Evgenia

Notes on Queer Mycology By Patricia Kashian

Queer theory is not necessary related to just sex or human relations, but it’s an idea that all relationships are constructed socially. Social constructions may or may not serve us. 

Fungi as organisms that form symbiotic relationships between species challenge our concept of an individual. 

Entire groups of fungi are asexual: multiple reproductive structures of different types within one body. How to organize/categorize them?

How does queer theory enhance scientific knowledge system?

The illusiveness of the scientific goal to be objective. Embrace transparency and the idea that we are deeply intertwined with life with culture and subjectivity.

Mycophobia  (gross/dangerous/do not touch)

Mushrooms are associated with death and decay. Fungi are uniquely implicated in death. Mushrooms are seen as perverse agents of disruption – fundamentally different (LGBTQ experience)

Formation of capitalism – mycophobia – commodifying organisms

Mushrooms are hard to cultivate (untamable creatures!), cannot be controlled or dominated. Fungi is a disruptive pathogen in monoculture (a capitalist tactic of control) to isolate organism from their natural ecologies to maximize their output. However, fungi thrive in monoculture environment (wheat) becoming antithesis for progressive agriculture production. 

Fungi – uncontrollable (underworld). 

People fear what they cannot control. 

Academia – an exclusive environment, where social science is investigated through a particular cultural lens. (western colonial perspective/homogenous understanding of the world)

Classist ideas like Lichens “as peasants of the plants”. (Queer, women, ppl of colour not worthy of being in the space)

Weeds – immigrants (Lou Ferguson)

Science as an equal opportunity. An investigative, methodological tool for everyone, regardless of their institutional domain, class, gender, race etc.

Scientists are to reflect on their power privileges and responsibilities that come with those. 

Scientists need to be in touch with “subjective elements of the work”.

Capitalism attaches incentives to inquiry, drawing people away form integrity. 

Institutional Capitalist Science.

Traditional ecological knowledge – culturally embedded. 

Science and believes can coexist. 

Pseudoscience – investigations without integrity in pursuit of money. 

Fungi are understudied. It’s ok top advocate for conservation of their habitat based on emotional arguments. 

How fungus migration is effected by climate change?

Amanita – considered non-native, but as fungi mostly live in mycelium state under ground, it is unknown if they are not present in the soil in other habitats. 

Conditions that make the mycelium fruit matter.

Fungi are rarely listed as endangered and threatened species. 

Extractive consumerism – deeply linked to consumerism in capitalist culture – engaging with the land through extraction of resources. 

What is the impact of large-scale foraging? Largely unknown (but can be predicted…)

Ethics of care!

How denying things as they are in confining them to limited categories of understanding we assist in their extinction.

Most species of fungi have not been named. 

Taxonomy – naming is not stamping, but including it into discourse. 

Naming as a sign of respect. (harder to harm things/bodies you now by their name)

Hard to advocate for nameless organisms that perish!

Conservation strategies to allow beings to live their lives, regardless of their “usefulness” to humans. The right to exist and flourish extended to more-than-human world. 

“Beyond human worldview as oppose as post-human” – me

Discussion Prompts:

Since mushrooms are mediators and connectors of many structures within one body,

how can a queer mycology theory help you to understand your connection to the community? What symbiotic relationships do you find integral to your practice?

Inspired by mushrooms’ innate ability to resist commodification and control, what subversive strategies do you employ in your practice or which ones would you like to incorporate in the future?

How can the motto of academic environment and science as an equal opportunity be incorporated into sharing knowledge in contemporary art practice? What responsibilities do we have as artists/researchers in accounting for our subjectivity?

Conservation strategies regardless of the organism’s usefulness: 

Think of things/beings/processes considered useless by your immediate community that you are incorporating/advocating/appreciating in your practice.

Fun one:

How the naming convention of “false” in mushrooms perpetuates our capitalist consumer philosophy of other living organisms’ usefulness to us?

What is a false painting/ false sculpture / false writing / false breakfast or false walk?

How does the grammar of “it” doesn’t serve you? 

Come up with your false names for mushrooms and start spreading the word about their unique ways of being.

GAME
HEADS OR TAILS OR DISRESPECTFUL MYCOLOGY

Guess whether the name is a real mushroom or made up one.

Come up with your own false names for mushrooms and start spreading the word about their unique ways of being. 

Notes on How to do Nothing by Jenny O’Dell

This hits home.

……..

