We're currently experiencing an increase in pace, an acceleration of the infosphere so intense that we simply cannot keep up with it.
Take a moment to read something...
Take a moment to read something...
A selection of things I have written
A selection of things written about me
‘The Painter’s Gambit’ – by curator Iben Bach Elmstrøm
‘Bibi Katholm: The Image will come at the Resurrection’ – by curator Alex White
‘Vote Imagination!’ – by artist Shane Bradford
‘A forward to Bibi Katholm’s Ghost Hunting in Broad Daylight‘ – by art critic John Slyce
After the Future
After the Future
by Bibi Katholm
“We have never been more fully able to describe the world, yet its foundations have never been less certain. Reality is revealed as multiple, polyvalent and contingent; we view our age through a prism of complexity.”
*Damian Griffiths, p.19 in Garageland magazine, issue 10.Published by Transition Editions.
Italian critic and media activist Franco ’Bifo’ Berardi has been described as a ’master of global activism in the age of depression’. In his book titled After the Futurehe traces the genesis of future-oriented thought through the punk movement of the early 70s and into the media revolution of the 90s. Cyberculture, considered by many to be the last truly utopian vision of the future, has ended in a meltdown, or as ’Bifo’ puts it –
the future has failed us. What’s left behind is an ever-growing system of virtual life and actual death, virtual knowledge and actual war.
According to Bifo the future of the ’moderns’ (modernity) had the following two reassuring qualities: It could be known, as in the trends of human history could be traced in linear directions through time, and from these lines science could discover the laws of human evolution. Secondly, it was possible to transform / affect the future by human will, by industry, economic techniques, and through political action. The 20th Century trusted in the future because it had faith in the scientists who foretold it, and in the politicians making rational decisions in order to affect it. But we’re no longer living in ’modern’ times.
”Space has expanded with no limits since we have entered virtual space. Virtual space is a vanishing point, the meeting point of infinite assemblages of enunciation. Virtual time, on the contrary, does not exist. There is no such thing as a time of virtuality because time is only in life, decomposition, and the becoming-death of the living. Virtuality is the collapse of the living; it is panic taking power in temporal perception. This is why the future is no longer a comfortable subject. We understand that it’s not likely to be known, just as we understand that the lines of intersection between the info-assemblages are so complex and fast that we cannot reduce them to any scientific law. And we are starting to doubt that the future can be governed by political strategies and military strength”.
*Franco ’Bifo’ Berardi: After the Future, p. 51-52
According to ‘Bifo’ the process of decision making and projecting a future in which one future among many can be selected depends less and less on human will. He refers to this ‘condition’ within the sphere of social politics as the ‘paradox of the decided’: as the circulation of information becomes faster and more complex, the time available for the elaboration of relevant information gradually dissolves. In other words, the more space is taken by available information, the less time there is for understanding and conscious choice.
“ The future becomes a threat when the collective imagination becomes incapable of seeing alternatives to trends leading to devastation, increased poverty, and violence. This is precisely our current situation, because capitalism has become a system of techno-economic automatisms that politics cannot evade. The paralysis of the will (the impossibility of politics) is the historical context of today’s depression epidemic.”
*France ’Bifo’ Berardi: After the Futurep. 59.
We think we’ve got access to all the information in the world, and in theory we do. We think the world has never been more open to us, and in theory it is… but in reality, the opposite is true.
The overwhelming complexity makes it almost impossible for us to choose, edit, act, make decisions and be present enough to experience the vast landscapes of information and possibilities ‘available’ to us. We dream about one day being able to make use of the individual freedom and access to the entire world we’ve allegedly gained.
City of Panic
“The urban territory is increasingly traversed by streams of diasporic, heterogeneous, and de-territorialized imaginaries. Panic tends to become the urban psychic dimension. It is the reaction of a sensitive organism subjected to stimulation that is too strong and too rapid. The reaction of an organism urged on by impulses too frequent and intense to be emotively and conversationally elaborated…The metropolis is a surface of complexity in the territorial domain. The social organism is unable to process the overwhelmingly complex experience of metropolitan chaos. The proliferation of lines of communication has created a new kind of chaotic perception… In the city of panic, there is no longer time to get close to each other; there is no more time for caresses, for the pleasure and slowness of whispered words. Advertising exalts and stimulates the libidinous attention, person-to-person communication multiplies the promises of encounters, but these promises never get fulfilled. Desire turns into anxiety, and time contracts.”
*Franco ’Bifo’ Berardi: After the Future, p. 93-96
The Age of Loneliness
“This is the Age of Loneliness. … We were social creatures from the start, mammalian bees, who depended entirely on each other. … We are shaped, to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with others. The age we are entering, in which we exist apart, is unlike any that has gone before.”
*Quote from George Monbiot: The Age of Loneliness is killing us, The Guardian 14. Oct. 2014.
In The Age of Loneliness, published in The Guardian 14th October 2014, George Monbiot writes that the war of every man against every man – in other words, competition and individualism – has become the religion of our time. A religion justified by a mythology of lone rangers, sole traders, self-made men and women, all going it alone and fighting an endless, lonely battle for success.
Factories and other work places have closed, unemployment is spreading like wild fire, people travel by car instead of using public transportation, we use YouTube instead going to the cinema, order take away food instead of going to restaurants. You can find so many examples of human behavioral patterns shifting towards isolation during the past decades, but these shifts alone fail to explain the expanse and the speed of our social collapse. According to Monbiot, these structural changes have been accompanied by a life-denying ideology, which enforces and celebrates our social isolation.
