If you take a city such as Salonika or Smyrna, you will find there five or six communities each of which has its own memories and which have almost nothing in common. Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common; and also that they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew,’ or the massacres that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century. There are not ten families in France that can supply proof of their Frankish origin, and any such proof would anyway be essentially flawed, as a consequence of countless unknown alliances, which are liable to disrupt any genealogical system.(1)
Ernest Renan, lecture given at the Sorbonne, 1882.
This is an idea inspired by a comment about Cairo’s City of the Dead as a place where the spiritual goal is to celebrate the absence of judgment, which is to be left for God(2) and in many other people’s case in God’s absence. The City of the Dead reveals more than a vernacularized classification of death or the cultural appreciation of idol worship - regardless of being urban or rural. It is also a place of mutual habitation between the living and the dead where people live, cleaning the family house: the Leichenhauser. That habitation is mirrored, anchored, by the collective memories of people and amnesia, trauma and other emotions. This text is nothing but an attempt to try and encourage an aspiration and joy towards an abandonment of judgementalism in social spaces without discussing participation or religion. The migrancy of people from the countryside to a necropolis might not be borne out of a desire to participate but socio-political pragmatism, or human despair- and motives that are also prone to migrate and change.
Imagine rejecting depiction and symbols- and to try and deal with the rejection and the demeaning or undermining the works of others in a way that is as quiet, positive and non-judgemental as one can be when one is saying “no”. Consider the extremes between fallibility of memory and the collective consciousness and the pointlessness in positioning superstition where everything today is more or less displaced but numerically posited and epistemologically archived (art as a soft cultural export; specifically representation). Instead consider the superstitiousness of people: how varied and entrenched are their psychic fears? What is the relevance of the collective memory if a participant, for example, is not a willing participant? Or in another place? Or is an amnesiac? Or is resistant to just about everything?
This is an idea that not just desperately panders to the idea of abandoning judgement and superstition but is infatuated with the idea. That idea is based on all of the clichéd punkish, anti-establishment, atheist, anarchic reasons- and to submit ourselves to class-based, gender-based, post-colonial scrutiny if need be. But importantly out of a genuine scientific desire to engage other frequencies like gamma waves, beta waves, x-rays, infra red, radio, ultraviolet, bandwidth and waveforms; or touch, listening and smelling. The irony is of culture, continually discussing how it is feeling without touching. And if the eyes are the window to the soul then: what of the house- or the soul?
“The builder arrived next morning with his men, and found a great rectangular trench, carefully dug in the ground. 'This is the foundation,' Krespel said. 'So set to work, and go on building the walls till I tell you to stop.'
'But what about the doors and windows?' asked the builder. 'Are there to be no partition walls?'
'Just you do as I tell you, my good man ' said Krespel as calmly as possible come quite right in its own good time.'
Nothing but the prospect of liberal payment induced the man to have anything to do with so preposterous a job—but never was there a piece of work carried through so merrily; for it was amid the ceaseless jokes and laughter of the workmen—who never left the ground, where abundance of victuals and drink was always at hand—that the four walls rose with incredible speed, till one day Krespel cried 'Stop!'
Mallets and chisels paused. The men came down from their scaffolds and formed a circle about Krespel, each grinning countenance seeming to say—'What's going to happen now?'
'Out of the way!' cried Krespel, who hastened to one end of the garden, and then paced slowly towards his rectangle of stone walls. On reaching the side of it which was nearest—the one, that is, towards which he had been marching—he shook his head dissatisfied, went to the other end of the garden, then paced up to the wall as before, shaking his head, dissatisfied, once more.
This process he repeated two or three times; but at last, going straight up to the wall till he touched it with the point of his nose, he cried out, loud: 'Come here, you fellows, come here! Knock me in the door! Knock me in a door here!' He gave the size it was to be, accurately in feet and inches; and what he told them to do they did. When the door was knocked through, he walked into the house, and smiled pleasantly at the builder's remark that the walls were just the proper height for a nice two-storied house. He walked meditatively up and down inside, the masons following him with their tools, and whenever he cried 'here a window six feet by four; a little one yonder three feet by two,' out flew the stones as directed.”(3)
ETA Hoffmann’s Councillor Krespel
The common perception of superstition being of an image being strengthened by its depiction, of confirming social beliefs via representation. Hebrew, Aboriginal and Socratic oral culture - and conceptual art and atheism - have peculiar ages and life cycles. For a long time they have challenged visuality - and the reified material - in preference to the notion, lightness, the idea, the complexity of fact. The Internet and New Aesthetic has entrenched us into the eye and it is difficult to work out what has become of the notion, or where was art going before the Internet. Things that flow from a different binary ethereal world force conceptual ideas to become algorithms and literal formulas that no normal human can calculate, something [epistemological] philosophers also do.
“Propose to look at artworks in a context that rejects superstition and the language that underpins the work, including symbolism and belief.” Consider superstition as the idea of things being weakened by being depicted. Where things are not necessarily about the medium - and not the individual - but of visual resistance. Could that be of use to a resistance collective without being ritualized or fetishizing our displacement? Is it the value of experience we are actually after? Or Motive vs Desire? This desire being the simple putting to one side of computational, epistemic metadata as a means of economy - and for addressing inevitable creative revenge. It is also for making quietness quieter for people not at war and for those who are, trying to find a realistic space for them to flee to.
People constantly dispute realized projects - even individual artist’s lives and their artworks – so why not the sum collective of artists and all of their works? Governments do this to art and psychologically it can be a particularly nasty thing to do - even as hypothetical or internal dialogue - and superstitious fear is something embedded, maybe cultivated, into Nationality and Religion(4). Religion is cursed by its historicity and society is cursed by it politic and both of their hegemonies –either inside or out - continually expose the superfluousness of morality and ethics. I’m interested in looking at things and considering all that has been represented as being systematically compromised because of the contents being depicted and spoken of. I know my Judgementalism spills into superstition, that superstition informs judgement and that judgement is embedded in Nationhood. I know the symbols of languages are safeguarded, memorized and repeated, changing each day, or what Anderson referred to as “emanations of reality”(5): emotional amorphousness... Such a juncture occurs when one is tired of reality and measuring things and simply wants to find the quickest, most effective method of leaving.
(1) Shlomo Sand and Ernest Renan, On the Nation and the Jewish People, Verso Books, P 47
(2) Di Marco, Anna Tozzi, The Reshaping of Cairo's City of the Dead: Rural Identity versus Urban Arena in the Cairene Cultural Narrative and Public Discourse. Anthropology of the Middle East, Volume 6, Number 2, Winter 2011, pp. 38-50
(3) http://www.has.vcu.edu/for/hoffmann/krespel_e.html
(4) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso Books, 1983. Anderson argues that Nationality is something that originated in 18th Century Europe, P37
