Continuous Project #8 TABLE OF CONTENTS Continuous Project, Introduction 7 Continuous Project, CNEAI Exhibition, May 2006 8 Allen Ruppersberg, Metamorphosis: Patriote Palloy and Harry Houdini 11 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator 19 Seth Price, Law Poem 31 Claire Fontaine, The Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A Few Clarifications 33 Dan Graham, Two-Way Mirror Cylinder inside Two-Way Mirror Cube; manuscript, contributed by Karen Kelly 45 Bettina Funcke, Urgency 53 Matthew Brannon, The last thing you remember was staring at the little white tile (Hers) and The last thing you remember was staring at the little white tile (His) 59 Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, The Public Sphere of Children 61 Mai-Thu Perret, Letter Home 67 Left Behind. A Continuous Project Symposium with Joshua Dubler 71 Tim Griffin, Rosters 79 August Bebel, Charles Fourier: His Life and His Theories 81 Maria Muhle, Equality and Public Realm according to Hannah Arendt 83 Pablo Lafuente, Image of the People, Voices of the People 91 Melanie Gilligan, The Emancipated – or Letters Not about Art 99 Simon Baier, Remarks on Installation 109 Donald Judd, ART AND INTERNATIONALISM. Prolegomena, contributed by Ei Arakawa 117 Mai-Thu Perret, Bake Sale 127 Nico Baumbach, Impure Ideas: On the Use of Badiou and Deleuze for Contemporary Film Theory 129 Serge Daney, In Stubborn Praise of Information 135 Johanna Burton, ‘Of Things Near at Hand,’ or Plumbing Cezanne’s Navel 139 Warren Niesluchowski, The Ars of Imperium 147 Summaries 158 6 CONTINOUS PROJEct #8 INTRODUctION 7 INTRODUCTION The Centre national de l’estampe et de l’art imprimé (CNEAI) invited us, as Continuous Project, to spend a month in Paris in the Spring of 2006 in order to realize a publication and an exhibition. The art-world tends to celebrate the image. Art magazines and books are packed with photographs, advertisements, glossy colors. This book, we decided, would be black and white, and focused on the word, on texts. We were at the time thinking a lot about critical theory and how it relates to art. Loosely speaking, the relationship between art and politics. More specifically, art and spectatorship. We invited writers and artists to contribute pieces along these lines. We didn’t want to ask what kind of theory is appropriate for art, but how art reacts to theory. The pieces in the book approach this intersection of interests from very different angles. They include a lecture by philosopher Jacques Rancière, never before printed in English; text pieces by artists, including Allen Ruppersberg, Mai-Thu Perret, Matthew Brannon, Josh Smith, Claire Fontaine, Dan Graham, and Melanie Gilligan; essays by writers such as Johanna Burton, Maria Muhle, Warren Niesluchowski, Bettina Funcke, Pablo Lafuente, and Simon Baier; reprints and new translations of work by Alexander Kluge, Charles Fourier, and Serge Daney; a couple of poems and a symposium we held in which we invited American religious scholar Joshua Dubler to present contemporary Evangelical Christianity and its uses of mass or popular culture. The exhibition was directly linked to the book and its questions or issues. Because Continuous Project is a collaborative group that often works with others, we invited several artists and writers to make interventions in the CNEAI space. Japanese performance artist Ei Arakawa and German critic Simon Baier staged a private performance in CNEAI’s attic archive room, revolving around a Donald Judd essay on Art and Internationalism that until now had been available only in a rare Japanese exhibition catalogue. Photo-documentation of the performance highlights the process of “installing” Judd’s text over the course of a day. Swedish artist Fia Backström, who often engages with artists and printed materials while reflecting the form of exhibitions per se, responded to CNEAI’s archive of printed matter by highlighting, through posters and a video, a 1982 issue of the artist’s magazine Intervention, which critiqued that year’s Documenta and ultimately questioned the notion of engaged art. Artist Claire Fontaine and curator Eva Svennung, both Paris-based, were invited to collaborate on a selection of French-language books to be sold during the exhibition in a makeshift bookstore, where they were presented on Backström’s custom-made table cloths. With the publication of Continuous Project #8, the final “issue”, Continuous Project becomes Consultants. August 2006 8 CONTINOUS PROJEct #8 TITLE 9 10 CONTINOUS PROJEct #8 METAMORPHOSIS 11 Metamorphosis: Patriote PALLoy AND Harry HOUDINI ALLEN RUPPERSBERG “In order to remain secret, the indirect must take shelter under the very figures of the direct….” Roland Barthes “You just have to know how to do it. There’s nothing to it if you just