BY MATTHEW GOULISH
A shape of paper trimmed by an astronaut—from a greater the instability of a social structure. Income
standard sheet into something like a letter M—floats
in zero gravity. Through a hole at its center a tube,
another blank page rolled and inserted there, transects
the axis, making the object multi-dimensional. Air
currents buffet it as they would a kite, and it arcs
and bounces on its wobbly flight around the space
station’s interior. The performance realizes a plan
of the artist, Eduardo Kac, for writing untethered to
gravity, letters multidirectional as planetary bodies.
Video-documented and projected on an immersive
room-sized portal’s wall, the paper form levitates
before a backdrop of windows and an upside-down
earth’s blue and white horizon.
Inner Telescope, curated by Fulla Abdul-Jabbar and
Caroline Picard, opened the final season of Chicago’s
Sector 2337. After five years of exhibitions, literary
events, and performances, Sector will cease operations
at the end of 2018. Midway in scale between the vibrant,
volunteer house galleries and major museums continu-
ally expanding in size, budget, and collecting ambition,
Sector housed exhibitions that could not easily situate
elsewhere. Too many factors contributed to the closing
to consider here. Proprietors Picard and Devin King
stated in their announcement: “Spaces don’t have to
last forever to have lasting impact.” As August turns
to September, I consider sustainability. I ask myself
what questions I need to ask. From the vantage of
these “uncollectible streets” (Dionne Brand), what is
missing? What has been lost? Is vanishing possible?
To evanesce (from the Latin evanescere: e-‘out of’ +
vanus ‘empty’) to pass from the field of perception
and into the void.
Where does the middle come from, the idea of
center? A drafting compass, or “pair of compasses,”
that which encircle, consists in two legs, one adjustable
at the hinge above, the other fixed, its fixedness a
consequence of its needle-like point. The English word
center derives from the Latin name for this compass
point, and from the Greek kentron meaning “wasp
sting.” What trace exists after the sting’s removal,
continuing after its vanishing from the surrounding
circle it initiated, anchored, and possibilized? The
artist sees his floating M as a paper humanoid of
sorts, the tube a severed umbilical cord. He sees it as
a 3-D glyph-like rendering of MOI (French for “me”).
I read M for middle. In my years of teaching writing
in an art school, I have encountered the imperative
to conceive of courses with interdisciplinary appeal.
I seek a concept over which no discipline can claim
authority. I need a subject like “systems” or “ghosts,”
to set at the center, as one sets a table before a meal,
to gather around. I might say that each specialist has
singular authority, none more definitive than the next.
Such a middle zone bears a sting in its otherness, the
loneliness of the equidistant outside point, fulfilling its
task of closing the set. The goad belongs to none and
all. Moon orbits earth and us on its surface—distance
as analogue for access.
Economist Amartya Sen has argued that the greater
the distance between highest and lowest incomes, the
52 CritiCs Page
compression that produces a “middle class” results
from labors of the most ordinary consolidations,
the stabilizing work of taxation, minimum wages,
unionization. I wonder whether the same principle
holds true if transferred across dimensions. In his
book, The Idea of Justice (2009) Sen wrote,
…the valuation of income is entirely as a means
to other ends and also that it is one means among
others. A more inclusive list of means has been used
by John Rawls in his theory of justice through his
concentration on primary good, which include rights,
liberties and opportunities, income and wealth, and
the social bases of self-respect…The worst of incomes
cannot stand separated from the deeper concerns,
and a society that respects individual well-being and
freedom must take note of these concerns in making
impersonal comparisons as well as social evaluations.
Eduardo Kac, Inner Telescope in the cupola, International Space Station, 2017. Courtesy the artist.
It remains a question (mine) whether inequality—of
rights, liberties, and opportunities—destabilizes social
structures as much as inequality of income.
