I cannot express how gratified I am by this. Apparently there’s a New York art show that’s been partially inspired by my work. This, for me, is the highest possible complement. Rather than simply providing commentary on a work, I feel like my work has been most valuable when it’s put to use and creates projects that I would have never thought of. From the website:
Resonance at the Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building joins artwork and contributions by Agency, Diedrich Diederichsen, Faivovich & Goldberg, Anselm Franke, Christoph Keller, and weareQQ. This exhibition and discursive program, organized by curatorial office Rivet, engages with object-oriented thinking and probes a range of temporalities through a variety of contributions that give different formats of experience.
Taking its key term from philosopher Levi Bryant, Resonance ponders the specificities of change within systems and entities. The project suggests viewers and participants to pause and consider contemporary questions about interaction and autonomy, rights, and the relation between objects and environments. In its entirety, Resonance shows how understandings of community, ideology, law, and even the division between nature and culture become perturbed once the mark of distinction between subjects and objects is suspended.
For the exhibition, Agency brings in Thing 000789 (Prince Charming) to focus on the legal category of “fixation” that aims to prevent resonance. Faivovich & Goldberg‘s work manifests how international art systems, local politics, indigenous rights, and questions about scientific procedures all of a sudden come to resonate with each other. This contribution continues and comments upon the artists’ recent dOCUMENTA (13) project. weareQQ charts a reflexive and dynamic relation between film, environment, and event to think about community in terms of affect and ephemerality.
The exhibition is accompanied by an active program: Agency hosts an assembly with local concerned people on Sunday, October 28; Diedrich Diederichsen will present a talk on Thursday, November 1; and Christoph Keller holds a lecture-performance on Tuesday, December 4. On Saturday, October 27, McNally Jackson Books hosts the launch of Faivovich & Goldberg’s latest volume from The Campo del Cielo Meteorites series published by dOCUMENTA (13). For the closing of the exhibition, Anselm Franke will contribute a written response to Resonance, which will be published on Rivet’s website.
Simultaneous to Resonance, Rivet organizes Resonance and Repetition at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, which investigates the particularity of repetition and its relevance in thinking about attractions and perturbations between systems. A talk resonating with the topics of both exhibitions will take place at the New School for Social Research.
Resonance is made possible thanks to the generous support of Friends of Goethe New York and Spain Culture New York—Consulate General of Spain.
October 23, 2012 at 1:34 am
This is really cool! Congrats, Levi.
October 23, 2012 at 5:13 pm
Yes, Levi, maybe…
But, and this is particularly risky given the prior post, I wouldn’t be so reflexively credulous. Your typo is telling. Maybe this show will be a complement to your work. But Levi, your work is way too soon for “perfection,” especially by others who may be there to nip its reception in the bud. Both Diedrichsen and Franke are intellectual popularizers, taste makers. Maybe their attention advances your name but with some core misunderstandings that will be hard-to-impossible to later overcome? What’s their rush to single you out, could it be because they want to silence you? Kill you with kindness? You have to at least consider these possibilities. I’m sorry, but that’s a burden you carry for being the originator of such stellar work.
Anselme Franke—If you check out his vimeo of his 20 minutes or so at the New School panel on Forensic Aesthetics, are you really buying this guy? Do you really think that that Escher he describes as “enigmatic” is particularly enigmatic? I suppose it could be if you subtract a major element of it, as he does, and ignore the newspaper, as he does–the underlying text. What about his declaration that a bone can never be purely object or subject, and what did he claim about animism there? That was getting weird. Or, what about his conclusion, that “laughter is itself is a physical corrective reaction to the disturbance of ontologically fixed boundaries” that “we laugh in order to shake the order back into place.”? That’s not what happens to me when I laugh. I can verify that one in my own body and spirit.
Diederich Diederichsen—Please, just listen around the 13th minute mark of Part I of his vimeo on Martin Kippenberger. You’ll hear him say/warn (in the context of his discussion of “sequentiality”) that there were other “people who were there to fuck things up” and “that he [Kipenberger] could correct them” and there was “no primary event, the main event was gone.” He talks about the “logic of endlessness, but also delegation, giving things to someone else” “every time someone continues for you, they make problems to be repaired.”
I really, really, really think the time is nigh to do some videos of you yourself speaking about your own work (which is not popularized and widely known or understood and extremely vulnerable to misinterpretation in the wider arena) starting immediately with the subject/object relation. I would also ask that the Goethe Haus museum gift shop have some signed copies of The Democracy of Objects on hand, and ditto for McNally Jackson (I had my very first NYC reading of Cooperative VIllage there; it’s a wonderful venue for The Democracy of Objects!). Your book should definitely be there, and why not in the window on Prince Street?
You can’t be everywhere promoting and defending your work. But you can make sure that it’s there to speak for itself!
October 24, 2012 at 2:22 am
Frances Madeson makes some good and sensible points, especially about getting videos of yourself out there and about getting some books into the Goethe Haus and Mcnally Jackson, but as an art historian and a fan of your work, I’d say you’re in good company. Diedrich Diederichsen is one of my favourite critics and I’m gratified to see him taking an interest in your philosophy.
October 24, 2012 at 11:51 am
[...] A show is up in New York that takes key inspiration from Levi Bryant. Levi explains HERE. [...]