impossible.love  

 

by Marko Stamenkovic

 for Luca Curci  www.lucacurci.com

 

In his essay “Surrealism Without the Unconscious”[i] Fredric Jameson reminds us that today, instead of thinking in terms of privileged genres or forms that used to dominate every age as the fittest to express the secret truths of that particular time and place, we must forget about the previous classifications related to characteristic or symptomatic objects in the world and the language of forms or genres. Jameson teaches us that, being aware of the fundamentally materialistic structure and functions of culture, something that was brought to light by capitalism and modern age after the extinction of the sacred and the “spiritual”, we are fostered to displace the older language of genres and forms if we are to accept the discovery of a new word: “medium - and in particular its plural, media.” What is even more important is the fact concerning the definition of the media, as opposed to traditional and modern aesthetic concepts. Accordingly, this definition, in order to be completed, requires the simultaneous attention to the multiple dimensions of the material, the social, and the aesthetic, “that of an artistic mode or specific form of aesthetic production; that of a specific technology, generally organized around a central apparatus or machine; and that, finally, of a social institution.”[ii]

In proposing a historical line of perceiving culture as a matter of media, thus insisting on equal materialistic nature of different media products (no matter how much “spiritual” their origin is), Jameson subverts the traditional attitude toward the non-material values of culture, and takes a radically different position with regard to what capitalism succeeded in the sphere of production in comparison to an older, precapitalist paradigm. Starting from this, I would like to propose reading of new media art in the contemporary European cultural space not through the context of new aesthetic forms (characteristic and developed in parallel to older aesthetic forms or genres), but through its displacement from solely this context or, more precisely, through the simultaneous focusing on these three particular modes of cultural production symptomatic for the new capitalist order, as suggested by Jameson, namely: the intervention of the machine, the mechanization of culture, and the mediation of culture.

 The question is: how to propose an alternative to such an overexposed intervention of capitalist machine into the very field of one’s most intimate, erotic sphere of communication? How to avoid the mechanization of love without getting into the trap of consuming it for the benefit of the system (most notably by being sexually correct, breeding-related, socially productive, and thus assimilated into the vicious chain of consuming typical family-oriented goods?). Also, how to resist a conditioned reality of over empowered, institutionalized, and profit-oriented capitalist feeling of enjoyment in order to preserve one’s own sense of non-conditioned (impossible?) Culture of Love? The “Culture of Love” is here understood as a specific (practice-oriented) discipline, determined as an organizational and productive activity and based upon the interface between subjective positions and social and cultural situations, and understood through the ways in which it raises fundamental questions about how individuals fit into the community and the social world. It is also the question of how to avoid the type of traditional concept of identity which could be defined as an ethnocentric program: the one being grounded on topographical nodes that rely on positive content, i.e. a process that grounds identity in a concrete space, relying on a predetermined context (such as national groups). Because today we are not, by no means, to deal with identity in general terms, but with a multiple set of identities that each of us encounters in given historical conditions. And just as Slovenian theoretician, philosopher, artist, and curator Marina Gržinić once said “It is not question of identity - identity is used as a shield for many transactions in art and politics - but a question of the capitalist art system and its connection to the art market and to the cannibalization of new territories. To this process of cannibalization, as capitalism is a cannibal par excellence, every identity is comodified.”[iii] 

 According to Gržinić, it is no more sustainable to think in terms of a classical concept of identity. Instead, Gržinić proposes another point of view, grounded in her own and our global experience of predominantly cyber-political beings, capable of operating within the new media spaces (digital media and Internet). And it is exactly due to the changes induced by the dematerialization of our presence on the Internet and WWW, that identity is no longer attached to a topos, a specific place, but rather to a reconfigured relationship (between body and space) and the digital re-constitution (of temporality versus space). The transformation of contexts and meaning in digitized environments is now made possible and open for our re-thinking of the subject, brought to light by a variety of transformations that are intrinsically connected to the reconstruction of social identity and different contexts in digital media. What Gržinić is pointing out – and this is all the more important for the subject of contemporary artistic identities considering the roles they are performing in such transformed environments – is a fundamental change that is taking place once we accept the loss of traditional concepts of identity, and based upon the different nominations of identity between “fluidity” and “flexibility”. What is really fluid in today’s “identity affairs” is not identity itself, but the variety of different ROLES we are forced to perform today.

In their video impossible.love (2005) Luca Curci and Fabiana Roscioli are investigating the issues of carnal communication, based upon the contact of bodies in an “evacuated” space. This non-space (of a Rome hotel, where the video had actually been shot)  is predominantly characterized by the lack of any identification, which actually perpetuates the idea of negativity. Negativity here refers, above all, to a possible strategy for distribution of alternative positive meaning in a world contaminated by capitalist processes of cannibalization – cannibalization of new bodies, new identities, new territories – for the benefit of an imposed state of jouissance (enjoyment). Because what really counts in today’s global capitalist sphere of intrusion, expansion, and production, is not a sense of consumerism itself, but a sense of enjoying this consumerism, fostered by multinational corporate logic that consumerism is good as long as people believe they enjoy it. The contemporary global capitalism, being a machine for production of such logic par excellence, imposes a kind of erotic communication for the benefit of its proper system. As a form of resistance to such an imposed articulation of love, Curci and Roscioli are actually repeating the very same paradigm of (one and only) “possible” love, but in order to re-articulate it into an essential impossibility, urging for an alternative way of dealing with discourses of “populist” capitalism, the one we experience in our everyday life of advertising and visualizing erotic attraction.  For attraction-oriented advertising systems are actually being operationalized through an over empowered circulation of ideas that are supposed to define the ways we can really profit from what these systems could bring (or sell) to us. An escape and migration from such a logic are essential for Curci and Roscioli. This connection between identities and migration is here re-thought on behalf of those that are not in power, or simply - “the Others”. Taken for an idealistic “refugee camp” for non-censored expression and manifestation of love, sex, and enjoyment, their video is the space of displacement (of one’s proper reality) and the non-space of alienation (where the identity confirms its incompleteness), but also – it is a virtual, media space of (artistic) collaboration, where the production of new, hybrid and multiple identities is taking place, as a de-contaminated response to the omnipotent “creativity” and productivity of contemporary capitalism.