I feel so intrinsically reverberated with the ideas and references in this book. Not to mention that the issues of attention economy are hard-felt in our immediate and global community a very acute way. I have been fighting the same battle, thinking, creating, awkwardly taking longer and walking a convoluted path as an unofficial everyday motto in search for sustainability. 

……

Public spaces are under constant capitalist pressure to be “productive”.

Unproductive public spaces are sparse and threatened like artist-run centres. 

Time treated as a commodity, too expensive to do nothing.

Groundedness requires actual ground!

Doing nothing is to hold yourself still, so you can perceive what is actually there. 

Connectivity is a rapid circulation of information among compatible units/agents. Nether of them would change throughout this process.

Sensitivity is difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between different bodies. Both entities might come away from the encounter different than they went in. 

The difference between connectivity and sensitivity is time.

……

Doing nothing is as essential as a pause between the notes. Holding space with time as a connecting tissue between the agents.

Doing nothing is awkward, introspective, reflective, attentive and at times hard. Hard because we are conditioned to productivity. However, doing nothing is not a leisure activity, as leisure can be camouflaged as productivity as well, creating the all-too-well known technique of masquerading the perpetual fresh-squeezed juice machine of value as care.  

…….

Kinship – the glue of assemblages of kin, a symbolic configuration of different kinds of beings maintained though the practice of care. 

Using technology to create a mere access to physical reality. 

Digital art about the physical world.

What does it mean to create digital worlds when the physical is in the process of being destroyed?

Groundbreaking has a sinister literal meaning. 

Survival by appearing useless. 

Perhaps being misunderstood is not such a terrible thing after all. It could be a survival strategy. 

Resistance-in-place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot be easily appropriated by the capitalist value system.

To inhibit somewhat fuzzier or wobblier ideas:

• of maintenance as productivity
• the importance of non-verbal communication
• the mere experience of life as the highest goal

Bioregionalsm is about how life forms are interconnected. 

Citizenship in the bioregion becomes familiarity with the local ecology and commitment to stewardship. 

What economy does to the eco-system, attention economy does to our attention. 

Production destroys the soil, until nothing can grow. It extinguishes one species of thought after another, hastens the erosion of attention. 

Productivity that produces what?

Success? 

Successful in what way, for whom?

 …..

Perhaps it could be fruitful to avoid clear structures in writing as a form of resistance against capitalist, productivity oriented language in favour of walkthrough a forest kind of meandering of an essay.

…..

Choices: escape the world/politics vs remain in place but escape the framework of attention economy.  

Create space of refusal! What does it look like?

What does it take to afford refusal? – learning to redirect and enhance attention. 

Identity: not a personal brand, but an unstable, shapeshifting thing, determine by interactions with others and different kind of places. 

Meaningful ideas require incubation time and space!

Awareness as a seed of responsibility. 

Patterns of attention is how we render reality for ourselves. They have a direct influence on what we feel is possible at any given time. 

Shit happens by Amy Sillman

How form can match the feeling or a condition – of funny, homely, lonely, ill-fitting, strange, clumsy things that feel right.

The dissatisfaction with all things perceived as beautiful, curated, perfected and resolved comes from the same place as the satisfaction with all things that reflect our experience as a breathing, walking, seeping body. Humanity is a wrong word. More like “all the shit that happens all the time, everywhere, now and then” and “this is best it can do, but it happens to be the best”.

Awkward lives in that space. It feeds on our desire to be honest with ourselves, extending it outward. (Outkward?) How far? You will see. You may wish to control it, but fortunately for you, it merely controls your urges to be right. And maybe you are, but perhaps the cake of right needs one unexpected flavour that will take it from the dignified desert to a conversation starter.

the subject no longer entirely in control of the plot, representation peeled away from realness.

However, many figured this out long ago and are relentlessly pursuing the awkward for the perceived authenticity that it attracts. Those are often easy to spot as the trying-to-hard conundrums and wannabe calculations. 

The awkward is an untameable beast that is best kept wild. It will always find something to feed on.

a form that ‘feels right’ without knowing why

Awkward/honest but unbeknown. 

the process of trying to figure something out while doing it.

Awkward as backward but also against the established order. Even if that order has been established by yourself. Awkward as a trickster revealing you under the composed you.

people use ‘awkward!’ after a faux pas, a moment of tension between the ideal and the real, where what’s supposed to happen goes awry.

Recent trends for all things ugly, awkward and backwards say a few things about how we are feeling with the current order of things. The image has not evaded this trend, it may actually started it. Maybe the internet? As a place for all things clumsy and revealing, maybe less so now, then in the 90’s. Perhaps awkward is timeless.

