Brumaria Works#4
The Borromean Knot (Jacques Lacan, Seminar R.S.I.). Brumaria Works#4, 2010 (23 x 32 cm., impresión digital sobre papel de acuarela / digital print on paper)
Edition: 50, signed and numbered (price request)
Brumaria Works#3
Brumaria Works#3 es un proyecto expositivo y editorial desarrollado para la Sala 1 del MUSAC (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, España, 29/01/11-05/06/11). El trabajo gira alrededor de la idea de vacio en el pensamiento de Jacques Lacan. Con motivo de la exposición Brumaria editó dos volúmenes del seminario RSI de Lacan (blanco y negro, parcialmente ilegibles) y coordinó un seminario sobre arte y psicoanálisis.
Proyecto
El arte, el vacio y la, ni siquiera, nada
Bibliografía lacaniana
Brumaria Works#2
Brumaria Works#2 was presented in the seminar Que faire? Art, film, politique (december 2010) at Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), preceded of this conference: Spanish / French.
Brumaria Works#2 from Brumaria on Vimeo.
Brumaria Works#1
Only violence can change this killer world
Bertolt Brecht
Expanded Violences focuses its attention on a triangulation between violence as representation strategically administered by power, the use the mass media make of it and the function of art form a critical vertex of this multiple dialectic. If it seems obvious that there exists interdependence between political and economic power and the strategic operations used in mass media, the role of art is not so clear in this context.
Between the Benjaminian concept of “reproducibility” and the structure of distribution and far-reaching influence of images and information we can identify a temporal mutation that affects the reception and legitimization of the processes involved in the making of collective decisions, that is, the execution of power through the media. The administration of power, as a means of controlling a dissuasive atmosphere as well as the state of opinion, is a strictly contemporary phenomenon whose historical development can be found in the natural diversion of distributive strategies through a sequence that includes the propagandistic Soviet apparatus and its appropriation by the fascists, as well as its advanced phase in the media-structure of capital. This situation, which had been discovered by the beginning of the previous century by productivist Russian theoreticians in connection with the concept of factography and by Benjamin himself, today constitutes the subjective experience of nature as well as its sociological organization in concepts such as “mass” or “multitude.” If Boris Groys has spoken of the “sub-media” suspicion, it is doubtless in the context of a phenomenology of the media that it determines political and cultural action. It is safe to say that the role of art has proved its worth in this situation if we think that all mass media are constructed over an aesthetic formula that contains, as is obvious, an ideological agenda. The problems traditionally analyzed by Marxist theoreticians on the use of art in mass culture remains here radically integrated with the unsettled task of politically interpreting flows of information. The function of art would not be to spread documentary information but rather to try and reconfigure means of critical reception, which may provide the conscious viewer with an alternative beyond that of a silent receiver of solemn representations. In any case, art is, according to Badiou “infinitely more critical than what the best critic can ever hope to be.” If the real opposes itself to reality, only the real—only impossible, like thought—is the same as art. In this sense art is against what is there.
Throughout the last two decades, the exhibition—that great univocal field of aesthetic experience—has lost its hegemonic role as the only place of representation for sharing reflexive space with other formats when it comes to shaping artistic discourse. In some way, artists try to take on the role of agitators and publicists of the new that the old vanguardists bequeathed to them. A result of this is a kind of wandering through the murky waters of art, searching for the construction of theoretical rudiments capable of illuminating deeply eroded formal territories—waters in which Brumaria tries to swim. One of our concerns has been and is to investigate the philosophical, social, economic, aesthetic, and political rudiments of violence when it comes to shaping and confirming the exertion of group power—each day more diffused and concentrated—over common interests. Previous projects such as Dying Typo/topologies, Art and Terrorism, Iconoclasm/Iconolatry have their continuity in the present Expanded Violences.
We can say that our present times are characterized as pertaining to what Guy Debord called “the society of spectacle,” as it is hard to deny the enormous prominence that experiencing the media has on the construction of our reality and our relationship with that reality. The visionary situationist discourses today resurrected, we find ourselves with Paul Virilio when he affirms that “given the ruptured state of a society of consumption destined to soon disappear, it was urgent to once again find balance in the duo of information/advertising that had become anachronistic: thanks to the impact of “live” programming, international terrorism supplies information with a great quantity of shocking images capable of influencing the multitudes with little costs.”
For this reason, Expanded Violences seeks to juxtapose the results of an exchange of ideas around the space of the media, currently occupied by an infinite variety of images and information, whose unique identity is constructed through repressive filters of the liberal system/world. Such images and information—typologically varied and of scarce temporal duration—shape a great visual archive, susceptible to being articulated as a totality of strata on the basis of the antithetical beginnings of order and chaos. Said principles represent in themselves the profound and systematic contradictions of postindustrial capitalism from which power is constructed and exerted: the state of war and permanent exception to which Giorgio Agamben, among others, has dedicated his investigations.
Our current time is not that of the State as a juridical and political construction that monopolizes the exertion of violence: violence is thought, projected, and exerted from the ethereal and monopolistic space of supranational capital. The permanent war-state is imposed, imposing its very reality. In it all violence is conservative, auto-legitimizing, foundational, performative, reiterated, and at once oriented towards its own conservation that turns into foundation and becomes divine. Here there is no distinguishing between divine violence that destroys the law and mythical violence that founds or constructs law. Conservative violence no longer stems from law (nor does it, by any stretch of the imagination, threaten it), but rather such founding violence is projected and exerted from supranational capital founding and monopolizing its divine law.
The problem exists that if, as Alain Badiou repeatedly warns us, by the word “terrorism” we name everything that cannot be named as such, the most generic and extensive word “violence” drags along with it a great ideological burden that makes it semantically useless when it comes to labeling actions and situations of aggression. In the words of Gustavo Bueno: “The aggressors of ETA who make car bombs or fire a shot in a citizen’s neck, they are called ‘violent,’ sometimes this is aimed at softening the word ‘murderers.’”
There exist three fundamental types of violence, Slavoj Zizek tells us. On one hand there is that which he calls “subjective violence” that is the directly visible, exerted by a clearly identifiable agent; on the other hand there are two types of “objective violence”: “symbolic” violence, manifested in language and its forms, and “systematic” violence, constituted by the “catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.” When we perceive subjective violence, we do so as a disruption of normalcy. Systematic violence is, from this point of view, imperceptible, since it ends up being inherent to that “normal state of things.” Images from the media are obviously clear examples of moments involving subjective violence, but we cannot forget that the experience of reality that such media transmit to us is loaded with ideology and with that invisible systematic violence. It is this last type of violence on which Expanded Violences reflects, and before which aesthetic experience serves as an analytical counterpoint.
On these extreme violences and wars/states of permanent exception (violence of class, gender, politics, capital, media, hunger, and disorganization of territory…), on their saturation in the era of digitalization, this is what Expanded Violences investigates.
*Brumaria is, in this occasion, formed by: Alejandro Arozamena, Darío Corbeira, Christophe Marsat, Irene Montero, Víctor del Río, and Daniel Patrick Rodríguez
Brumaria Works 1. Expanded Violences was the project by Brumaria for Manifesta 8 (Old Jail of St. Anton, Cartagena, Murcia, 09/10/10 to 09/01/11), invited by Chamber of Public Secrets (Khaled Ramadan and Alfredo Cramenotti) to participate in the official program.
