Public - Volume 25, Issue 50, 2014

Introduction to issue of PUBLIC 50 on "The Retreat."

Retreat communicates power through refusal. By turning away or separating from, the subject in retreat engages in an act of negativity that demands a break with dominant modes of thinking and a redirecting of energies towards the messy, diffuse, or unpopular. In the post-1945 German context, such associations carry specific historical and cultural weight, as negation always also denotes a retreat from the legacies of fascism. This article examines the German author Gisela Elsner (1937-1992) as a case study of just such a retreat. As a figure, she enacted retreat through costuming, make-up, and her fierce commitment to the DKP, the German Communist Party, despite her location in West Germany. Her writing also retreats - from representation, from pleasure, from emotion and from interpretation. The article explores Elsner as a figure of retreat that complicates the positive coding of the term's identity-political possibilities.

Exploring the politics of representation, … … … … … … (Exile) is comprised of abstracted film stills created through the productive misuse of technology. Sourced from Kent Mackenzie's film, The Exiles (1961), These images are made by scanning the film while it is being played on a portable digital video player: turning moving images into still ones. The documentary style film follows a small group of Indigenous people living in Los Angeles. Over a twelve-hour period, the film records their candid discussions of home, community and future.

Lecture presented during the 2012 Banff Research in Culture research residency. Malabou takes head on the significance of the concept of 'retreat' and the theoretical operations it performs, by probing what retreat and withdrawal tell us about our ontological and epistemological condition. As she interrogates the metaphysics of retreat, we are reminded repeatedly of the significant of the physical and neurobiological in the philosophical, an area of research in which the author has played a critical framing role.

Ankyloglossia manifests as multiple systems of categorization. A series of films, 'Systems for: Base, curl, foot, free, out, pile, shake, stack', focus solely on a thigh, calve, an arm and three fingers. These fractions are piled and sorted, at times functioning as distinct and separate characters, and in others emphasized as a whole. They fold into one another to allude to the Exquisite Corpses of the Surrealists, or Donna Haraway's 'Many-Headed Monsters'. A series of text collages are arranged by the order in which the physiological, philosophical and psychological words were removed from the original source, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus (1956). The texts are arranged in entomological boxes, each word separated by an individual entomology pin. A series of photographs are adorned with digitally printed limbs, and presented alongside Raku-fired limbs in Petri-dishes, a collection of parts arranged on tabletops as evidence of an absurd research.

All too frequently individuals working in art institutions are faced with the frustrating contradiction that the quality engagement with art and ideas that are the institution's raison d'être, and the concentrated research and writing that are a vital part of, for instance, curatorial work are compromised by workload and have to be eked out in less-than-efficient spurts, fit in after regular working hours, or postponed altogether. This text explores some of the reasons conditions of overwork exist in art institutions and how slow time for working with art, artists and ideas might be reprioritized by looking at recent examples of art institutions that have employed strategies of retreat and withdrawal. The text also proposes that given the prevalence and normalization of conditions of overwork as well as an increasing reliance on unpaid labour in the field, art institutions have an ethical responsibility to refuse such exploitative conditions and commit to doing less when human and financial resources are insufficient.

The elevator doors opened. Three security guards stood on the other side of the spacious hall awaiting them. She followed the young man, the three guards in turn followed her. They went through various small conference rooms, named after opera's: Aida, Lohengrin, Don Giovanni. She wondered whether there was one called Cosi fan Tutte/Thus do they all.

In this essay Berardi proclaims that we need to llimit the possibilities for retreat, rather than expand them. Looking optimistically to social movement and a rising collective consciousness against exploitation and austerity, Bifo calls for the generation of "a common sphere of sensibility" that will inform a politics that serves the interests of all, rather than just a few. For Bifo, a technology-induced retreat is at least partially to blame: this is the techno-alienation experienced by today's cognitive labourers, who are also "the first generation of people who have learned more words from a machine than from their mother."

