Death Work in Venice - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Death Work in Venice
In memoriam Khadija Saye

MIGNON NIXON

A man sits down in the seat across from me in the Underground train and
begins to cry. I look up from my book, J.-B. Pontalis’s Frontiers in Psychoanalysis:
Between the Dream and Psychic Pain (1981), chapter fourteen, “On Death-Work,” the
week’s assigned text for my reading group in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University
College London. My attention pivots from the theoretical proposition that “the
movements and defenses generated by the death instinct have superseded the con-
flict between the claims of desire conveyed by sexuality and the forces of suppres-
sion and repression” to the middle-aged man before me whose tears have escalat-
ed to stifled sobs.1 As the train moves off, the man uncovers his face, closes his
occhi, and appears to fall asleep. At Russell Square, my stop, I tiptoe out across pil-
lows of newspaper, discarded copies of the morning commuter paper, the Metro.
There, the news is of the attacks on the Manchester Arena two nights before, SU
the 22nd of May, in which a twenty-two-year-old local man killed twenty-two people
with a suicide bomb concealed in a backpack.

In the reading group, we begin our discussion of the death-work with Freud’s
theory of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). “What is concerned
here?” muses Pontalis: “The desire for death, or the death of desire?”2 Death is in
us from the beginning, Freud has it. The prominence of sexuality in Freud’s theo-
ry, Pontalis contends, is devised to conceal death. Death is hidden, but drives us. UN
drive makes us work. The death-work is “negative-work,” an unbinding process
having “no aim but its own accomplishment”—but it is work.3 The talk turns to sui-
cidal fantasy. I remember the suicide bomber in Manchester. I have been not-
thinking about suicide bombers since 2005, when a fellow resident of north
London boarded a Piccadilly Line train with a bomb hidden in a backpack and
detonated it, committing mass murder in the car my husband, Greg, was riding in
on his way to work. He was uninjured, and I make a point of not-thinking about
this daily when I board the same train, sitting, if possible, near the driver’s com-

1.
Press, 1981), pag. 191–92.

J.-B. Pontalis, Frontiers in Psychoanalysis: Between the Dream and Psychic Pain (London: Hogarth

Ibid., P. 190.

Ibid., P. 189.

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
o
C
T
o
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

D
o

io
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
O
C
T
O
_
UN
_
0
0
3
0
0
1
7
5
4
0
5
0
o
C
T
o
_
UN
_
0
0
3
0
0
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

OCTOBER

partment in the front car, the seat Greg occupied when he was not-damaged by
that bomb. “Every psychoanalyst talks about death insinuated into life,” Pontalis
observes. One “cannot evade the antagonistic work of death” but must “go out to
meet it.”4

“Something has happened in London,” a scratchy voice announces near me,
as a bedside lamp clicks on. The three of us are lying on narrow beds in a close,
dark room. Venice. We are here with students on a field trip to the Biennale.
Yesterday, the Giardini; today, the Arsenale. Text messages begin to ping, and my
roommates fill me in over breakfast. Late last night, three men drove a van into a
crowd at the Borough Market near London Bridge before launching themselves
on bystanders in a frenzied knife attack. The snap election campaign, called in
April by Conservative prime minister Theresa May, is suspended for a second time.
I call home. My father, lying in the hospital and watching the news on television,
asks if I am safe. My sister reminds him that I am not in London, but he does not
retain this information. I send him a picture postcard, this one handed to me out-
side the Giardini. Doing this, I affirm, as On Kawara distilled the essence of all
remote communication in his telegrams, that I Am Still Alive (1970–2000)—and so
is he. Kawara’s One Million Years (Past), “for all those who have lived and died,” and
One Million Years (Future), “for the last one,” are being read during the Biennale.

The day before, entering the central pavilion in the Giardini, we halted in a
tight space near the entrance to consider the show’s sleepers. In the chorus of
derision that has greeted Viva Arte Viva, the photographic self-portraits of Mladen
Stilinović sleeping, a series from the late 1970s titled “Artist at Work,” displayed
alongside Franz West’s psycho-iconic chaise longue, have been picked out as
emblems of an enervated art-politics for bad times. Was this curatorial conceit, we
wondered, an appeal to the dream-work or a blind eye turned to a mad world—or
both? Driven to hypervigilance by a madman’s predawn tweets, our insomniac cul-
ture, tuned to the alarums of news feeds and text alerts, craves—but eschews—a
good night’s sleep. Rehearsing for doomsday, those who still have beds to sleep in,
or couches to lie on, refuse to use them. Those who don’t—refugees, the home-
less, the dispossessed, the incarcerated, the desperate—long for sleep, the unbro-
ken, unmolested sleep of the perchance-to-dream kind. But in Viva Arte Viva,
refugees do not sleep. Invece, they are put to work, by Olafur Eliasson for one,
whose workshop producing lamps for sale to visitors occupies a spacious atrium in
the Giardini. The dignity of work, rather than the dignity of sleep, is showcased
here. I think of Yayoi Kusama, who in 1966 also turned the Giardini into a market,

Ibid., P. 191.

