01:20:01.949]Look, I have three different touchstones for this that is
[01:20:07.439]not hopefully that panel MLA, but maybe can show the
[01:20:11.759]complexity of the project that I'm just doing my tiny little
[01:20:14.969]piece of and you're right. This is very close to my earlier
[01:20:19.199]work on failure, which did have sort of weird, loopy and
[01:20:25.590]ludic hope embedded in it because of the the cartoon archive
[01:20:29.730]and so on. But this one is a bit more serious. And I think
[01:20:33.660]there's three, three theorists who mean a lot to me, who are
[01:20:39.810]showing the way on this. So one would be, you know, Anna
[01:20:43.470]Singh's book on the mushroom at the end of the world. Now,
[01:20:47.730]is that a hopeless book? No, it's just not centered on
[01:20:51.870]humans in the way that we used to in an ethnography. And, in
[01:20:55.500]fact, it is similar to some of the things that I'm saying in
[01:20:59.760]that she makes the point that this Matsuzaki mushroom grows,
[01:21:05.670]where humans have destroyed land, like the terrain has to
[01:21:10.770]first be destroyed by the human presence, in order to create
[01:21:15.360]the conditions under which a certain kind of pine then
[01:21:17.820]grows. And that pine is where the Matsuzaki mushroom can
[01:21:22.290]flourish. And so she talks about a salvage economy, within
[01:21:26.640]which it's not the end of she's not talking about bringing
[01:21:30.060]capitalism down. She's actually trying to give us a better
[01:21:33.330]and more accurate understanding of capitalism, and the way
[01:21:37.260]in which it can flourish in certain areas of devastation.
[01:21:42.090]But so can other forms of life like these very rare
[01:21:45.960]mushrooms, right? So that would be one Touchstone on the
[01:21:50.520]point of like, can you give us hope? Here, I would refer
[01:21:54.330]people back to Cydia, Hartman's brilliant essay, Venus into
[01:21:57.900]x, where she argues for a kind of narrative withholding of
[01:22:05.310]things like hope, because when she's talking about this,
[01:22:09.450]this this record that she finds in the archive of slavery of
[01:22:12.720]a young girl,
[01:22:14.640]and another girl that died during the voyage, and she tries
[01:22:18.360]to imagine these two girls giving each other comfort. She
[01:22:21.840]said, But wait a minute, why am I doing this? This doesn't
[01:22:25.650]do anything for the young girls. It's for me, and I'm not
[01:22:29.550]sure that we should be giving each other comfort in the face
[01:22:32.640]of this kind of material. And therefore, she offers us this
[01:22:37.140]image of narrative withholding. And I'm not saying no to
[01:22:39.900]hope, but I am saying, Could we not indulge our desire
[01:22:44.550]always to say, and then the world will be a better place?
[01:22:48.450]You know, because maybe there are other things that
[01:22:51.420]scholarship can do like loosening the bond between certain
[01:22:54.990]kind of aesthetics and a certain kind of worldview. And this
[01:22:58.710]is the third reference then would be James C. Scott, who
[01:23:01.290]says in seeing like a state, wow, how is it that modern
[01:23:05.340]architecture managed to suture a particular understanding of
[01:23:09.150]the political which turned out to be sort of fascist to
[01:23:12.120]these very orderly grids of the city? And how What work does
[01:23:17.400]the aesthetic do to make horrendous politics seem right? So
[01:23:22.230]can we make the reverse out of this where seemingly
[01:23:25.740]disorderly aesthetics can make another kind of political
[01:23:29.490]vision possible, you know, by disrupting our in seemingly
[01:23:35.220]ingrained desire for order symmetry, coherence, right. So I
[01:23:41.520]think that the answer you know, I wish we could end with
[01:23:45.000]hope, but I think that we are doing ourselves a disservice
[01:23:48.900]by by giving ourselves that comfort when we should not be
[01:23:53.160]competent right now. We should be afraid, very afraid. And
[01:23:56.880]that hopefully, will, you know, push us into the into the
[01:24:01.500]breach.
[01:24:03.360]Wish we could end somewhere else, but there you are.
[01:24:07.410]And on that,
[01:24:10.190]I would like to thank Jack Halberstam again, thank you all
[01:24:14.690]for coming.

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An Aesthetics of Collapse - a lecture by Jack Halberstam

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