tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5599996641013376589.post5105190651695302627..comments2022-11-09T21:03:44.529-08:00Comments on PHARMAKON LIBRARY: Kevin Hamilton: "Healing Brush Tool"Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08059822500106737973noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5599996641013376589.post-63691488171932359902008-12-17T00:01:00.000-08:002008-12-17T00:01:00.000-08:00Kevin has raised a fascinating point here-- how ea...Kevin has raised a fascinating point here-- how easily comes the <BR/>subjective reverie under the guise of a 'healing' transformation.<BR/><BR/><BR/><BR/>"Is my Rocky Mountain High a poison to me as well, a changing agent within me, that I exist in those spaces as someone who benefits from<BR/>genocide? I think so. But it's hard to get my modern mind around - I<BR/>fall so easily into displacing the evil done by attending to my own<BR/>positive or negative transformation."<BR/><BR/>Kevin Hamilton<BR/><BR/>and his ironic smile can be seen turning up at the edges of his <BR/>wonderfully tart, deadpan images:<BR/><BR/>http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_FLhbGXNtwE4/SUV-CKxocpI/AAAAAAAAADA/BDf6hmXzV40/s1600-h/1.3.6healingbrush.jpg<BR/><BR/>with, beneath the image, a quote in very proper undertaker-style <BR/>capitals, from First Corinthians:<BR/><BR/>'...oh Death, Where is Thy Sting?"<BR/><BR/>For some time now whenever I"ve come across Joseph Beuy's extravagant <BR/>debris I 've wondered, was he serious? was he deadpan and tart like<BR/>Kevin or is he really imagining himself some kind of faith healer? or <BR/>something, pharmakonian-chameloning, 'tweening between frames 55 and <BR/>166 as it were, a bit of a slip?<BR/><BR/>So was very happy tonight when E-flux Journal hit my inbox tonight, <BR/>with a new trenchant essay by Jan Verwoert . who deftly brings into <BR/>play a related set of questions about<BR/>''healing" and genocide-- , even, a flip/ of perpetrator and victim, <BR/>in the work of Joseph Beuys, possibly the most notorious practitioner <BR/>of artist-as-shaman in the post war period.. The full article is <BR/>here: http://e-flux.com/journal/view/12<BR/><BR/>Just for a moment we see with what ease the proximity of possible <BR/>redemption slides into a mess (is the road to hell paved with <BR/>Patagonia?) To quote Kevin Hamilton again:<BR/><BR/><BR/>"We can look, for example, to the function of the Colorado Rockies as a<BR/>pharmakon for white Americans, seeking a pastoral remedy from their<BR/>urban/suburban lives.<BR/><BR/>As a modern skeptic, I can divide the poison from the remedy, and see<BR/>how what heals me there in my fancy hiking boots is what kills the<BR/>place and the people displaced by white settlement. I'm racist without<BR/>meaning to be - sounds like the definition of white guilt.<BR/><BR/>But what if that's too subjective for the pharmakon? Can I look at how<BR/>what's healing me is also a poison to me, in addition to looking at it<BR/>as a poison to someone else?"<BR/><BR/><BR/>There's this strange event Joseph Beuys staged, "I Like America and It <BR/>Likes Me" in which he moved into a gallery in New York with a coyote <BR/>for awhile, claiming to be 'both sufferer and healer": Jan writes:<BR/><BR/>"In fact, he [Beuys] continued to dwell on one particularly <BR/>irresolvable ambiguity at the heart of the Messianic: to the extent <BR/>that the Messiah of the Christian tradition redeems humanity by <BR/>taking its suffering upon himself, he becomes both victim and <BR/>savior, both sufferer and healer. It was precisely this double role <BR/>that Beuys took on in the performance I Like America and America <BR/>Likes Me of 1974. The performance began (if the reports are to be <BR/>believed) with Beuys being picked up at the airport in New York by <BR/>an ambulance and transported to the René Block Gallery. There he <BR/>spent three days with a coyote and, wrapped in a felt blanket and <BR/>holding a walking stick upside down like a shepherd’s crook, played <BR/>the shamanistic healer and messianic shepherd. As the patient or <BR/>victim of an unspecified accident, he had arranged to have himself <BR/>delivered to a space where he would then turn himself into the healer.