 So, I will now introduce our third speaker of the day. After this little break, I hope that you enjoyed Motoko Ishibashi's performance. There will be a second iteration of the performance this afternoon. So our third speaker is Ingrid Lukigade. Ingrid Lukigade is an art critic based in Paris. She is an editor for Les Enrecupables, Spike Art Magazine and a correspondent for Flash Art, among others. She writes about how artists give form to techno-political shifts in individual and collective subjectivity. As a PhD candidate at Université Paris-en-Porte-au-Sorbonne in Paris with Vincent Sandny, her research centers on artistic autonomy strategies during the 2010 decade. Welcome, Ingrid. Thank you so much, Clémentine, for your introduction. Thank you to Bettina for having me here. And thank you all to be here present today. So, my topic will go back a bit further in time. I'm going to have a bit of a wider historical frame, but that is to speak about the present. I'm trying to go back really to nowadays, but not through chronological reading, and especially not through a teleological one, but rather by identifying several moments in time where a figure of the artist relating to a certain totality, to a certain moment of change out of chaos can merge. So the title of my introduction is called, and that is the wordplay, Majeruismimimimim, but actually I wanted to speak about, first of all, the perils of having a true historical approach of newness, and then second to see maybe how some recursive strategies have occurred over time. So I will start very chronologically with this very first approach of how contemporaries have approached Michel Majeruist's self-professed newness, as the newness has been a characteristic often taken up by commentators at the time of Majeruist's life. A telling example is a 1997 portrait by Daniel Bienbaum in Fritz Magazine titled The Power of Now. This was only one year after the breakthrough show at the 1996 at Kunsthaler Basel, so it was also an article that was to become time-giving. The first sentence is starting and setting the tone. For Michel Majeruist's art history is over. All images that have ever existed appear to be represented in his work simultaneously on an infinitely rich and hospitable present. Another entry point would be the notes of the artist himself that have been compiled through his sketchbook in the publication Notizen by Brigitte Fransen and relating to now-ness one finds several entries. The first would be what is it about these times that makes them so representative in 1995 or all paintings that have been painted anew. When I say all paintings that I mean all those paintings we know and we no longer want to see because they've had that day. You can't drink milk all the time. It turns sour sometimes too. And this was also in 1995. One recurrent expression of Michel Majeruist as we have already seen in the previous conference is referring to his four bears as dead suckers. But with Majeruist's own work, his newness also bears this very same peril, that of turning into history. In her essay for the same catalogue about the notes, Brigitte Fransen brings up this very point. What looks like nothing but pure banality screamed out loud acquired a historical dimension over the years. Suddenly the painting of Michel Majeruist filed into line historically. They are no longer that dynamic and loud, no longer that fleeting and superficial, no longer as obvious as before. And then of course there is the title of this symposium, which is taken from the 2000 painting what looks good today might not look good tomorrow. Regarding to this topic of history, a third point to keep in mind would be a very generational reading. It is also one with bears the same perils of a symptomatic reading. This approach is the one that would emerge later in the turn of the millennium, and also posthumously. To Peter Paquetch, a critic, reminiscing about his first encounter with the work in 1994 through the exhibition at Neuger in Schneider Gallery in Berlin, he would write about Michel Majeruist as the sharp-eyed painter of the cyber generation. Günther Hallowschwister in the same catalogue of the installation from Michel Majeruist would similarly also declare Trondet so as to encompass the death of Michel Majeruist. He was writing about his paintings. He must have had the notion of a virtual structure in his head. And in 2006, the same Daniel Bienbaum, writing posthumously again in Artforum, also chose to embrace this later reading. The cybernetic reception at the turn of the 2000 had then become the dominant one. And in the article Search Engine, he was writing, to an eye not trained as a visual logic of computer games, the space can make little sense. But is it then possible today, with our eyes and minds now trained to encompass this cybernetic logic, to experience the same overwhelming disorientation when faced with the works? Or are the works, on the contrary, condemned to maybe have another reception which would be to help us understand how at the time the senses of the painter and the onlookers were configured? Is the work then condemned to bear witness to a certain historical configuration of the senses? Or can we try to