According to evolutional theory, human beings are (still?) the most social of creatures, supposedly incapable of surviving and prospering without love, connection and human contact, and yet we seem to have somehow moved beyond the social and our human dependency on others. Statistics show that children no longer aspire to grow up and have ’normal jobs’ or careers that require training, hard-earned skills, or have any social function whatsoever. In one survey of British children results showed that the sole ambition of 40% of the kids involved was ’wealth and fame’. When asked what they were hoping to achieve as adults many of them said ’I just want to be rich’ or ’I just want to be famous’ with no comments about how they were hoping to get there, or which specific skills or talent they would develop. Furthermore, a government study in June 2014 revealed that Britain has become the ’loneliness capital’ of Europe.
Inner catastrophes
“These days potential catastrophes are everywhere you look. The world is so full of danger, stress, competition, overload and insecurity, and most of the time it feels very likely that we are all going to be dead soon, the only question is when and how, exactly? Assuming that we, against all odds, survive the pitfalls of the future that lies ahead, is creativity going to be the thing that saves us? Will our imagination become an escape route, a place where we can hide and pretend to be alive for real, or will it be the one thing that forcefully confronts us with the truth and gives us the strength needed to make a change? What kind of art would a generation of unlikely survivors produce, and where would they find their inspiration? What influence would surviving a catastrophe have on our values, ethics, and our perception of truth and how might this influence visualize itself in the art of the future?”
*Quote from the original ICWDD manifesto / exhibition proposal 2010.
Lately, there’s been an important ‘shift in scale’ as far as catastrophes go, and the anxiety we picked up on in 2010 with the first ICWDD exhibition and which signified the collective ‘externalized’ fear of the unknown future, while still very much present today seems to have been somehow ‘internalized’ or overruled by less obvious forms of fear, pain, stress and anxiety – a new post-social condition or disorder you might call ‘inner catastrophes’ (read ‘subjective’).
These days we’re all subjected to such vast amounts of information, entertainment and virtual stimuli that we hardly have time to feel our bodies, concentrate on doing our work (concentration = no interruptions before a thought pattern is complete), or come up with new ideas before we have to make our presence known by posting a ’status update’ online. Documenting, sharing or blogging about what we’re doing has become an obsession for most of us. We try to create a perfect online image of our lives that we can use as a shield… against what? and then we hope… we keep our fingers crossed and hope that everyone else out there is just as busy and stressed out as we are, because if they are it’s unlikely that anyone will notice how much we’re actually struggling, and how lonely our struggle is.
That Which is Not Hell
That which is not Hell
by Bibi Katholm - Featured on ‘The Empty Square’
“Twelfth-century Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) understood the universe as an entity and saw a radiance in creation – in the greening of the Earth, the sprouting of seeds and blossoming of plants – that had both spiritual and healing potential; a verdant fecundity that she called Viridatas. She understood the power of images and music to connect to the archaic past, to the spiritual sense of who we are, and she amalgamated science, mysticism and art in a medieval cosmology that she believed had the potential to awaken humanity to mysterious truths of the universe.” - Quote from ‘The Botanical Mind’ p. 11 (Essay by Gina Buenfeld)
Biophilia
It’s the strangest kind of responsibility you feel when you’re in the process of creating something new. It involves everyone and everything around you – it’s universal or cosmic... and it’s REAL. You suddenly experience an overwhelming urge to give something back… to your community, to life or Nature or…?
The biophilia hypothesis suggests that there is an instinctive bond between human beings and other living systems. American biologist Edward O. Wilson introduced the hypothesis in his book, Biophilia (1984), and he defines biophilia as "the urge to affiliate with other forms of life". Originally, the term ”biophilia” means "love of life or living systems." It was first used by the German social psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm to describe the psychological orientation of being “attracted to all that isalive and vital”. Wilson uses the term in the same sense when he suggests that ”biophilia” describes "the connections that human beings subconsciously seek withthe rest of life”, and he proposes the possibility that the strong affiliation humans have with other life forms and nature as a whole, is rooted in our biology.
Nature gives… the painter gives back.
When I’m alone in nature and I experience the rupture of inspiration or just catch a glimpse of something that is in the process of transformation right in front of my eyes, I always feel this immediate urge to grab it and hold on to it with everything I’ve got… Remember it for just long enough so I can take the raw, unshaped experience of it and turn it into an image. It must become an image – if it exists and if I cannot understand it any other way, I simply have to turn it into a painting. And then, I’ll give it back… in a new form and with added ingredients, but in a cosmic or microscopic way, it’s basically the same thing. Nature´s gift is at the same time generously open and demanding. In order to understand something, the answer to a question you’ve constructed in your mind, you have to first ask the next question and throw that into the wind as your contribution to evolution, and then Nature will answer.
Everything is in the grips of being transformed or dissolved; things emerge only to fall apart again. The world is out of joint… And this is only the beginning.
How transitory, fleeting and unstable the nature of painting... You experience how the creative process gains a power of its own that seems to be equivalent to the degree of control you surrender. In this way the process mirrors the way we have to approach technology as the information age unfolds and overwhelms us. If we don’t have any filters that can protect us from overdosing on this world of possibilities, we will drown in a sea of anxiety, chaos, uncertainty, and doubt created by a subjective consciousness that has met its own absolute limitations.
Slippage, cracks, and instability… Nature shows us how to create perfect structure and perfect chaos. In between is creativity.
“Today, there is a greater urgency than ever to reconsider our relationship with the natural world as the climate crisis accelerates and habitats are being destroyed at an unprecedented rate. At the same time, new discoveries in quantum biology, ‘new botany’ and plant physiology are forcing us to rethink long-held beliefs around consciousness and matter, as well as urging an expanded philosophical and ethical engagement with non-human entities.”
– Quote from ‘The Botanical Mind’ p. 5 by Martin Clark, Director, Camden Art Centre.
To make a world
Sometimes painting feels like being in a boat on the water, sensing the movements all around, but not being able to determine which part is actually moving; you, the boat, the landscape, or everything all at once. You become one with the landscape.
