Betraying Gestures #33
headless criticism
Headless by K.D., by Goldin+Senneby, sat as a tab in my browser for months before I closed it, when I found it (as a book) in Portuguese on a Brazilian second-hand book platform, an equivalent to AbeBooks, where I once every other month search for the books—usually in English and most often published in Europe—that I have as tabs in my browser, checking if I can buy them cheaper, but especially to watch them leak into a context they weren’t published for. And, perhaps, by purchasing them, inscribe myself in the leak. When I searched for Headless on the online platform whose name translates to English as Virtual Bookshelf, I was surprised not only to find Headless (because my searches usually come up empty) but to find a significant offer of it, and in Portuguese, as Em Busca de Headless. Intrigue took over, observing the book I hadn’t yet read but whose project I had read about struggle to fit bibliographical categories. In some ads, Goldin+Senneby figured as the publisher. In others, Goldin+Senneby stood after the colon after "author." In another, it was K.D. that was attributed as the author, as should be, to Goldin+Senneby, I guess. All copies of Em Busca de Headless were cheap. I bought a few and had them shipped to my parents'. I opened the packages the last time I visited. The first thing I did with the first volume I unpacked was bring it close to my eyes and massage it with my thumb to determine whether some indiscernible spots on the cover were marks of time or if they were printed and, therefore, "the book." I finally concluded they were graphic elements when I opened all the packages and put all the volumes next to one another. This edition of Em Busca de Headless is from 2008, and it tells me Goldin+Senneby and Goldin+Senneby’s webpage, Johan Hjerpe and Anders Jandér as responsible for the graphic project, the copyrights belong to K.D., the translation was made by Alexandre Barbosa de Souza, and that it was printed in Brazil in October of that year (2008). I expected the edition would provide me with information on the context in which it was published in Brazil and where it circulated because it wasn’t in bookshops since it has no ISBN, and we know bookshops don’t like that. I flipped the book to the last page to look for a colophon, but the book ends on the last page of text. It has no back cover, or the back cover is the same as what fills up the book: text.
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That writing a critique takes distance... that writing a critique takes context... that writing a critique takes perspective…
...everyone knows but no one cares and is not true.
Starting the sentence with "That" comes from reading Theodor Adorno this summer with philosopher Fahim Amir, whom I mentioned—unspecifically—in Betraying Gestures #32. We discussed the use of "That" at the beginning of the English translation of the essay "Essay as a Form": “That in Germany the essay is condemned as a hybrid, that the form has no competing tradition, that its emphatic demands are met only intermittently—all this has been said and censured, often enough.” Because letter #32 was a comeback under the sensible reason of announcing Betraying Gestures coming out as a novel and as an exhibition at From Me To You Space, I wish for the comeback from the comeback to respond to the opening of Betraying Gestures' exhibition at From Me To You Space. A critique. I have, therefore, to ask myself what I need and who I need (to read, to be) to write this critique that emerged as a critique from dinner with Emmanuel and Maud (the editors of From Me To You running From Me To You Space), from Emmanuel’s suggestion that the text that accompanies Betraying Gestures on the Space’s website be a sort of critique that bridges the format of this letter(s) and the format they are proposing—where invited publishers contribute a text to be presented alongside the photographic documentation of their exhibition. Reminds me of Tenías Que Tener (from Spanish: Had to Have), which asks what I need to do something, a sentence I wrote as part of a text that composed a work that took the opening sentence, Tenías Que Tener, as title in 2020 at a residency in Colombia; a sentence Aiko took hold of, between Portuguese and Spanish, in her song Nado Verde, "Um conto contado de amor, tenías que tener." (My translation for intricate-complicated lyric: A told story told of love, had to have.)
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We had a pile of volumes of Betraying Gestures—in Betraying Gestures (the novel) We is protagonist, in the sentence “We had a pile of volumes of Betraying Gestures,” though, We is me (Vinícius) and Maud and Emmanuel (From Me To You). We had a pile of fifty volumes, and by the end of the opening, almost half of them were taken. They were distributed—imagine distributed means for free. Distribution was a matter of conversation during the opening and a matter that I took to debate with interlocutors afterward, asking what distribution
is and imagining what it means if it means for free. A particular visitor had to have a reason to accept distribution; for this particular visitor, a course he was teaching on democracy was the reason, and therefore democracy became the reason, or a reason—because of distribution. With another visitor, I talked about the English language as medium, and Maud, who also takes English as medium in her texts, joined the conversation.
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In a critique session I had last week, I presented Betraying Gestures’ exhibition through speech, extra copies of the distributed volumes, and pictures. I said I wanted to debrief. I ended up talking about my encounter with the aforementioned edition of Goldin+Senneby’s Headless. I exaggerated my cluelessness, acting as if it were a message in a bottle on the beach. Carla succored me from my real and performative cluelessness with a text message telling me Em Busca de Headless had been published in the context of the 2008 São Paulo Biennial. I looked at that year's biennial catalog and found the following sentence, which adding here invades and evades the intended critique for Betraying Gestures: “Goldin+Senneby’s investigation takes the shape of an ongoing performance where subject, method, and artistic narrative cannot be separated.” Carla, when she sent me the message, was on her way to meet Simon and Jakob (Goldin+Senneby) at the opening of a show they are participating in in Stockholm. She asked me if she could tell them about my encounter with their fifteen-year-old piece, and I told her, Of course. In this critique session, I said the work succeeds when (and if) I someday find an edition of Betraying Gestures circulating/not fitting in some online second-hand book platform, for instance. It means it has a value, but a system can’t precise it. Carla telling them (Simon and Jakob/Goldin+Senneby) is telling them that under my idea of success for Betraying Gestures, Em Busca de Headless succeeded. Of course, that’s not necessarily their idea of success, but I can’t help but take the graphic spots that look like the marks of time on both cover and amidst the text as an omen of circulation as permeation.
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Tenías que tener…
tenías que tener conversations, and I’m happy to announce that the next post in Betraying Gestures will be Oscar Lyons’ How To Be Reasonable When Making Unreasonable Gestures. Oscar buzzes his hair once or twice a year and lets it grow until it’s time to buzz it again; Oscar has a daughter; Oscar always has something smart to say, and, still, he sometimes keeps it to himself; Oscar is Harry in Marina’s written Betraying Gestures; Oscar’s been researching the 2012 London Olympics; Oscar is a kind, observant, and curious character who’s been looking and prying on the use of the word Gesture.