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
o
C
T
o
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

D
o

io
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
O
C
T
O
_
UN
_
0
0
3
0
0
1
7
5
4
0
5
0
o
C
T
o
_
UN
_
0
0
3
0
0
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

Death Work in Venice

filling the lawn of the Italian pavilion with one thousand five hundred mirrored
balls and selling them, under the title slogan “Your Narcissism for Sale,” for the
price of two dollars (before the authorities put an end to the performance, object-
ing to selling works of art “like hot dogs”).5

Whatever “pulls us away from the world of dream, keeps us awake,” also
“stops us from being able to paint,” Jacqueline Rose observes in her essay “On Not
Being Able to Sleep” (2000).6 Ironically, given its opening nod to sleep, this is the
defining problem of Viva Arte Viva. The unconscious—political unconscious, opti-
cal unconscious—is as elusive as slumber is conspicuous. For this is an exhibition
so affirmative, so insistently art- and artist-positive (“designed with artists, by artists,
and for artists”), that it is also, in Leo Bersani’s term, “antiartistic.”7 Resisting (as I
read it) the instrumentalization of art by politics, curator Christine Macel protests
too much: “In a world of conflicts and shocks, art bears witness to the most pre-
cious part of what makes us human,” she writes.8 And so, turning away from the
scene of politics, which is also the scene of the unconscious par excellence, Viva
Arte Viva does not so much evade as embrace the “messianic task” allocated to art
“in the face of the failure of politics,” as Briony Fer has aptly described the
predicament of contemporary art.9 In its humanist bombast—witness the Pavilion
of Joys and Fears, the Pavilion of Colors, the Pavilion of Time and Infinity—Viva
Arte Viva invokes an aesthetic of redemption in which art’s claims to be “a correc-
tion of life” are predicated on a “negation of life” that, as Bersani has argued,
“must also negate art.”10

In Venice, if there is a draw, it is not Viva Arte Viva but Anne Imhof’s Faust in
the German pavilion. Outside, Dobermans pace in a glass cage. Dentro, visitors tra-
verse a vertiginous glass floor that spans the space, below which soiled towels and
metal bowls, among other, more sinister-looking props, lie abandoned. At appoint-
ed times, performers appear, enacting a drawn-out bondage-themed scenario,
their movements cued by the artist via text message. One of the dancers is a friend
of someone in our group. A few of the students excuse themselves to queue for the
performance. I think back to Pontalis: “The movements and defenses generated by

5.
Kusama, ed. Frances Morris (London: Tate, 2012), P. 109.

Quoted in Rachel Taylor, “Walking Piece, Narcissus Garden and Self-Portraiture 1966,” in Yayoi

6.
Jacqueline Rose, “On Not Being Able to Sleep,” in On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis
and the Modern World (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003), P. 121. The title is an homage to the British
psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s autobiographical narrative On Not Being Able to Paint (London:
Heinemann, 1950).

7.
Press, 1990), P. 2.

The term is used by Bersani in The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University

Christine Macel, curator’s statement, Viva Arte Viva, exhibition brochure, P. 3.

9.
Contemporary Art, University College London, Giugno 10, 2017.

Briony Fer, “Little Exercise,” conference paper, “Lifework,” Centre for the Study of

10.

Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, P. 2.

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
o
C
T
o
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

D
o

io
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
O
C
T
O
_
UN
_
0
0
3
0
0
1
7
5
4
0
5
0
o
C
T
o
_
UN
_
0
0
3
0
0
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

OCTOBER

the death instinct have superseded the conflict between the claims of desire con-
veyed by sexuality and the forces of suppression and repression.” So it seems. IO
think about Carolee Schneemann receiving this year’s Lion d’Or for lifetime
achievement. The movements of the small troupe recall the pairing of dancers in
“holds” and “falls” in Schneemann’s kinetic theater. Faust’s devices are perversely
reminiscent of Snows, the piece Schneemann presented at the Martinique Theatre
in New York in the winter of 1967, for the week of the Angry Arts, a mass artistic
protest against the American war in Vietnam. In Snows, six performers, three
women and three men, circled and grasped one another, wrapped one another’s
bodies in tinfoil and painted one another’s faces, grappled with and stroked one
another, their movements evoking, without mimicking, the contorted postures
imposed on bodies in war and under torture.11 The sensual grace of lithe bodies
exposed, shackled, hung upside down, as documented in the photographs of
atrocity Schneemann obsessively collected, provided a lexicon of movements in
which sadism fused with eroticism, not slickly and photogenically, as they do in
Faust, but in raw contingency. Faust takes a leaf from Schneemann’s notes for
Snows, in which the artist expressed her horror at a culture “mechanical in its emo-
tions and insane with cold lusts.”12 For Schneemann, Tuttavia, there was a political
imperative to confront, to take on, the dynamic of desire in a culture of cold lust:

The performance imagery is finally ambiguous: shifting metaphors in
which performers are aggressor and victim, torturer and tortured, lover
and beloved. . . . We set each other on fire, we extinguish the fire, we
create each other’s face and body, we abandon each other, we save
each other, we take responsibility for each other, we lose responsibility
for each other, we reveal each other, we choose, we respond, we build,
we are destroyed.13

In the reading group, on the day of the election, we discuss laws. Where do
they come from? What do they do? What counts as law, covenant, regulation, E
how to distinguish them? This is a matter of dispute for the group, but as the dis-
cussion breaks up, there is agreement on one point. The Conservatives’ threat to
bring in more draconian anti-terror laws if, as anticipated, they are returned to
power in a landslide is a strategy of escalation that is dangerously oblivious to the

11.
ed. Bruce R. McPherson (Kingston, N.Y.: Doucumentext, 1979/1997), pag. 128–49.

Carolee Schneemann, “Snows,” in More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings,

12.
Circle, ed. Krstine Stiles (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), P. 114.

Carolee Schneemann, Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her

13.

Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy, P. 131.

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
o
C
T
o
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

D
o

io
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
O
C
T
O
_
UN
_
0
0
3
0
0
1
7
5
4
0
5
0
o
C
T
o
_
UN
_
0
0
3
0
0
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

Death Work in Venice

imperatives of the death instinct. Pontalis again: Anyone seeking “to specify the
present social forms assumed by the death instinct” is confronted “by the burden of
the choice!”14 He names “the atomic threat, the cycle of violence and counter-vio-
lence, pollution, and bondage” among these forms and concludes: “It is as though
the metaphors of Beyond the Pleasure Principle have become . . . those of our cul-
ture.”15 This jeremiad seems laced with death-excitement. There is no escaping
the death drive. We must “go out to meet it.”

At ten o’clock, the exit poll is revealed, projecting a hung Parliament. I lack
the nerve to sleep, trusting the forecasted reversal of Conservative fortunes only to
the apotropaic logic of an all-night vigil. The prime minister’s political advisors
coolly account for the shock result: “The Conservative election campaign . . . failed
to notice the surge in Labour support, because modern campaigning techniques
require ever-narrower targeting of specific voters, and we were not talking to the
people who decided to vote for Labour.”16 This not-talking strategy, a campaign of
cold lusts in which May refused to debate her opponents and avoided unscripted
encounters with voters, contriving to not-talk by repeating slogans with a mechani-
cal regularity that would make a robot blush, proves a turn-off, even in the wealthy
seat of Kensington, which for the first time elects a Labour MP, the architectural
historian, journalist, and housing activist Emma Dent Coad.

“The burnt carcass of Grenfell speaks for itself,” Dent Coad would tell
Parliament a week later in her maiden speech.17 Inferno. Crematorium.
Hecatomb. Grenfell Towers, a tower block apartment building clad in a new, shiny
skin to redeem a blot on the skyline of west London, is now a charred monument
to the violence of austerity government, privatization, deregulation, racism, xeno-
phobia, and structural inequality. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s promise of a pol-
itics “for the many not the few,” lingering on abandoned campaign placards,
acquires an eerie resonance as the still-unformed minority government—May now
in negotiation with the hard-right Democratic Unionist Party of Northern
Ireland—reaches its Katrina moment. May visits the site of the fire without meet-
ing a single resident or grieving relative. The official explanation for this, “security
concerns,” draws an unfavorable comparison with the nonagenarian queen. Nel
coming days, we learn about flammable cladding, plastic insulation, exposed gas
pipes, about the dearth of sprinklers, fire escapes, fire doors, and secondary stair-

14.

15.

Pontalis, Frontiers, P. 192.

Ibid., P. 193.

16.
Nick Timothy, quoted in “May’s Abusive Top Staff Removed As Recriminations Grow over
Poll Failure,” Observer, Giugno 10, 2017, online edition, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/
jun/10/theresa-may-top-advisers-quit-nick-timothy-fiona-hill-tory-recriminations-grow.

17.
06-22a.228.3&s=speaker%3A25706#g248.0.

