PODCAST
Postcritical Psychogeographies
From Weak Resistance to Weak Avant-Garde
This podcast is based on the premise that comparisons are useful, however should also be limited and conducted with caution. It also reclaims transdisciplinary approach as one that can allow grasping the formation and evolution of such phenomena as resistance and avant-garde. The aesthetic experience, understood as one conducted by the senses, in a cultural context, is the most general premise of theories, social movements, art projects and other things discussed here.
Since 2015 I have been working on the notion of weak avant-garde, and in 2016, when I was writing about Ewa Partum's art, I realized that I was stumbling trying to classify Partum, a fantastic Polish feminist artist, in the categories existing in art history, while at the same time respecting her own self-definitions and feminist involvement. At first, I thought the post-war notion of ‘neo-avant-garde’ will be perfect to discuss her work, but soon I realized this was not the case (see the article: “Feminist Art of Failure, Ewa Partum and the Avant-garde of the Weak” in Widok journal 16/2016. Later I came across many feminist and queer artists resisting and rejecting the notion and practice of avant-garde as a remnant of patriarchal, exclusivist art history. I also realized the notion of neo-avant-garde only captured the experience of the Western artists working within the elitist patterns of art market and representing mostly the majoritarian positions (male, White, privileged). So - in my further work, I started to discuss the classical post-war art history and theory to find a concept which would express the radical aesthetic and political claims of contemporary artists on the one hand, and be applicable for minoritarian and peripheral art producers (see the article: “Towards a Weak Avant-Garde, Re-Shaping the Canon”). Here the concept of weak avant-garde begun, in the process of conceptualizing the art of Ewa Partum.
The Episode 1 of this podcast discusses Partum's work and my interpretation of it in detail, then in consecutive episodes I speak with Joanna Warsza, Timothy Waterman and Patricia Reed about planetarity, and further interviews with artists, theorists and curators (Baruch Gottlieb, Keti Chukhrov, Marsha Bradfield, Karolina Majewska-Güde, Oliver Ressler and Marc James Léger) focus on the avant-garde, and this will be continued in further episodes of the podcast. In the new Pilot I show how it was done, and in Episode 1 I discuss the problems, hypothesis and further thoughts I had on post-war notions of avant-garde, in relation to the East-West divide, the hegemonic vs. minoritarian subjectivities and universality/particularity debates. In further Episodes, with each of my interlocutors I discuss their understanding of the avant-garde, as well as the notion of weak avant-garde.
This podcast begun with a different title, Postcritical Psychogeographies. From Weak Resistance to Weak Avant-Garde, and a slightly different, much more open thematic scope. The ‘old pilot’ explains the early ideas for my podcast. But after I made some episodes in Polish language, also available on this website, which focused solely on the questions related to the notion and practice of the avant-garde, I realized I should focus on this topic in this Podcast. All the conversations I have in this podcast, and the episodes I do on my own, revolve around the questions related to the intersections of aesthetics and politics, where art is an element of a wider field of the social.
This podcast was initially inspired by Agata Lisiak’s Spatial Delight.