In dialogue with current and former fellows, as well as guest authors, Plural is evolving into a site for the emergence of textual forms that engage with, reflect on, and practice artistic research. These essays and conversations discuss theories, accompany research projects and examine frameworks of knowledge production. 

The following are excerpts from a conversation between Lyónn Wolf, (fellow 2022/23) and Vika Kirchenbauer, artist, author and music producer, in which they explore how artistic writing and video practices can challenge traditional notions of authorship and academic authority.

I’m going to try and do this now
– Lyónn Wolf with Vika Kirchenbauer –

Lyónn Wolf, Text in Public, Zine Performances and Rants (2022), artist monograph published by Archive Books, Scriptings Berlin and eeclectic, courtesy of the artist

Lyónn Wolf: Both of us published books in 2022, yours titled Works, Scripts, Essays 2012–2022 (Mousse Publishing) and mine Text in Public – Zine Performances and Rants (Archive Books, Scriptings Berlin & Eeclectic). Text in Public collects writing across the past nine years: manifestos, scripts for performances and videos, essays, speculative fiction and transcripts from group workshop exercises. The texts involved experimentation, stabs at things, and finding ways to work with language that feel interesting to me. Looking at it now, I’m surprised to see how it all comes together and looks like such a tidy object.

The process itself was anything but tidy – there were countless attempts with every text. I told myself, ‘I’m going to try and do this now’, without assuming anything was predetermined or foregone. I can see now that I was cracking open a space of possibility for myself away from the tightness of academic language or the class restrictions placed on speaking or writing publicly; the belief that everything needs to be correct before it can hold value, and in that also be neutral and purged of any traces of class-inflected expression. So now I feel able to write as a working-class artist without a creative writing degree. I also feel I’ve allowed myself to write in a way that uses language as a material capable of holding meaning, mess and imperfection. […]

Troubling Authorship

Vika Kirchenbauer: Your writing practice is also integral to how you work with the moving image. Especially in the context of your video works, I’m interested in how you negotiate didactic elements in your writing, the passing on of information, and how you engage with the material you researched. In contemporary art, I often see artists’ content merely pointing at something or referencing an issue without necessarily offering their own analysis of it. I’m curious to learn more about your approach and about how your work arrives at its form.

Vika Kirchenbauer, WORKS; SCRIPTS, ESSAYS 2012-2022, Mousse Publishing, 2022, book, © Vika Kirchenbauer & VG Bild Kunst

LW: It’s a very generous question, and it’s something I’ve thought about quite consciously along the way. When you write a script, for example, engaging a lot of research, you’re making meaning which can easily become overly didactic; it’s easy to slide towards a kind of lecture mode. I’m interested in troubling this instructive and singular aspect of authorship. I think this relates to the pressure for certain forms of authorship that claim mastery – I’m thinking of a very clean kind of aesthetic, something almost forensic and finely tuned, the kind of very polished works that are often considered good examples of artistic research. There’s an expectation that for a ‘successful’ and ‘resolved’ research-based work, the process should bring you to a place of specialist knowledge, which you then neatly deliver for consumption. And this is part of it – I do also alchemize a lot of research into a condensed form, but I’m interested in troubling this position of mastery by incorporating co-authorship, polyvocal workshop formats, autofiction, critical fabulation (a strategy forwarded by Saidiya Hartman) and by writing myself and other misfits into the historical or critical narrative, unsettling the presumed stability of what we’re given by established institutions and cultural canons.

I come from a theatre background, so I carry a concern with audience and community building, with how the work will be met, and engaged with. I want the work to offer multiple entry points, I don’t want to alienate people, I lean more towards seduction, with language, humor, and vernacular aesthetic and material forms such as the making and sharing of ephemera freely available to take from exhibitions – zines, flyers, posters – and by collaging queer, dyke, trans and working-class subcultural objects into the material works.

I think the modular formats I work with allow for imperfection to be held and treated as worthy of display or performance or publishing, and I hope that this offers entryways for continuing community networks beyond the expectations of institutions and institutional audiences. Your works also engage strongly with language, voice and the relation of image and script. I wonder how you approach your work with text and language.