There is a rhythm that flows through me as I am applying brushstrokes and paint onto these surfaces. A greater movement than the one my body is creating surrounds me and sweeps me away like waves of energy. It’s about moving closer to Nature, and in order to do so you need an open or inclusive approach to painting.
A painting contains so many layers of meaning, space, colours and movement, and it doesn’t just exist on a single ’level’ or ’plane’. It’s complicated, mystical, expanded in time and it wants to remain open. We must concentrate on seeing.
If we concentrate on seeing and being present in our senses, another creative dimension opens up and allows us to experience layers of existence, both inside and outside of ourselves that tend to remain hidden in contemporary societies. With the ever-increasing pace and intensity of the information flow that surrounds us, it has become a rare gift and privilege to be able to focus and be present for long enough to reach a deeper level of the creative process. We forget our bodies and their instinctive knowledge about nature and in doing so, we make a fatal mistake. We forget, or perhaps we’ve never understood that the only kind of attention, care, seeing… or love that holds enough power to create real change - to invent a future or make a world – is the absolute kind. There can be no distractions in the moment of creation, just as there can be no distractions in love.
”No American artist before Pollock had quite so audaciously realized the aspiration ‘to make a world’ – not to copy one, but to invent one. In place of trees and streets and people and painting’s often-pale imitation of the real force of the world – it’s actors and environments – painting would itself be a reality, as vibrant as life itself. As Pollock is reputed to have said in 1950, “I don’t paint nature; I am nature.” Helen took this in.”
- Quote from ‘Fierce Poise – Helen Frankenthaler and 1950’s New York’ p. 29 by Alexander Nemerov.
What is Hell? If you ask me, as an artist… as a painter. My answer is this: Hell is the loss of our instinctive, archaic connection to nature and thereby our inherent creativity.
The Politics of Love
The Politics of Love
by Bibi Katholm
“People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept, but a concept of love is just what we need to grasp the constituent power of the multitude. The modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family. Love has become a strictly private affair. We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love.”
*Quote from Michael Hardt, ’Multitude’.Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire is a book by post-Marxist philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, published in 2004. It is the second installment of a “trilogy” also comprising Empire (2000) and Commonwealth (2009).
Michael Hardt is a professor of English at Duke University. His recent writings deal primarily with the political, legal, economic and social aspects of globalization, and he is a key figure in cultural theory and anthropology. In his books ‘Empire’ (2000) and ‘Multitude’ (2004), written in collaboration with Antonio Negri, he has analyzed the functioning of our current global power structure and the possible democratic alternatives to that structure.
In an interview by Leonard Schwartz, published in Interval(le)s II.2-III.1 2008 / 2009 and titled ’A Conversation with Michael Hardt on the Politics of Love’, Schwartz begins the discussion by quoting the passage above from Hardt’s book ’Multitude’ :
Michael Hardt’s comment, when asked to elaborate on this quote is:
“In part it starts with a recognition that in certain political actions, in certain political demonstrations – the really good ones – you do have a feeling of something really like love. And so, it’s partly a way of trying to theorize that recognition of this feeling of… let’s call it a ’collective transformation’ that one experiences in certain kinds of political action. And therefore, to think about love, love which I do understand to be precisely a transformative power, something in which we come out different. And to try to think of it as a political concept.”
So, is it possible for us to become politically and socially engaged in the shaping of our future societies while at the same time focusing on trying to push our individual careers forward in an ever-increasing battle with all the other creative people out there struggling to survive? We definitely seem to have reached a point now where we’re all faced with having to choose what kind of future we want to create – do we choose isolation or participation, loneliness or social connectedness? Assuming that there is in fact still time to influence our future with regards to these social concerns it has to be a real choice that we make, a real choice with real consequences.
“Posing love in relation to the power of money can help us construct a properly political concept of love. We lack such a political concept of love, in my view, and our contemporary political vocabulary suffers from its absence. A political concept of love would, at the minimum, reorient our political discourses and practices in two important ways. First, it would challenge conventional conceptions that separate the logic of political interests from our affective lives and opposes political reason to the passions. A political concept of love would have to deploy at once reason and passion. Second, love is a motor of both transformation and duration or continuity. We lose ourselves in love and open the possibility of a new world, but at the same time love constitutes powerful bonds that last.”
*Quote from Michael Hardt’s text ’For Love or Money’ published in ’Cultural Anthropology’, Vol. 26, issue 4, 2011 by the American Anthropological Association.
The sense of human solidarity
Etel Adnan is a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist. In her essay titled The Cost for Love We Are Not Willing to Pay that was printed in the catalogue for the Documenta 13 exhibition in Kassel she writes about the current ecological catastrophes sweeping across our planet and the lack of love for Nature and our community that has left us stranded in a present with little hope as far as the future survival of our species is concerned.
“More and more people behave as if they ignore Nature, dislike it, or even despise it. We wouldn’t have the ecological catastrophe in which we live if it were otherwise. …
On the symbolic level, it’s absolutely true that we’ve lost interest in our nomadic planet. The most advanced research in the world nowadays concerns either the infinitely small (the field of the atom) or astronomy. Mankind is already exploring the sustainability of life on other planets… technology is totally at the service of abstract science and its involvement with non-imaginable matters. Planet Earth is old news. It’s the house we are discarding. We definitely don’t love her. We almost believe we don’t need her. Because the price for the love that will save her would reach an almost impossible level. It would require that we change radically our ways of life, that we give up many of our comforts, our toys, our gadgets, and above all our political and religious mythologies. We would have to create a new world (not a Brave New World!). We’re not ready to do all that.”
