“Basically, a Marxist is recognized by his assertion that a society contradicts itself, that it is defined by its contradictions. We say rather that in a society everything flees, and that a society is defined by its lines of flight, which affect masses of every kind (once again, “mass” is a molecular notion” (On the Line, pag. 91, 1983)
The problem of the IN&OUT position.
The Art Research field is not a well established field and gives reason to conflicts. My zig-zag subjective-objective style does not fit very much with the scientific or pseudo-scientific academic style that commands to take a cold position that is detached by its “object” of study. For me, as an artist, I feel it is important to be immanent to the heat of the artistic event that I lived and I am describing as an art researcher - and also I am living everyday as a way of life. I cannot separate myself by this intimate continuity of presence and sensations. Even when I write over one of my interventions after years I am still part of the same immanence of the art event. Or at least I am in an IN&OUT moving position and for this reason also the way I am writing is in a multi-genres line of variation (essay, narrative, biography, manifesto, epic…). I cross different areas of intensity and perspectives. Even the genre follows the crossover oscillation of my position and the subjective-objective relation. In some part of the text my position is fully IN and I write directly with my flesh and bones. I think this subjective pathos should be a plus for the reviewer. It should be an occasion to enter in empathy with the position of the “speaker” and its own “voice”; especially if the speaker is a marginalised artist or art researcher. The “voice” is also an instrument of justice. A subjective approach should give much more power to my words, more color, more fleshy reality but this attitude is rarely accepted by academics. It would be necessary to write a book on Philosophy of Knowledge to explain my position. In part my dissertation is also a book of Philosophy of Knowledge because it is necessary when you deal with art research. Furthermore, after my dissertation I tried to deepen this point of the Knowledge in art research and to write a dedicated book but I felt a clear signal of corporatist defence and I quitted my attempt to publish it. After months I understoof I was just wasting my time and nobody was interested in it. It is also incredible the difference between what has been taught to me for 5 years in Aalto University by professor Juha Varto and the positivism and objectivism of the reviewer I ofen encounter in art research. This brought me to a conflict with art research and to be marginalised by the higher ranks. If there is a limit to the phenomenological subjectivism in art research is not the positivist objectivism given by the imitation of exact sciences but the missing of a stable ground of a centred subjectivity as it has been shown by “radical phenomenology”: the ideas of Merleau-Ponty “chiasmus” (Ponty, 2004) or Deleuze’s“becomings” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). But there is a complicit consensus to exclude difference in itself by art research because it complicates the way of writing that must be clear, well ordered, authorised, etc. For these and other reasons I feel very frustrated with publishing in art research and I am searching for new media to make my research known. Furthermore my research and art praxis is related to show the political obscene of how a system works. It is a desouvrement of a sytem of power. This attitude encounters many resistences and obstacles, for not say censorship, in a corporatist Protestant Country in the name of community consensus and responsibility. For this reason I decided to create a sort of clandestine journal.
Clandestine tactics: the Anartist as “graphic novel” character.
The next step for an alternative publication is to transform the images of my interventions, films and photos, into a “graphic novel” style. This opens up the possibility of transforming my interventions into “graphic novel” stories to be distributed in a parasitic and clandestine way in front of the openings of galleries and museums and also in front of universities and academies (they do not let me set foot inside.) Another possibility that intrigues me is distributing the stories in the subway in honour of an underground press attitude. Furthermore, in this way, I will re-double my “graphic novel” style through a public performance of distribution. In fact, the Anartist, who is the character I invented - and who wears a black balaclava - is a sort of demonic avatar who attracts me into the event of radical urban interventions. The Anartist creates critical play-grounds that disturb the organization of capitalist space-time implemented in the reproduction of habits, perceptions, gestures, actions, feelings, subjectivities etc. The Anartist engenders an untimely and unspacely event which from a starting critique opens the urban situation to an “infinite contestation”. The Anartist, who is also an artistic remodulation of a Black Bloc aesthetic and subjectivity, is already a performative “graphic novel character". This does not mean that a "character" does not have authentic political potential. It is not a parody but an intensification of a political mask; it is a bifurcation that regenerates the subversive force of the original “simulacrum” (there are no original). Furthermore, “fiction", as both Deleuze and Rancière would agree, is charged with subversive potential (Rancière, 2011). First of all it allows a "de-actualization" of the subjectivity that is free from social conditioning and can reinvent itself. In other words fiction shatters the perceptible orders. The inclusion of fiction in my interventions creates an indefinite ambiguity between art, literature, theater, politics, graphic novel, which, as Sylvain Lazarus would put it, gives life to a “purely subjective” and “intimate” politics that has nothing to do with an “exterior object” (Lazarus, 2015). My quasi-fictional practice creates a “distance from the State’s politics” and it has nothing as its “object”…In other words my praxis is an oscillatory and indefinitely multi-variation politics on an edge of escape that is not subjugated to the constant of the signifier of the State; Deleuze would echo Lazarus in this way. Furthermore, such a strategy increases the “dissensus” and “displacement” of the pre-defined “partition of the sensorium” as Rancière would add (Rancière, 2002). However, if we look beyond theory of politics and theory of art, which I have talked about at length in my dissertation and some other articles, it is desire and contingency that move any practice. As everybody knows theory and action, art and politics, and writing and experience cannot clearly overlap and this is also good news; otherwise nothing new that exceeds theory or writing could be created. There is something in action that escapes signification, it is an excessive “being there” in the midst of an Event. Everything cannot be explained…Knowledge of doing and making is tacit (Johannessen, 1990). It subtracts itself to the power of language and the reproduction of epistemic “Power-Knowledge” (Foucault, 1980).