Lyónn Wolf, De-production – First Trimester (2024) Flat Time House with Askeaton Contemporary Arts, residency, zine launch & public event, FTH, London. Photo by Frank Wasser

VK: Language is the form that I’m most fluid with, and the registers in which I write are quite different depending on whether I’m writing an essay, a script for a voice-over or a text to be performed. My book, edited by Eva Birkenstock, Fanny Hauser and Viktor Neumann, compiles these different approaches to working with text. In my work, I often try to complicate the social positioning of ‘the artist’ in relation to class, and I think a lot about implicatedness and complicity in that regard. My own position within contemporary art is not a minoritarian or outside position, but one of relative privilege. In my video works, I often use my own biography as an entry point into these questions, while in my essays, for instance, I avoid that in order to consider issues like the role of critique in contemporary art in broader and more abstract terms. […]

Reparative Approaches

LW: In a recent collaborative work, a dear friend, Iarlaith Ní Fheorais, was invited to respond to a chapter from James Joyce’s Ulysses. We decided to collage a loose script that used cutups from the original text, something that we could improvise around. Iarlaith proposed to not immediately take a critical position. It seemed too easy, so we tried something else, looking at what we could work with rather than what pissed us off. In a way, we made the work up between the lines.

VK: A reparative approach.

LW: Exactly. That was something Iarlaith suggested, a reparative approach. At first, I was skeptical, it was a larger project centering James Joyce, after all, who is so pivotal to the modernist canon, and I’m so familiar with a particular critical approach, to go in and start undoing ethical knots as a key part of the process. But then I thought, ‘Yeah, let’s try’. In this instance a reparative approach involved reading and cutting the text, rearranging and collaging Joyce’s words, which is probably closer to something paranoid in the end. I think this idea of a reparative approach towards artistic research troubles me from a class perspective. To think of reparative or paranoid reading practices, as they’re laid out by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, being a working-class artist, it feels close to impossible not to meet the canon with a critical paranoia. I mean, it’s a place that was never meant for me, so I come to research first with a desire to pluralize what counts as viable research material (incorporating personal experience, anecdote, unofficial archives, invisible histories, conversation, and speculation or fiction), and second with a need to rip apart what is given to us as legitimate or valuable. The destructive, or rather deconstructive impulse is the space where things happen, where I find something reparative, where I can engage with the stuff that I was never meant to touch. 

Domestic Optimism Act 1 – Modernism a Lesbian Lovestory (2020), The Grazer Kunstverein, installation view by Christine Winkler

Now I’m researching and writing autotheory as a way of intermixing personal experience with a self-reflexive criticality. I’ve been working with autofiction for a while now and continue to mix autobiography with fiction as a way of weaving together research with my own experience and desires. I’ve become interested in autotheory as a queer, trans, BIPOC and feminist tool for spinning theory through the personal, emotive, poetic and anecdotal (for example, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body), through documented and reflected durational practices (for example, McKenzie Wark’s Raving) and via the direct incorporation of references, quotes, art criticism and summaries of cultural objects (as in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Harry Dodge’s My Meteorite).

I’m writing a lot, so I’m writing, writing, writing, but I also want to find a way that the writing could exist otherwise, so the work doesn’t rely too heavily on language alone, maybe through experiments with sound and voice, with gesture. Especially with the things that can’t be spoken about. My current research is under the working title De-production and began with the intention of engaging with family history and the enmeshed violence of colonial legacy, patriarchal dominance, the uniting of church and state and working-class material reality in Dublin from the 1950s to the 1970s, when I was born. I was interested to unpick the working-class Irish family as a structure that already always holds nonbiological forms of kin-making, and I wanted to think about these things together with my own embodiments of popular science fiction when growing up and how this was a form of intimacy between me and my mother during very hard times.

I think that now a lot of my initial intentions have shifted due to the incredibly challenging work of opening all of this up for myself, but as is often the way with an artistic research process, whatever it becomes will probably clearly echo my first ideas and impulses. My first go to for all of this is language, reading, writing and talking to people, recorded conversations. I’m not sure why language is so central, but it seems to be the carrier to every other element as the work unfolds.

VK: What I hope to achieve through language is to ask better questions. My work doesn’t generally grow out of an idea but out of responses to problems I come across. Even if I cannot resolve these problems in my head, at least I want to be precise in asking a question that hopefully is politically generative to others. This is something that to me is linked to language, but working without language as a tool can also open other ways for creating affective infrastructures that have the potential to resonate with people on a deeper level, beyond the cognitive.