*Quote from Etel Adnan’s ’The Cost for Love We Are Not Willing to Pay’
According to Etel Adnan the state of being in love is a transformative state resembling that of the politically unstable climate with waves of discomfort, instability and riots leading up to a revolution. It is an almost irrational awakening, susceptible to all winds and influences, and it can easily cause fear and terror or become obsessive. So, when thinking about this kind of instability and radical change in relation to politics it is important to notice the way we’ve made such an effort in our culture these days to avoid the upheaval of falling in love and getting close to other human beings without the safety of the screen divider between us. We seem to be OD’ing on the intensity and constant stress caused by the hours spent in front of our Macs and our online “presence”, and it leaves very little room for any added intensity, emotionally or whatsoever.
John Lennon said: “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.”
These days you might say that life is what happens to you while your mind is preoccupied with maintaining your hyper-real presence online and your body has gone numb.
The key question is: How can we be expected to bear the added intensity of an emotional and existential upheaval resembling that of falling in love when dealing with political, social or ecological states of emergency? Where can we find the time, the energy and the will to throw ourselves into the turmoil and the chaos of becoming actively engaged in our communities and assuming more responsibility for our fellow human beings? Etel Adnan’s answer is this >
“… What must be done? Most urgently, we ought to find the sense of human solidarity without which no society is coherent. On November 5, 1873, Tolstoy wrote in his diary: ’Love is disturbing.’ Yes, political activism is a way of love, and it’s explosive, and it can lead to great upheavals. But what if we do not take those risks, what if we’re determined to maintain the present state of affairs, playing it (only apparently) safe? The answer is simple: by not paying the price for what it takes to change the world, the world will change in its own way, will change anyway, will escape the possibility we possess to direct it along roads we deem beneficial, and the price will end up being much higher, and it will be too late! The problem – to make things worse – is universal.”
My answer would be the same: “Most urgently, we ought to find the sense of human solidarity without which no society is coherent” – and I would add: because at this point in time finding our way back to this sense of solidarity is the only meaningful thing to do.
“Love always acts like an earthquake. It strongly affects not only lovers but also those who watch it happen.”
*Quotes from Etel Adnan’s ’The Cost for Love We Are Not Willing to Pay’
Love is awakening. Love is fierce. Love is a voyage into the unknown. Love takes priority and re-arranges our values and our lives. It begins with a softness or tenderness, not dissimilar to an allergic reaction, or a hypersensitive response to our surroundings that causes a disruption to our balance and our sense of calm and content. Suddenly the world seems different or lacking, and we are gradually convinced that the only way we can satisfy the nervous longing in our mind and body is by re-accessing the world through another human being. We are beginning to understand that we need the eyes of another in order to see ourselves clearly, and for reasons unknown to us seeing things clearly has become the most important thing in the world.
Love begins this way… The presence of another being calls your senses to attention.
Sharing the world – Approaching the Other
“Before wanting to approach the other, it is advisable to wonder about oneself and one’s own manner of dwelling. It is important to have a view of one’s own faithfulness to that which is proper to one. And often it will be necessary to turn back on our path in order to question ourselves about where we are already situated. If we are not dwelling where we ought to dwell, being what or who we are, we are not prepared for an encounter with the other. We are only able to impose on the other our alienation, misunderstanding, or ignorance. Opening a threshold in order to approach the other requires that we dwell where we can and should be.”
*Luce Irigaray: ’Sharing the World’ p. 7-8.
It is in our action upon things, in our interaction with other human beings, and in our work that our existence becomes meaningful. Our biggest mistake these days is to think that work is the only existential constant we have to cling to, because if we work only for ourselves, with no sense of responsibility, no sense of community, or history, or culture, or nature, with no future in mind – if we forget about our natural need to be part of a community and share our lives with other living beings, as opposed to our simulated friends online, then it is all for nothing. Our work will be forgotten, swept away by the wind like castles in the sand. And we will most likely be alone when it happens because we’ve become post-social creatures in our constant battle for power, money, eternal youth and success.
Even if it seems like we’re already balancing on a knife’s edge and that the smallest amount of added stress or responsibility might push us into the abyss, we simply have to find a way to remember the importance of love and not shy away from it when an opening presents itself. At first it might seem like we’re being held back or sidetracked by the intensity of emotion, but when we gradually start to feel the expansion in our lives, from really engaging with our living surroundings and connecting with others, it will make us forget the initial fear we felt. Society itself / the institution suspects the potential intensity of love and represses it with all its might. It considers love to be a potential subversive revolution in the making, on a small and personal scale or a large, community-driven scale, it doesn’t matter. How could we not be afraid?
“Nearness to the other, or better with the other, appears in the possibility of elaborating a common world with him, or her, a world which will not destroy the world proper to each one. This common world is always in becoming.”
*Luce Irigaray: ’Sharing the World’ p. 8.
Viva Ultra
Viva Ultra
by Bibi Katholm
“The Singularity: prepare to be unprepared …
… In technology, things get faster. It’s called hyper-exponential acceleration and it has profound implications. Soon, there will be a concatenation of globalization, biotech, climate change, AI, robotics, discovery of life elsewhere, nuclear fusion, maglev trains and carbon nanotubes, all technologically enabled. The hyper-exponential curve that we’ve been riding is going vertical. More change will happen in the next generation’s first years than in all of human history including the Stone Age.
The speed of history is tied to the pace of innovation, so society has a problem. No one is going to be able to keep up with their own history or with the succession of technologies. Science fiction writers won’t be able to imagine the future fast enough to stay ahead of it.
The point in time when the rate of change exceeds our collective ability to deal with it is named after the bit of a black hole where nothing makes sense anymore; the Singularity.”
