9/3/2023 0 Comments Art of the trickster![]() Thanks to him, it’s now clear to me that the Holy Spirit is a trickster. It’s not a theological book, per se, but it’s entirely possible that Hyde’s written one of the best descriptions of the indescribable Holy Spirit ever. The second considers the concept of trickery in artistic and mediatic practice, and the ways it may open up alternative possibilities for resistance and deflection of power.My copy of Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes this World: Mischief, Myth, and Art has almost as many Post-It notes sticking out from its pages as it has pages.Īnd almost anyone who has heard me present over the last decade or come to the Spent Dandelion for a stay or even sat with me over an otherwise innocuous cup of coffee or a cocktail knows that time with me will rarely end before I bust out the book or a cascade of quotes from it. This first event looks for tricksters and their traces, both human and nonhuman, in contemporary art and culture. Two connected events at the ICI Berlin will follow these and other leads. ![]() Might it be that today’s tricksters are to be found in the creative political activity of artists and cultural practitioners attempting to respond to the oppressive mess they find all around them? Could the disarming, oblique ways in which the trickster takes on states of misrule that cannot be challenged face-on be a particularly apt strategy for resistance in times of turbo-capitalism: embracing chaos to turn it against itself? Are hegemonic oppressive forces a necessary condition for the emergence of tricksters – in fact, do the tricks and machinations of power themselves form the prototype and genesis of the trickster? As opposed to its traditionally embodied and most often male form, is the trickster of today more a mode than a figure, fragmenting and multiplying into an array of inanimate and collective forms? ![]() The exhibition ‘BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places’ – taking its name from a popular exclamation used in contemporary Russian to indicate a farce, a mess, chaos – features works that in one way or another engage with such unruly states. Trickster circumvents the logic and techniques of power through a mixture of cunning and naivety, discovering new possibilities as much through foolishness and error as through devious shifts of identity and perspective. Michel Serres took the tricksy god Hermes – patron of communication, but also of theft, interruption and secrets – as his guiding figure and alter ego, in order to weave together and traverse disparate cultural spheres with randoneés, ‘expeditions filled with random discoveries’. ![]() As ‘the creative idiot, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby’ (Lewis Hyde), trickster crosses every boundary and confuses every distinction. Tricksters are folkloric figures found in numerous cultures, seemingly dreamed up – or springing out of nowhere – to provide ways of undermining, ridiculing or resisting everything that is wrong, fucked up, unfair in the world, from the tyranny of gods and sovereigns, to social inequality, to the existential injustice of mortality and suffering. ![]()
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