Through a desire to articulate modes of multispecies agency, data were gathered in response to material, spatial and temporal qualities of Sleeping Buffalo (Tunnel) mountain - or iniskim - during The Retreat residency at the Banff Centre. In an attempt to 'retreat' from forms exclusive to art, data are presented using the ubiquitous structures of 'newspaper' and 'postcard'.

This article traces a brief genealogy of the move from totality to discrepancy as a major shift in the understanding of ideology and its critique as it supposedly takes place in art. Drawing on the work of Jorge Luis Borges, a model is developed for the study of 'theoretical ideology', as distinct both from the 'political ideology' of the author and from the 'aesthetic ideology' of his work. Borges's texts on the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, in particular, are read as signposts on the path that leads from Lukács to Adorno and from Sartre to Lacan or Miller.

The Dead Man Drifted Along in the Breeze presents stills from a video document capturing a computer screen as I navigated Google Streetview, in an attempt to retrace Robert Smithson's walk as described in his 1967 Artforum article 'The monuments of Passaic'. The contemporary video stills are accompanied by quotations from the original Smithson article. It is as if Smithson was writing about a future landscape as documented by the Google cameras; a fragile world of unstable pictures and shifting ground.

This article considers the role of retreat in the time of global capital through an exploration of some of the major themes arising during the Banff residency, The Retreat: A position of dOCUMENTA(13), held in August 2012. These themes include the retreats of mastery, subjectivity, the protagonist, historical time, and the return of totality in response to the so-called crisis of capitalism.

Postcard project reflecting on the possibility of retreating and communicating to the outside world from Banff, Canada.

A brief history on select environmental insignia.

This short essay will respond to a photographic series produced by artist Maria Whiteman during her Studio Time residency at Banff. These photos consist of two diptychs each of which contrasts an image of the gardens of Versailles with one taken of a desolately mined oil sand's landscape; a single fifth photograph reveals an unfinished road, a major future piece in the oil infrastructure of Alberta, stretching off into an empty horizon. In the proposed article I read these photos as provocative reflections on the historical fate of sovereign reason; the issues they raise pertain to that which remains vital or stillborn in the ability of the human mind to shape and alter its environment and future. The gardens of Versailles have historically functioned as emblems of a highly aestheticized sovereignty (both political and epistemological); they have more recently become a shorthand for the violence of 'Enlightenment' reason, for the brutal capture of nature by mathematics and logic. Whiteman's series complicates this contemporary reading: there is a verdure, stillness and elegance to these re-contextualized gardens, one which at the same time does not discount the possibility that the desertified zone of extraction is simply a direct extension of rationalist control gone awry. I will argue that there is a quiet call within these photos to a return to form, to a political humanism of the willed effect and to the strength and vigour of a now almost antiquated political act. A nostalgia, however, that at the same time utterly concedes the way in which contemporary politics and economics are both forms of the same tragic fantasy of centrality, the bad hubris of anthropocentrism.

Beacon is a photo-essay documenting members of the TH&B collective taking a billboard of the Great Lakes for a walk in the woods along a trail to the Bow River. The project was developed during the BRiC residency The Retreat at the Banff Centre for the Arts in August 2012 (All photos by Carol Sawyer).

Even in an era when images have become omnipresent, art practices continue to carry out critique of a kind that is invaluable to our comprehension of our social and political condition. Amongst the most significant issues art and cultural production more generally draw attention to, are the operations of ownership and property, especially in connection to culture. Property continues to name a limit and blockage in our current social configuration. How, why and what are the consequences of property today? And how might we retreat from property through the articulation of a new social commons?

Afterword for special issue of PUBLIC on The Retreat: A Position of dOCUMENTA (13) reflects on author's participation in the Banff residency through personal vignettes and keywords that connect essays in the issue. The second half of the article examines Hong Kong-born Canadian artist Yam Lau's recent projection-based art installation. It considers contemporary implications for retreat as model in relation to the historic literati retreat of seventeenth century China and the Buddhist metaphor of Indra's Net, arguing the impossibility of both profound withdrawal and retreat into indifference.

Column on Walter Benjamin and the notion of the retreat.