Blog Entry
Making This Post Public, Is It Worth It?
March 9, 2010 by admin, under Uncategorized.
It seems to me necessary to mention, at this stage, that one of the main functions of this blog are for a personal access to what has become a very large database of ideas and sketches that I have accumulated over more than 4 years. Less than 2% is actually made public on this blog. With how my practice has developed over the last year it seems important to speak about this private function to a tool that seems to be primordially for a public expression of ideas and concerns, and of sharing. My decision to make most of my post private does not come from the fact of fear of my ideas being stolen but of in a very simple way further explore the sense of holding back and symultaneosly (or contradictory to its essense) showing signs of an interface. I feel to some extent that this hesitation, (could be seen as a counter sadomasocistic ritual described by Deleuze and Gautarri when reffering to “Body without organs” whipped into a formless and empty vessle to entice further desire and flow. My concern is mainly a concern over questions of perserving a discourse on subjectivity as such, and not a sense that I think I’m holding back something that I think is too good. This also does not mean that I defend on this conservative notion of sensing a threat on my privacy, or an abuse of my good will of becoming public, I’m not interested in that, I dont think. Other concerns might be linked with the fact that I write very badly, I’m all too aware of my dislexsia and my love for writting sentences with no verbs. Hopefully the quality of writting will increase the more I write and practice. Again this adds to the ideas and general fustration surrounding the lowering of the quality of communication due to the reputation that a “blog” has gained over the last years – exposing (and more and more often forcing) a wave of lazy and badly constructed english. But seeing this in a historical context this has always been an interesting phenomena to observe the fabrication of slang and new ways of writting and speaking. These changes in communication seems to be more and more dependent on the technological structures through which spoken or written word flows, from the telegraph, fax, email to the revolutionary text messaging. The blog is simply another one of those technologies that shapes language into new representations…. But yet, going back to my initial idea: Its more a question of discussing what it means to be who I am, how does that change when someone decides to go the whole mile and do their best to throw up everything they can think of (or not think of)? Are they more themselves than I am myself? Who defines that, where and when are these validations going on?
I’m am in pursuit of a subtle challenge, or intervention, on the actual nature of this system and question its social function(s). To turn its skin around, and to redefine the space of its insertion.
I find it interesting that what lies between me and the world is a lousy (hardly visible) button on my wordpress dashboard that changes posts from private to public with one (unconscious) click. Yes, we could associate this with something like Doctor Strange Love and the whole activity and intellectual production of humankind being boiled down to the decision of pressing the button and destroy the entire planet…or not.
Emma Heddith, for example, is an artist I had the priviledge to meet during my stay at the Wysing Artrs Centre in early February 2010. Her works seems to master this space of hesitation before appearing, with a delicate but precise tone and criticality.
Click here to view some of her interventions, or maybe better described as pre-interventions: http://www.overidentification.blogspot.com/
The title of this blog comes actually from one of her projects called ‘Coming To Have a Public Life, Is It Worth It?’ at ‘Art Now Live’, Tate Britain, London (2007)