Zeigam Azizov
Cosmo-epistemological paragraphs on Migrasophia
1. The struggle that overcame decades of resistance for and against knowledge is back in the scene as a 'return of the repressed'. Partially motivated by the 'knowledge industry' it problemitised or even disrupted the formalist approach dominant in artistic production, since different forms of knowledge opened up their possible critical articulation. It is the proliferation of knowledge, which allowed an artist to be productive independently by operating within the space of the visual knowledge on its own rights, to borrow the phrase from Sarat Maharaj. The visual knowledge on its own right means that the mutational cross-circulation of different forms of knowledge provides the intertwining and intermingling of different forms. It exposes what is hidden behind the binary fixity of the "dialectical veil" to put it in Giorgio Agamben's words and accentuates dialogical rather than dialectical nature of an artistic struggle and turns an artwork into the object 'good to think with".
2. The cross circulation of knowledge, however problematical it may seem, is mostly made possible by the cross circulation of cultures, ideas, languages, cousins but also people themselves. It makes the knowledge industry a prominent characteristic moment of global age. We should also remember that this knowledge is based on 'distorted perception' since the dominance and hegemony of media. New temporalities that were previously oppressed by spatiality now became more crucial by the media that makes possible network-society and global spectacle etc. (Negri and Hardt). New subjectivities produce multiplied meanings and structures: One doesn't exclude another.
3. What does an experience of migration as such bring for us? Many aspects of our habits in everyday life differ and relate our view, our vision of the globe. Migrant is the most visible stance, the flexible moving throughout the global terrain open to different experiences and experiments being and always at the state of becoming. My work explores only one aspect of this experience: how the migration explores the world space through the knowledge (of the world) and as such is one of the dimensions of the global formation or globalization. Migration is in fact the product and articulation of this knowledge.
4. Although this project (Migrasophia) is the result of the articulation of my working hard to grasp theoretical and artistic knowledge and experience, I am not interested fetishising none of them. My study of them made their use as an instruments, a 'tool box', which is very helpful in doing the work by transforming the information received. Because of that neither art, nor theory is privileged in my work. They are instruments partly playing the role to signify my visual interests in urban reality of migrations and changing globe.
5. The proliferation of knowledge and its cross- circulation creates the situation or the strategic chance for positioning and questioning the role of an artist. It dates back, as far as the Kantian notion of art as a 'groups need', rather than taste. This inquiry today attains very new meaning since the knowledge made possible to bind together the group’s needs, which is sometimes called "minority problem".
How to enter into the complicated zone of understanding without having a conceptual or other tool able to delimit the scope of action? The most of the time thinking take place at the moment of clear vision of what is missing, what is not there. Excess produced by this kind of rendering is cut and mix in order to create the space of soft topology to negotiate what is missing. We need sometimes to be reminded of the difference between the real and symbolic politics. We live with perpetual superabundance of communication about every nuance of continues crisis; spectacular machinery welcomes infinite indictment, the multitude flexing its right to expression. Rather than trying to celebrate such an inevitable compromise, we somewhere might turn with fractionally more hope towards the production of subjectivity.
6. Usually the 'production of subjectivity' has referred to the fact that in order to expand and thereby survive, capital had to produce not only goods and services, but also workers, managers, capitalists etc. In the last few years, of course, the reference points have changed, as 'migrating subjects, received the status if 'global citizens' in a discourse (one may think of Hardt and Negri), at the same time as sliding into subterranean vulnerability. It should be noted here that in a global age everything can move, goods, cultures, languages, but only people should stand still, to put it in Stuart Hall's words. In a few cases art can require and consequently reproduce in single or collective subjects attributes subversive to the qualities of post modern global citizen.
7. The poiesis incarnated in my kind of work founded on the obscure indivisibility of sensual realities normally understood as 'past'; present' and future, instead brings all these forms together. In fact there are various 'tools' I borrowed from the critical cultural theory, conceptual art, and the experience of painting among others. Editing, critically transforming articulations, mapping, combining and juxtaposing can be taken as a key elements I use to built up this encyclopaedia, where the image, the text, the sound, are joined together not to dominate but to provide the goal of comprehension, understanding, sensing and experiencing. This kind of formal background is important since the legitimacy would not be possible without the permanence of the continuity of the appearance received from the both migration paradigm and artistic experience. This experience involves the mediatic conceptuality and the experience of editing. 'Migrasophia' is an encyclopaedia exploring visual dimensions of global circulation of knowledge and migration paradigm. The mediatic conceptuality is to certain degree to built up the language, the morphology, the syntax, the grammar of which is derived from the understanding of connectivity of different forms, structures, languages' people etc.This kind of connectivity is mediated by the principle of editing as a conceptual hermeneutic device.
