Karin Michalski, The Alphabet of Feeling Bad (Filmstill), 2012.
In 2012, I collaborated on a video installation with Berlin-based artist Karin Michalski for a group show called A Burnt-Out Case at NGBK Gallery in Berlin. Karin was interested in the work of Public Feelings and Feel Tank, including the concept of “political depression,” and I had previously worked with her on an interview for a zine she made called Feeling Bad. For this project, she proposed that I help her write an “alphabet of feeling bad,” an abecediary of key terms from “A is for anxiety” to “Z is for zest.” During a trip I made to Berlin, we had a one-day shoot in which I recited a version of the alphabet three times in one long take of 45 minutes! I didn’t quite realize until I got to the studio (where a queer version of Tracy Emin’s bed was set up as my stage) that Karin wanted me to actually explain the words not just recite them, and the resulting live/filmed performance is a combination of script and improvisation. The video has been screened as a continuous loop composed of two of the different versions, and it has now been part of exhibitions in London (at an exhibition called Visualising Affect at Goldsmiths College), Zurich (at Les Complices), and other locations around Europe.
The project was an interesting way to perform theory and to create it. Some of the terms, such as “vulnerability,” “loneliness,” “rage,” and, of course, “feeling bad,” are more ordinary or vernacular terms. Others are major theoretical concepts from fellow travelers in queer affect theory – such as Heather Love’s “feeling backward,” Lauren Berlant’s “slow death,” and Sara Ahmed’s “happiness” and “killjoy” -- but the explanations are brief enough to remain accessible and to drift into the public sphere without becoming a full-on lecture. And some terms were more personal for me: “dread,” one of my favorite affect words from George Eliot, “melodrama,” in recognition of my work on 19th-century genres, “numbness,” always a point of reference for me in thinking about affect as force or energy.
The Alphabet has also been a good way to combine scholarship and art, and I’ve been able to use it in some of my own presentations, starting with a mini live performance for Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue’s Axe-Grinding Workshop at the Tate Modern, and as a point of departure for writing workshops in Sydney and Sundsvall, Sweden. And Karin and I were finally able to co-present a screening at a conference on Art and Affect in Freiburg in February, which helped me unpack its meanings more fully.
I’ve also collaborated with Karin on a second version for a video installation project called Words Needed curated by Swedish filmmaker Anna Linder in Umea, Sweden, which is a European Capital of Culture for 2014. For that version we turned the script into a text – white words on black background -- which was projected on a wall of snow in the middle of one of the city streets -- right next to a shopping mall called Utopia! -- as part of the festival’s opening ceremonies in January. Although I wasn’t able to be there, I did just recently visit Umea and was able to get a fuller sense of the context. And that version will be part of an exhibition that Anna Linder is organizing in Goteberg in August 2014. (For the trailer that shows excerpts from all four pieces that were in the show, click here.)
The project was an interesting way to perform theory and to create it. Some of the terms, such as “vulnerability,” “loneliness,” “rage,” and, of course, “feeling bad,” are more ordinary or vernacular terms. Others are major theoretical concepts from fellow travelers in queer affect theory – such as Heather Love’s “feeling backward,” Lauren Berlant’s “slow death,” and Sara Ahmed’s “happiness” and “killjoy” -- but the explanations are brief enough to remain accessible and to drift into the public sphere without becoming a full-on lecture. And some terms were more personal for me: “dread,” one of my favorite affect words from George Eliot, “melodrama,” in recognition of my work on 19th-century genres, “numbness,” always a point of reference for me in thinking about affect as force or energy.
The Alphabet has also been a good way to combine scholarship and art, and I’ve been able to use it in some of my own presentations, starting with a mini live performance for Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue’s Axe-Grinding Workshop at the Tate Modern, and as a point of departure for writing workshops in Sydney and Sundsvall, Sweden. And Karin and I were finally able to co-present a screening at a conference on Art and Affect in Freiburg in February, which helped me unpack its meanings more fully.
I’ve also collaborated with Karin on a second version for a video installation project called Words Needed curated by Swedish filmmaker Anna Linder in Umea, Sweden, which is a European Capital of Culture for 2014. For that version we turned the script into a text – white words on black background -- which was projected on a wall of snow in the middle of one of the city streets -- right next to a shopping mall called Utopia! -- as part of the festival’s opening ceremonies in January. Although I wasn’t able to be there, I did just recently visit Umea and was able to get a fuller sense of the context. And that version will be part of an exhibition that Anna Linder is organizing in Goteberg in August 2014. (For the trailer that shows excerpts from all four pieces that were in the show, click here.)
The original version has also been screened as part of a show called The Unhappy Archive that Karin co-curated for a museum in Karlsruhe, Germany. That show features books by me and many of my queer theory friends displayed on the walls as though they were art objects! Along with mattresses on the floor and slogans and other objects on the walls, they help to further the work of making feelings public and political.
RSS Feed