Carissa Rodriguez

STEADY DIET OF NOTHING

Dear Artist,
I hate, you hate. How can culture return us to our bodies while still holding back
from ever touching, moving, exciting other bodies so they lose a bit of themselves
in one another or whatever? We try to grow closer but how is it that I’ve become so
detached, so empty, so fake? What happens in this strange time when all we learn to
share is an accumulation of sophisticated, sleeker, smugger ways to say that alienation
alienates? We clone and decorate each other’s hollow rhetoric around the social
corpse until there’s nothing but our divided steely coldness, a malignant silence. A
bloodless scream fills the corpse. I want to kick the corpse of everything that the past
promised and the present lacks in its antihuman splendor. I must shriek. I want to
enter the spasm of something more. Don’t you, dear artist? Who wants beauty when
together we can make the ugly?

Dear Artist,
What happened to the conversation of wanting intimacy? To the sound of our voices
peeling through whatever grey ambiguous mass seemed to also carry with it
a common living desire? When a theory is hung on a creative act to validate it
within a chain of consumption, another false encounter is staged on a culture decomposing
under the rot of those very words. Stab away at vain speech with what
other speech? To package my experience of your energies would only steal from
your spirit and mine. In friendship and conspiracy you asked me to be here in this
space. An anxious space. My thoughts may be misguided, juvenile, ill conceived
and rotten to the core, but something else will fill the invitation, some other remnant
of our invocation, vocation, generation, gentrification and lonely, inelegant
resistance to it all.

Dear Artist,
How to learn to like the same. We sell ourselves when we don’t know how to give ourselves.
Through you I’ve seen that the line between selling and giving is what traces
a constant attraction of the will to subjective effacements that refuse everything
that would harden you into a readable, purchasable thing. I feel the shocks
of an ascetic’s desire in your actions, a hunger reaching for something extreme to
defend you from the attacks of life possessed by economies that weaken it. Asceticism
is seductive because it strives to be pure, yet purity is often expressed by the
worst reductions. The ascetic gives herself up as the purest form of protest, but how
much self-indulgence does total self-abnegation require? While being seduced by the
idealism of the destructive character, you shift your appetite for militancy into covert
multilayered practices that stay flexible in the struggle to renew art’s social function.
Leaving the distanced critical role behind, you follow through on temptations
fraught with contradiction – health regimes, representations of dead or undead political
actions, products striving to be counter-products, the pirating of pop culture
– all to root out new communicative strategies from seemingly stagnant or exploitative
forms. Your art becomes a form of activism committed to tricking the so-called
‘ natural’ flows of consumption and historical progress by messing with its normalized
rhythm. Making the corpse talk. Your interventions: songs, texts, posters, shared
spatial operations and public monuments are assembled like antibodies and experiment
with the transmissibility of culture and its potential for serving collective
needs over the pseudo-needs spawned by consumerism. By joining others in collaboration,
you’ve become a medium against the notion of the producer. Forgetting
how ‘to make’ in order to better learn how ‘to practice’. Practicing to be alive together.
Against the deathblows of advanced capitalism, ‘to practice’ becomes ‘to struggle’.
What does the art world do with this?

Dear Artist,
There was a time when struggle was romantic, mystical and necessary in the pursuit
of unknown beauty and truth. Society needed its artists to exemplify a kind of
transcendent suffering. It believed that the more the artist suffered in their art, the
more truth their art promised. Every truth had its a martyr. For better or worse, suffering
had a function in the economy of art. Can an art market infatuated with power
afford a suffering artist? It embraces the ‘winners’ but nevertheless needs ‘losers’
clinging at the margins to be the measure of its ambition and object of occasional
charity. In order to dominate, an economy needs a good conscience and the myth of
supporting an alternative world. Suppress chaos, effort and doubt.
Stay content, efficient and in control. A healthy diet of competition, careerism and
products for a ruling class.