In Dialogues in Public Art (2000) artist Vito Acconci
wrote: “I’ve talked about coming in from the side, and
coming up from underneath, and clinging on like a
leech. I’d welcome the chance sometime, the risk, of
having to start from the center; then I’d have to make
my own center, I wouldn’t have the luxury of react-
ing.” Operating from this provocation, I ask whether
avant-gardism has traditionally been considered an
edge phenomena, whether an entrenched prejudice
discriminates against middles of any sort—geographic,
imagistic, economic, or symbolic—as a possible seat
of philosophical and aesthetic adventure; whether Not long ago the great English critic and historian follows function” or “art into life,” this was mostly but of weakening their
coastal privileging extends to metaphorical thought, of photography Steve Edwards complained that art because it aimed at finding a place in the still-ris- antagonism.” In Marx’s
championing strange over familiar, new over old, historians have “paid remarkably little attention to the ing industrial economy and its attendant political day, that weakening
minoritarian over majoritarian, extraordinary over petite bourgeoisie,” and particularly so its role as “the forms. Artists could be workers too and so they could took the form of an airy
ordinary, or generally the extreme over the mod- invisible social glue.” We might add that it is worse be organized. proclivity to imagine
erate—as if to equate edge with the challenges of still with critics. Indeed, even as the rapidly evolving Since 1945, however, the ruling wannabe fantasies oneself “elevated above
radicalism, and the center with a conservative status geopolitical dynamics of class relations reclaim their consecrated in our highest cultural forms have shifted class antagonism;” in
quo. I welcome Acconci’s rejection of that subtraction sway more and more with each passing day, writing from the old workerism to identifications that fall ours it is an earthy itch
story, his generous, characteristic upending. about class remains clunky, naive, boorish, and po- outside of the modern economy—to folk culture, to sink below. Either way,
My mind returns to philosopher Charles Taylor’s larized—“undialectical,” as we used to say—where it say, or itinerant life, or PTSD and “resistance,” or the above or below, deluded
notion of anti-structure, the carnival, the nonsense exists at all. ever popular perennially innocent brute materiality or depressed, as a wan-
event, the dress-up participatory ritual of reversal. Sure, we hear about the ever wealthier 0.1% and, of of things. Think Pete Seeger, for example, or Karen nabe god or a wannabe
Anti-structure’s revelation of life’s inexhaustibility course, the evermore precarious raft of the uneducated, Finley, or Bruno Latour. thing, our way of tem-
positions it as rejoinder to “the temptation to put into but who writes about us as a class? Who writes about The role we occupy in our capacity as cultural dis- pering class conflict can
effect a code which brooks no limit,” that totalitarian the social glue that not only keeps the whole system of aggregators and creative destroyers, in other words, is be summed up with the
urge that “lends a positive ring to such slogans as ‘zero exploitation and denial in place but extends it? Who no longer R&D for Henry Ford’s empire, or Vladimir same rule of thumb: a
tolerance.’” Intolerance arises from the belief that writes about our role as cultural intercessors in “the Lenin’s, or Franklin Roosevelt’s but instead serves liberal is someone who
one has perceived the entire horizon of experience, space between globetrotting plutocrats on the high the post-statist, neo-feudalizing, climate-changning thinks they are innocent.
rejecting the notion of more to life, to be invented if end and struggling flextimers below?” Who writes agenda of the great wealth and power consolidation
not discovered, as one must make a center of one’s about our charge not to conquer the old edifice of that dominates the headlines of our day. “Is Democracy
own—a center in which to confront disappointment, enlightenment, but instead to dismantle it one brick Dying?” is the cover pitch for The Atlantic this month, BLAKE STIMSON is the author
to open oneself to the possibility of a further reality at a time, opening wider and wider the rent through for example, just as it was for Foreign Affairs in June. of Citizen Warhol.
inside the apparent reality. Dances of encounter, of which the redistribution of wealth and political power Indeed, these days different versions of the same twinge
risk and reward, gather in middle space, harder to that first found its current in 1980 continues to flow? pop up on the New York Times’ website every few hours.
characterize than the durable extremes that surround Well, there are a few who take up these questions There have always been two defining roles for cul-
it, more fragile, more patient, more necessary. generally—Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, for ex- tural types like us: either we use our creative talents
ample, or Thomas Frank, or Lane Relyea—but they are to assemble “the space between” into workable social
MATTHEW GOULISH is co-founder and dramaturg of the performance
group Every house has a door, and teaches in the Writing Program at far between. Such self-reflexivity is hard, and taking form and in so doing make our role as the “invisible
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. on personal responsibility is harder still. It is not social glue” visible and testable, or we disassemble that BY BLAKE STIMSON
something that even the most self-punishing among form; either we make it about our desires and interests
us relish. It is much easier to write about that which or we hide them by ventriloquizing the desires and
feels other to oneself or, even easier, to be other to interests of the other and the Other, the struggling
oneself—an out we have been taking for a long time. flextimer and the globetrotting plutocrat.
If there was a moment when the cultural wing of Self-reflexivity is hard. Without it, however, we
the educated class worked overtime to imagine itself simply repeat the crime against humanity that Marx
as something other than a lumpen drag on the system said was characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie: “not of
by donning coveralls or hewing to slogans like “form doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labor,
SEPTEMBER 2O18 CritiCs Page 53