Blog Salon #3: On Collectivity and Collapse

In 1967, amidst uprisings by the globally dispossessed, Barthes proposed the Death of the Author, and creators have since been playing with radical ejection from and ambiguous presence within new work. The notion of collective collapse in performance is another utterance in this dialectic between an un-apparent or irrelevant author-body and the intentional negation of the body’s mechanics and composure (straight lines, length, elevation). And in the half-century since Barthes – since so many revolutions, neo-liberalism, hip hop, social media, disenchantment with a black president – the idea of a negated author has collided with the idea of a negative work, and produced a theory of descent (a “poetics of failure”). This Blog Salon aims to push that developing theoretical canon. What’s it mean to fall [in love] with your friends? How’s it feel to fall alone? Who has more practice in which kind of fall? And which is the most talked about?

The contributors to this Blog Salon on Collectivity and Collapse play with death as a kind of fall: the end of stamina, the aging of the body, the death of the human. There also runs through these pieces an interrogation into how the presence of the collective undoes the creator and vice versa. How is the multi-ethnic duet both an expansion and a loss of one’s self?  How is the shared impetus towards a militant queer front complicated by the author’s presence? And of course what would a Blog Salon on collapse be without a righteous challenge to Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure?

Perhaps there is no better time to be critically engaging with these issues. On the heels of eight years of collective gains made by brown folk, youth, queers, and the working class, we find ourselves in a position that might be familiar to Barthes. The U.S. came frighteningly close this November to swearing in a new commander-in-chief without any information about his economic plan or donor base, and with an abundance of evidence of his neo-Darwinian logic in regards to political minorities and the disenfranchised. The hopefulness of a decentralized revolution in Southwest Asia/Northwest Africa has quickly transmutated into the complex political infighting and devastating sectarian violence that continues to erode (and reconstitute) Syrian, Egyptian and Iranian life. And while environmentalist efforts have grown increasingly strategic since COP15, and despite a year of severe drought and epic storms, climate change continues to exist as US political rhetoric only with little action attached. We are in the midst of a frankenstorm of cultural, political, and collective failures – even while so many of us are leaping toward once-foreign alliances and new ways of working together. (An ideological two state solution, as Haft notes in her piece Finding Midline, is destined for failure.) This moment, then, may be our most perfect opportunity to review how we intend to cope post-collapse and, as Ibarra details bitingly in her piece Stuck With This, what we know of our ability to endure.

Now. Before you go exploring: two notes.

1. While the contributors to this Blog Salon inhabit an array of practices – from installation to dance to curatorial to a mix and more – it’s worth noting that all are people of color. We were interested in hearing from people who are most likely to live close to the realm of collapse, and with whom we are more likely to feel some affinity as we navigate the turbulence of collective stumbling. For those reasons, Ernesto and I looked to our friends and family of color to fill these pages.

2. A salon is a gathering of the minds, and that includes yours. Whatever you find on these pages that leaves you angry, enchanted, disturbed – respond.

Keep the dialogue going: we are all authors here.

Anna Martine Whitehead
Lead Instigator
THEOFFCENTER 

ANNA MARTINE WHITEHEAD – Since uncannily repeating her grandmother’s gesture of emerging from the Virginia woods, Martine has preoccupied herself by writing zines, playing in bands, curating performances, instigating street actions, and flailing about. She has presented at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco; LA Contemporary Exhibits (LACE) in LA; The Bronx Museum; galleri bob in Gothenburg, Sweden; and various backyards across North America. She has collaborated on projects led by Jefferson Pinder (Juke, 2007); Violeta Luna and Guillermo Gomez-Pena (Corpo/Ilicito, 2009); and Keith Hennessy (Turbulence, 2011, 2012), to name names. She now lives in Los Angeles, where she is experimenting with free fall.  To learn more visit Anna online at annamartine.com  

The THEOFFCENTER Blog Salon Series – The concept behind these virtual salons is simple.  We enlist the time and intention of 10 to 12 artists who, after receiving a prompt, are asked to produce a piece of writing. These writings then get published in rapid succession (2 a day for one week), during which time we engage with the larger community and encourage their participation in the conversation via written comments. By creating this virtual dialogue we hope to document a more grounded and richer critique of the subject at hand and our relationship to it.