Jake Yuzna's Open at Kuenstlerhaus Stuttgart

The exhibition at Kuenstlerhaus Stuttgart, Skeptical Thoughts on Love, departs from artistic perspectives that conjecture multiple forms of attachment, intimacy, and obsession. Methodologically speaking, it is inspired from the physical reality, potential impact and transformative power of love. The exhibition speculates on the potentiality of love as if it is the only possible form of resistance for cognitive/collective revolution in our contemporary solitude, demands silence as a conceptual tool to deal with human relationships and art works, and proposes to operate as a testing ground for introspection, self-analysis and self-reflection.




Participating artists:

Natalie Czech, Keren Cytter, Mariechen Danz, Leyla Gediz, Judith Hopf, Matthias Megyeri, Henrik Olesen, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Johannes Paul Raether, Sophie Reinhold, Emily Roysdon, Eva Schmeckenbecher, Jake Yuzna and Adbusters

The show ends with the screening and discussion of Jake Yuzna's film Open (2010). Open generates a strong vision, and contemporary panorama of how gender, sexuality and identity transform through diverse forms of love, attachment and intimacy. It is the first American film to win the Teddy Jury Prize at the Teddy Award (Premier: Berlin Film Festival in 2010). The film also won Best Narrative Film at the TLV Festival in Tel Aviv Israel, Best Performance at Newfest, as well as having the Jake Yuzna named a Four in Focus filmmaker at Outfest. Much of the film was inspired by the artist and musician Genesis P-Orridge, who served as creative consultant on the film and an interview with her made by Yuzna has been shown as part of the installation at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. 




Cuneyt Cakirlar gives an introductory talk on the film and moderates the post-screening discussion with the curator of the show Adnan Yıldız on 30 March 2014. 

Butler's Bodies That Matter (1993) in Turkish

Cüneyt Cakirlar has been working with Zeynep Talay on the Turkish translation of Judith Butler's seminal book Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993). The translation, Bela Bedenler, has finally been published in early March this year by the Istanbul-based publishing house Pinhan. Butler's other works, including Gender Trouble (1990), The Psychic Life of Power (1997), and Precarious Life (2006), had already been translated into Turkish in previous years. In Bodies That Matter, Butler offers a groundbreaking exploration of embodiment and sexuality in Western philosophy. We hope that the Turkish translation will be as effective and inspiring to the new generation of queer scholars in the country.    

Institutional Discourse and the Cult(ure) of Managerialism

Liz Morrish contemplates the legacy of Foucault's concept of governmentality in this piece on the construction of managerial identity in UK universities.

In UK universities, the conflict between managerial and academic values is primarily a struggle over discourse and the symbolic. It operates by forcing the academic to cite discourse which redefines their subjectivity in terms of managerial values.  We have seen a destabilization of established academic practices, and a superseding of existing values of cooperation, collective governance and democracy.  Whereas, once the university was once conceived of as a refuge from market values in its tolerance of risk and failure, they now reward only entrepreneurial, self-governing and competitive subjects, who are happy to function within the limits and discourse set for them by the managerial project. 

This paper draws on an ongoing project to collect and analyse data to support the argument that university management is like a Ponzi Scheme which is having a malign effect on the character of British higher education institutions. These schemes only succeed when you can persuade new investors to join the scheme, and so the internal priorities of universities are distorted away from teaching and research, towards feeding the managerial Ponzi. 

I am fortunate to be able pursue my research as an outsider on the inside by embedding myself in the rich environment of managerial apprenticeship now offered by most universities. The project of neoliberal governmentality is for the institution to produce its ideal employee (Morrissey 2013) and there can be no rejection of the new subjectivity. Our professional lives are dominated by the need to provide discursive evidence that we are compliant with the managerial regime in the form of performance management reviews, teaching evaluations, student satisfactions surveys, research excellence frameworks. Failure to enter into the discourse results in illocutionary silencing. A kind of biopower is exacted by compelling academics to undergo dressage training (Bendix Petersen and Davies 2010) in the new ratified behaviours and discourses. Linguistic data supporting this analysis emerges from management training programs such as: Leading High Performance Teams, Succession Planning, and Supporting Gold Standard Customer Service. 

I argue that those who pursue management roles in higher education are in the grip of a cult. Their identification with others in that tier, and their search for community, demands that they police the borders of the in-group while compelling subordinates to cite their norms. It is precisely because a fiction has been constituted, that management has to work so hard to maintain this precarious identity by discourse. Academics, however, are very aware that the official university culture of transparency and access to information is a perverse parody, retreating to what Docherty (2011) has called the ‘clandestine university’ within to pursue meaningful teaching and research.

