Kim Calder Considers Vanessa Place's Denunciation at Los Angeles Review of Books
Los Angeles-based poet and academic Kim Calder has written an essay, "The Denunciation of Vanessa Place," for the Los Angeles Review of Books. The piece starts with Mongrel Coalition's tweet back in May, which called for individual accountability re: a stance on Place's Gone With the Wind project; and goes on to consider--alongside the work of the poet and critic Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, who wrote two posts for us focusing on Kenny Goldsmith and Place--Goldsmith's easier "rehabilitation." Calder also discusses racism, community, authorship, performance, and traumatic materials and effective transformative art:
Who even cares about Gone With the Wind, anyway, when black Americans are being killed in the streets?[1] On the other hand, if black Americans are still being killed in the streets, are we that far past Gone With the Wind? Is that part of the point?
The piece positions itself at the eyewall of the storm, some might say, instead of square in the center, with Calder eschewing terminology lately dispensed in other online discussions for framing like art historian Claire Bishop's “relational antagonism":
Place recently posted a video of the artist Santiago Sierra on social media, and the connection makes me wonder if Place’s interventions might be better read, rather than under the rubric of the lyric, in terms of their status of what Claire Bishop has termed “relational antagonism,”[2] since, after all, the “conceptual” in conceptual writing is a nod to conceptual art. The Mongrel Coalition, true to form, has already said “NO” to Sierra after the video was posted, but there are other possible replies.[3] Offering a counterpoint to the more familiar term “relational aesthetics,” in which works are based in the desire to create a microtopia (small-scale utopia) via the dialogue between work/artist and viewer, Bishop claims that antagonism, not utopian ambition, is essential to the creation of a truly democratic society. This is not to be confused with a clumsy cry for “free speech”; rather, Bishop’s point is that “without antagonism there is only the imposed consensus of authoritarian order — a total suppression of debate and discussion, which is inimical to democracy.” Certainly, the Mongrel Coalition’s tactics seem to fit well with the notion of this “imposed consensus,” and it makes good sense that both Place’s and Sierra’s work become targets. Let us not forget that the left, too, has its authoritarian orders.
What Place’s work threatens, then, is the illusion of a kind of microtopia unique to the poetry world: that subjectivity is whole and authentic experience can be transmitted, and that community is a space of “immanent togetherness.” Rather than promoting identification, Place’s projects “are marked by sensations of unease and discomfort,” in Bishop’s words, and maintain tensions rather than model communities. The “unease” surrounding Place’s work can be linked to its mission of challenging, in this case, the poetry world’s supposition that it is a domain that “embraces other social and political structures” only in ways we would welcome. Instead, Place creates a kind of “ethnographic realism,” as Bishop says of Sierra, “in which the outcome or unfolding of [her] action forms an indexical trace of the economic and social reality of the place in which [she] works.”
A common critique of relational antagonism is that it merely states what Bishop calls the “pessimistic obvious”; in this particular case, that Gone With the Wind is racist, that whiteness is responsible for blackface, etc. Rather than a restatement of the obvious, Place’s antagonism explores complicity and interrogates our reception of that complicity, from which none of us are exempt.
Read it all at Los Angeles Review of Books.