BADco. Changes

This performance was sooo awful, I am amazed people made it to the end. Like so many other people, I left early, 15 minutes before the end. Lordy lawrd what a total bore. I will talk about this performance at length in a piece I am writing.

I saw this performance on the second day. They were handing out free tickets to journalists and the like. Go figure. Word must have gotten out after the premiere about how awful and boring it was, which explains all the left-over tickets they were handing out to the media-people in order to at least get some exposure for the company. Well, THIS blog entry is the kind exposure they can expect from me!

I have a HUGE problem with Bojana Cvejic praising them for the “lazy” posturing in the promo-text in the Tanz in August booklet.

A SERB critic praising a CROATIAN company for calling themselves “lazy”?!
This is totally unacceptable.
That’s like a white supremacist American praising a blackman for calling himself lazy (ie, reinforcing a white racist stereotype about blacks), or a Mexican for calling himself lazy (ie, reinforcing a white racist stereotype about Latinos). It’s plain racist, and it’s no less racist when a Serb does it to a Croat.

Just because they are both “white Europeans” doesn’t make it less racist. It refers to a racist stereotype that white Western Europeans harbor about Southern Europeans in general (not just Croats, but Greeks, Italians, the Spanish with their siestas, etc.). Just because it’s the Croat artist himself who reinforces the stereotype doesn’t make it less racist when a Serb (who lives in the West and identifies with that culture, as Bojana Cvejic clearly does) pats the Croat on the head for doing so.

As for the Marx quote they included in the booklet (the lay-out of which looks suspiciously like Bojana Cvejic’s stammtisch magazine Etcetera), that is just sooo ignorant. Marx was NOT anti-work.

All in all, a terrible company endorsed by a terrible writer producing terrible promotional blurbs for them. Never again. To hell with their trilogy plans.

Maria Technosux

Nope, I don’t think so, because if I were to say: “A Serb praising a Croat for calling himself lazy is a form of white-on-white racism”, than no one would have a clue as to what I am talking about and what it is that I take offense to.

This I already know, because whenever I tell people that here in Europe there is, not just the traditional colour-line black/white, but also another colour-line separating “white” (Western Europeans and Scandinavians) from “not-so-white” (Southern/Mediterranean Europeans and all the “former Soviets”), people tend look at me like they’re not getting it. In my experience, people just don’t get it.

I readily admit that it’s hyperbole to compare it to the n-word, but I wouldn’t be using hyperbole if people were intelligent and sensitive enough about racism-issues in general, let alone European white-on-white racism, to get a more subtle argument. The fact that such a comment appears as praise in a festival booklet is all the proof I need that no one is batting an eye at the racism behind such a comment.

I can assure you if it were a white critic praising a black company for using the n-word about themselves, things would have been different. Such comments never would have been printed as praise in a festival booklet.

So, it’s only when I compare it to something like black people using the n-word about themselves in front of (still racist) white audiences, that people might begin to understand what I am getting at, and why I find Bojana’s comment offensive and, yes, essentially racist.

I honestly don’t think that BADCo are intelligent enough to understand that Bojana’s praise over the “lazy” posturing is actually a backhanded insult, informed by the Western-European (essentially racist) stereotype of the lazy Southern-European (Hitler’s “Niggers of Europe”). If BADCo were smart enough to realize what Bojana is doing there, they never would have mistaken her backhanded insult for praise.

But then again, this kind of *cough* laziness with regards to interpreting just what sort of praise one receives (some of it might not be praise after all!) is not specific to BADCo. I have often seen performers appropriate the most ridiculous comments on their work for promotional purposes, just as long as such comments were vaguely resembling praise. BADCo have fallen into the same trap, a trap which Cvejic quite deliberately exploited, I might add.

I guess BADCo were so desperate for a vested avant garde writer (like Cvejic) to write a positive promo-blurb that they would even allow a Serb of ill intent like Bojana Cvejic to insult BADCo to their faces and in front of their audience under the guise of promotional praise.

BADCo of course will never admit to this, they will never admit they mistook her insults for praise.

But some of us in the audience are a bit more savvy and skeptical of praise than the performers we are watching, and do not want OUR intelligence insulted by the likes of Bojana Cvejic, thank you very much.

Maria Technosux

First of all, what are you concerned about? That BADCo might read this? That Bojana Cvejic might? Judging by their statements, they’re probably too lazy to get on the internet and Google reviews of their show, ahahaha! No really, I don’t think they will ever see this discussion unless you send them the URL, so don’t get so stressed out by my comments. Cvejic/BADCo couldn’t care less if I don’t like their show or their promo-blurbs. They just don’t care. I didn’t have to pay for my ticket anyway, so it’s not like they’ve lost a potential repeat customer. It’s not like they will lose subsidies or invitations just because of some blog-comments on the internet.

re: “Bojana’s claiming BADco. is lazy actually means she thinks they are great artists.”

