In conjunction with the screening of ‘Deproduction‘ at Third Edition, Frida Sandström joined Terre Thaemlitz for a conversation over email, on the art industry, on the biographical and on the question of when a speech act becomes a performance.
Still from ‘Deproduction’ by Terre Thaemlitz
Frida Sandström: You are established in the middle of several fields, where disciplines are brought closer to each other through changed finances for art and music, as well as the fine and performing arts scene’s increased interest in the choreographic field and also the electronic music scene. How have you experienced this development, from your practice as DJ Sprinkles to the recent participation in Documenta 14? How do you find the art market mingling with a still not so well financed and often self-made, underground electronic music scene? Or, is it at all of any interest to make such distinctions?
Terre Thaemlitz: Of course, those distinctions are vital to clarify —particularly given the way arts financing is much more reliant upon patronage, whereas music industries are much more rooted in sales. This is also a familiar divide between haute couture and pop culture, which also relates to how the majority of people in this world find the arts snobby and irrelevant. This is countered by an annoyingly naïve generalization about the universality of music, blah-blah. The way I usually illustrate this divide is to point out the fact that so many people in the arts who actively understand that creativity/authenticity/originality are all bullshit can then turn to music and still believe in the authenticity of the blues musician. So most people carry these multiple and contradictory ideological relationships to media, yet we fail to ever think about it. And that failure is, of course, something that facilitates different forms of economic exploitation.
I have written several times about how the art industry’s “rediscovery” of sound art in the early ’00s was directly linked to the collapse of the European audio distribution networks — in particular, the bankruptcy of EFA, which enacted a domino collapse of countless record labels. The result was a glut of audio producers who then turned to the arts for employment. This flux in audio-based labor was what that was all about. That’s it.
I must say, the social dynamics of the art world are cultic and exhausting. One advantage of working in the music industry is the relative ease around discussing fees, arriving at contracts, etc. In the arts, everybody wants to suck countless hours of time socializing, “having coffee,” never getting down to specifics… It is a level of social participation in an unrewarding system that is just so fucking annoying. If you want to license a work for exhibition, just fucking say so. Tell me if there is a fee involved up front. Don’t require me to be enthusiastic about your exhibition. Just get to the point. Of course, curators are also always trying to pick the brains of producers outside the arts for clues as to who is up and coming, etc. Also annoying. I’ve learned to avoid having coffee as much as possible.
FS: As a writer and performer, what is your relation to biographical writing and to fiction? That is, how do you relate biography to the rewriting of a history, like I would say that you do in Deproduction? How is a sense of a collective/dominant idea of a shared history reconfigured through the embodiment of a self-ethnography, and what role does fiction play in this context?
TT: I consider biography, autobiography, narrative and fiction as extensions of oral traditions. For me, actively incorporating these “non-factual” strategies for story telling into historical and cultural analyses is a way of constantly understanding analyses as ‘polluted’ or ‘distorted’ by the subjective. It is also a kind of post-Modern stance of placing the self within one’s site of critique, as opposed to traditional Modernist vanguardism through which one imagines launching critiques from outside. In the same way I do consider my audio productions as a kind of ‘folk music’ in that they are minor and in opposition to dominant markets, so are my analyses in some way related to the critical construction of ‘folklore’ and alternate factual systems in order to produce certain reactions and feelings of impact–but never in a glorifying or heroic way. To the contrary, any intended impact is generally self-destructive and destabilizing, which is how I see the political position of ‘folk’ in antagonism to the stature and glory of dominant cultural praxes. I guess I came to this language of folk through Nina Simone’s autobiography, in which she spoke very clearly about how she never saw herself as a jazz musician, but as a folk musician. It resonated for me. Not about folk as a stylistic genre, but as a cultural position.
FS: When presenting a text, how do you develop it’s presentation — through verbal reading, animation or printed matter? What makes, in your opinion, a text need to be read/heard, and why should it?
TT: As with my live performances and DJ-ing, I only do public readings of texts to pay the bills. There is no necessity for them to be read aloud. When texts are written for specific symposiums or exhibitions, I generally attempt to integrate direct criticisms of my participation in those events, since I do see my need to take such jobs as a cultural capitulation to art and media industries with rather specific means of exploitation. First and foremost, the means of making us all feel so fucking grateful for doing shit for free or next to nothing, just to “get out there.” Labor critique becomes virtually impossible within a climate where any complaint is immediately met with statements like, “At least you do what you love.” Fuck off already. Despite all the positive vibes over cups of coffee, these are industries that rely on the impossibility for true solidarity.
FS: In the essay ‘Languages of the New Brutality’, Nina Power writes the following:
[Viktor] Klemperer describes the language of the Third Reich as no longer drawing a distinction between spoken and written language, such that “everything was oration, had to be address, exhortation, invective.” Fanaticism becomes a virtue. While the rally, the talk show, the shock jock, and the tabloid smear all exhibit these features, the internet provides us with another avenue of investigation. If spoken and written language continue to be blurred, such that every Trump tweet is indistinguishable from something he might equally well say aloud (“Getting ready for my big foreign trip. Will be strongly protecting American interests—that’s what I like to do!”), we can also describe the blurring of the distinction between written language and the image in the form of the meme.
