Explain Pictures to a Dying Human
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Cover: Shezad Dawood, Leviathan Cycle, Episode 1: Ben, 2017 HD Video, 12’52’’ (detail) Courtesy of the artist and UBIK Productions (with footage The from the Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA) Large Glass No. 27 / 28, 2019 CONTENT: 4 Tihomir Topuzovski: Intoduction - Visibilities of becoming POSTHUMAN CORPOREALITY 93 Heather Dewey-Hagborg & Joerg Blumtritt: Posthumanism, 7 biopolitics and contemporary art Josephine Berry: How to Explain Pictures to a Dying Human: On Art in Expanded Ontologies 97 Eduardo Kac: BIO ART 20 STELARC: Contingent and Contestable Futures: Zombie,Cy- A LENS ON THE RADICAL HORIZON borg and Phantom Bodies 110 30 Saul Newman: Postanarchism and the posthuman horizon Extending and creating new corporealities: Interview with STELARC by Tihomir Topuzovski 117 Chantal Moufe: Critical Artistic Practices: An Agonistic 33 Approach Slavcho Dimitrov: Ron Athey and Acéphale in Skopje 120 37 Sarah W. Sutton: Thinking Diferently, with Creativity, Curiosity Nicole C. Karafyllis: Posthumanism does not exist and Courage 39 123 Igor Grubic: Do Animals...? The MoCA’s Pavilion in Venice Biennial 2019 Nada Prlja Subversion to Red 44 Jef Rasel 126 Vlad Morariu: Nada Prlja: the Left, Language and Writing A LANDSCAPE OF ANXIETY 129 48 Blanca de la Torre: Relocating Red Narratives Jef Diamanti: Heliotropism at the Terminal Beach of Critique 132 The MoCA’s exhibition: Skopje Resurgent: International- 57 ism, Art, and Solidarity, 1963 - 1980 Susanna Hertrich: Haunted Lands 134 62 Contributors Amanda Boetzkes: Posthuman Planetarity 72 Gligor Stefanov: A Conversation with Material and Space 78 Chris Salter: In the Haze of the Technosphere 83 Amanda du Prezz: Do Astronauts Dream of Post-Earth? Posthuman Corpore ality Jose phine Be rry expanded anthropological conceptions of culture and semiosis as non-exclusive to humans, the context-sensitivity of de- constructionism and identity politics, and the now tangible unfolding of a long an- How to Explain ticipated climate crisis. As Rosi Braidotti puts it, human is a term that ensures a ‘privileged access to resources’, and it is this privilege that is in question today.4 Picture s to a However, the self-critiquing – or one might say self-hating or antihuman- ist – aspect of posthumanism is only one, albeit powerful, tendency of the Dying Human: discourse; one which, it should be said, problematically fails to consider the hu- man in this capitalist, globally extended European supremacist sense as victim On Art in to, as much as perpetrator of, a social mode of production and relation that has systematically annihilated almost all oth- er forms of being human on Earth today. Expande d There are more promising dimensions of posthumanist theory, however, that do not necessarily blame the human for its species self-interest so much as under- mine its basis for justifying its diference Ontologie s and superiority to other life. Such a line of argument is convincingly proposed by anthropologist Eduardo Kohn in his eth- nography of the Runa of Ecuador’s Up- “The allergy to aura, from which liest human cultures and religions, today per Amazon, How Forests Think: Toward no art today is able to escape, is in- the term has developed a sharp political an Anthropology Beyond the Human. separable from the eruption of inhu- edge that previously it either did not pos- Through an extended discussion of the manity.”– Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic sess (for instance within animist world semiotic assemblages that exist between Theory 1 views) or did not own (there is doubtless the Runa and the rich diversity of animal a politics of animism). However, in these and plant life that cluster in the Amazon, The concept of the posthuman is not earlier times the human was not negated Kohn asserts that “all life is semiotic and really new; the more you think about it the or disparaged by such ‘webbed’ ontolog- all semiosis is alive”.5 By this he means older it gets. Fundamentally it has to do ical conceptions, while today there is a that signification and hence communica- with a non-unilateral conception of the strong streak of antihumanism running tion, selfhood, and even thought can be human’s relationship to the world which through nearly all notions of the posthu- said to exist within all living beings and imagines the species as embedded in man. The human, most especially in its systems, as summarised in his proposi- an expanded web of physical, biological, Enlightenment conception as a species tion that “life and thought are one and semiotic and material relations of ex- separated from the rest of nature by vir- the same: life thinks; thoughts are alive.”6 change. Implied within this is a process tue of its superior capacity for symbolic Kohn extends this proposition to exam- of continuous individual and species signification, culture and technological ine how the non-human production of THE LARGE GLASS No. 27 / 28, 2019 transformation or becoming based on the