– Alexander Cartwright, p. 7 in Garageland magazine, issue 10. Published by Transition Editions. www.transitiongallery.co.uk
Complexity, complex patterns, structure, or lack of structure?… It all assumes such overwhelming proportions. Seems impossible to choose, and just as impossible to disregard the need for making choices, decisions… We aim higher, constantly higher, as we try to sort through the layers of chaotic static that pulsate all around us.
Anxiety is everywhere. Anxious insides. Anxious surroundings. Anxious work. Anxious dreams. It spreads like wild fire and pulls you in, catches you off guard, again and again. We stumble through our days, and sleep with our eyes open.
Nervous System
According to Italian critic and media activist Franco ’Bifo’ Berardi, technological transformations have displaced the economic process from the sphere of the production of material goods toward the sphere of semiotic goods. In this way, ’semiocapital’ (signified value / meaning) has become the dominant form of the economy. What he refers to as ’the accelerated creation of surplus value’ depends on the acceleration of the infosphere. Because of the digitalization of the ’infosphere’ signs are produced and circulated at a growing speed, but as humans, with the limited capacity of our embodied minds, we are put under too much pressure by this acceleration, and we end up crumbling. In Bifo’s opinion the current economic and political crisis has a lot to do with this imbalance between the fields of ’semioproduction’ and ’semiodemand’ – in other words the imbalance between the supply of semiotic goods and the socially available time of attention.
We’re currently experiencing an increase in pace, an acceleration of the infosphere so intense that we simply cannot keep up with it. Scientists and intellectuals are expressing serious concerns as to whether or not we’re in process of exceeding the limited capacity of our minds and moving away from human social behavoir all together. In Asia they’ve already reached the point where kids and teenagers are so addicted to social media and being online non-stop day and night, that they’ve had to invent rehab facilities for dealing with this new serious form of addiction. Our nervous systems are under attack like never before in human history and it doesn’t seem like the current mindfulness trend, our yoga classes and coaching sessions concerned with stress handling and finding meaning, will be enough to counteract this development. We’re in the middle of a gigantic evolutionary shift, moving away from the Real and further towards the Virtual with every passing minute we spend online.
”In recent decades, the organism has been exposed to an increasing mass of neuromobilizing stimuli. The acceleration and intensification of nervous stimuli on the conscious organism seems to have thinned the cognitive membrane that we might call sensibility. The conscious organism needs to accelerate its cognitive, gestural, kinetic reactivity.
The time available for responding to nervous stimuli has been dramatically reduced. This is perhaps why we seem to be seeing a reduction of the capacity for empathy. Symbolic exchange among human beings is elaborated without empathy, because it becomes increasingly difficult to perceive the existence of the body of the other in time. In order to experience the other as a sensorial body, you need time, time to caress and smell. The time for empathy is lacking, because stimulation has become too intense.”
– Franco ’Bifo’ Berardi : After the Future, p. 67-68
What happens when the human nervous system enters a semi-permanent state of overload? This is usually the point when we… wake up?… turn our attention away from the screen and start searching for communities, intimacy and social connection. A sense of humanity and solidarity is awakened under extreme pressure, but why do we have to push ourselves so far, into a state of exhaustion that almost kills us, before we finally stop and listen to our nervous heartbeat and our aching bodies? Why has it become so incredibly difficult for us to get out of our heads, stop working, go off-line and just be still for a while? We’re all workaholics to some extent – no doubt, but that still doesn’t explain our reluctance to pay attention to all the warning signs we’re constantly witnessing in the form of stress, anxiety disorders, violence, loneliness, depression etc.
Sensitivity is slowness
”Connection is interoperability and it makes possible the circulation of abstract information. It involves conscious and sensitive bodies, but the conscious and sensitive body is only a passive carrier of connection. Consciousness is only an operational ability to react. And sensitivity is slowness, hindering acceleration and competition.”
– Franco ’Bifo’ Berardi :After the Future, p. 57
We’ve been taught to think that being online is the same as being ’connected’. This is of course true if you’re thinking about the word ’connected’ an a strictly electronic sense, as being hooked up to a power source and online, part of the virtual circuitry.
But if you consider the meaning of being ’connected’ in a more social and human context, it again becomes a question of defining what’s real and what’s virtual.
You can feel connected to a friend, a family member, a partner, or even strangers if you get close to them and share your thoughts, your body language and feelings with them, but you have to use all of your senses in order to experience this meeting with the Other. Your Mac will never be able to show you any understading or empathy. It’s not a real person you can share your thoughts and secrets with, and it will never be your friend. Neither will the virtual ’people’ or ’friends’ whose names you see popping up on the screen when you’re online. None of it is Real. Communicating and interacting with other people online is still, and will probably always be a kind of one way street – at least as far as our senses are concerned. As long as we still experience the world through the filter of human consciousness and our bodily senses, any kind of virtual reality will seem alien and lacking to us.
”The infinite acceleration of the world with respect to the mind is the feeling of being definitively cut off from the sense of the world. Sense isn’t found in the world, but in what we are able to create. What circulates in the sphere of friendship, of love, of social solidarity is what allows us to find sense. Depression can be defined as a lack of sense, as an inability to find sense through action, through communication, through life. The inability to find sense is first of all the inability to create it…. ”
– Franco ’Bifo’ Berardi : After the Future, p. 64
The Image will come at the Resurrection
Bibi Katholm: The Image will come at the Resurrection
By curator, Alex White (US, UK)
Somewhere between painting, installation, and film, lies the work of Danish artist Bibi Katholm, who began her three-month residency at 18th Street Arts Center, in Santa Monica. Through the use of carefully selected fabrics and other found objects, Katholm cuts and manipulates her materials, juxtaposing fabrics and paints creating a visual association–not unlike a film editor creating a montage. As much as Katholm’s work is painting, it is also very much about painting and the process of image-making itself. Having graduated in 2008 with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London, Katholm’s work is informed by philosophical thinking. She continually investigates and challenges herself to expose the cracks and fissures of the medium – a medium, which has been consistently called into question since the development of photographyin the mid 19th Century. In 1839, French artist Paul Delaroche famously declared, “from today, painting is dead. ” Through a deconstruction of Katholm’s process, however, we are made aware of a truly dynamic practice that makes up an amorphous, living, and breathing body of work. Fragments are re-cycled and re-invented to create living images that are invariably subject to change, as in nature. What once was a cherished article of clothing, for example, may later be given new life as a work of art, like in Katholm’s recent painting, Push the Sky Away # Avalanche .
