Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna VOLUME 15 Not Now! Now! Chronopolitics, Art & Research Renate Lorenz (Ed.) Not Now! Now! Not Now! Now! Chronopolitics, Art & Research Renate Lorenz (Ed.) Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Eva Blimlinger, Andrea B. Braidt, Karin Riegler (Series Eds.) Volume 15 On the Publication Series We are pleased to present this new volume in the publication series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. The series, published in cooperation with our highly committed partner Sternberg Press, is devoted to central themes of contemporary thought about art practices and art theories. The volumes in the series comprise collected contributions on subjects that form the focus of discourse in terms of art theory, cultural studies, art history, and research at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and represent the quintessence of inter- national study and discussion taking place in their respective fields. Each vol- ume is published in the form of an anthology edited by staff members of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Authors of high international repute are invited to write contributions dealing with their respective areas of emphasis. Re- search activities such as international conferences, lecture series, institute- specific research focuses, and research projects serve as the points of depar- ture for the individual volumes. With this book we launch volume fifteen of the series. Not Now! Now! Chro- nopolitics, Art & Research collects proceedings from an international confer- ence of the same title that took place at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in October 2013. This conference was held as part of the European Art Research Network (EARN), of which the Academy is a founding partner together with institutions like the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, the Malmö Art Academy at Lund University, the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at Gothenburg University, and others. Alongside these institutions, including the EU project Step-Change for Higher Arts Research and Education (SHARE) under the lead of the European Institutes of the Arts (ELIA), the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna has been dedicated for many years to the establishment and fostering of artistic research: through establishing a doctoral program (PhD in Practice) within this field, thus strengthening the structural implementation of artistic research on an institutional level; and by proposing topics for this field that are discussed internationally, thereby setting the thematic agenda for a discourse that is often confined to methodological and institutional is- sues. This book is a result of the Academy’s engagement in the area of artistic research as well as a kind of anniversary present: it marks the five year exis- tence of our PhD in Practice program. We would like to thank this volume’s editor, Renate Lorenz, who—together with Anette Baldauf—codirects the PhD in Practice program at the Academy, for her efforts in collecting the proceedings. We are certain that the contributions on the many dimensions of time and chronology, undertaken from different positions of artistic and theoretic reflections, will prove to be timely. The Rectorate of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Eva Blimlinger, Andrea B. Braidt, Karin Riegler Contents Editor: Renate Lorenz Preface Copyeditor/proofreader: Walter Ancarrow Elizabeth Freeman 10 Editorial coordination: Martina Krenn Design: Surface, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin Introduction Cover images: Kenneth Anger, “Puce Moment,” film stills, 1949. Renate Lorenz 14 Courtesy of the Anthology Film Archives. Printing and binding: Holzhausen Druck GmbH, Wolkersdorf As If Time Could Talk Nana Adusei-Poku 26 ISBN 978-3-95679-108-6 Queer Archive and Queer Memory: © 2014 Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Sternberg Press Chronopolitical Reflections on the Family Album All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole Ana Hoffner 50 or in part in any form. Temporal Relations Sternberg Press Sharon Hayes 56 Caroline Schneider Karl-Marx-Allee 78 Kissing Historically: D-10243 Berlin A Performance-Lecture www.sternberg-press.com Mara Lee Gerdén 72 Far Now: The Fugitive Archetype of Resistance and Her Ever-Changing Now (aka “We Go Back to the Future to Tell Our Stories”) Jamika Ajalon 78 A Minus Suitcase Yva Jung 92 Veils/Folds/Events: Production of Face in Space-Time Suzana Milevska 104 A Reeducation Andrea Ray 128 Untitled Ingrid Cogne 138 Dormancy: Notes on Sleep, Criticality, and the Poetics of Suspension in and around Henriette Heise’s Darkness Machines Mathias Danbolt 144 7’ Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh 172 Image Credits 178 Biographies 182 Acknowledgments 186 Elizabeth Freeman 11 The title of the conference from which these essays spring, “Not Now! Now!,” shimmers with complexity. It suggests the past reappearing in the present, “not now” showing up, uncannily, “now.” It invokes the time of stop-and-go Preface rhythm, as with the American children’s game Red Light!