artifice, is today a form to be abandoned signification challenges the notion that passing back and forth of causality, com- as irrevocably implicated in capitalist co- the human world is in some sense on- munication and events. All it really means lonialism, its racist othering of non-Euro- tologically self-sufcient and therefore is that there is no human without a world peans and its violent expropriation of the closed. “By contrast,” he writes, “The of which it is continuously, emergently natural world that is threatening a near Open Whole aims to show that the rec- and constitutively a part, although there destruction of our biosphere. This desire ognition of representational processes certainly was and can be a world with- for exodus from European ‘monohuman- as something unique to, and in a sense out humans. While this conception of our ism’2 comes at the intersection point of a even synonymous with life, allows us to species’ reciprocal relationship to the scientific discrediting of Cartesian objec- situate distinctively human ways of being world can be found within even the ear- tivity and its techno-positivist worldview,3 Josephine Berry: How to Explain Pictures to a Dying Human: On Art in Expanded Ontologies 7 in the world as both emergent from and from the empirical world,” writes Adorno, Kohn’s formulation, “Selves, human or in continuity with a broader living semi- “their semblance character, is constitut- nonhuman, simple or complex, are out- otic realm.”7 Outside of language we are ed out of the empirical world and in op- comes of semiosis as well as the starting communicating through non-symbolic position to it. If for the sake of their own points for new sign interpretation whose sign systems all the time with multiple concept artworks wanted absolutely to outcome will be a future self”?15 Another beings, matter, phenomena and there- destroy their reference back to the em- way to put this question is to ask how art fore, importantly, futures. Accordingly, pirical world, they would wipe out their can protest a reified or ‘empirical’ real- ‘thought’ and meaning-making can be own premise.”12 Contemporary art can ity that is more sentient and intelligent, radically extended to all of life, posi- neither aspire to the ‘phantasmagoric’ less objectlike, stabile or docile, than the tioning the human in a world thick with semblance character of realism nor to 20th century imaginary could fathom? In semiotic production and interpretation. producing something wholly indepen- addition, is the ineluctable semblance Conversely, semiosis is represented as dent of the external reality from which all character even of radically anti-illusion- profoundly material: “Although semiosis its “form and materials, spirit and subject istic process art, its ‘second naturalism’, is something more than energetics and matter” are derived; nor too can it aspire fundamentally in contradiction with the materiality, all sign processes eventually to being simply continuous with external posthumanist project if artists want to ‘do things’ in the world, and this is an im- reality while holding onto the diference engage a posthuman conception of re- portant part of what makes them alive.”8 that makes it art at all. Adorno illustrates ality in a way that exceeds its mere use In order to think through the implications this dilemma rather charmingly with the as subject matter, i.e. by declaring art’s of posthuman theory for art, I am inter- image of the artwork trying to shake of co-extensivity with a living, thinking ested in this proposition in particular for its illusoriness “like an animal trying to world? If posthumanist art simply throws the way that it impacts art’s minimum shake of its antlers”.13 Artists of the last its lasso of autonomy around worldly liv- condition – the production of something century increasingly included ‘external ing semiosis and calls it art, does this not whole, a semantic unity, out of what was reality’ directly within the artwork in only perpetuate the human exceptional- previously inexistent or amorphous, pro- such a way that reality is made to re-en- ism it intends to dismantle by reimposing ducing what Theodor Adorno describes ter into appearance. We can find exam- semblance or meaning upon what is al- as art’s ineluctable semblance character. ples of this at a variety of scales, from ready meaningful? If, however, it rejects For Adorno, the artwork’s illusory factic- Henri Matisse’s literal or non-descriptive the power of its own autonomy, how is ity issues from, yet also difers from, an use of the colour red in his Red Studio it possible to attain the semblance that external reality understood as indetermi- (1911), to the nomination of huge derelict is its vestigial diference from empirical nate in its relation to the artwork. red shale heaps in Scotland as ‘process reality, and by which it can interpret and For this high modernist aesthetic sculptures’ by the conceptual artist John resignify the thinking world? All these philosopher, modern art’s key paradox Latham (Niddrie Woman, 1975-6).