Finding a form is building these feelings (in this case, dissatisfaction, embarrassment and doubt) into a substance.

The urge for authenticity is at its high. And so the search begins. Perhaps the most satisfying part of this search is its uncanny space of occurrence. It certainly can happen in the studio, deep into the making, but it can also resurface elsewhere. Often the event is documented (maybe even posted for the world to see), like a discovery of a new specimen and the excitement that it brings. The awkward is now firmly categorized and evaluated. 

I am tired of seeing the awkward in this sad state. I much rather see the reflection of awkward, the glimpse of a story, visually undocumented, my brain filling in the gaps. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the curated awkward in the form; there, what I see, is a documentation of an encounter with the wild beats that it is. A tense standoff where the animal wins. 

Unmonumental:
The Object in the 21st Century

Ask the Dust by Massimiliano Gioni

The disappearance of the pedestal as it gets absorbed by the sculpture itself.

Sculpture entertained more than a dangerous liaison with the realm of death: it was a substitute for life, a from of placebo.

Works that are seeping and oozing the precarious fragments of old monumentality while occupying a modest space of private proximity.

Resilient urban-trash flora growing steady against the hostile environment they are very comfortable inhabiting.

Metaphoric state of paranoia and internal conflict between acts of revolt and retreat to personal privacy.

Third world Arte povera.

Objects that “fight for your attention.” The chaos has subsided by now. The need for visual clarity is more pronounced as we are bombarded with Information and visual stimuli. 

Anti-heroic art ridicules the old canons while beheading its authority by eliminating it completely.

Against the very idea of permanence. Proclamation of fragility while emphasizing mortality and passing of time. The themes of memory and nostalgia with fragments of the stories lost in time and almost confused with its history.

A deconstructed modernism. Revised, fragmented, unclothed and presented back in its vulnerable state, private and ridden of its authoritarian status.

The tendency to retreat inside while a more private view is maximized in the attention to detail and a micro perspective.

Multi-dimensionality and layers of complexities in the literal form overlap with undertones of civilization doom and exhausted society from their own devices. Critique of the global economy that is told with a tired voice, not defeated but scratchy from repeating itself. 

While radically different in the formal terms, the grammar of minimalist sculpture is complementary to the logic governing earthworks; it aims to attain a sense of timelessness. Assertive, almost inevitable, and thus monumental. 

These works exude transitionality and uncertainty.

A lot has happened since Massimiliano Gioni wrote the piece, since the Unmonumental exhibition. Fifteen years of acceleration in the direction of the immediate crisis on a global scale. The radical shift that the works achieved from the legacy of monumental sculpture are now grown into a different kind of beast. 

The installation art today is still grappling with the historical connections it has to monumental sculpture and the ideas of permanence, but it has taken on a fundamentally different ephemeral quality. It’s painstrickenly close to disseminating into the corporeal. Not all, but its feet have been dipping in it for quite some time now. Contemplating its own reflection, it too has concluded that being timeless is more than outdated it is dangerous. The irony is that the metaverse clings uncomfortably close to the old hierarchies of the cannon, with much of the nuances seeming to evade that space. Perhaps like an enfant terrible, it is still playing with guns and horses in the wild west of the ephemera. 

A monumental scale of our current pollution problem.

Huyghe’s work is permeating the physical and digital space, effecting one another. The island has been scanned to become the environment of a live simulation. It is simultaneously an island and what that island could be in an alternate reality. A fictional narrative gives a set of rules and prompts, played out by an artificial neural network that generates unpredictable mutations in the simulation, of what is present on the island, animate or inanimate, sounds or things, such as trees, trash, animals, or humans.

Occasionally, mutations exit the simulation and manifest physically on the island where they sustain or decay, contaminating the existing reality with an unknown possibility of itself, progressively modifying the island’s appearance.

A mirror to our current relationships with physical and digital spaces. But who can do it better, the neural network or humans? Both have a capacity for pulling their blankets on themselves. A very dark, sinister scenario is looming while we play the game.

Installation art now seems to have one foot dangling over the new propositional realities and the other submerged into the depths of connectivity, our past, and an immediate monumental crisis—no pedestals can withstand such a heavy burden. 

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Seeing a colour

Eye is a recorder, with or without will.

Vision is a liar; one cannot trust it as it always suspects your emotions. 

