THE NEW UTOPIA OF TH
E SHORT XXI CENTURY!

USC’s January 27, 2007 Symposium On the Future of Art School was typical of its kind. A tooled, tailored Howard Singerman gave a detailed chronological account of the major shifts in art education in the twentieth century. Picture Howie’s grim Darth Vader-like complexion. He ended his talk by embracing today’s MFAs as indeed the new MBAs. The mods and out-of-sync teddyboys applauded. O joy! Rapture! Jan Verwoert, contributing editor of Frieze snarkily disagreed, and asked how meaning was generated in today’s art market. The punks screeched scat. –Bollocks to art skool! Fuck Charles Saatchi!! And the dumb market that tolerates Hirst!!! Verwoert was tired of the long line of emerging artists in Artforum, the too-cool-for-school crowd. Mai Abu ElDahab’s proxy, co-curator of Manifesta-6 was a breath of fresh air. Unlike the rest of the panel - who were incidentally mostly white, heterosexual, middle-aged men – Mai Abu ElDahab’s cyborg twin was neither invested in cataloguing, categorizing the past nor charmed by the giddy excesses of faux-Foucauldian theoretical negativity. To hell with combative critique* Rather, she opted to engage in a positively-charged, speculative project concerning utopia. Mister run! But Really? Utopia? The thing? Did somebody really say ______? Of course – many risks on such a journey. The synthetic life-form glittered in the so-cal sun: ‘The thing is – when you’re thinking about what ought to be, how the future should be – there is always the possibility that you’ll reproduce the same shit that came prior; that is to say, you may find yourself in the naïve position.’ To “ignore the centrality of history and its specificity would be, in part, to ignore the divisive cleavages of modern society and present them, instead, as if a product of a universalized essence of man, and hence as an ‘ought’ sui generis.” ‘But of course, to do nothing or to passively accept the status quo would be to persist in the nihilistic position. And to actively pursue any old utopia – is a relative nihilism that exposes oneself to an intolerable extreme of unfreedom.’

HABEN STATISCHE INSTITUTIONEN UBERHAUPT NOCH EINE ZUKUNFT?! The kids remained sexy (but didn’t walk around like Britney Spears, intentionally showing their rolls of fat), loud (but not coarse) and free-spirited. WHERE IS OUR UTOPIA?! I DEMAND MY UTOPIA! THIS ARTIST-RUN SPACE REMAINS CLOSED ‘TIL THIS TOWN HAS ITS UTOPIA!! A typical scandal-soaked night at Betalevel, an artist-run space at LA’s Chinatown. Imagine the replicant poet Mathew Timmons’ half-eaten lip music: All the variations in sound / produced by the tip of my tongue- / no lip movement, no jaw movement, / no expulsion of air. And the indigo smoke of a thousand hostile cigarettes, near-ambient winds, a myriad of phantasmagoric german aphorisms, sparse nostalgic piano playing, and the lovely perfume of chicken tikka and bhuna with mushroom rice and potatoes. And in the alleyway immediately adjacent to the underground fringe fest - there was much barbed conversation and disagreement about Impunities, a two-day conference on writing and communities that occurred at Roy & Edna Disney / CalArts Theatre (October 2006). A nomad: I think for me the moment that sticks out most memorably was the final sum-up with Johnny and Christine. I think it was a brilliant moment, truly amazing and alive and full of everything that spoke at the heart of the conference. A pirate: i felt that the word "community" in this conference was used wholly abstractly and as a kind of religious invocation of something unconnected to the earth. "community" was imagined as cyberspace, not streets, houses, actual living biological terrain. that seems entirely utopian, that community can exist mentally and intellectually while not anywhere on the ground. An otaku: But wait a minute! If social reality is indeed structured by fantasies, is not ‘moving the underground’ of fantasies a key step in transforming reality itself? A clown from Goldsmiths: Pay no attention to that wo/man behind the curtain! –Gina Clark + Maxi Kim This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

2 DO STATIC INSTITUTIONS ACTUALLY HAVE A FUTURE?! For answers: One Break, A Thousand Blows! by Maxi Kim (Book Works, 2008). Published as part of Book Works’ Semina series (No.2) edited by Stewart Home & Gavin Everall (www.bookworks.org.uk – ISBN: 978 1 906012 05 2).