understand differently the meaning of Michel Majeruist's works in history? There is, sorry, there is, however, another way to approach Michel Majeruist's legacy. This reading is the one that I wanted to refer to with the title and with the two terms, mimetic and mimetic. So this mimetic quality would be then to understand a certain way of relating to totality, or more precisely to a certain totality, one that is still time-specific, but recaptures at a wider strategy and potentially also recurring in time. This alternative strand is already present in the early readings of Majeruist, but is only mentioned fleetingly. To come back to the same 1997 portrait, Daniel Bienbaum is also speaking of a will to encompass everything. This, however, is relating to the treatment of the painterly medium. The will to encompass everything is then related to the size of the huge paintings and the fact that no image is no longer irrelevant or worthy of attention. However, it can also be expanded beyond the medium, so as to encompass a relation of the artist to a given totality. Contrary to simply situating oneself inside art history, this would then be a more horizontal reading. It also has to do with a certain compulsion, which is a word that the artist would use time and time again in his notes. In the same notes from April 1995, he is writing, such an order is a preponderance of the compulsion coming from a specific prevailing order. The term is connotating an uncontrable urge, a irrational obsession, as well as a coercive force. One can also keep in mind another much analyzed snippet of the works, which would be folk the intention of the artist, positioned on the 2000 skate ramp. The skate ramp shows from there on a way to approach the strategy of mimetic exacerbation. This strategy or tactic is hinting at a wish to fully merge with a symbolic order, so as to better expose its workings. It is a non-critical one without any value judgment, but at the peril of a paranoiac turnout. The specific phrase mimetic exacerbation appears not so long after the installation of the skate ramp in 2000. It was developed in a 2003 article by Hal Foster titled Data Mime and published by The Journal October. The critic Hal Foster then looks back at the dataist artist, working at the turn of the 1920 decades. In response to another paradigmatic moment of accelerated change and dehumanizing chaos, what interests him in this article is a specific figure of the artist. Drawing from the example of Hugo Bohr's performance at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, here on the first image, he characterizes the position of the artist as exorcist as possessed at the same time. A key persona of data is a traumatic mime, using the strategy of mimetic adaptation, whereby the dataist then assumes the diastrate of his time, namely the armoring of the military body, the fragmenting of the military worker, and the commodifying of the capitalist subject, and then goes on to inflate them through hyperbole or hypertrophy. Accordingly, the dataist is not giving up on totality, but embracing it to the peril of their own persona and sanity. He is still so convinced of the unity of all beings, of the totality of all things, that he suffers from the dissonance to the point of self-disintegration. It is a dangerous game where there is no sublimation nor catharsis at the end of the process. It is also uncertain in its effect, as it's assuming a position of a critique that flaunts its own fertility. At the very end of the article, it's also suggesting a way to enlarge this position and maybe expand it to a post-war artist like Andy Warhol, which would be a version of this figure refitted to consumer society. There are several clues in mission-measure's works that would corroborate this take. As early as 1998, one of the two works installed for Manifesta II in Luxembourg already indicated that paranoia is a trait of fine arts. But to look like a detective for the small clues in the work would be to miss the point. The idea is much rather that of a total chaos that demands to be left as such, left as a chaotic moment, left as a totality, and then maybe that would be best exemplified by the skate ramp, which we have already seen. The point of the skate ramp then is not so much to be a large painting, it is not so much a size, than the fact that it has a convex surface. To see the painting, one has to enter it, to be lost in it, and to walk over it or skate it. In short, this is already to subject oneself to a feeling of totality, of being engulfed in a pool, and this, in turn, produces, rather than only reproduces, represents or abstracts, adhesion and descent of totality. It is not a coincidence that this ramp would appear in the later part of Michel Madre's production at the turn of the decade. In 2000, it was not only that the painter's own production has changed, deepened or expanded, but it was more fundamentally that the conditions of the time and the settings of the totality it was relating to had changed. The same year, in 2000 as well, Michel Hart and Anthony Negri published their very influential essay, Empire. Empire was a theorization of a new world order, which was breaching with the