In Jacques Rancière’s seminal text The Future of the Image – which has been influential to Katholm – Rancière discusses two schools of thought in relation to the image. One, that “there is no longer any reality, but only images,” and two, that “there are no more images but only a reality incessantly representing itself to itself.” Ultimately, despite that these arguments may appear in direct opposition, Rancière contends, “if there is now nothing but images, there is nothing other than the image. And if there is nothing other than the image, the very notion of the image becomes devoid of content.” The chaos of an image-driven society creates instability, asboundaries between life and art begin to blur. For Katholm, the double mediation of images has become standard. “Layering, filtering, or using the collage technique is no longer just an option,” Katholm remarks, “it’s simply the only way to create a believable representation of a world that is moving too fast for its population to understand it.” As Douglas Crimp notes in his progressive essay The End of Painting: with the rise of student movements across the world in the 1960s, came the birth of institutional critique. Painting began to feel elitist and inaccessible as artists demanded new environments and broader audiences. Artists began to embrace film, video, and performance as mediums. Today, Katholm asserts, “the work of art is a multi-cultural, fragmented, ever-expanding, and self-reflective discourse that attempts to create a bridge between the historical recognition of metaphysical loss and the brave new world of the 21st century.” Through a sampling and accumulation of fragments, Katholm’s work becomes emblematic of a very postmodern, contemporary way of thinking – a fresh take on the cinematic montage through a return to painting. The cutting and manipulation of fabric mimics the act of splicing film. Material that once stood alone as a still image is combined with paint to create movement. Each painting contains a number of images in every detail. For example, in Neon’s Cabin # Rebel Rebel the image of the blue cabin was originally painted for her moving image piece Operation Space Magic. The Daniel Buren-esque layer of black and grey striped fabric, which appears in a number of her works, was formerly a beloved Vivienne Westwood dress.
Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein hypothesized that one image on its own does not create the same visceral effect as the juxtaposition of images. Montage creates a visual association – the aesthetic becomes political. Katholm adds:
The image holds no truth, if not the truth of limitations and boundaries, of lack and want. In my attempts to create representations of the objective world, I am always confronted with the chaos that undermines all structure and creates rupture and instability… The only truth is movement.
This physical action, Katholm’s process, is a way to navigate the endless stream of images and information towards something more natural. Growing up in Denmark, a country characterized by its high degree of agriculture and vast rural landscapes, Katholm describes herself as “Nordic,” a term referring to both the organic and the philosophical – nature as a place of solitude, where one is left purely to her own sense and instinct, melancholy, and silence. Nature is the “place where language collapses,” says Katholm. Ranciére describes this as the relationship between the visible and the invisible. While “words make seen what does not pertain to the visible,” he comments, the image “is a way in which things themselves speak and are silent”. The image has the capacity to show signs, imprinted directly on the body by its history. Each fabric in Katholm’s paintings has a history; sometimes all that is left is their indexical trace onto the image. In Micro Castle # Westwood vs Harmony, details reveal the patterns that take shape after a fabric has been applied and later removed. Paint is then added to bring the patterns back to life. What is left behind, their silent speech, is the language of exchange between humans and nature.
American biologist Edward O. Wilson coined the term “biophillia” referring to the intuitive tendency for humans to seek connections with nature. “Intuition is the link between biology and creativity,” claims Katholm. Her painting process, which she calls “biophillia painting,” is the result of her desire for reciprocity with nature. The result being the revitalizing of found materials – or, as Rancière suggests, “the image as raw, material presence.”
From a distance paints and fabrics mesh, obfuscating the process. Upon closer inspection, we begin to distinguish fabrics from other textures, revealing the slippage between images, the apparatus. In film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry’s The Ideological Effects of the Cinematic Apparatus, Baudry refers to the spectator as passive, accepting everything he sees as truth. When continuity editing is implemented in film, the spectator rarely questions the experience. When there is a disruption, however, such as a technical difficulty or a rupture in the continuity of the film, “the spectator is broughtabruptly back to discontinuity… to the technical apparatus which he had forgotten.” The cinematic mechanisms have been suppressed, but it is only when they are revealed that the viewer is truly liberated from the role as passive spectator. Through Katholm’s gathering of stories, objects, techniques, philosophical musings, and ways of perceiving the world, the narrative is disrupted, and the painterly apparatus is exposed. It is up to the viewer to put together the moving parts. Katholm reveals:
The fragments contained within my work accumulate to form imagined landscapes. These landscapes have become a way of structuring or layering the images filtered through my inner experience, and as such they are free from the restraints of representation and traditional narrative interpretation.
Even when Katholm is not painting, her work refers to painting. Be it films shot on Super 8, revealing her process, or her collaborative platform In Case We Don’t Die, her projects run parallel to her practice. In Case We Don’t Die is an artist community established by Katholm as a means for artists to support each other through contemporary uncertainties. The project addresses the changing role of the artist; the relationship between aesthetics, the social, and the political; and the potential for shared creative process. “These days everyone experiences increasing pressure of living in a culture where speed, excess, and expansion put our collective nervous system to the test,” Katholm explains. Through clever self-referentiality – the title perhaps also alluding to the continual threat to painting’s mortality – In Case We Don’t Die exists as both an online platform (incasewedontdie.com) and a series of group exhibitions, which have so far taken place in Berlin, Copenhagen, London, and Los Angeles.