Sound is much more honest, except honesty is the last thing on my mind.

Words do not look like things they designate – Maurice Merleau–Ponty

Witnessing a colour change is an event. A change, a chemical reaction, a mental and physical state of being that decided to transcend outwards its hopes and dreams of becoming the other. Some colours are very persistent and, like a progression to any argument, require a heavy spoonful of reason to be swayed to the other side. So what can sustain a colour and convince it to change?

Life-long obsessions:

Fire Red – the one sometimes called tomato red or orange-red or fire-red; a moment before you know, already knowing by the feeling; a childish urgency; an attention-freak of a dancer; a deeply powerful part of yourself; an annoying fast talker; magnetic persistency with mercurial tendencies; one that got away

Warm Yellow – buttery, almost honey sun-licked self-indulgence; a buzzing energy

Terracotta Red – earthy tone that leaves a spicy residue; a copper flare; an oxidized, lived-in intense moment of connection-air and material dance

Deeply Intense Blue or Infantile-light Blue and Fire-Red combinations – like a couple that has been together for a long time

Thinking about colours happens simultaneously as I think of materials – why one and not the other? Biased opinions and feelings become physical spatial implications. Often, when I work with found materials, I honour the colour it comes to me; of course, I choose the object based on the particular texture and colour, to begin with. Needless to say, colour, its origin, change or state of being is very important to me. 

For a while, I realized I was childish enough not to like a certain colour. Akin to hating a particular type of wine. The grape has less to do with it than the caring for methods, the bottled-up feelings you were enveloped in that day or the mood of the landscape on the day of harvest. 

I am learning to recognize my hidden love for green. It was strange that for a nature lover, I never thought to include that colour in my preferences. Upon closer inspection, I realized that this love for green had been the type of relationship I take entirely for granted. Akin to an attentive lover, whose attention with time becomes an everyday occurrence, I, too, have taken my relationship with green to be a given of sorts. My attraction to it started to grow once I became painfully aware of this phenomenon. How predictable of an all-things-red colour lover. 

Colour as a state of being  

I am less interested in a singularity of a human-made object than in a system. The system of connecting the dots, the part as a whole, the interdependencies, reciprocities and incompatibilities. Art objects – a system of powerfully useful sentimentality? Politics of excessive tenderness.

Saturation – satisfaction (as one cannot absorb or take any more drop, fullness)

Colour is information, the overload of which is a dangerous path that leads to resistance. For better or worse.

Children prefer warmer colours (red), they grow older into cooler tones (blue). 

Children are violent and I am childishly addicted.

Something has to be said about cultural preferences and the implications of colour. I do recognize my love for red has partially sprouted from my culture. The deep love and problematics of it all. Where does the other part come from? Do you know where your love comes from? The first one that alters you from the inside?

When something ceases to bring you pleasure, you cannot talk the pleasure back to it. 

What is left once the pleasure leaves? A different kind of conversation. 

Gatherer, not an owner. 

Look for Jason Logan, Toronto Ink Company

Jason Logan’s approach to working with colour is less about its usefulness and more about creating a relationship with it. Discovery, questions, impossible dreams and possible connections. Everything can be a start of a colour. What do you find? What questions one has for it? What colour can be made from a rock? A car part? A nail? A piece of wood? He talks about how nothing is impossible, and a curious question can lead to something unexpected, long-lasting or ever-changing, ephemeral and fragile. Is there a colour that doesn’t change? 

Colour as poetry, contextual and political. 

Owning is about taking space, and gathering is getting to know the space. So my practice is a never-ending getting-to-know-a collection of questions.

A word.

Nonetheless – curious word. 

Synonym: Also but, although, however, still

Perhaps we could use more nonetheless and less of the notnonetheless/somethemore/manyanyway

Anton Alvares

His practice focuses on the design of systems and the creation of tools and processes for producing sculptural objects and architecture.

Blue is not a colour, it’s a state, a very convincing one. 

How much of that illusion is a cultural phenomenon and how much is it an embodied experience and its aftermath? 

When does the colour begin, and where does the reflection of colour start?

Nonetheless, within any blue, there is always a bit of red. S

Does an album of written thought perform a similar displacement or replacement of the original thought? But if the writing does displace the idea, if it extrudes it like a lump of wet clay through the hole, where does the excess go? – Chogyam Trungpa

Sometimes it goes into a sound of an utterance, wet, slinky, emotional and incoherent, raw and unedited, captured or left wild roaming the air and filling (feeling) the space around it.