know the trick.” Harry Houdini What is metamorphosis? Who are Patriote Palloy and Harry Houdini? And what do they have to do with one another? We shall see. First the stage, then a trick, and finally the secret. T HE S TAGE Item: Harry Houdini was born Ehrich Weiss on April 6, 1874 in Appleton, Wis., the son of a Rabbi. Patriote Palloy was born Pierre-Francois Palloy on January 23, 1755 in Paris, the son of wine merchants. Item: Separated by a century, Palloy sold Patriotism and became in his own words a “Patriot” and Houdini sold magic to become in his own words “a mysterious entertainer.” One was forgotten, the other became a legend. Item: Events have their own ways of shaping a life; once they have taken place, they can never be undone or ignored. Both men stepped up out of the audience and crossed the dividing line to the performer’s side of the stage. They were not the public any longer for they had been invited to join the charmed and secret circle of those who knew the truth and who could themselves make magic for more credulous folk. Item: Houdini’s career coincided roughly with the life-span of early vaudeville itself—developing before the turn of the century, and lasting until motion pictures replaced live performers in most theaters. He was a child of vaudeville and especially 12 CONTINOUS PROJEct #8 METAMORPHOSIS 13 skillful at the techniques of publicity. He was, for example, one of the Item: Palloy understood that the Revolution had created a demand for a new kind greatest experts on handcuffs the world has ever known and was of history, one that told of the epic of the common man. This new history had to never defeated by any handcuff challenge the public could contrive. be related in a new way. History was to be made directly contemporary with the However, his success came when he learned that in order to average citizen’s life. He would insert his own experience, even at second hand, present the trick in an effective manner he had to make it appear into the unfolding present. Instead of contemplating the vast centuries, the new extremely difficult when it was in fact quite simple for him. history would be chopped up into memories of a single day or week. Finally, to lend immediacy to the events for those who were geographically distant, souvenirs Item: After taking a commission in the army as a young had to take concrete form, so that by contemplating or touching them the citizen man, Palloy became an apprentice mason who shortly married could share in the intensity of the event. The 14th of July being the great event, it his master’s daughter and launched himself in the construction took Palloy just one day to realize that as Vainqueur, construction engineer, industry. By 1789 he had amassed a sizable fortune and was considered a and experienced boss of labor gangs he was in a position to acquire a most model success story of old-regime capitalism. On the 14th of July, he was acting important piece of real estate. On the 15th he brought 800 men to the commandant of his local district on the Ile Saint-Louis. Well within hearing range Bastille ready to begin the work of demolition. Once the first stone fell the of the battle at the Bastille, he claimed that he had run to the scene and on arrival free-for-all began: bonfires burned by day and fireworks exploded by night took a ball through his tricorn hat by the side of one Lieutenant Elie. He acquired and good Patriots were everywhere with stories and tours. Through it all a brevet de vainqueur to certify that he had been one of the sacred nine hundred. Palloy was planning his business. He not only provided work and pay, but he gave structure to the entire enterprise. He designed identity cards, he Item: As a measure of his accomplishment, the standard dictionaries of the period acted as boss-father, throwing parties for the workers, and playing with contain the word Houdinize which was “to release or extricate oneself (from the children. Wielding a cane and clapper with which to call people to confinement, bonds, and the like) as by “wriggling out.” attention, he was also constable, judge and jury for those caught stealing or getting into drunken fights. Item: The reality of the Bastille, the Bastille itself, was far less important than its For all this chaos, the work proceeded with great speed. By the end afterlife in legend. The Bastille gave shape and an image to all the vices against of November, most of the Bastille was demolished. The physical work which the Revolution defined itself. The myth of patriotic unity became enshrined completed, Palloy’s own Bastille business had only just begun. Some of this in a cult of the Bastille. No one grasped the creative opportunities better than involved new projects, erecting a platform for a cannon from the Bastille on Palloy.