Flee and find a new medium: a Deleuzian media theory.
I am not a recognised mainstream artist who is granted by money, notoriety and institutions .For my condition of “minority”, my interventions must always rise from the limiting power-relations in which I am always confined, stratified, territorialized. I need to handle the potential of my situated practice as an unnamable marginalised subject (this is not victimhood but practical realism). I cannot dispose of the tools as I wish; as if I were an institutionalised artist or art researcher who have stored much capital (relational, economic, cultural) at hand - as also Pierre Bourdieu would put it. I am kept at a distance by curators, colleagues and authorities. However these power-relation constrictions, as much as the scarce availability of media space for expression and visibility, produce an active field for “lines of flight”. In the constraints of the context I can see the opening of a space of becoming. “ Flee and find your weapon” as Gilles Deleuze puts it. We could say that all history of art is to find new media (or new weapons) of expression to flee the code of the old media that become soon stratifying apparata of power-relations once they are institutionalised. A new medium invented out of the immediate needs is an uncoded “war machine”, a “smooth space”, a “tunnel” to escape. A new medium is a new fold of contemporary art that allows a new unfolding of expression, language, style. Some years ago I wrote a book that I published by myself, entitled “The becoming of Contemporary Art as a war machine”. In this self-published book, that I distributed to a few ex-professors of Aalto University and Art Academy, I described the history of Contemporary art as a resonating multiplicity of flights and captures. Each new line of flight escapes from the over-coding of an old medium and constitutes a new uncoded medium of expression that deterritorializes the old one. Then a deterritorialization is always a re-territorialization and re-coding of old media in an active rhizome of media; as also McLuhan would put it in different words (McLuhan, 1969). The media plane of becoming is in continuous metamorphosis with the proliferation of new media, new praxis, new styles and unpredictable re-codings that charge the field of possibilities. This relation between medium and expression is necessary because it is not possible to have an appearance without medium. The medium channels the super-intense field of metamorphosis that can be felt by an artist at the level of an immanent, obscure noumena before it is expressed into a medium. Intensities emerge as phenomena through a medium and its code of expression. When a medium is too stratified, striated or saturated by power-relations and power-codes the intensities are obstructed and too slow for emerging as new. In this condition of “stratification” the super-intense field must find a new medium through a new art praxis to emerge as a force of metamorphosis. The medium is part of a complex plane of metamorphosis always changing. The artist, who is the “intense other” and also a “messenger of the metamorphosis”, feels this pressure for a new medium of expression. Whatever comes out as “new” is under the spell of an immediate urge for a “new weapon”. The artist feels this necessity and this explains the anarchic proliferation of new media, new styles and new languages that transgress but also echoes the old media, styles and languages. It is a crossover that bifurcates and returns on itself with new unpredictable potentialities. The media rhizome re-doubles the super-intense rhizome. Media “differentiate” and differen(c)iate” dividing in coded “apparata of capture” and “war machines” forming a new code in their disruptive appearing. This series of flights and captures is repeated in the dynamic of a medium. Each new medium allows a slowing down of the intensities from the obscure super-intense field but, simultaneously, also the acceleration of new emerging expressions.
Everything flees: alliances, obstacles and potentialities for alternative publishing.
