Weaklings
Brian Boigon asks Elizabeth Diller, Rosalind Krauss, and John Oswald about the aesthetics of weakness
The following text is an excerpt from Culture Lab 3.3: “Weaklings.” Culture Lab was a series of symposia hosted by Brian Boigon throughout the early 1990s at The Rivoli Club in Toronto. Boigon’s symposia are the central focus of the CCA exhibition, Interactive Entertainment Architecture: Culture Lab, Toronto 1991–1994, curated by Farzin Lotfi-Jam.
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Brian Boigon, Introduction to Culture Lab 3.3: Weaklings, 1994. CCA
- BB
- The three of you have identified the weak as a field of empowerment, but what of aesthetics? What can introduce weakness into the media propaganda as strength?
We can make the weak hip. For example, with grunge fashion we can help market the weak, but what if we remove the superficial notion of pity to know that homeless does not mean brainless? Then a weakling—a feeling of weakness—can be opened up to include the aesthetics of weakness itself. For example, while accumulation of material goods is attributed to strength, by contrast, the notion of a nomadic society who is materialistically light could be seen to embrace such a thing as an aesthetics of weakness.
Do you believe in an aesthetics of weakness? And if so, where does it appear most significantly for any of you up here?
- RK
- I obviously do believe in aesthetics of weakness. Brian said weaklings, the topic for this evening, is a state of narrative being. Then he produced one of these little narratives of, “be strong, be a man.”
Now, I think one of the problems for aesthetics is always this signifier-signified thing, which is a fall into narrative. This thematization, this constant production of meaning over the site where meaning is in process and not already formed, is a mythologizing tendency. In present aesthetic practice, this tendency to constantly signify without paying attention to signifiers has given us an art of so-called abjection.
The hottest thing right now is precisely weakling art, which involves bodily fluids, excrement, the most marginalized, most abject parts of the social bodily fabric. That is a real problem because aesthetics is something that is operating not at the level of signified but the level of the signifier. This pre-packaged, prefabricated, pre-cooked notion of meaning is precisely the set of stereotypes that are oppressive rather than liberatory. And I take aesthetics to be about an act of freedom.
- JO
- I tend to take this personally, in that I like to think about my own practice. I’ve continued to choose to do things that are most often described as musical endeavors. Since I was young, people kept trying to dissuade me. I took piano lessons and couldn’t do it. They told me not to come back to guitar lessons. I wasn’t allowed in the school band so I stole some band instruments and tried to put together my own band, which everyone quit. But I continue to make things, and I tend to be pleased with the things I’ve made once they’re made. So there’s an aesthetic of weakness to be found in there. I suppose it’s ripe to be found.
- ED
- I would say I’m interested in weaklings insofar as reevaluating negative and positive categories. I suppose a more interesting relationship than weak and strong would be something like description and creation. Maybe in that way there is a tangency between these two sets of issues. I’m interested in transcription, which has conventionally been thought of as passive and uncritical, and I tend to think of it critically. In fact, how does one foreground that which is already there but invisible? We’re blinded to it because it’s too banal and obvious, but through mechanisms of description—because they are editorial by nature—we can torque the conventional readings of ordinary things.
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Liz Diller, Instructions on how to iron a shirt from Bad Press presented at Culture Lab 3.3: Weaklings, 1994. CCA
- BB
- Maybe I’ll just clarify the word from my understanding. I use the word weakling to suggest that there’s a question of what it means to be weak. What is the ontology of a weakness? Not so much a dyad of what’s strong and what’s weak, but what it means to be, or to appear in a state of weakness. To move away as far as possible from the dyad that’s implicit in the colloquial phrasing of the weak and the strong.
For example, in your work what might be considered marginal activity in terms of labour in industrial and domestic proxies, is given it’s due through reconfiguring the art of pressing the shirt into service, which in my mind is a play on the notion of weakling—of being in a position of weakness—and at the same time points to a submissive-dominant relationship that one is engaged in.
- ED
- I wouldn’t disagree with that. However, the motivation of the work is not so much to foreground its submissiveness but to take into the realm of issues of interest and various convergences of disciplines—one that’s very common and untheorized. It’s not so much because of any reading of victimization.
