Dirt, Punk, Trash WorkshopLocation: Castrum Peregrini (Herengracht 401, Amsterdam), December 1, 2016 @ASCA, UvA
OCT 28, 2016
'Dirt, Punk, Trash' is a workshop where art/cultural theoreticians and practitioners theorize the notions -- which are now often employed interchangeably -- in two ways. They discuss concrete punk-, dirt- and trash-focused cultural practices and objects; and they map and unravel conceptual interrelations between the notions.
Dirt, Punk, Trash workshop
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, Location Castrum Peregrini: Herengracht 401, 1017BP AmsterdamDecember 1, 201614.00-18.00
In (audio-)visual arts and writing, dirt, punk, and trash have long been aestheticized and lauded -- but in recent decades, artists and cultural analysts have harbored a particularly insistent interest in 'dirty art' (cf. Sandberg's Dirty Art Department), 'dirt[y] media' (Kelly), 'dirty words' (Gluklya), 'politics of trash' and 'politics of punk' (Whiteley; Ensminger), 'trash culture' (LaGuardia), and in the overall rhetoric 'of waste, dirt, and shit' that dominate some local and historical punk traditions (Gololobov & Steinholt).
Speakers are dirt/punk/trash experts Gluklya (Factory of Found Clothes, St. Petersburg / A'dam), Caleb Kelly (University of New South Wales), Natalia Samutina (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), Yngvar Steinholt (Tromso University). The workshop is introduced and moderated by the members of the VIDI Sublime Imperfections team Fabienne Rachmadiev, Jakko Kemper, and Ellen Rutten (all UvA).
Guests are welcome; registration is not needed, but feel free to contact OmarElgendy@live.nl for questions.
Abstracts
The Sound of (Dirty) MaterialsCaleb Kelly (Program Director Bachelor of Art Theory, UNSW: Art & Design, Sydney)
In recent years there has been a tangible shift back to making simple electronics and writing code within media art. There is an abundance of hardware and software available that helps us to build electronics and code; from Arduino to littleBits, MaKey MaKey to Ototo, Scratch to Python. Furthermore, this approach to making links to a materials-based media art practice that foregoes digital media in favour of the handmade, the put-together and the dirty. This paper will look to these sound practices as they form in Australia and through them it will re-listen to imperfect sound making practices that literally get dirty.
Holy Shit! The high, the low, and the abject in Russian discourses on culture. Yngvar Steinholt (Associate Professor of Russian Culture and Literature, University of Tromso, Norway)
In line with Kremlin ideologist Aleksandr Dugin’s idea that Russia’s future lies in its past, the current Russian definition of ‘culture’ itself appears to be shrinking back to earlier confines. The concept may no longer serve the ideological demands of Marxist-Leninism, but instead new demands are being set by an officially promoted national patriotism and by the Russian Orthodox Church. Interestingly, the traditional Russian aesthetic notion of ‘kul’tura’ as something elevated and pure, is closely related to the moral concept of kul’turnost’ (lit. ‘culturedness’). Indeed, a person of good manners is referred to as ‘kul’turnyi’ and, similarly, a badly behaved person as ‘nekul’turnyi’ (‘uncultured’). Thus, by representing the other of high culture, concepts of ‘low’, popular or ‘amateur’ culture are implicitly marked as impure, sullied,and potentially harmful. Artists operating beyond the established canon of high culture can respond in two ways: either they attempt to become accepted as part of sanitized high culture, or they embrace dirt as the true criterion for good art. By way of a few key examples from contemporary Russian popular music and art activism, the current presentation takes a closer look at the notion of ‘dirt’ the Russian discourses on culture and, in so doing, hopefully unearths a shallowly buried paradox or two.
Language of FragilityGluklya (Factory of Found Clothes, Amsterdam-Petersburg)
Gluklya will talk about her project Language of Fragility which she is doing in Amsterdam and her method of Utopian Clothes that she is practising and learning her participants.
The working method for the Language of Fragility is derived from the earlier project Shop of Utopian Clothes*; a laboratory that questions core principles of consumerism, and maps out alternative ways for fighting the contradictions of capitalism. The Utopian Clothes, different to their everyday function within society, generate another language - the language of oppressed feelings .
In her practice ,she is using method ,which meant to both produce Utopian Clothes and to name them; relating to Edouard Glissant’s “dirty language” concept. “Dirty language” used to describe the process of new words from the refugee’s mother tongue becoming embedded in the local language, Invoking, as a result, ideas of the cultural enrichment and revitalization that migration could bring to Europe, and harking back to the expectations of multiculturalism processes that started in Europe during the 80’s .
What is trash within participatory cultures? Functions of cultural hierarchies in amateurish internet production.Natalia Samutina (Head of the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture, Higher School of Economics, Moscow)
Contemporary participatory cultures and their amateurish production, highly valuable to the participants (fans, vidders, blogers, gamers,etc.) but standing outside of the industries and official hierarchies, are not free from aesthetic questions and internal hierarchies of taste. I will try to demonstrate briefly the ambivalent functions of the category of "trash" in this cultural field. On the one hand, this notion performs liberatory functions, allowing people to express joy of boundless creativity; on the other hand, it is often re-introduced into the field as a mechanism of differentiation by criteria of group or community's taste. I will show on a couple of examples the meaning of discussions of trash among media fans in Russia.