Emma Dent Coad, MP for Kensington, https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2017-

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
o
C
T
o
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

D
o

io
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
O
C
T
O
_
UN
_
0
0
3
0
0
1
7
5
4
0
5
0
o
C
T
o
_
UN
_
0
0
3
0
0
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
o
C
T
o
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

D
o

io
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
O
C
T
O
_
UN
_
0
0
3
0
0
1
7
5
4
0
5
0
o
C
T
o
_
UN
_
0
0
3
0
0
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

Khadija Saye. Dwelling: In This Space We Breathe. 2017.

Death Work in Venice

cases in public housing, about tenants’ fears, repeatedly expressed to local govern-
ment officials, that they, like countless others throughout the country, were living
in a “firetrap.”18 We learn that the authorities have “made a corpse of Reason,” as
Pontalis describes the psychic shocks of the Great War.19

A photograph appears on the screen. I recognize it, a black-and-white por-
trait, self-portrait, of a woman in profile, head bent forward, her neck making a
shelf on which a fluted cup is placed by an outstretched arm reaching out from
the margin. The photograph is from a series of wet-plate collodion tintypes we saw
in Venice, at the Diaspora Pavilion. The exacting, antiquated medium takes the
image out of time, or projects it more deeply into time. This depth cradles the
solid body, the shadowed face, and the wrapped head, concentrated in its bend-
ing, holds them in time but also suspends them in the temporal ambiguity of
anachronism. I find it impossible not to think of Roland Barthes’s observation of
being the subject of the portrait-photograph: “I then experience a micro-version
of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a spectre.”20 From a series entitled
Dwelling: In This Space We Breathe, the photograph is conspicuously, self-consciously
spectral, an adventitious effect of the medium being to deposit ghostly traces in
the image and at the same time to “turn” it, like milk, as Barthes also wrote, into
something invisible, something that is “not what we see.”21

“What makes for a grievable life?”22 In Grenfell, being an artist, exhibiting
at the Venice Biennale. “Khadija is now missing,” the artist Joy Gregory
announces the night after the fire, speaking on a panel at the Institute for
Advanced Study.23 Khadija Saye, aged twenty-four, the photographer who created
Dwelling: In This Space We Breathe, lives with her mother, Mary Mendy, on an upper
floor of Grenfell Tower.

The artist has some prominent friends, including my local MP, David
Lammy, who announces her disappearance in a radio interview.24 We are left with
a few bodies of work, including this one. I want to resist Dwelling: In This Space We
Breathe becoming Grenfell. The work attests to a myth of the domestic in which we

18.
tower-fire-the-forgotten-forgotten-victims/.

Grenfell Action Group, https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2017/06/22/grenfell-

19.

Pontalis, Frontiers, P. 190.

20.
Hill and Wang, 1981), P. 14.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York:

21.

Barthes, Camera Lucida, P. 6.

22.
Violence (London: Verso, 2004), P. 20.

Judith Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and

23.
15, 2017.

Joy Gregory, “Talking Points,” University College London Institute for Advanced Study, Giugno

24.
Anny Shaw, “Labour MP Searching for Missing Artist Calls Grenfell Tower Fire ‘Corporate
Manslaughter,’” The Art Newspaper, Giugno 15, 2017. http://theartnewspaper.com/news/news/labour-mp-
searching-for-missing-artist-says-grenfell-tower-fire-is-corporate-manslaughter/.

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
o
C
T
o
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

D
o

io
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
O
C
T
O
_
UN
_
0
0
3
0
0
1
7
5
4
0
5
0
o
C
T
o
_
UN
_
0
0
3
0
0
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

OCTOBER

all share, as far as we are allowed: Where we dwell is where we can breathe, Dove
there is “oxygen in the air.” The poet M. NourbeSe Philip, in her opening keynote
for “Feminist Emergency,” a conference that takes place a week after the fire,
offers this suggestion. There are ways, she says, to breathe for another. It’s a start.
In London, the community of Grenfell has been showing the way: I can’t breathe. IO
will breathe for you.25

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
o
C
T
o
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

D
o

io
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
O
C
T
O
_
UN
_
0
0
3
0
0
1
7
5
4
0
5
0
o
C
T
o
_
UN
_
0
0
3
0
0
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

25.
M. NourbeSe Philip, “Gasp: Unspeakable Acts,” keynote lecture, “Feminist Emergency,"
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Giugno 22, 2017. Philip quoted Nina Simone’s lyric for “22nd
Century,” which begins: “There is no oxygen in the air.” The lecture’s refrain was: “I can’t breathe. IO
will breathe for you.” Death Work in Venice image

Scarica il pdf