8. It is in editing or montages the technological and intellectual moments come together, because the montage arises from the interplay of form and surrounding formlessness. It brings together the elements of language, sound, text alongside with the dominant visual or pictorial elements and in their combination. Because of the proliferation of means it is more explicit that it is not one who makes two, but two who makes one. It is dialogical and polyphonic. At this point of reversibility the connection in between the symbolic and social is clearer. What is socially peripheral, may be symbolically central. This kind of reversibility signifies differences, rather than their opposing to each other.
These differences make visible the earlier hidden dimensions of our experience of the globe. Samir Amin calls it re-linking, which the link was always there, but it became possible because of the global migrations. It is based on an event-that is making link with the bundle of events and ideas. Instead of sheer style and appearance I use formal mutations (from flaneur to migration); which refer to global network of 'disorganized' systems. It is a kind of morphology of migration: it is clear that in today's global world everything can travel; goods; cultures, languages, ideas, everything imaginable. The only problem arises when it comes to people them travelling.
9. Making art in this manner involves not only critical but also what after Deleuze could be called clinical approach. Finding symptoms lead to making diagnosis. Such a possibility is resided within the process of making, since making art is also making meaning. To put it in Stuart Halls words ‘the world has to be made to mean!’ This guarantees the discovery of fragile moments, non perfect work of technology as well as linguistic tools. Almost aphasic failures like in aphasia which was theorized by Jacobson these elements can be developed into the new meaning. Return of the repressed.
Using elements of popular media which exemplifies the use of intellectual ideas or theoretical stereotypes which allows one to complete PhD, the other to sell goods by classifying them for sale promotions, [1] like Internet in order to discover this moment of confrontation of the theory and everyday life .This confrontation happens in the gap which is sublimated by the 'total visual information flow', by dis-identifing, or configuration ones identity differently because the mode of encoding is only possible in this gap. Since the total flow is about leading to the closure, it’s crossing through this gap dis-closing it, otherwising it, altering and even dis-identifing it deliberately. Because the mediatic conceptuality does not simulate or it is not simulacrum at all, since simulacrum is not differentiating but performing the difference. It is simulating to the point, where simulation becomes totalizing and ends itself. The crossing of the total flow of the visual informational practice informed by the theory through this gap very clearly holds together different poles of the same in their heterogeneity, where the simulacrum is homogenizing, like in the TV commercial: the performance simulating the quality is always about consuming and reduced to this fact. Because in commercial packaging nothing can be seen or felt as it may produce certain surplus or excess, it is always perfect. Heterogeneity of grasping of experiencing the same reality in different languages and different means is entering to the conflict with each other and makes a discourse, nomadic consistency in de-territoralising (Deleuze) or temporal positionality (Stuart Hall) ‘in order to be able to say anything at all’ is possible. This is also my interest in migration paradigm since it is opening up the discursive space for confronting and articulating differences and to trying to understand or to grasp or to sense them in a migrasophic manner of omnipresence.
10. The style of representing in forms of juxtaposing and combining different elements already poses the question: If there are means such as -aural and visual radio-and video, internet and etc. can we still speak of the hegemony of one form, or we have to accept the hegemony of multiplicities. If the audio is alive and well and co-exists alongside with the video why in art world video is opposed to audio and vice verse? The confusion in the contemporary world is often related to essentialist one-dimensional attitude of modernism: reductionism. McLuhan suggesting that audio- visual medium destroyed literature and painting forgot that coming along of the new medium is often translation of the previous medium. TV did not replace the radio and the public space wasn’t’ transformed because it opposed radio, but it was possible only televisions standing alongside with the radio. And together they connected the public voice with the public image.
Understanding of connectivity of different mediums from the standpoint of time as well as space is very crucial to the whole argument. Because the form of representation of artwork in the gallery, which privileged space, when time based medias, as well as traveling cultures, 'annihilated space through time' to use David Harvey’s very sharp phrase. It questioned the dimensions that have gone missing, what is often in the contemporary lexicon called 'the other'. This kind of approach challenged the linear dialectic and instead posed something what again S.Amin called de-linking. A new inventions as well as political upheavels,actually make visible or heard previously unseen or unheard links. This involved understanding of time itself in a new manner, i.e. the new media, as cinema or video as they transgressed the empirical understanding of time and instead suggested past-present-future perspective.
11. Speaking of different mediums in terms of difference, instead of their destroying each other helps to answer to the question: where means opposed to each other and where they represent differences. Where the territory of opposition ends and the asylum seeking of difference starts? There is never opposition, but there is always difference.
Did coming along of the new destroy the old? And if they are different to each other where is and how to place the differences? The magic word 'difference' that defines one of the most important features of globalization makes all the means of communication as existing alongside, in their combination with each other. Nothing has been destroyed, what happened is they are transformed, translated within the dimension of temporal positioning.
[1] See Zeigam Azizov, Between the conformity and consciousness, in Outsourcing, Paula Rush (ed.), inIVA / MSDM, 2003, also www.semiotics.co.uk.