For me, what’s interesting about the shirt and the inscriptions on the shirt is that it is a surface in a rhetorical form that inadvertently produces discourses. In our reading of those discourses, we can foreground these conventions about efficiency and the aesthetics of efficiency, gendered work, hygiene, and so forth.
I suppose I’m resisting a little bit because I think it’s your job to fold us into this category of weakness. I wouldn’t submit to describing the work that way because I don’t think it that way. Although I must admit that the very things that interest me are things that are normally marginalized and thought of as boring. And maybe they are.
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Liz Diller, Description of “Fold” from Bad Press presented at Culture Lab 3.3: Weaklings, 1994. CCA
- RK
- I was very fascinated by the whole saga of the shirt and also by the distinction that Liz was making between the fold, which has been given this heavy-duty theoretical powerful architectural leverage, and this very sneaky thing about the crease. I thought that that was incredibly brilliant. It’s true that it is the crease that has this interesting, inscriptional force. And the whole issue of inscriptional force is something that Foucault has made us all very aware of and how social forces cross our bodies in a variety of ways. And to use the shirt as a metaphor for that, I thought that was totally brilliant. I was dazzled.
- ED
- Well, thank you, but I think there is an ironic undertaking in looking at the fold because it’s the same kind of issue that you that you just brought up. It’s architectural practices, particularly theoretical ones, that tend to appropriate theory and recent philosophy. It’s a kind of applied theory to architecture and that’s why I tend to shy away.
What interests me about the distinction between fold and crease is precisely that the fold, in a way, becomes emblematic of the of the slippery practices of being able to fold in anything under that category. The crease is lodged culturally. That’s what fascinates me, that by its very nature fold is anti-representational. It resists representation which I think is a very convenient metaphor.
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Liz Diller, Description of “Crease” from Bad Press presented at Culture Lab 3.3: Weaklings, 1994. CCA
- BB
- What about origami?
- ED
- What about it? You’re into it? You really like the fold?
- BB
- I am going to defend the fold. Origami collects itself into one form; it’s not unlike montage. You can’t retrace the folds back to something interesting like you can with collage—or, perhaps, creases. There’s something to be said for trying to construct a new form out of a serial application or a transformation of lines that aren’t necessarily traceable. That’s what I think montage does. Montage makes that assembly without detracting to its references; that’s what gives it its power.
About these so-called catch phrases and catch-alls that get hipsterized in art or architecture theory. That’s too bad, I guess, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the entire aspect of that discourse is not worthy of engaging necessarily. I think it’s a very interesting introduction of narrative space back into the fold by signaling the crease.
I guess that’s why I thought back to origami, because in a sense, it’s one fold made into many folds and pictured as one fold in the end.
- JO
- I thought you were going to start off by saying origami is representational form-making. That seemed like the obvious statement, but you didn’t say that. Are you just being polite?
- BB
- I don’t really care how many folds it took to make the little colored swan, per se. What you look at at the end is this compressed feature of lines that represent some kind of animal. Trying to dismantle that isn’t as interesting to me as what amalgamates to form that thing. I’m not interested in the recipe.
- ED
- Well, can I just ask, what motivates origami? I don’t know much about it.
- BB
- I can speak as an ignorant westerner in this situation. It’s a challenge of transformational space where you try and take a singular element and reorganize it into one particular affect and then back into another. It has something to do with an asymmetrical or non-centred space in which things are always transforming, mutating, and going back and forth between different amalgamations—which I think is a very Japanese field, where there isn’t necessarily a final object but one that’s in constant transformation. I think of it more in terms of information. How information is always being folded and reconfigured, not unlike the shirt.
I don’t know what the fundamental historical motivations are behind origami. It’s just that there’s a certain way in which it calculates itself according to montage and to the whole proposition of a unified field of dynamic transformation.
- ED
- For me, it’s certainly the disruption of the contiguous surface and the ambiguous condition of making structure where there is none, and surface and structure the same thing. Where the crease becomes pertinent is in the unfolding of the fold. It’s the trace of the operation, and when that operation is motivated, that trace becomes significant. In the fold, it just becomes an invisible joint, but when the fold is unfolded, the joint becomes the object.