During her residency at 18th Street Arts Center, Katholm has been working on an entirely new body of work, which will be on display at her first US solo exhibition, The Image will come at the Resurrection at the Daily Dose in downtown Los Angeles. While still retaining their Scandinavian minimalist appearance, the new works have been influenced by her time in Los Angeles, both in the physical fabrics –many of which were found in the downtown fashion district – as well as in the bright and natural aesthetic, inspired by time spent at Santa Monica beach. “18th Street has given me this amazing opportunity to focus on my work in a place that seems alien, but also strangely familiar,” remarks Katholm, “everything here feels cinematic – the way we experience time… the warm, expanding landscape.” It is a stark contrast from the cold, dark winters in Denmark. The exhibit will run through December, and in addition to new work created at 18th Street, the show will include moving image work, and several site-specific installations made from locally sourced fabrics.
The Painter’s Gambit
The Painter’s Gambit
Essay on works by painter Bibi Katholm
By curator, Iben Bach Elmstrøm (DK)
In chess, the ’gambit’ is an opening move in which a player makes a sacrifice, typically of a pawn, for the sake of a compensating advantage
Bibi Katholm is a painter. The film-like flow in her work is created in a highly contradictory tension between a gut-feel improvisation and a structured cut-up montage technique. It’s not about painting out of pure spontaneity, but about artistic choices and creating an inner visual rhetoric. There is a durational aspect in Katholm’s painting, as the different layers have their own independent process. She explores painting as a kind of moving image, in a process similar to montage film-editing, where a series of shots are sequenced into a condensed time frame to create a certain feeling. This approach creates an overall impression of complexity.
Transformation is a process rather than a measurement or a constant, and it continuously happens in nature as well as and in our bodies. Katholm explores this perceptual space in her paintings as she visualizes the struggle between still image and moving image through layers of brushstrokes and collage elements. Her paintings are like a temporal experience that, like montage, resists the modern standardization and restraints of time. On the way to the perfect lasting complexity, the painting repeatedly closes in seductive and irresistible ‘beauty stills’. It takes an almost violent sacrifice to obstruct the beauty, destroy the dead balance and set the painting free. To make it move again. The closer to the complexity limit, the greater the risk. The greater the risk, the greater the reward. The painter’s gambit is the necessary gamble.
Katholm’s works are about connections, transformation, hybrids of forms, movement and coactivity. These themes materialize through her abstract and partly figurative works. The pieces are large-scale and balanced in a compositional completion that awakens your mind as you explore the works. The temperament of colours and the different layers create a depth and intensity that draws you into the painting’s logic and rhythmic force. The combination of bold brushstrokes, figuration, geometry and painted fabric parts, acts as if a collective force or several minds are at play in creating the pieces. Yet it all balances in a calm harmony, which only one artist can master. Katholm forms her own language within painting, a language based on correspondence between forms, colours and added parts. She works within the frame and outside of it. Sometimes even adding lace from an old dress or a found fabric where tears and threads become a part of the composition. She contrasts colors from bright and soft, to dark and blocked out. This plays intelligently with the intensity of brushstrokes ranging from thin washes to thick bold strokes.
Despite their improvisational outset, Katholm’s paintings are formed by the experience of art. Her works are in a clear dialogue with artists of the past and art movements in the history of painting. Katholm’s pieces relate to artists like Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, Amy Sillman, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston and Prunella Clough. Her artistic methods seem connected to forces found in artist movements like dynamic suprematism, neo-plasticism, The New York School, abstract expressionism and geometric abstraction. Yet her artistic choices are fully formed by her contemporary outset. Where it’s less about establishing a discourse for the sake of driving forward the progression of art, and more about connecting things that flow together in unrestrained ways. Katholm’s approach is inclusive and improvisational, rather than medium specific and classified. Abstraction is the core stand in Katholm’s works, although figuration sometimes forms and appears to underline how the abstract is also connected to the representational regime.
Katholm’s works are both a seductive tangible surface and an open perceptual space. She rhythmically moves around with bold steps on the canvases and gives the works their own energies and flows. To experience Katholm’s paintings, one has to unlearn the modern discourse of critical art and be accepting of our present and its softening and rerendering of separation, representation and classification.
Vote Imagination
Vote Imagination!
by artist, Shane Bradford (UK)
Speaking from experience there are often two distinct points of view about an artist’s work: the artists and the viewers. The artist invests learning, intention, goals, beliefs, philosophies, ideas, directions, and outcomes. An entire neural network of memory, thought and coincidence is whittled down to a single selection which the artist hopes will in turn reflect the complexity of the works origins. Then the viewer comes along, takes one look at the work and simultaneously superimposes an entirely different set of values upon it. Thrown into a completely different context another set of connections is made; billions of electrical impulses recalculate in an instant and stamp out a brand new neural imprint that, more often than not, bares not the least resemblance to the artist’s original intention.
I mention this in relation to Bibi’s work in particular for one reason: to express the inherent generosity afforded to the viewer in her work. The underlying premise of Bibi’s approach is to give up her ideas, her style, her thoughts, and her intentions to the viewer. Rather than to impose her point of view, the very substance of Bibi’s work is to expose the myriad neural ticks that went into its fabrication. Part of what makes this work modern is its willingness to relinquish the hierarchical power systems that are assumed and exploited by other artists. The decisions made during her process are not based on value; she doesn’t ask is this good or bad? Or is this better or worse? Such questions would imply a pedagogical framework in which the artist is employed as ‘teacher’ and the viewer as ‘student’. Instead, expectations on the viewers’ part are confronted and challenged, not in an aggressive way but in a way that takes you beyond the nuts and bolts of the work itself. What you see in Bibi’s work is not the hard edge of certainty or solution, but the generous and open world of intelligence and possibility.
