REPERTORY 2011-2014, Villa Design Group

BUILDING BEYREUTH OR THE WOODEN SHOE OF SABOTAGE If a private collection might, like a book, tell a tall tale, the texts, scripts, and drawings collected here might say this. It begins as the latest wave of privitisation swept across the United Kingdom and Europe. There, after the death of Yves Saint Laurent and after a copy of A Guide to Civil War became ubiquitous in the back pocket of every art student with a conscious, the task of performing any thinking subjectivity became not only redundant, but revolting. So it was then, while sitting at the ‘Sale of the Century’ at the Grand Palais, as the hammer struck on Eileen Grey’s Dragon Chair, that another deal was struck – no more queer subjects, just queer objects. Is this the story of the death of Identity Politics then? Leaving behind the queer subject for the queer object, however, is more of a true crime book than anything else. Better yet, it is a murder mystery in front of you – who killed identity politics and why? Or who convinced us that it was dead? AIDS, Capital, Marriage – whoever it was – they have been extremely convincing. So much so, that when we found ourselves as students at the point where the performance of queer subjectivity had been rendered near impossible, or critically invisible, save the requisite nods towards Butlerian parody ala Paris is Burning, the turn toward the design of the queer object (lets think again here on Madame Grey’s Dragon Chair) became a means of smuggling queer presences into an academy in which queerness had either been taken as nostalgic or as a stylish selection of references easily appropriated by anyone – even the ‘hetero boys’ in the room. If there is any joy to be taken from this continued state of affairs, it is that, as the designers of queer objects, we must no longer rely on a queer body doing queer things for traction. As we have learned, any body othered in relation to bodies of power, only makes themselves available to the mechanisms of power they have tried to resist. With this in mind, over the last three years, we have not only acted as designers of queer objects, but to become queer objects ourselves. Then it’s the story of fags who would rather be ‘lamps’ then ‘women.’ The misogyny here is pointed in two directions. First, as an attack on those who think that queerness’ only aesthetic violence is parodic. Most recently, it was Mr. Sharp who would have us believe that camp continues its apolitical march from Sontag’s pen, parodying itself now as Neo-Camp as it sashays down to the market. Not as fags, but as ‘lamps’, we would like to argue otherwise. If we stand with Susan long enough to remember her inconstancies- Camp is not a reversal, however, the ultimate Camp statement is ‘its good because its awful’ – and we recognise Marx’s metaphorical illustration of ideology as a camera obscure – the world through the ideological lens is upside down, not reversed – we start to articulate a broader scope for the ideological violence queerness might provoke. Secondly, as ‘Lamps’, we attack the way that abjection is still triangulated with queerness, by the academy as a means of ‘speaking truth to power’, and by the market as a means of brand mangement. That is, if at one point queerness derived its monstrous potential from the horror provoked by queer desire, today, it is queer taste from which we must draw our weapons, not as ‘aristocrats of taste’ (thank you Sontag), but more dangerously as aristocrats of objects and their making. Our story quickly becomes complicated, however, as a queer object must be placed, whether within the academy as it was then, or out here in the vipers den as it is now. The question of the placement of a queer thing, pluralized in this case as the arrangement of queer things, quickly leads on from Madame Grey’s Chair back to its’ position in a certain drawing room on the Rue Babylone, before it sashayed down to the market. Today, the designed interior as a refuge for those cut off from public life is a critical common place. Neither as designers of lamps nor as ‘lamps’ ourselves, however, are we interested in taking refuge from the outside world. The interior in which we find ourselves in the present has now become a world. More stridently, this is to argue, that, if Benjamin’s assertion is correct that an interior always signifies a corpse, the corpse here is the body of queerness in relation to others. To no longer desire to be with the world as it exists outside, but to be without the outside world in its entirety, places particular pressures on the queer object, that is, questions of how, without the world, queer objects might be amongst themselves. This now becomes dramatic or at least conflicted. Turning away from the performance of queer subjectivity, rendered ineffective by both the academy and the capital which sustains it, to the design of queer objects as a means of sabotage, we found ourselves responsible for the object´s placement, its arrangement, its relation, not to the outside world, but to other objects. This is then to set a scene and to move from acting as designers of objects and interiors to acting as scenographers, reactivating the question of narration, via the arrangement of objects and how that narrative might be performed. We have answered these questions by scripting the theatrical relation of queer objects amongst and between themselves. Ironically, this turn away from subjectivity, and thus from the world in which it is performed, has necessitated that another structure be built for these relations to be displayed. We have turned to the theatre for the architectural guidelines of this new construction, not to academic or market driven performativity. In the end, this is to turn finally towards fiction and the world as it might be, as a means of creating critical distance, rather than to depend on the deconstruction of the mediocrities of the real for emancipation. In theatrical terms, we might say that this is a move away from Brechtian alienation, another critical common place, to Wagnarian submersion as a means by which to stage our attack. The texts, scripts, and drawings in this book outline the perimeters of what might be called tentatively, a ‘Theatre of Design.’ It is a structure that has yet to be built – we visited Beyreuth this summer in anticipation- however, the repertory, which follows in these pages, constitutes a three year process by which we have attempted to lay what might be this theatre’s foundations. Villa Design Group, 2014

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“REPERTORY 2011-2014, Villa Design Group”, , wurde erarbeitet und verfasst von Than Hussein Clark. Das Buch für Leser und Leserinnen erschien am 01.01.2014 im Montez Press.

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