Failure, Precarity & Performance: A Scene Report
Failure, of course, goes hand in hand with capitalism. - Judith Halberstam
In Queer Art of Failure, Judith Halberstam locates instances of failure in Anglo American culture, and how failure rises out of a need to reject normative models of “success” in modern capitalist terms. For Halberstam, failure is linked to both pessimist ideologies that emerge out of denial power for white, male and heterosexual subjects, and queer critique of norms. Although this post is not wholly dedicated to making a serviceable link between queerness and failure (though one certainly exists), I want to briefly expand on their correlation to adequately place both terms in the context of my research as whole, especially in the previous analysis of the artwork of Zach Blas, as well as the numerous other pieces I will explore in this entry. For Zach Blas the term queer “extends far beyond [LGBT identity] to a radical, non-normative, anti-capitalist politics of transgression, desire, experimentation and collectivity”. Halberstam is interested in the political valence of the term in a similar way; “Queer studies offer us one method for imagining, not some fantasy of an elsewhere, but existing alternative to hegemonic systems” (89).
Blas’s and Micha Cárdenas’s Queer Technologies does just this, through a bevy of imaginative queer and “transreal” aesthetic pieces that redefine norms and protocol in the technological realm. Taking from Alan Turing’s work on computation, logic, they seeks to recreate or infuse new alternatives into present technology. For Blas and Cárdenas, Alan Turing’s own homosexuality ultimately shaped his work, although the link is not completely explicit. Turing’s impossible and impractical imaginative designs are therefore a starting point for the explicit conflation of sexual desire and antinormativity that is placed into Queer Technologies.
In keeping with this, Queer Technologies products turn computing on its head through imagined interfaces, and software and hardware configurations. The ENgendering Gender Changer denies traditional male/female hardware coupling by introducing the linking male serial cables to Female and Power Bottom couplers that take of the signal. The gender changer fails active electronic connection through its, “pacified design” in order to, “undermine traditional hardware control structure. The Queer Technologies transCoder introduces an “anti-programing” knowledge to allow for “programmatic and linguistic” possibilities, and the Gay Bomb provides a technical manual for devising political action through queer technology tactics.
Micha Cárdenas and Elle Mehrmand’s virus.circuit.laboratory imagines a computer system that runs on ejaculated fluid. By incorporating biological material and computer hardware, the piece foregrounds the viral as political figure, with its intersects in “the militarization of medical authority, microscopic transnational migrations, and global economic inequality”. Echoing Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker’s implicit link between viruses and the digital networks, virus.circuit.laboratory also highlights how the rhetoric of viruses like HIV, have been used to undermine populations, and exercise transnational control. With ever an increasing demand for resources to manufacture and power computational systems, Cárdenas and Mehrmand ask the question, “what if computers required a heightened emotional state in order to function?”
The scope of artworks that utilize new mediums to index contemporary life is vast. Part of the Stimulus/Response/Affect exhibition at Oakland University, Brian Patrick Franklin and Chris Wille’s collaborative project Currency brings together new and obsolete technology together to generate a power, tactile sense of uncertainty and precarity in the modern economic world.
Fusing a Burroughs adding machine and microcontroller to create a game console that prints out two columns of ASCII symbols using bitcoin to US dollar exchange rate. The objective is to pull these two columns using the number keys and crank lever on the adding machine. Apart from these instructions, the player is unsure the immediate results of their actions, and in most cases, fail to fuse the two columns together. The weight and heft of the machine itself brings a physical dimension to the player’s connection with a complex financial system. In doing so, Currency allows players to experience risk and failure in acclimating to the nuances of complex, financial instruments. Walter Benjamin reflects on this uncertain space between old and new technology; “Because [new] technology aims at liberating human beings from drudgery. the individual suddenly sees his scope for play, his field of action, immeasurably expanded. He does not yet know his way around this space”.
I want to conclude this post by focusing on precarity and performativity, two terms used by the gender theorist (and all out superstar) Judith Butler, and how they connect to art and failure. So far, I have shown how modern artist, especially those working in queer art, have foregrounded their work with failure. Failure in art is a type of political inaction, elucidating the normative and hegemonic systems of control that they operate. Besides being allegories or dramatizations of particular aspects of contemporary life, they also imagine new alternatives through performances. In Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics Judith Butler gives an account of how performativity functions in regards to politics, especially for marginalized groups. Precarity is for her, a more general concern, and is a condition of living beings themselves. Indeed, every living being is under the threat of extermination. Precarity is also an economic condition of populations, and state institutions are set up to preserve the safety of citizens’ lives. On the hand, precarity is too often a condition faced by those who fail to fit into normative economic, sexual and racial molds. Butler is famous for claiming that gender is itself a performance. Gender norms also “have everything to do with how and in what way we can appear in public space”, and how precarious one existing can then be, based on how well they exhibit (or perform) gender roles. The ability to correctly perform gender roles then allows one to be recognizable (think Blas), and without this recognizability, precarity is imminent as an erasure of subjectivity. Failure, or “non-compliance” of norms, can then put into question, “the viability of one’s life, the ontological conditions of one’s persistence”.
Alli Coates and Signe Pierce’s American Reflexxx performatively explores failure, non-compliance and recognition, and plays out the interplay in a jarring 14 minute video. Coates follows the artist Signe Pierce with a digital hand-held camera, as she walks around the busy streets of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in blue stripper garb, with a reflective, defacing mask that hides her face. Pierce is an immediate center of attention, as she mimics stripper-moves and furtively engages with the crowd around her. Pierce’s mask reflects the high-gloss glow of the streets many businesses, and cases a panic within the crowd who demand that she take it off. This is only one of a series of chants and jeers that Pierce is subjected to, and the crowds reaction is capture in grating freeze frames and close caption written in Nintendo font: “it’s a man, a shim, that’s just wrong, that’s some fucking shit, I don’t know what your face looks like but your body’s alright, nobody want that…” Reactions are a mix of curiosity, cautious approach, and harassment. These reactions often turn into risky moments of pursuit, and a concern for Pierce’s safety is palpable. She is poked, tripped and gets doused with water from a passerby. Although the crowd shows some concern when harrasment turns to physical violence, it is done so superficially, implying the erasure of Pierce as a subject. The ordeal ends with Pierce being tripped and thrown to the ground, where she lays in some apparent pain. The floats around, attempting to aid her, but are unwilling to make a real effort. According to Coates and Pierce, they had not anticipated these results when they set out to film their documentary. The queer and unrecognizable figure of Signe Pierce invokes this violence, which make a case for how performatively imagined alternatives (and failures to conform) to gender norms generate scenes of precarity, which are imbedded in heteronormative, capitalist societies.