older imperialist modernism, and now enveloping the globalized super-national world. The new order envelops the entire space of civilization, meaning that from now on, any response, involvement, or attempt to push against it can only occur from inside and against Empire. In their recent 2019 article published by New Left Review, they are commemorating the 20 years of its publication and writing. The fact that no nation state is able to fill the hegemonic role of the emerging global order is not a diagnosis of chaos and disorder, but rather it reveals the emergence of a new global power and structure and indeed a new form of serenity. The legacy of Michel Madre is also one that can be read with a timely conscience of having to work from the inside of a new scale and a new reality. Such a way of situating oneself horizontally in relation to the totality would then start with a dataist to echo Michel Madre's but also encompass another iteration in time, and namely the loose grouping of artists that were growing up in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis that dropped out of art school and that came together on the platform of the Web 2.0, trying to produce images from yet another moment of chaotic imagery and ever-exaggerated perceptual conditions and ultimately also imploded when they set foot in the institutional setting. So here as well, the notion of time is of course very present. This magazine, because it's the artist I wanted to take as a third comparison, were active from 2010 to 2016. And here I wanted to look more especially at the 9 Berlin Biennale curated by the collective and titled The Present in Drag, not only because there is a approach of time but also because it's the point when the collective would explode and seize its activities. The introduction to the catalogue starts with, welcome to the post-contemporary. The future feels like the past, familiar, predictable, immutable, leaving the present with the uncertainties of the future. And then as a declaration of intent, let's give a body to the problem of the present where they occur so as to make them a matter of agency and not of spectatorship. This other totality calls for a similar strategy. It is not so much that the visual material is comparable because the order has, since those decades, become less and less legible. So where we used to have cybernetics and video game, we now have the seamless air-condition co-working spaces and the branding that has gotten way more effective. But a first example to the parallel can be maybe the way of intervening in physical space. And so from there, I want to come back to this image from the 1998 manifesto in Luxembourg. Michel Margerit chose to install one of his true works in this cafeteria space at the Utopolis Cinema. And actually there is a telegram to Ulrike Gross who was responsible for the project where he is explaining his choice, saying they've got this huge popcorn bar there. I think it's the only one at the whole cinema. Just where the bar starts on the left, there is a concrete wall five meters wide. This is just the wall from the work, the gym shoe and the color waves. The environment itself with a Coca-Cola advertisement doesn't immediately signal the art quality of the painting and that actually was also a reason of its very popular success at the time. This as well initially started. They are very practiced by investing in non-art spaces. And here it is a view from the 2014 show that produced called This Own Not For Everyone taking place in spring of 2014. And that was an art exhibition posing as a retail store according to the press release and which was set at Red Bull Studios in New York. So it was a collective show with artists and collectives and just to name a few, K-Hole, Telfar, Dora Bouddard, Simon Fujihwara, Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Tricartin, or Amalia Ullman. So here instead of the gossip magazines such as Bravo, all the Disney movies such as Tron, we now had Ikea bags, Ikea laundry bags with this logo or with stock photography collaged on it. Or we also had clothing items, body pillows, dormant hammocks or even flotation devices inside a total hell with logos everywhere. But this to them was a way specifically of showing also the structural condition they were working against in the sense that they wanted so the collective to produce aura without the hypocrisy since any museum as well was permeated by this very commercial logic. At the Berlin Biennale, it's a bit of a different approach since this was already a Biennale, so already an institution space and there were however several examples of those environments and to keep in tune with the cafeteria space I wanted to choose the juice bar from Deborah Del Mar Cop called Mint and installed in 2016 at the Academia der Künste for the Berlin Biennale. This also was mining the iconography of all the health-driven and very exploitative lifestyle but it was also a function in bar so taking place inside institutional space and selling green juice. The similar strategy of exposing certain structural workings by Mimesis is at play because the name itself is an acronym of Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey which were the fruit exporting markets at the time that of course didn't receive as much in return as the developed countries which were branding and then selling the juices. Reportedly, Majer is two works at Manifesta had a very different reception between both. The first one, the one with tennis shoe was an instant success with the art world. The other one, however, with the more classical setup like this was received as a relative disappointment and this one was the one which was set in the building of the Manifesta itself. But then for the 9 Berlin Biennale, the reception was very different. I wanted to take this example of a much quoted article in The Guardian by Jason Farago titled Welcome to Lol House how Berlin's Biennale became a slick, sarcastic joke and which is mentioning among the incriminating evidence the juice bar we have just seen or also the selfie-up work at the entrance of the Kavi building in Berlin. What is very interesting is that this article is precisely leading its charge in the name of newness. At the very least, the right. No one seems to have read an art history textbook. There is a century of precedence for artistic intercession into mass culture that undermined the fetishised newness parodied here. The other then compares the Biennale to historical precedence that to him on the contrary had been very successful. So he's naming Bada once again or Marcel Duchamp which had already turned himself into a cooperation with the Monte Carlo band in 1924 but also interestingly a nineties collective called Art Club 2000 who was staging mock fashion shows with gap closing. So something very interesting is happening here because what is it really that makes the strategy of the Biennale and of this magazine so different in its similar fusion with the consumerist mentality? What is it that makes its reception so opposite? What is it that has shifted so that one would perceive those strategies so differently as to write for them? Art is hopelessly tainted by commerce and the past is for circus. What has happened between a playful dismissal of dead circus and a past that can be only for circus because this magazine is not cultured enough to have opened a history textbook? And again the ambiguous celebration of newness here is read as a charge of not knowing what comes before whereas in the nineties Michel Majors was read and received as a painter of newness. This was on the contrary a way of knowing art history but then repurposing it. Michel Majors spatial intervention that we have seen and that I will maybe speak a bit more quicker about also includes so this work the Schleunigang at Munich Central Station. This is another one that was also interesting to me because it is in a hotel hall and a bit earlier and then also the social palace that we have seen but then also the television accidental television footage on CNN. So throughout his life those attempts at bringing art into the public space which were maybe less attempts at bridging art and life but maybe rather of heading towards an unprecedented fusion were all very well received, encouraged and even requested. I am speaking about an unprecedented fusion because this is a work the word that is used by two smartness in her essay the complex answer for the catalogue of the Ninth Berlin Biennale again and she is writing it is known that we need to collapse the core premises of aesthetics the distances separate art from institutions, viewers and the artists themselves. However this implies a nearness or unprecedented fusion of substances having remained in the path for so long that it could demand new organs that is a whole theory of relevance of senses in an epistemology to come. So this again is further dismantling a chronological reading of new organs because by then by 2016 we would have fully have the time to develop new organs since the 90s. So what separates both moments has then less to do with the relation to totality rather than to its institutions. With Majeru's the act of remixing content or translating it back to art history extends to institutions because similarly institutions are not fully dismissed as his interventions in public space or in commercial spaces are always framed by a certain context and that would be manifesto for instance or open art Munich. So they are enacted as a side step and intervening in parallel also between real shows. However with this magazine it is another paradigm the conditions that they are responding to have hardened the phase in institution is then at its lowest and in the wake of the economic crash of 2008 and the post-occupied war three years then this name has worked from the outside at first and seek autonomy from any artistic institution. So a last entry point would then concern an ultra contemporary approach of totality and that would be this time the meme. Majeru's was aspiring to an art aimed lower but wider but this was still aimed at art history because the phase in the present was still strong at his time. So with the dataists as well as Majeru's they were living in moments of tremendous change but it was still a change and not a stasis even the data is sometimes changing not for the better but still mutating and accelerating. So