Vika Kirchenbauer, SHE WHOSE BLOOD IS CLOTTING IN MY UNDERWEAR, 2016, video, 3 mins, © Vika Kirchenbauer & VG Bild Kunst

Scattering Time

VK: When I moved to Berlin in 2007, there were many active squats, and they were a big part of my social life and political socialization. These kinds of feminist queer spaces were where I was, where I could go out. But most of these spaces have disappeared, and there is this assumption that what we have lost won’t come back –

LW: Which suggests a linear timeline.

VK: Exactly, so from your speculation I take the impetus to not give in to this futurelessness. And I see the writing in your work as a refusal to lament the past. It is an interesting proposition that moves beyond the critical. A text I keep coming back to is Resisting Left Melancholy by the political theorist Wendy Brown. In it, she considers prevailing „left melancholia“ in relation to affect and political agency. To me, her idea of melancholia is closely connected to the affective comfort that critical clarity can offer. Brown’s melancholic leftist is a depressive who believes themselves to be a realist, attached to knowledge and analyses almost as material assets, but unable to see that they have in fact given up on seeking to alter the present world or the terms of the future based on any shared convictions or potentialities. The irony of melancholia, she writes, “is that attachment to the object of one’s sorrowful loss supersedes any desire to recover from this loss”. (1) In your work I also see that you reject the complacency of any backward-oriented defeatism by focusing on political desire.

LW: It is about personal desire as well. I try to imagine and incorporate something that I would desire into performances or texts, and I try to think through the complications of the desire itself, my own and the audience’s. I’m also very interested in exploring the convergence of class and queerness. And I increasingly wonder if there is a potential crossover space, which is the utopian aspect of it perhaps. I agree with José Esteban Muñoz’s ideas about utopia as something always on the horizon, and in its never quite thereness utopia is also touched with melancholia and hope.

The way I approach making and researching work involves a movement across critical and historical research towards proposition making, something a bit like the fluctuations between melancholia and hope. I’m often working with things that don’t exist or that haven’t been taken care of (sex-club architectures designed and run by and for FLINTA people in The Re-appropriation of Sensuality, cruising grounds for dykes, queer women and trans people in Sex in Public and forgotten or sidelined histories or historical figures that offer the possibility for different realities to the ones we’re spoon-fed in Domestic Optimism).

Working with the utopian is I think a kind of world-making practice, asking if something can start to exist just because you imagine it and share the vision with others. With De-production I’m interested in a horizon of possibility for life, love and care beyond the nuclear family. I’m interested in the thought experiments played out in science fiction and fantasy and our limitations in imagining otherwise, how questioning the nuclear family’s validity is taboo, for example. I think this is a utopian project but also something more material, so many queer and trans and working-class people are already living out the reality of something else, piecing together patchwork solutions to the scarcity economy and crises in care that are continually pressing for more work, endless potential for reproductive labour and less and less time for collective experience. Sophie Lewis’s work has been really important to consider through this process. […]

And then there are spaces in between. You intentionally leave space, also, like your blank screen. And there are breaks and pauses. And this really does something as well. I think silences, gaps, holes and ruptures are all things I’m drawn to in a research process. How to negotiate what’s not there, or what can’t be remembered or articulated? There are so many ways to develop forms of response, material, aesthetic, linguistic. I was really drawn to the use of blank space in your video works, space where no image is presented, how that makes for a kind of pause that inflects what comes before and after.

Vika Kirchenbauer, UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS, 2020, video, 13 mins, © Vika Kirchenbauer & VG Bild Kunst

VK: Imagelessness is present in almost all of my video works, most notably perhaps in UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS (2020), a work approaching trauma-related memory loss via reflections on light outside the visible spectrum. My intention is to avoid suggesting any linear continuity because that’s not how memory works. There are large gaps in memory, where things are repressed, or made inaccessible to oneself. Whatever is accessible through memory doesn’t encompass the totality of lived experience, it’s just a glimpse. Reflecting this in formal terms as supposed blanks that carry meaning is important to me. 

LW: And I guess that is why the form of the memoir is problematic as well, because it suggests a totally linear, chronological structure. I like to play around with the joints and intensify slippage. So if something is feeling too much like a lecture or too directly biographical I space out and find the places where formal expectations start to break down and offer something unexpected, perverse or absurd. I really enjoy the confusion of those dense overlaps, the points where the line bleeds and the wound offer a world that feels possible in its brokenness. […]

About the artists:

🔗 Website Lyónn Wolf
🔗 Website Vika Kirchenbauer

(1) Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” boundary 2 26, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 20.