Once this is understood we are free to roam inside the work and see what it is all about. First of all, I would say there is a prevailing feeling of ‘folk’ that logically would seem to sit in opposition to its modernity, but somehow doesn’t. The log-cabin-like, into-the-woods appearance works hard to specify Bibi’s Scandinavian roots while at the same time alluding to a more general, almost pagan environment in which myth, magic, dream and spirit are still considered valid and tangible propositions. Of course, the work as a whole is far too restless to settle upon such a reading for long, I only suggest that the hint of folk in the work subtly prepares the mind for the lucid journey it’s about to take.
The word ‘journey’ leads to another important element in Bibi’s work, which is ‘narrative’. Narrative in the sense of storytelling is certainly linked to the folk tradition. The narrative employed within this work however is disjointed andrandom. It is the narrative of the dream, not the story. In Bibi’s world narrative has more to do with the relationship between the painting or installation as an object and its osmosis with the imagination than it does with the upholding of tradition. The stories told in B’s work are multi-dimensional in that they speak outwards to the viewer as well as to themselves. They are conscious trains of thought that lead you in and out of reality and illusion. In the harsh reality of the present you are standing in front of a seemingly ordinary, perhaps random object, where the work has a definite artistic and aesthetic value. But it is up to the viewer to make the leap into a less certain world of what the object implies in terms of the imagination. It is tempting to apply a kind shamanistic definition here whereby the work is pinned down to serving the role of medium between our world and the world of the spirit but I think that is too easy and simplistic an idea to settle on for long. What discounts this reading for me is the fact of the works modernity in terms of the art world in which it very much exists. Aside from all this talk of storytelling and tradition, all artwork in the 21st century has a dialogue with the commercial and hierarchical world of art for which, to some degree at least, it is made. Younger artists don’t necessarily see the commercial art world as completely separate from their experience as artists as much as older generations.
When held up to the art world in this light you begin to see Bibi’s relevance in terms of expressing the ‘new’. The prevailing need in a commercial art world is for commodities to be defined so as to be understood and therefore sold. Whether good or bad this has led to the exposure of clearly defined market driven artistic strategies as artists follow commercial models in order to succeed. Bibi’s work in this sense bucks the trend and points to a new approach among a younger generation in which all specific definitions and solutions are abandoned in favour of a non-linear explosion of creativity.
This work is modern because it makes no attempt to specify its direction. With Bibi’s work what you see is a conscious assertion that creativity, when accompanied by awareness, can be a much more valuable commodity. Each generation should break the shackles imposed by its predecessor. The creation of raw, complex, creative, intelligent, yet accessible and art market conscious work is what prompted respected London critic JJ Charlesworth to comment that Bibi’s work was ‘ahead of its time’. Bibi has an unfettered connection to her own strange psyche and that is just to scratch the surface.
A forward to Ghost Hunting in Broad Daylight
‘A forward to Bibi Katholm’s Ghost Hunting in Broad Daylight‘
by art critic, John Slyce (US, UK)
“Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.” -Walter Benjamin
It is an awesome privilege to write early on an artist of rare talent and originality. The words one puts into circulation gain amplitude–often all too much–as they follow a young artist into a new world. There is much I would like to say about my experience of Bibi Katholm’s art and working methods that will remain unsaid here and for now. This is not to concoct a sense of mystery or aura to hang on her practice. Bibi is in many respects a painter through and through. Painting is, however, in her handling not a static and self-legitimating object but rather a restless pursuit and something of a ghostly apparition in itself.
I have often found Bibi Katholm’s work in film and video to be amongst the clearest statements of her interest in and handling of painting as a practice. The object of painting may be expressed and found in the folds of a fabric that hangs as a remnant from a performance in her cave-like den of a studio. Fugitive, transitory and still pursued relentlessly as if the chase is itself the better part of capture, a viewer is offered an experience that is at once tangible and a totality and world of its own. What one engages with in such an installation are mainly traces left in the wake of a process that is intensely chaotic though rhythmically structured by repetition and internal quotation. Her art is a passionate questioning expressed as a restless quest for that which remains outside of language and standard logic and yet can be seen and felt with a gaze altered and located not solely in the eye but also in the head and heart.
Movement is crucial, though so too is color. Kaleidoscopic refractions of time, place and action abound. I would like to suggest a space that is suspended in non-identity: neither the everyday world of experience, nor that delineated as “the gallery”; not a wholly interior space that is a projection emanating from inside the head of the artist, nor an imaginatively construed parallel and fictitious reality given to whimsy which creatively turns the external world on its head. The process reveals itself at full speed: binaries collapse and points of entry and exit open onto a multi-dimensional story thatcommunicates its own raw materiality and vibrant visuality through an accretion of layered fragments. That is how I would describe my encounter with and in an installation of Katholm’s art – as an experience other than experience and therefore profound. At its best, it is not unlike what one feels when one sees the northern lights float fleetingly across the sky. Not all stars come out only at night. It is Bibi Katholm’s great gift to trace such constellations across the sky in the broad daylight of her art.
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John Slyce is an American writer and critic based in London, U.K.. He has contributed articles, reviews and interviews to many of the major art magazines and has written numerous catalogue essays on the work of artists such as Sarah Sze, Jemima Stehli, Adam Chodzko, Gillian Wearing, Sarah Jones, David Shrigley, Darren Almond, Michael Landy, Muntean/Rosenblum, and Artlab (Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards). He writes regularly in Portfolio, Camera Austria, Art Monthly, and Flash Art and has written monographs on the work of Jemima Stehli and Patrick Hughes