References

• Bendix Petersen, Eva and Davies, Bronwyn. (2010) In/Difference in the neoliberalised university. Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences. 3:2. 92-109
• Docherty, Thomas (2011). The unseen academy. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/418076.article
• Morrissey, John. (2013). Governing the academic subject: Foucault, governmentality and the performing university. Oxford Review of Education. 39:6. 797-810.

Special Issue: Revisiting Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary Arts (Critical Arts)

The special issue "Revisiting Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary Arts", edited by Kris Rutten, An van Dienderen and Ronald Soetaert, has been published in the journal Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies. Cuneyt contributed to the special issue with an article focusing on documentary video in arts. 

         

Cakirlar, C. "Aesthetics of Self-Scaling: Parallaxed Transregionalism and Kutluğ Ataman’s Art-Practice", Critical Arts 27(6), 2013, 684-706. 

This article examines relations of ethnography, contemporary art-practice, globalisation and scalar geopolitics with particular reference to Kutluğ Ataman’s art-works. Having been shortlisted for the Turner Prize at the Tate and awarded the prestigious international Carnegie Prize in 2004 with his forty-screen video installation Küba (2004), Ataman became an extremely well-known, globally acclaimed artist and filmmaker. Self-conscious of their global travel and critically attentive to the contemporary ethnographic turn in the visual arts scene, Ataman’s video-works perform a conscientious failure of representing cultural alterity as indigeneity. Concentrating on the artist’s engagement with ethnography, this article contains three main parts. Analyses of the selection of videos in each part will give an account of different scalar aspects of Ataman’s artworks. It will first revisit a previous study (Çakirlar 2011) on the artist’s earlier work of video-portraits including Never My Soul! (2002) and Women Who Wear Wigs (1999). A detailed discussion of Küba follows, which may be taken as the ‘hinge-work’ in Ataman’s oeuvre that marks a scalar transition in his critical focus – from body and identity to community and geopolitics. The discussion will then move to a brief analysis of the series Mesopotamian Dramaturgies, including the screen-based sculptures Dome (2009), Column (2009), Frame (2009), English as a Second Language (2009), and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (2009). Rather than addressing scale as a differential concept, this article aims to demonstrate the ways in which Ataman’s art-practice produces self-scaling, self-regioning subjects that unsettle the hierarchical constructions of scale and facilitates a critique of the scalar normativity within the global art world’s regionalisms and internationalisms. 

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2013.867591

Shifting Dialogues II: Sexual Artifice in Asian Art and Performance

The Asian Art and Performance Consortium (AAPC) of the Academy of Fine Arts (Kuva) and the Finnish Theatre Academy Helsinki (Teak) hosted a symposium focusing on manifestations of sex, sexuality and gender in Asian art and performance on 17-19 October. This was the second symposium organized under the ongoing research project, Shifting Dialogues. The project is funded by the Academy of Finland in 2011-2014.

Following the focus on “The Politics of Site, Locality & Context in Performance and Visual Arts” last year, this year’s project targets at issues of sexual embodiment and gender subjectitivy in Asian/Asiatic art-practice with emphasis on performance arts, film, video art, installation, live art, and dialogical work.

In his paper “Troubled Objects of Nationalism and Masculinity”, Cüneyt Çakırlar explored the role of scalar, regional, and global/international discourses in contemporary art criticism. Cüneyt’s paper discussed the practice of a selection of artists producing work from/on/about the Middle East (Erinç Seymen, Taner Ceylan, Akram Zaatari, Slavs and Tatars, etc.). Questioning their critical use of geo-political location, region and scale in their aesthetic framework, Cüneyt talked about performative, transregional methodological/theoretical approaches to globalized art forms, which would contextualize, if not re-enact, the ways in which these artistic subjectivities inhabit the world.

Signs and Symptoms of the Mad Genius

In a new article, Simon Cross explores whats at stake in the representation of the 'mad genius'.

 

He argues that the madman is a protean figure in the popular imagination slipping through in dreams, fairytales, ballads, paintings, sculpting, literature, and as this chapter discusses, more recently in cinema as the mad genius in films. The chapter argues that madness and genius in films like Shine must be seen and understood concomitantly as each symbolises our culture’s fascination with the boundaries and limits of our own mental functioning. The signs of mad genius in film reveal creativity out of the chaos of symptoms. The conclusion argues that the meaning of the mad genius is heroic, strangely special, and utterly mythic. 

Simon Cross (2013) ‘Signs and Symptoms of the Mad Genius'. In Julian McDougall and Pete Bennett (Eds.) Myth Today and Together: Theory under Reconstruction (Routledge, 2013)