TERMINAL PROJECT REPORT2015

«A»By Farhad Bahram

Committee Chair: Professor Terri Warpinski Committee Members: Professor Dan Powell, Professor Brian Gillis

“ HER: Say « A ».HIM: « A ».HER: Whisper: « A ».HIM: « A ».HER: Say « A » as if to say you love me.HIM: « A ».HER: Say « A » as if to say you'll never forget me.HIM: « A »!HER: Say « A » as if to say : « stay! »HIM: « A ».HER: Ok... Do I want a coffee?HIM: « A »?HER: Yes, I'd love one.[He gets up and pours her a coffee.]HIM: « A »?HER: Just a small piece, thank you.HIM: « A »?HER: I don't know… Though I think I prefer to eat at home.HIM: « A ».HER: Now, look me straight in the eyes.HIM: « A ».HER: Say « A » in your mind.HIM: ...HER: Now, say « A » in your mind as if to say you love me…HIM: ...HER: Say « A » in your mind as if to say you'll never forget me.HIM: ....HER: And now I'm going to ask you something... Something very important... And you're going to answer in your mind. Are you ready?HIM: ...HER: « A »?HIM: ...HER: ...HIM: … “

– Matéi Visniec, The Story of the Panda Bears told by a Saxophonist who has a Girlfriend in Frankfurt

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 4

2. AFFIRMATIVE NEGATION …………………………………………………..………………….. 6

3. THE «A»…………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 7

4. BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………………….. 11

5. ACKNOWLEDGMENT ……………………………………………………………….……...…….. 11

6. APPENDIX A: WORK STATEMENT …………………………………………………….….. 12

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7. APPENDIX B: ARTIST STATEMENT………………………………………………….…….. 12

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1. INTRODUCTION

1.1. TERMINAL PROJECT ABSTRACT

Matei Vişniec is an ambivalent writer. In his plays and poems he usually talks about the necessity of human relationships, but ironically, through destroying its conventional means. His characters, mostly as men of the twentieth century, and despite their greatness of being the planet’s conqueror, are normally incapable of communicating with each other. They are always seeking out a new language to communicate through. However this new language usually associates itself with its own disruption. As he suggests, by destroying the language, existence alone would become the most effective and only communicational mean.

My thesis is a representation of my artistic experience of such affirmative destruction that depicts the permutation of my understanding of works of art as a self-destructive medium. In this project I am trying to seek the possibility of structuring an indecisive space in which the audience could spontaneously realize the inaction of subjectivity and disruption of intentions in communicating with others.

1.2. PROBLEM STATEMENT

In the last ten years, since I started my early creative practice as a photojournalist in Iran, I have been repeatedly amazed by one thing: the Communicative Act! If one resides within Middle Eastern culture for awhile, perhaps the first thing that catches one’s attention would be a persistent social mistrust among people. While recent cultural research by Middle Eastern scholars such as Edward Said or Hamid Dabashi analyzes the complicated contexture of this mistrust, I have always been more interested in the social consequences of it in everyday life; one such way is that in which communicative language, as a habitual disposition, becomes a transitional object that exclusively carries inter-subjective utterances such as idiom, gesture and indicative metaphors. As a photojournalist I started to realize that communicative acts in my modern society, are not merely simple linguistic actions for expressing intentions and certain causes, but in fact, due to those traditional mistrusts, they sometimes function as exact opposites. Apparently there are several instances wherein people communicate with each other in order to negate a mindset, or to conceal a personal fact that is in danger of being exposed or conveyed. Therefore, those who used to structure their creative act based on communicational elements, such

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as photojournalists, may realize that the indicative message of a communicative act is not necessarily embedded within a set of utterances and wordings as such, but it could, paradoxically, be found in the negation of these superficial manifestations. In fact, this led me to one of my very first –and still current– questions as an artist: How does one communicate beyond statement? That is to ask, is it possible to deliberately initiate an interpersonal communication that is based on connotative association rather than a denotative medium – such as language? And if so, how could we re-structure that medium?

1.3. EARLY WORKS

For a photojournalist, communication is mainly a tool for establishing an informative theme; it is a structured interaction that relies on the intentionality of the author and contextuality of language. In art practice, however, one would seek out unplanned interactions, wherein the communicative act may appear as the main theme. As a former photojournalist, in my early artistic experience I was curiously looking for those subjects that are not necessarily based on a pre-defined informative theme but rather a spontaneous and communicative interaction, and in fact, this was the beginning of my passion for a practice that could socially engage the public. The outcome of this new experience was a series of interactive and collaborative works including a project called “Date with the Subject”. In this work (Img. 1) I reached out to random people through a Facebook message, sent from an anonymous profile, asking them to meet me as a stranger at a location of their choice in Tehran. The immediacy and spontaneity of this meeting with a stranger provided an unplanned communication accompanied by several contrasting qualities and gestures such as trust, fear, privacy, curiosity and courage. Prior to the meeting, I asked each participant to choose an object, as a ready-made, and bring it to the meeting. The object was an incarnation of the mixed-up feelings that they had about meeting an anonymous inviter.