How do you work specifically with the performance of words in your lecture performances and what would you say is the difference with words outspoken in the present moment, besides the printed or recorded ones? What is, according to you, a public speech?
TT: I’m not sure if this is really an answer to what you are asking, but I do anticipate the ways in which people will misinterpret, oversimplify and essentialize the things I speak about. Since I do not use social media myself, those misinterpretations quickly take over the ways people perceive my work, and of course, how they perceive me. Of course, personally speaking, it can be disappointing and even hurtful. But I also see this as a means of self-erasure, which is also something I am interested in. Specifically, how self-erasure and other practices of secrecy relate to the legacy of sexual and gender closets. In today’s cultural climate, the speed with which I can no longer recognize my intentions is quite amazing. I do think this somehow presents a contemporary restructuring of ‘the closet’ as it persists amidst, or despite, such extreme visibilities.
FS: You are performing in many contexts, as well as you are performing these contexts. We live in a time where the notion of performance and performativity is of high value for the arts industry as well as in the new liberal market in general, where performance is the word for post-fordist alienation of workers and lives. How do you relate to the notion, in terms of identity and experience as well as of arts? When it comes to production (and deproduction), I find your text certainly interesting when it comes to the production of lives as well as of identity – products which are clearly intertwined. Do you, and if so: how, refuse performance?
TT: You walk away from work, you turn down job offers, you minimize participation in those systems as much as possible, even when you need the money.
FS: In an essay on verbal and non-verbal movement, Sima Belmar writes on the gap between the two, which according to her are performed not as a generalised synthesis, but rather of the bridge in between two different positions and practices.
Are we understanding something different about the same thing when we investigate that thing through non-verbal movement vs. through words? Can we arrive at the same understanding of the same thing from different sensory and cognitive approaches? Is that even a desirable goal? What do we want when we say we want to bridge the gap? Butler and Jenkinson chose to perform the gap, to wade in, swim, tread water, float, and play chicken in the gap—though there wasn’t a spirit of knocking opponents off shoulders.
How do you work on these ”choreographies of collapse” in your practice as artist and performer, in the intersection of theory and musical/performance practice?
TT: You know, I think it is so interesting that dancers and choreographers often have such truly interesting analyses behind their work. So why does it always end up kind of all being the same? It’s like improvisational jazz. I think the concepts are really vital and interesting as reactions against systems of codification. But I’ll be damned if I ever want to sit through that shit.
FS: Paul B. Preciado recently wrote an essay on Technopatriarchy, which I assume is inspired by Deproduction. In the text, Preciado refers to “the evolution of linguistic codes of social and cultural reproduction” as “a key element to consider in any investigation of the uses of power”. They ask:
Can a new form of masculinity be defined in nonnecropolitical terms? Is it possible to depatriarchalize and decolonize the institutions of family and nation-state?
According to Deproduction, the answer would be no. Still, our society is more and more dependent on useful data, though readable signs, numbers and definitions, which Preciado calls “linguistic codes of social and cultural reproduction”. How to aim at the purloined letter, the de-linked sign without a signifyer? Or, are we already bare symbols, in a sovereign system of semiotics?
TT: I am not familiar with that text by Paul, but of course he has dealt with issues of reproduction and community building for years, so I am a little suspicious about the chronology or influence of my project Deproduction that you are implying.
But yes, my answer to those questions would be a very hard and nihilistic “no.” That is because I do not presuppose any means of transcending patriarchy. As a result, that impossibility to depatriarchalize or decolonialize becomes an identifiable and comprehensible precondition to our actions. I think most people tend to interpret any “no” as a sign to give up or fall into social paralysis. While that may be an existential affect, identifying what is hopeless can also be a means of clarifying material reasons for resistance and rebellion. For Paul, the last time we spoke about such things directly, he said he believed in the potential for revolution. I do not. I just see eternal struggle. I would rather engage in that struggle with an understanding of the meaninglessness of life, rather than succumb to a delusion of promise. But I get that is not an easy sell.
Okay, so now I’m no longer talking about Paul, but just generally speaking, people want hope. If what I’m talking about is a hard sell, religion is the easy sell, right? Maybe that offers an insight into the cultic optimism and mandatory gestures of friendliness at the core of today’s art institutions. Gestures we all know are bullshit in this very cold, manipulative and back-stabbing business.
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This interview is published in co-operation with Paletten Art Journal.
‘Deproduction’ opens the Third Edition Festival for Other Music at Fylkingen on 8 February 2018. Please note that Terre will not be at Fylkingen in person.
Tickets available here.
Entrance includes a 56 page perfect bound book of Terre’s notes to Deproduction in English and Swedish (translated by Frida Sandström).