11. Vagueness

“European opulence is literally a scandal for it was built on the back of slaves, it fed on the blood of slaves, and owes its very existence to the soil and subsoil of the underdeveloped world. Europe’s well-being and progress were built with the sweat and corpses of blacks, Arabs, Indians and Asians. This we are determined never to forget.”

- Frantz Fanon (2004 [1963]) The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

“As far as I can see here, the only main way to solve this, and we almost certainly won’t see it in our lifetimes, is a radical upheaval of every curriculum, to include a confrontation of a painful history of enslavement.”

- Hannah Catherine Jones (2018) Statement (recited by Cecilia Wee) at: Decolonising the Institution #1, Royal College of Art Student Union. January 15th. Available at: http://rcasu.org.uk/wp/decolonising-the-institution-1/

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What are the limits of working with the vagueness of something like ‘bad feeling’? Most difficult conversations won’t be broached unless they are centered and made explicit. Vagueness will never address the concrete problems of a particular context. 

We wrote in our call-out that this workshop would address “painful histories we’d rather forget.” But when we read the above quotes by Fanon and Jones, we feel ashamed. It is so clear that through doing this work, we (Rohanne and Paul) never meaningfully or sufficiently engaged with the histories of empire. Why not do all this – as one participant suggested – at the BBC? Why didn’t we directly chart Artsadmin's complicity in racial capitalism? There are historical exclusions particular to Toynbee Studios that we failed to address. We just dressed up as ghosts and dicked about for two days.

The focus of Ghosting was on the presence (and absence) of the artist in arts institutions. And in this case, Toynbee Studios became a proxy for ‘the institution’ in general: an abstract idea representing systemic conditions that come about from a confusion of many distinct organisations, funding bodies, histories and understandings of artistic practice (not to mention wider systems of racial capitalism). McKenzie Wark, in writing about the 2011 Occupy movement, asks: “How can you occupy an abstraction? Perhaps only with another abstraction.” We understand Ghosting to have been such a response. The figure of the ghost appears across enough media and cultures that it carries and can sustain a proliferation of contradictory gestures, movements, aesthetics and il/logics. This vagueness is both the power and weakness of Ghosting: it is a loud kind of muteness; bad feeling without clear resolution; a problem that appears and departs on its own terms. 

Maybe in trying to think through all these contradictions, we are catching ourselves in a trap. We are coming to the end of these texts, and notice ourselves grasping for tangible conclusions. We took the money (paying ourselves £450 each from the £1600 fee), invited participants into this strange Ghosting practice, and are now making a public document that will inevitably mis/represent what went down. The stakes are high, and these commissions are much sought after. What have we got to show for it? What did we achieve?

But – and maybe this is just us trying to let ourselves off the hook – it seems arrogant for us to claim any neat summary or conclusion. Ghosting was so much more than we can know or write about, because Ghosting was first and foremost a platform for the many contradictory questions and enquiries the participants brought with them. These things were bigger than Artsadmin’s particular set-up and problems; and couldn’t have taken place if we had too closely delineated the parameters of the workshop.

For us: we think of Ghosting as an experiment in listening. An impossibile kind of listening to the absent, yes, but also listening to ourselves. We gave ourselves permission to attend to our impulses – especially those from the most sticky, riotous, weary, teenager-y, wounded, unreasonable, unjustifiable parts of ourselves – and risked following them, even as we put them to question. And then we came back to our corporeal selves – with all of our words and visibility and limits – with a better understanding of our priorities and possibilities, and the debts and allegiance we hold to our past and future allies. 

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- McKenzie Wark (2011) 'How to Occupy an Abstraction'. Verso. 3 October. Available at: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/728-mckenzie-wark-on-occupy-wall-street-how-to-occupy-an-abstraction