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After moving to the United States, affected by a new cultural climate, the concept of communication in my works transmuted itself into something more personal, which was closer to a self-exploration, or in another words, exploration of the alienated self in communicating with others. Considering the exigency of new modes of relations and communications, which in fact had been emboldened in response to my new experience of delocalization, my works started to address the increasing cultivation of identity as a malleable self, and my body as a cultural object. In my performance, Re-identification (Img. 2), I investigated these new communicational elements, which were mostly based on the physical appearance of my body and its transforming identity within a new cultural context. By confining my body inside a pedestal I proposed my exposed head as a medium. The audience had the opportunity to perform an autopsy on this medium by cutting my hair and beard, helping me in this struggle to capture the altering identity which was mixed up with loss and fear, vulnerability of the body, jouissance of the engagement, and the intimacy that is present in non-verbal communication, even at a superficial level.

2. AFFIRMATIVE NEGATION

“All creations, all novelties, are in some sense the affirmative part of a negation.”

– Alain Badiou, The contemporary figure of the soldier in politics and poetry, UCLA, 2007

Img. 1: Date with the Subject

Img. 2: Re-identification

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Over the course of the last few years I further developed my concepts regarding the medium of body as a cultural object in the communicative act. In a conventional context, the body would be introduced as a predicative gesture that is fixed in time and space – for it solidifies a cultural identity into a single untouchable lexeme that is already digested by the addressee prior to the communicational process. Similar to a book that supposedly reveals an intended message – a predefined text that only vouches for its own context. Thinking about this definitive prescription, I centered the main trajectory of my work on examining the possibilities for transforming this determined correlation between [the medium of] body and [the message of] identity into an ever-moving chain of relations with no fixed entities to hold onto. In fact, this would be an attempt to understand the communicative act as a subjective mechanism that is shaped by a series of immediate struggles, such as desire, rejection, or satisfaction, which could also present the inability of the body to fully express one’s identity. Therefore, during this communicative act, the difference between what a body intends to address as its identity and what is being identified by the addressee, becomes an essential theme. To me, this arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed, is a scale for appraising the content of any medium – such as text, image, or the body, as an unplanned realization that is not fixed or predetermined by its nature. However, this realization is a self-destructive process that urges me to negate the subjectivity of my own self, a subjectivity that is impregnated by intentionality, and rooted in my culture.

I should take this opportunity to also elaborate my understanding of negation here as a transformative process rather than a complete removal or eradication. The subject of negation is a deformed body that defers the process of identification rather than exterminating it. This deferral, in fact, provides an embryonic stage for the permutation of a new subjectivity – something sustainable but at the same time incapable of recognizing the pre-determined identity. In his lecture about Pier Paolo Pasolini at UCLA, Alain Badiou mapped out a very similar concept after he defined two different aspects of political or artistic displacement: destruction, and subtraction. To him destruction is the negative part of displacement that favors the complete disintegration of the old structure; while subtraction, as the affirmative form of displacement, simply avoids the old structure without demolishing it. But my question is this: How is it possible to practically negate a medium, such as image, text, or body, from the point of view of subtraction, as opposed to destruction?

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3. THE «A»

My installation, «A», appears as an unsettling and anomic 8’x4’x10’ (LWH) space within the gallery that is constructed of two distinct bodies of work. “The Representation” consists of an 8’x4’ false-wall that is perpendicularly attached to 10’ of the gallery wall, and fully covered with a large 8’ x 14’ digital print which appears as a sort of wallpaper. This piece also includes a book with plain black cover placed on barely visible transparent shelf attached to the false wall. The title of the book, “The Severed Head”, is inlaid on the book’s spine. The printed contents of the book has been concealed with thin red masking tape, leaving only the word “head” exposed through out the whole book. In other words, the original content of the book is not accessible to the reader and the only textual elements that one could read inside this book would be 153 words, all of which are “head”.

The other piece, “The Interpretation”, includes 152 bricks that accompany a book titled “Against Interpretation”. The book is placed on a wooden shelf attached to the back of the false wall along with two plain bricks – it has almost the same color as the bricks. All of the inside pages of the book have been glued together one-by-one, so the book could not be opened and therefore there is no access to the content of it. The rest of the bricks have been positioned in a grid which creates a 4’x10’ flooring surface within the installation space.

Img. 3: «A»

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There is delicate and consistent handwritten text covering the outer surface of each brick, it is the Farsi translation of the book “Against Interpretation”. Most of the bricks are broken into pieces and while still in position, there are random cracks all over the grid of bricks. Entering into the space and walking on the bricks dislocates the lumps and pieces of the bricks and scatter them around, making the content inaccessible to even Farsi readers. A somewhat similar destructive process has been applied to the surface of the wall-mounted print from the previous body of work. There are linear, randomly-shaped white marks on the print, which are in fact the mid-layer of the paper that have been exposed after a removal process as it is apparent that red tape once covered the surface. There is also an orbicular area on the print that contains an image of a life-size naked body, lying prostrate and curled up like a fetus in womb. Except, this orbicular area, with the body contained it within, was not covered by the tape.