If Bojana truly thinks BADCo are great artists worthy of her support, then she should to praise them for other things than the laziness posturing. Why does she specifically highlight this laziness posturing for praise? She could have talked about 4,33 instead, or about the anthropomorphization of insects (or the animalization of human workers) in one of the voice-overs. But no, as far as Cvejic is concerned it’s BADCo’s laziness posturing that deserves all the praises.

I am pretty sure there are a lot of white rap fans who refer to black rappers like Busta and Nelly as “my nigga”, thinking this is praise because Busta and Nelly themselves use the n-word about themselves and their buddies. The reasoning of white rap-fans being: Well, if Nelly calls himself nigga, and he calls his man my nigga, why can’t I call him my nigga? I mean well, don’t I? I call Nelly my nigga because I like him! It’s a word of praise.”.

This is the same argument you are using re: Cvejic praising BADCo over the laziness posturing. “I only call them lazy cos they themselves do, to them lazy is a good word, so when I use it, I am calling them something they like”.

What about all the people who feel that the n-word is NEVER a word of praise, whether it’s whites or black people themselves using it?

I feel the same way about the word lazy applied to Southern Europeans.

Remember what I said at Podewil about using examples from pop-culture to demonstrate how elite avant garde people are let off the hook for things that pop-culture people are crucified over? This is a perfect example! If Bojana was praising a black group for using the n-word to describe themselves, this promo-blurb would have never been printed. It’s because white-on-white racism isn’t taken seriously enough that the blurb is deemed acceptable.

BADCo/Cvejic both take a racist stereotype (Southern Europeans are lazy) and turn this into a self-fulfilling prophecy (“You say I am lazy? Well YESSIR I AM!”). Am I supposed to think this is A Good Thing? Well, NO IT ISN’T! Calling someone lazy is never an act of praise. Just because they call themselves that way doesn’t mean you should. Same with the n-word.

Affirming racist stereotypes is never a good thing. That this promo-blurb gets printed is a symptom of an avant garde that refuses to acknowledge internalized racism.

No one should be claiming praise for using racist terms (n-word, lazy Croats, etc) to describe themselves, and no one should give praise to anyone for using such words in a performance in front of a white audience in Western Europe that most likely already harbours racist stereotypes about Southern Europeans being lazy, and, like the performers themselves, most likely wants to see such stereotypes adhered to, not challenged. Shame on BADCo for self-congratulatingly using such a word, and shame on Cvejic for praising them over it.

Maria Technosux

First of all, I do not think that “all interpretations are right”. If you see a traffic light switch to red, but you drive through anyway and end up in a car accident, don’t be telling your insurance-company that your choice to disregard the red light (which essentially tells you to stay put) was “the right interpretation”. It was the WRONG interpretation to disregard that red light.

re: “You seem to think that the racist allusion is objectively there”.

Oh, but that’s a good one: “It’s not really racist, Maria, it’s only racist because you make it so!” (aka “blaming the victim for feeling offended”).

My friend, I know racism when it’s hurled at me that way. You can’t slap me across the face with a rotten fish the way they did and expect me to stay put. I don’t need a new pair of spectacles to tell racist comments apart from innocent ones, tho BADCo could certainly use a pair.

Instead of blaming the victim for being sensitive to such things, why not blame BADCo for a lack of sensitivity for such things?

Maybe because BADCo are awarded for their lack of pride, whereas I am marginalized for being too proud to debase myself to the level of affirming the white-man’s stereotypes about us in exchange for funds and an arts-career? BADCo get funding and access to public forums for living up to such racist stereotypes… well, if that’s what it takes to get funds, I’ll excuse myself. I think I will stay in the margins instead, and laugh at artists who willingly partake in what I see as an artistic version of the capitalist race to the bottom.

BTW, why do you think I went out of my way to point out THE CONTEXT, ie. that they are performing in front of “a white Western-European audience that already harbors racist biases about Southern Europeans it wants to see adhered to, not challenged”? It is racist because makes a self-fulfilling prophecy out of a racist stereotype in front of the kind of people who want to see it become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This audience doesn’t want to see BADCo stand up and say:

“You know what, Germans? You’re nothing but a bunch of racists for calling us Croats lazy. We Croats are not lazy. This is a lie. We Croats are NOT lazy! Quit laughing, this isn’t funny. Yeah, you too Bojana, quit laughing right now. Let me tell you what it is. It’s *racism*, plain and simple. You know what we’re gonna do now? We’ll be like James Brown, the hardest workin’man in music. We won’t slack like you want us to, like you expect us to. No, we will bust our asses and get it real tight. We will shake that money maker till you racists don’t know what’s what. Movin’, doin’it, ya know, shake our arms and move our bums. We Croats are not lazy.”. Think Tanz Im August would ever program something like this? The room would empty for sure, but quite differently from the flight we witnessed during BADCo.

I think white Western audiences are perfectly happy to see blacks, Croats, Greeks, refer to themselves as lazy. Not only do they (whites) think it’s amusing, it’s also never a challenge to their worldviews (lazy artists get lazy audiences). White people don’t come to the theatre to have their racism challenged. If there’s any kind of laziness we are dealing here, than it’s the laziness of the avant garde to investigate internalized racism.

