Art as a Total Social Fact, Panel discussion, Cal Arts, Oct. 24th 2024 JP Caron, Michael Pisaro Liu, Chris Santiago, Eyvind Kang, Amanda Beech
2024
Published by:
Center for Discursive Inquiry, Cal Arts, USA
J.-P. Caron is a philosopher and musician based in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil. He’s a lecturer at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and an instructor at the New Centre for Research and Practice. As a musician he released many albums, several through his own label Seminal Records. He’s currently writing two books: one on the relationships between language, rule-following, forms of life and value-form in contemporary capitalism; one on the ontology of indeterminacy in experimental music from an inferentialist point of view.
Michael Pisaro-Liu is a guitarist and composer. Recordings of his music can be found on Edition Wandelweiser, erstwhile records, elsewhere music, Potlatch, another timbre, ftarri, winds measure and other labels. Pisaro-Liu wrote an article on notation for the Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music (2011) with other writing in Writing the Field Recording (University of Edinburgh Press, 2017), Perspectives for Contemporary Music in the 21st Century, (Wolke Verlag, 2016), Word Events: Perspectives on Verbal Notation (Bloomsbury, 2012) and for Revue TACET (Paris), Revue et Corrigeé (France), Positionen (Berlin) and others. Pisaro-Liu is the Director of Composition and Experimental Music at CalArts.
Eyvind Kang is a musician and composer whose recent albums are Azure (with Jessika Kenney, 2023), Sonic Gnostic (2021) and Ajaeng Ajaeng (2020). He has performed with musicians including Bennie Maupin, Bill Frisell, Laurie Anderson, and worked with bands such as Secret Chiefs, Animal Collective and Blonde Redhead. He is a disciple of spiritual jazz violinist Michael White and a lifelong student of Hindustani music with Dr. N. Rajam.
Chris Santiago is a poet, musician, and educator, and the author of Tula, winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize, and Small Wars Manual, forthcoming in April from Milkweed Editions. A Poetry Mentor at the Loft and Fellow of the McKnight Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and Kundiman, he received his PhD from the USC Literature & Creative Writing Program and joined the Faculty of the CalArts Creative Writing Program in September 2023.
Amanda Beech is an artist and writer. In video, painting, print and sculpture her work proposes art as a form of intelligence and power beyond the ideals of capitalism and the limits that art has
set for itself by means of its critiques of it. Exhibiting internationally her shows include Delphic Future, Twelve Ten Gallery, Chicago, RIB Gallery, Rotterdam, 2024, and the Havana Biennale 2021. Forthcoming work includes a book of philosophy, The Intolerable Image, from MIT. amandabeech.com
Marcel Mauss in his book The Gift talked about the “Total Social Fact” asking how we
organize distinct phenomenon, from the artistic, to the legal, to the economic and the
aesthetic in singular frameworks that take place beyond our consciousness.
The rise of the term “the curatorial” is central to this idea of art as an organizational mechanism, a space of the operative, dynamics of use, action, change and flux as opposed to the representational, conceptual and the universal. As we all know, everything is now ‘curated’. Here, inside the valorisation of uses and action, as opposed to a concern with meaning and qualities, lies the claim that art is, and or could be free of the old standards of top-down authoritarianism, mastery and dominance. And yet, this curatorial turn has also been proof of arts amelioration of social, governmental and systematic orders of bureaucracy, installing processes and forms of order that adhere to the same normative frameworks it sought to exit. In this discussion we tackle the tensions, antagonisms at play here, addressing the question of how art contributes, resists or could produce other forms of facticity. This is the question of how art operates in the space of the normative “social whole”.