The book “The Severed Head”, written by Julia Kristeva, investigates the idea of human body as an integrated medium, which comprises the consciousness and the identity of the self. Considering this idea, any physical or psychological deprivation that disrupts the integrity of the body could favorably extricate the contained self by transforming it into something discrete, sustainable and disentangled from the integrity of the body. The body as whole always suggests a pre-defined identity, or a self that coexists with the body. However, by dissecting that wholeness the identity will be fragmented and transformed merely into the existence of each body part, and nothing more than that. During this affirmative process the definitive value of any pre-defined identity will be subtracted into a fragmented body; an exquisite corpse that is being assembled out of the dissected body of a prior medium. Therefore this negated medium is always in-between; it becomes an index that does not signify a new medium since it is constantly designating a dissected referent. “Erased de Kooning Drawing” by Robert Rauschenberg could be a good example of this in-between-ness.

Img. 4: «A» (image credit: Sabina Poole)

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While it cannot liberate itself from the mediumship of de Koonig’s drawing, as an absolute medium, it remains authentic by representing the gesture of negation.

In a similar fashion, my installation appears as an obscure lexicon, consisting of several such indexes referring to destruction and subtraction. Each piece in this installation negates the presentation of itself as a pre-defined medium. There are texts that are impotent in conveying their intended message; diminished books that are incapable of structuring a common narrative; destructed prints that are depleted from the iconic value of an image; and bodies that are unable to introduce the real identity of individuals. Inside this destructive space lies an important and affirmative sentiment, which is the main objective in this work: the possibility of relocating the meaning from both within the text, and from the intentionality of the author to the contingencies of the reception and spontaneity of interaction.

What has become the most valuable part of this project is the physical engagement of the audience with the installation. Rather than presenting two modular pieces, I was able to construct an interactive space by combining two bodies of work and allowing the viewer to physically enter into this destructive context. In fact, by being positioned in the piece, the body of the audience becomes another negated medium; a medium that is not able to communicate through her subjectivity, as she does not have access to the denotative content of the other subjects within this space. The only way to communicate is through connotative associations – through observing her own existence as a negated self, extricated from any other fixed entities to hold onto.

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4. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor W., Rolf Tiedemann, and Rodney Livingstone. Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. Print.

Dor, Joel, Judith Feher. Gurewich, and Susan Fairfield. Introduction to the Reading of Lacan: The Unconscious Structured like a Language. New York: Other, 1998. Print.

Eliot, T. S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Perspecta 19 (1982): 36. Web.

Kristeva, Julia. The Severed Head: Capital Visions. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. Print.

McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel. The Medium Is the Massage. New York: Bantam, 1967. Print.

Pile, Steve. The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space, and Subjectivity. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.

Said, Edward W. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 1999. Print.

Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation: And Other Essays. New York: Dell Pub., 1966. Print.

5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This work would not have been possible without my family, friends and teachers whose roles as such I have found to be increasingly difficult to distinguish between. This work bears your name as well:

My committee:Terri Warpinski (Chair)Dan PowellBrian Gillis

My dream woman, confidante, supporter and my wife:

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Pooyesh

6. WORK STATEMENT

Affirmative destruction; or autopsy of the self; an unconventional context, where "Malone Dies" within; and "The Severed Head", as body without identity; a cultural object, of vulnerability, and impregnated subjectivity; and a fragmented body, for self-destructive realization; as if John Cage plays Mao Zedong; as destruction is, for Pier Paolo Pasolini; complete disintegration; negation; or spasmodic ignorance, as opposed to Mediumship; a synthesized existence; and metamorphosis; distributary production, of medium un-specificity; from SNAFU to FUBAR; from Narcissus to Orpheus; as “A Musical Portrait of Chuck Close”; or “Grey by Krzysztof Kieslowski (2020)”; delocalization; of Domus within Megalopolis; The Radicant; rhizomatic displacement, of “A Saxophonist who has a Girlfriend in Frankfurt”; or Farhad Bahram of Iran; of nomadism; concurrent assumptions, of saying « A »; a non-verbal schizophrenia, like photography; something dimensionally agnostic; a transformational object; something participatory and process-based; as verb; enunciation, of unintended message; Ma ( 間 ); or in-betweenness; and a lateral reception, which is “Against Interpretation”.

7. ARTIST STATEMENT

My current artistic inquiry mostly revolves around communicative modes of reception and space as an alternative context wherein I could apply those communicative modes. To me, communication is cultural object, and by cultural object I mean a medium that is not self-sufficient or merely related to the archeology of its existence but rather to the contingency of its reception within the space. In my photography practice, image appears as a lexicon, consists of several indexes referring to those cultural objects. And in fact, that is how photography negates the presentation of itself as a medium. In my thesis installation, there are books that are impotent of conveying their intended message; destructed photos that are depleted from the iconic value of an image; and bodies that are unable to introduce the real identity of individuals. Within this destructive spaces lies an important and affirmative sentiment, which is the main objective in my works: the possibility of relocating the meaning from within the art object to the contingencies of the reception process.

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