Excerpt from Monique's 20 minute presentation 'Delusional Cause' for Do The Right Thing ! ~ DAI's 3 day graduation lectures marathon, July 2015.

Delusional Cause

Summary

Monique Hendriksen’s performance featured a new video work and a live reading from the artist’s research to address (invisible) cartographies. The video is made from found material taken from the web, and in it, Hendriksen asks how we can map the economy: Does it happen from the vantage point of a distant point? The artist elaborates, “mapping figurations of capital constitutes a kind of forcefield which puts the accuracy of our perceptions to the test.” Looking at the relationship between overview and oversight Hendriksen claims that “overview is a fantasy” so we, “treat reality as a fiction because fiction is a condition of truth.” The artist refers to a question brought up by Hobbes and contextualizes it in the contemporary setting. “Where can our curiosity take us today when it comes to capital?” Hendriksen also mentions the book, “Cartographies of the Absolute” (2015) in which it is observed that we have become used to the “god’s eye view” of GPS images.

For Maria Hlavajova, different manifestations of a similar research trajectory she has seen over the past two days, brought her to topic of methodology (how do we work in the field of art?). By “fictionalizing the theoretical,” we can “probe the possibility of overcoming division,” not only asking ‘what do I share?’ but also – ‘when do I share?’ Hlavajova suggests that the term “project” should be questioned and that by reconfigure the language used to describe the process, the commitment to a research process will, as a consequence, change. “Nomadic methodology allows you to transverse between different fields of knowledge,” so one asks, “What (is) my ethics? Affirmative ethics?” Again, there is a need to understand and articulate what and when, so that the remaining question is “what is the proposition within that?”

Alena Alexandrova recalled recent exchanges with photography students – “considering abstraction in a detailed way, and within the field of digital texture or the digital field of plastic entities which are entities…the image emerges from the virtual.” Alexandrova notes that there is a particular moment where immateriality pushes back and tries to acquire a body. Hendriksen is making, framing, and capturing, while building a visual and research vocabulary. Historically, we might consider Malevich, and his detached disembodied view from above.

Bassam el Baroni found a strong beginning in the vision that Hendriksen naturalized between theory and the video work, and wondered, “what is at stake in the relationship between the theory and the video work?” He asks what the essential points were that actually connected this idea within the work and remarked that, “what differentiates real abstraction from abstraction is it proposition that all thought begins with the idea of the money abstraction.” Furthermore he questions how, during this time of intense financial abstraction, our thoughts are affected.

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