<BR/><BR/>Again, the crucial question is: who is claiming to heal whom of what <BR/>(and by virtue of what authority)? Since patient and healer are the <BR/>same person, one obvious way to understand the performance is as an <BR/>attempt at self-healing. In this sense, Kuspit’s interpretation of <BR/>Beuys trying, as a German, to heal German culture by tapping <BR/>mythical sources of energy (represented here by the coyote) would <BR/>seem justified. However, the highly problematic question that this <BR/>interpretation leaves unanswered is: by what right does this German <BR/>claim to be not only healer, but also patient and sufferer (if not <BR/>even victim)? Victim of whom? Why would a German—in the historical <BR/>wake of Germany’s responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust and <BR/>its instigation of two world wars—ever be entitled to play that role <BR/>on an international stage? Beuys’ statements on the performance are <BR/>no help: “I believe I made contact with the psychological trauma <BR/>point of the United States’ energy constellation: the whole American <BR/>trauma with the Indian, the Red Man.”11 (The symptoms of the <BR/>American trauma, according to Beuys, manifest themselves in the <BR/>alienated culture of capitalism, represented in the performance by <BR/>issues of The Wall Street Journal spread out on the floor on which, <BR/>as he recounts, the coyote urinated now and again.) Despite the <BR/>change of geographical context the problem with this scenario of <BR/>trauma and healing remains the same. By interpreting the trauma of <BR/>the genocide committed against the Native American population as a <BR/>trauma for the modern United States caused by this genocide, Beuys <BR/>essentially declares perpetrators to be victims. In this picture, <BR/>the supposedly painful alienation of the United States from its <BR/>roots is given the same status as the suffering of the victims of <BR/>genocide, which fall out of the picture entirely. Though surely <BR/>unintentional (and nevertheless effective), murder is equated with a <BR/>regrettable destruction of nature. The historical victims have no <BR/>voice here. The coyote cannot complain.<BR/><BR/>Almost inescapably, one feels compelled to read this constellation <BR/>as a parable of the German situation and the exchange of roles as <BR/>the expression of Beuys’ notoriously unclear position in relation to <BR/>the historic role and guilt of his own generation. Benjamin Buchloh <BR/>articulated this criticism with all possible harshness. In his essay <BR/>“Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol,” Buchloh in principle accused <BR/>Beuys of deliberately blurring the historical facts by mythologizing <BR/>the concepts of suffering and healing, thus of avoiding the question <BR/>of responsibility." (Jan Verwoert) <BR/><BR/><BR/>and the reference to Buchloh is: Benjamin Buchloh, “Beuys: The <BR/>Twilight of the Idol,” originally published in Artforum 18, no. 5 <BR/>(1980): 35–43; quoted here from Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, <BR/>ed.Gene Ray (New York: D.A.P., 2001), 199–211.<BR/><BR/>One wonders if surely the title "I Like America and It Likes Me" <BR/>points out a trickster element-- after all the coyote is the mythic <BR/>trickster out here in the West. So such a statement as "I believe I <BR/>made contact with the psychological trauma point of the United States' <BR/>energy constellation..." has this wild<BR/>lunatic fringe Americana quality about it (like some ham radio <BR/>operator communicating with the Virgin Mary) and not by accident, <BR/>no? The "Red Man"? It's such a zoned out comment, so out-there <BR/>racist (like who the hell are you to make contact with the Red <BR/>Man??!! You gotta admire the chutzpah.<BR/><BR/><BR/>=cm<BR/><BR/>https://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2008-December/001078.htmlAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com