Each
Life
Kills
Each

Martyred
Acts
Reclaim
Hunger
Önly
For
Eternal
Revolt

révolutionnaires! il n’y a pas de révolution practices collective suicide in its hunger for
renewal, a piercing invocation to a scattered community. The process of its conception
undergoes the same steps involved in an ancient Greek technology of the self, a meditation
invented by the Stoics to prepare for misfortune. The first step was to envision
one’s worst possible fate. Secondly, one had to perceive this tragedy not as an abstract
event that would come in the future, but as an actuality taking place in the here and
now. Finally one had to let go of disappointment and practice acceptance. This combination
of a dreaded fate, of the future folded into the present, and the struggle to
overcome disappointment was compressed into a single act of deep contemplation
that hoped to guide one’s actions through present privations. In révolutionnaires! il
n’y a pas de révolution, Elke Marhöfer creates a corpse in her likeness and inserts it into
a hypothetical political drama in which an anonymous young woman is accidentally
killed in the intensity of a rioting mass. The corpse breaks with linear history; she’s
the suspension of time from which to rethink the possibilities for political activism.
She’s the undead figure of radical desire. The melancholy of her community is its failure
to shake its infatuation with a dead political culture whose phantoms live on in
the form of limitless consumer goods. In meditating its worst destiny as the cooption
of human communicability into lifestyles and commodities that betray collective
hopes, dead body music is révolutionnaires’ timeless leitmotif and the corpse’s self-help
regiment, “dead body music - nobody panic – it’s only dead body music”.
révolutionnaires! il n’y a pas de révolution is a reconfiguration of Paul Thek’s The Tomb
– The Death of a Hippie (1967). Thek displayed a wax effigy of himself in a pink ziggurat
tomb that mocked the strict formalism of minimalism. This representation of
self-sacrifice (self-mutilation and starvation) was an attempt to deal with feelings of
impotence towards social change, the modern world’s broken connection to nature
and intuition, as well as the disillusionment with a disengaged art world. The Tomb
– The Death of a Hippie is an anomaly of history for failing to assimilate with the commercially
viable minimalist art of its time and for dragging the low and dirty counterculture
of the hippie into a bourgeois art world that wanted to look away from the
unmanageable. By appropriating an artwork misunderstood in its day, does révolutionnaires!
il n’y a pas de révolution renounce commercial ambition and show solidarity
with Thek’s unruliness and disinterest in becoming a cohesive product, and align
itself communally with other work in created and struggling in that same spirit? If
we imagine history played backwards, could Thek’s single collaboration with Warhol
be seen as a possible dark future of révolutionnaires! il n’y a pas de révolution? In Meat
Piece with Warhol Brillo Box (1965), perhaps the temporary meeting of Pop with less
manageable ritualistic/personal/political/immaterial/marginal practices best illustrates
the polarized relationship between a bourgeois art world and all the activities
pushed to the margins. It’s a quick exchange before they are again pulled apart
in a sort of first-world/third-world antagonism. Taking into account the precarious
survival of art practices less adaptable to market trend, it’s not hard to imagine the
corpse of révolutionnaires! il n’y a pas de révolution as the carcass framed by the Brillo
box – a ubiquitous commodity and Warhol’s transcendent signature gesture. One
kind of art is the surface; the other is the rotten inside. A neoconservative future?
Must an act of quotation kill its source in order to take place? Why is it that
governments are able to wield surfaces this way? Does that mean that an opposition can
too? Or is their key difference, and the reason for the state’s advancement and a
counterculture’s retreat, the idea that power is an ontologically corrupt entity, and
everything opposed to it cannot escape the antithetical relation and therefore
coded to fail?
The corpse of révolutionnaires! il n’y a pas de révolution was fashioned after a group of
middle-class young radicals drifting zombie-like through the ruins of the disappointed
utopia of Paris in the mid-70s. Just coming into adulthood, they are probably
too young to have participated in the upheavals of ‘68. Their rage is nevertheless
real. Dread is stretched tightly over their collective schizo existence. They are heirs
to social disaster. Like the face of révolutionnaires’ corpse, the characters in the film
The Devil, Probably (Bresson) have the beautiful doomed faces of the saints and martyrs
of medieval art. In trying to trick life out of dealing him years of alienation, the
main character becomes seduced by the expanding void. He desires to test it, not as
a true end, but as an impulsive act of youth, to see if it breaks open.
Young man: In losing my life, here’s what I’d lose! [He takes out a piece of paper from
his pocket and begins to read from it] Family planning. Package holidays, cultural,
sporting, linguistic. The cultivated man’s library. All sports. How to adopt a child.
Parent-Teachers Association. Education. Schooling: 0 to 7 years, 7 to 14 years, 14 to
17 years. Preparation for marriage. Military duties. Europe. Decorations (honorary
insignia). The single woman. Sickness: paid. Sickness: unpaid. The successful man.
Tax benefits for the elderly. Local rates. Rent-purchase. Radio and television rentals.
Credit cards. Home repairs. Index-linking. VAT and the consumer … [He crumples
the paper up and throws it with disgust into the fireplace]
Psychiatrist: Loss of appetite often accompanies severe depression.
Young man: I’m not depressed. I just want the right to be myself. Not to be forced to
give up wanting more … to replace true desires with false ones based on statistics …
[The psychiatrist starts on his diagnosis of the young man’s condition]
Psychiatrist: … would impede your psychological development and would explain
the root of your disgust and your wish to die.
Young man: But I don’t want to die!
Psychiatrist: Of course you do!
Young man: I hate life. But I hate death, too. I find it appalling …if I commit suicide
… I can’t think I’ll be condemned for not comprehending the incomprehensible.

Dear Artist,
Have you ever felt that the most potent way to negate death was to make it your own
creation?