as there was still something that could be repurposed whereas afterwards it became a moment of stillness. Majeru's production period was encapsulated as we have already seen between the birth of the Internet in 1996 and the advent of a globalised world order but after him and after the 2016 Berlin Biennale this would coincide with a moment that was to become riddled by crisis depth and art for the 1%. And to go even further this means that the recurrence of the mimetic exacerbation tactic might have come to an end in 2016 with the Berlin Biennale. This also was more profoundly a way of highlighting a certain hypocrisy that then was going to come to its fullest expression. In an art firm article Christopher Glazek for instance is writing large corporations under right museums exhibition all the time. The difference with this was that they highlighted here Red Bull's involvement instead of consuming it. And with the Biennale it was also retrospective that was a performative ending as a platform was closed in the following months. So if history returns then as we know first as fast but maybe then as a meme. And in his 2019 book Can the Left Learn to Meme Mike Watson who is a philosopher who has worked a lot of Adorno is also diagnosing the lack of utopian vision of the very current generation due to a collapse of the avant-garde stream of democratising creativity. But he still has a hope in an attempt to match the madness of our media world either through interaction with its absurdity or by temporarily staving off a safe and wholly fabricated space within it. Except that in his approach which is very still comparable to dataism and later iterations. The art world now has been totally cut out of the equation and this also means any artistic production that would try to put back inside the museum, inside art history the aesthetics of what is emerging online. For him the trouble is that the art world has become inextricably linked with finance while remaining as culturally elitist as it always was. So for him it is not that there can't be any freedom agency or creativity within that very same shared midgetic sphere of experience. It is not that there can't be any user friendly response to totality but rather that any time that the aesthetic of online memes, video games of do-it-yourself videos are put back into anything that resembles art history of art institutions. This only means to reproduce a capitalist mechanism where anything that looks outside the system and then being cannibalized and put back in. So therefore to my question still, art is today perhaps the most archaic metagia in existence and even when art appropriates these aesthetics. So I think to look back at Michel Majore's work in the way that they relate to a certain totality and in the way as they enact a certain strategy it is also a way of learning from his work accuracy. Twenty years later it is very probable that the tactics that he was employing would miss the point because the time has changed and he is not responding to those same coordinates. But at the same time Michel Majore was not prescient and his work did not by any higher consciousness anticipate the recent or present technometric condition and I think that's maybe a big peril of wanting to put back his work in a post-internet genealogy. But I think to say so, to say that he was responding very specifically to his own conditions is also a tribute to the work's accuracy and to a certain perceiving body's discernment. It is also a testimony to how an individual voice can emerge in a playful interaction with a mesh of common denominators which are both at the same time restricting a subject but also a way for him or her to push back. Thank you Ingrid. So yeah, as you demonstrated first through this slide and also when you quoted the statement from the this Berlin Biennale, it seems that we're a bit stuck in a moment like we're experiencing a kind of stasis that has been widely discussed also by Marc Fischer. And as contrast to that, it seems that Majore was living in a time of drastic change but also of excitement and of playfulness and of curiosity maybe. And I was wondering and I was very interested in the way you contrasted the aesthetics of the end of the 90s when Majores was active and his aesthetics. So using like Disney characters, comics, etc. How you contrasted it with the very sleek aesthetics for instance of this. I was wondering if you could expand a bit more on these aesthetic tendencies that are 20 or 30 years apart. A point also that maybe I didn't get enough across was the idea of paranoia. And that is also why I wanted to go back to dataism so that it wouldn't seem like history is progressing on one way line. So I think what is different however with now relating as opposed to dataism to the 90s and even to the early 2010 is the fact that now we can't feel any change. And what I wanted to prove in their works is that even when there is a change and even when the speed is maybe going too quick for the human to take a step back and represent things there is a certain figure of the artist who wants to show not so much how you represent it but how you can make the viewer feel those settings and which is