//// RESIDENCY
ILYA LIPKIN
Period of residence: december 2008
Ilya Lipkin is an artist and writer currently living in Berlin. His work revolves primarily around the activities of Downstairs Productions, a film-production company of which he is a founding member. He is also the author of A Lie That Presents Itself as Truth is a Lie, But a Lie That Presents Itself as a Lie is a Goddamn Truth, and Belongs in the Museum (Pendant Publishing, 2007), a collection of essays and short fiction. For his residency at Signal, Ilya Lipkin will present a talk on the legacy of non-institutional art initiatives around the Øresund region, including Copenhagen and Malmö, focusing specifically on the Scandinavian wing of the Situationist International and its members. His presentation – neither an attempt to reanimate long buried corpses, nor to contribute to the canonization of yet another set of proper names from this movement – will attempt to examine how certain formations within the vanguard left managed to resist accommodation into the current, dominant history of the avant-garde. In our present cultural moment, when artistic production is neatly conflated with strategies of branding and identity formation, the minor and dilettantish practice of the Scandinavian Situationists retains a latent potential to disrupt these processes of reification. Remembered neither for their theoretical contributions, nor for their artistic output, there is little of what one can term as "work" left behind by this movement. Instead, the productive output of the Scandinavian SI can best be defined as the temporary creation of a loose-knit set of social relations, which, through their negative interaction with the surrounding cultural and historical circumstances, allowed for a momentary glimpse of what an emancipatory subjectivity could look like. These tactics of negation and their relationship to our present moment will be the central subject of Ilya Lipkin's presentation. The talk is titled: Thus, the dustbin is an expression of emancipation which immediately strikes the senses, the senses of all men, a synthesis of reality and the vested needs of emancipation, a common link and not an allegory, outside the range of senses or a symbol for "dustbin manufacturers." We can identify ourselves only accidentally with a poor man buying fish.
For the occasion of this talk at Signal a poster has been produced through a collaborative process between Ilya Lipkin and Jacqueline de Jong, editor and publisher of the Situationist Times between 1962 and 1967.