In the contingent and immanent becoming of my praxis I happened to meet the talented visual artist Arja Reiman, who managed to make my desire real through a “graphic novel” elaboration of my “public actions”. From our joining of forces has borne the idea to make a light and cheap clandestine newspaper by printing an A2 and folding it into 4 pages. Then I will make A2 or A3 photocopies to increase the number. The newspaper, which will contain graphic novel images and also a short art research essay related to the experience of an intervention, will be distributed by the Anartist in the public spaces. In this way, even the distribution of the newspaper with the graphic story will be an intervention-action that will duplicate the intervention narrated in the newspaper. I hope this hypermedia strategy will make my art and ideas better known to a large audience that does not yet know them. The graphic novel newspaper being an A2 can become a poster…or whoever can use two newspapers for framing a single poster with all the story. This variability of the use, that is ingrained in the idea of an origami-medium, is related to enfolding and unfolding possibilities. To carry out this project I need a grant (this is the true problem) because every project has a cost. Only to make 100 photocopies I need about 700 euros. In any case I will try to make a very limited number zero at my expenses and include an account number for a mobile digital payment at the end of the graphic novel intervention. It is a small-investment experiment to generate fundraising to finance the newspaper without grants. As Becket says "fails better". The grant system is a matrix of subjugation so much as the institutional market of galleries and museums. It is not neutral at all and it is a tool of the process of cultural governance of Davos' corporations. For art to regain the lost autonomy we should find an alternative also to the medium of financing, not only to the medium of publishing. In order to get a grant you must be in the Davos guidelines and its imperative “order-words” that limit the dominion of expression to “social skills”. For example you must be “inclusive” but if you are "inclusive" the other does not exist anymore. The “other” is other because it cannot be included. It cannot be easy to relate with the other, it must be a non-relational relation (a parallax).
Hyperrealistic dystopia and graphic novel.
Back to my publishing tactic. I believe the graphic novel dimension adds a new polysemic element in my attempt to erase the separation between life and art into an oscillatory multiplicity in becoming. Apparently this move looks like an escape from real life towards the artifice of art but actually it intensifies the dystopia of my “critical playgrounds”; it adds intensity and chiaroscuro. For me, showing a dystopia is the only weapon against a realized capitalist utopia. Furthermore, this derealization in the graphic novel allows me to actually show a virtuality of action and thinking that is separated from commodified life which, having become bio-political, can no longer be considered life but "bare life" in a "concentration camp”, as Agamben would put it. Furthermore, Capitalist commodification and their apparatuses, that are everywhere, produces zombie spaces and zombie subjectivities of which the myriads of movies and series about zombies could be a symptom. And this capitalist situation of full commodification already brings with it an immanent “graphic novel” atmosphere. Today “graphic novel” is a form of hyperrealism because we live in a reality where the imaginary has collapsed into an Apocalyptic real, the ephemeral into the tragic of the End of the World, the utopian in the dystopian. These themes have been intensely explored by Baudrillard (Baudrillard, 1981), Eco (Eco, 1990), Jameson (Jameson, 1991) , Fisher (Fisher, 2009) and many other thinkers before the new millennium but they still affect our times with even more radical intensity.
Black Magic rites of possession.
For what concerns my example of "graphic novel clandestine press” I will show images elaborated by my last critical playground the “Court, of Human Rights.” Here the Court is a “tennis court” where two policemen play sadistically with a weak subject (a puppet with a tennis-ball head)…The puppet can represent a stranger, a soul, an exiled, an unnamable stranger…but also a voodoo puppet …) The text of the clandestine newspaper will be short, in a way academic, but with the lyric style of the art manifesto. Otherwise it loses the feature of artworks and does not fit with the “graphic novel” style. One must find a mediating language that is proper to the scope of a new medium and its use. The intervention “The Court, of Human Rights” is conceived, produced, installed and performed by the artists Gian Luigi Biagini and John Dunn but photographed and elaborated by the artist Arja Reiman. The “graphic novel clandestine press” is an idea by Gian Luigi Biagini but the Anartist assemblage, that is a singular but pluralist assemblage, is to start a becoming and enfolding encounters as potentialities. The subject of the doing becomes a desiring super-jective Event that acquires its animistic power into an “objectile” (Deleuze, 1992) in becoming. Here is a wave of black magic that works in the process; we are only witches and shamans that follows-creates the “immanentation” of a “spirit”. Each of my installation-performance is like the emerging of a temple for an inhuman divine-demonic presence. I cannot build the temple all by myself. I need to detach a flow from the block of an inert everyday life. I need to generate a magic flow with its own life that seduces other participants and produces a collective sacred catalysis. I need to prepare the “clearing” (Heidegger, 1998) to host a “mysterious anima”. It’s a rite of possession
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