also a way of... I like this expression of new organs but it's also a way of helping I think you are to grow new organs not through the artwork because that is another sphere of experience but also as a way to then become more conscious of what you are actually experiencing in your real life and for me it is a very critical strategy in a way of a political one to educate people to be more in touch with their senses so that they can have a critical reflection when they go out again after. Any question in the audience? I found that super interesting thank you so much for your talk and this Mark Fisher just seeing Mark Fisher's name makes me think about his famous quote that it's easier to think of or imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism and I think that you know I spent a lot of time with the Dispianial and thought a lot through it because it was so poorly received indeed in Berlin and they're actually quite positively received in New York and I came to realize that the kind of aesthetic strategy of dis and a lot of the artists surrounding dis and that were in the Berlin Biennale was one of kind of thinking through the commodity object and thinking through alienation and using that as a strategy a critical strategy and that echoes this idea from Mark Fisher of like how do you actually like at this late stage in capitalism how do you actually not necessarily work against it because that's just not going to work but actually work through it and I think that that was very very badly received in Berlin because there is this really vibrant important history of resisting capitalism resisting gentrification there's a vibrant street culture of protest you know many many buildings have been saved from demolition because of the squatting the squatters and various neighborhoods and so I think it was interesting to see that kind of culture clash happening and I'd never thought about that before in terms of Majeros' work and where he exactly fits into that and his kind of approach to maybe a criticality in terms of how he's thinking through his relationship to capitalism and mass media and I was wondering if you could just share some thoughts on that like the context of Berlin and you know I don't even know if you know this but like how he was received in that way in terms of like this kind of idea that Berliners have a very very critical relationship to you know commodity culture and capitalism and he was so so much embracing it well from what I've seen in all the because I looked a lot of the on the reception actually also for exactly because of what you are saying because we haven't known him so for me it was interesting to see the different periods of how that was changing and also because it was a very few group of very important people writing about his work so it was really a few articles that became so tone setting that everyone then was embracing it but for me actually being neither German nor American weirdly he was always passing as something else when he was in the US he was a German painter and when he was in Berlin he was very Los Angeles and I think it's also something in his notes I don't have it at hand but he's saying a bit the same that he wants to pretend that he's in Los Angeles when he's in Berlin and yeah he doesn't say the opposite but that's a bit implied as well but then relating to Berlin and the dis I think it's interesting but for me it's purely because the city was a bit late in its development but now it is exactly what is happening and I see that I had a discussion with Metis Altman who is doing a show on that especially now about the commodification of and that is even worse on the alternative culture of Berlin and how that is being co-opted by startups very quickly actually so actually how this is even more perverse because contrary to another city you don't have this middle ground so you don't have bourgeois culture so it's from one to the other but yeah with Majores for me it was really interesting to see that this book Empire which I know have been influential for a lot of artists and that was also much more read than a theory book normally is and they were a bit to me maybe not the first but the one who did it at that scale who showed that actually there is no outside and they are interesting because there are very leftist thinkers so you can't there is not the same suspicion that you would have with a generationist or you know this whole other kind of thinkers they were very leftist in their thought they wanted to oppose Empire but still it was in 2000 and the skate rumps for me is a very clear example of this that people also started to feel that they themselves didn't really know how to go outside from that or how to situate them and so for for militants and for artists alike it also meant that if you didn't live in a kind of utopian world but that would be totally detached and have no impact on the real world you had to respond to this and then again the idea of paranoia I think is very interesting as well it means if you do that you are at risk of losing yourself and that always happened but it's where the strength is lying as well thank you thanks any other question no okay thank you so much Ingrid