Edouard Glissant once discussed that “the idea of a non-linear time, coexistence of several time zones, would of course allow for a great variety of different contact zones”. Hans Ulrich Obrist quoted him in his introductory notes for the recent Guangzhou Triennial, talking about the multiplicity of the international art scene, in its boom of biennials, triennials, symposia and festivals, as a means for finding new ways to maneuver within the contemporary art dialectic. Mieszko calls it mingling.

I still get upset when I think about the time David passed it back to me, “Oh yeah, Tetsuo told me about it. He said it’s some kind of networking thing or something.” Among words in list of words to be negatively connoted–networking. In the present participle form, it’s 恶心, yuck, like a slimy handshake, knowing all the lines perfectly for your 吹自己牛 nice-to-meet-you-what-do-YOU-do-as-in-what-can-you-do-for-me kind of smirk. But hey, that’s a pretentious attitude refusing to deal with reality, now isn’t it? Could the thousands on myspace, friendster, and my giant stack of 名片 be wrong? Man needs man, even if it’s alien (I finally watched Solaris last night, it’s amazing). Networking implies something discursive, it moves to the level of culture, and, even if it’s superficial, it derives meaning from a discursive history. Would Wittgenstein say “We’ll keep in touch”?In noun form, the network is a giant and heady flag of our, add the sound of horns here, ahem, postmodern age. It is the price of oil and the blood attached to it; it is The Matrix; it is Kevin Bacon; it is MSN Messenger as office internal communication; it is French kids in Clichy-sous-Bois filming themselves with their mobile phones while they burn the streets then sell the footage to television stations. It is all of this, tangled into one incestuous whole. And somehow, it gains a certain objectivity in its vastness, the overwhelming inability to comprehend the, well—too simply stated—largeness. As in Alistair suddenly lying on his back in the middle of the interview, hands folded behind his head, this kind of feeling. But then it’s not objective at all anymore, becoming instead an indulgence in nostalgia for the present, as we are so often apt to do these days, making paintings that look like graphic design and engaging in voyeurism as the highest form of fantasy. Amidst the loss of ability to say anything new, anything of value, let’s document everything. Let’s make an archive because we don’t know exactly what we want, and actually, don’t we want everything?There is no point. And that is not among the list to be negatively connoted. Quite the opposite, I am discovering more and more, no point means finding a shape in the absence of a singular goal. Beijing the 坦大饼 pancake, the cookie or the doughnut—it is an experiment in urban yeast. Anouchka says circles, I say spirals. As in learning new words every day. As in trying to describe it to you better.

.	rss 2.0 | feedburner | del.icio.us
.	this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
.	site by orange 程康 and ourwork.is.
.	best viewed with your character encoding set to unicode utf-8.