/Green Light! in which an announcer shouts “green light!” and children move in a frenzy, until hearing Elizabeth Freeman “red light!” and freezing in whatever position they are in. And it calls forth the veilings and unveilings of the striptease, as in “Now you see it, now you don’t.” History and memory. The sheer physicality of time in rhythm. The problems and the pleasures of visualizing time. These three themes course through these essays in provocative and beautiful ways. First, on the past (and sometimes the future) reappearing in the present. In- voking the trope of memory-seeds, Jamika Ajalon gives us the figure of the “space cowboi” to conjure an image of movement through time: a “time cowboi,” we might say, who like a time-traveling, gender-outlaw Johnny Appleseed moves between events, eras, moments, not only scattering but picking up the pips of what has been and what might be, mixing memory (“not now”) and desire (“now” in the imperative). Ingrid Cogne’s surfing is another way of being a time-cowboi: waiting patiently for that “NOW” when you can catch a wave of time and let it take you elsewhere than now. Yva Jung makes this surfing literal in her meditations upon travel, where, creating “something uncontainable,” she lets a yellow suitcase filled with her friends’ artworks take her on a trip without an itinerary, marked by stairs, train compartments, stages, galleries, and bridges, using the unspecified time of her travels to reorganize spatial relations and even the historical relations of possession: her point is less to leave only a footprint (that sign of human domination over land from Robinson Crusoe to astronauts on the moon) than to take “only air.” Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh offers the figure of an archive of photographs from the Burj al-Shamali camp that would include “the ones people entrusted me, the hidden ones/the imagined ones, the ones from the past, the present, and also the ones from the past possible futures.” Ana Hoffner’s queer family album is another such archive that rearranges the ligaments between then and now, between so- called generations, and so between events that are not mere repetitions of one another and yet are not for that unrelated. And of course Sharon Hayes’s uncanny performances of archive fuse “not now” and “now” into something more powerful and visceral than memory: she writes that we “absorb much of the historical specificity of our first decade of life” before we have the capacity to process it. This figure of absorption, of physically soaking up history, also captures the way Hayes leaks or leeches, we might say, the past into the present in her performances. Her respeaking, resituating, reanimating are modes of reembodying the past such that it irrupts into the present rather than, as with reenactment, casting the past as safely other. 12 Preface Elizabeth Freeman 13 My metaphors of leeching and leaking are not incidental here, for the physicality Thus the project becomes, as the veil would have it, twofold: to find objects of time appears in these essays as texture: as the aprons, wood, scratches, and situations that are at once charged with progressive time and also capa- layering that manifest Nana Adusei-Poku’s racial time; as Mara Lee Gerdén’s ble of blocking it. Danbolt’s dormancy, for instance, promises future activity red lipstick smears and stains; as Jung’s increasingly battered suitcase; as the and yet also leads us to the uncaptured, uncapturable time of dreaming scratched sidewalks in Eid-Sabbagh’s piece; as the soiled black piece of and darkness. Ajalon’s cowboys invoke the frontier, but muddle its spatial weed-controlling fabric with dried grass and used duvet covers that indicate and temporal boundaries. Gerdén asks us to kiss our specters, which would Mathias Danbolt’s conception of dormancy. Texture, as Renu Bora has reminded ordinarily seal a promise and guarantee a future, but here demands that us, “expresses how temporality [...] is intrinsic to the meaning of materiality.”1 repressed histories appear. And Andrea Ray finds in marriage—an institution For texture includes a history of material transactions between object and users. that so attempts to manage time that death is predicted in the very vows I sometimes think that too much of an emphasis on texture returns us to the securing it—a call from past utopian schemes to confront the contemporary German Romantic worship of the relic whose decay makes history manifest, “monogamous-normative state.” The fold that all of these essays risk is this: yet whose presence attests to something eternal.