So white Westerners walk into the theatre thinking we’re all lazy bums, and what does BADCo do? They adhere to the stereotype. Well, screw that. I want to see such stereotypes challenged, not adhered to.

I can tell you I busted my ass in school and did my utmost best in school here in NL at least in part in order to dispel such myths, cos, hey, yo, this Greek girl here is definitely not lazy! Not that the Dutch people noticed (if anything, they resented me for being a hardworkin’ woman), but I don’t care. I know they were in the wrong with assuming us Greeks to be lazy bums. I am not, my friends are not, my family isn’t. We’re all working class. We are not lazy.

I don’t think that a word like lazy applied to Germans has the same connotation as lazy applied to Southern Europeans like Croats or Greeks. I think it’s that lack of connotations that makes that word so easy and harmless for you to claim, and so fundamentally loathsome for me to want to distance myself from it.

I don’t think that BADCo can claim the (alleged) innocence of this word the same way you do. If anything, their obligation as artists should be to show exactly why this word, “lazy”, isn’t innocent or harmless.

There is NO stereotype of “the lazy German”. There IS a stereotype of “the lazy Southern European”. There is also the stereotype of the lazy nigger. So for you to claim that word, used a stick with which to beat all these other people, is decidedly NOT the same thing. This is why BADCo cannot claim the word the way you do, regardless of what they write in their scripts or what Cvejic writes about them.

Tex.

I am an immigrant, I grew up having to field racist stereotypes, I have a problem with BADCo using such a word. I don’t expect you to understand.

Maybe if you’d grown up as an immigrant, you’d understand.
But since you haven’t, you don’t and can’t understand.

And yes, I do feel victimized by racism. I don’t care how hyperbolic that sounds to YOU. Racism is part and parcel of an immigrant’s life, and yes, I am negatively affected by it. Again, I don’t expect you to understand this.

All I am saying is that US immigrants cannot claim laziness or even the word lazy the same matter-of-fact/innocent way YOU do. You insist that we can, but that’s simply not true.

In your reply above, you keep on isolating this word, giving me examples of innocent and matter-of-fact uses of “lazy”. Such innocent uses are irrelevant to the discussion here. It’s in combination with an ethnic/regional identifier (the way BADCo themselves used it in their script) that I addressed the racist connotations of this word. I have already pointed out that saying “lazy German” isn’t the same as saying “lazy Croat”. The latter refers to a racist stereotype, the former doesn’t. It’s true that “nigger” negatively stereotypes to a whole group of people, but so does “lazy Southerner”.

If YOU can’t understand this, that this word is never innocent or matter-of-fact when applied to US immigrants from the South/Med-ean, then there is nothing I can do to make YOU understand.

I do suspect that other immigrants from the South might understand what I am talking about. I don’t expect you to, or BADCo, cos BADCo aren’t immigrants either. Cvejic may be a foreigner, certainly in Germany but *more importantly in Croatia too* (no doubt much to her chagrin) but she identifies with the Westerm mainstream. Cvejic will never claim immigrant identity or even stranger-status the way I do (self-consciously).

I talked with my mother about this “laziness” issue, (my mom, a working class immigrant woman who has never earned above mimimmum-wage all her life), and lo behold, she immediately understood what I was talking about:

“Yeah, Dutch people think we Southerners are all lazy, because the Dutch people fear that we’re out to steal their jobs. The Dutch people call us lazy so as to suggest that we are unworthy of the jobs we ‘stole’ from them. They also call us lazy to suggest that, once we have a job, we’ll slack and won’t perform well. Calling us lazy is an excuse for the Dutch to deny us foreigners jobs.”.

I honestly don’t think that BADCo set out to strip the stereotype of the “lazy Southerner” of its racist connotations. BADCo are either too naive, too cynical or too apathetic to do that. BADCo “lazily” affirm the stereotype.

As for that imaginary James Brown-based performance I fantasized about, I don’t see what’s “dated” about challenging racist stereotypes, last time I checked racism was alive and kicking, ie perfectly contemporary, so why would challenging it not be contemporary?! Now as to why it would never be staged: Like I said before in this thread, Western people don’t go to the theatre to have their racism challenged. Boring audiences out of their seats (passive aggression) is perfectly acceptable in the elite avant garde, addressing audiences as a bunch of racists (open confrontation, aka “scaring” them) is not. This is why a performance that openly challenges racist stereotypes would never be staged: it would be too controversial. Elite avant garde theatre tolerates passive aggression only, never open confrontation. This is why it is OK to affirm racist stereotypes (passive aggression to the point of masochism) but not to challenge them.

BADCo/Cvejic cater to their audience, they give the audience what the audience wants/expects (passive aggression instead of confrontation). The audience wants to see stereotypes, and BADCo promptly delivers.

BADCo forgets that there maybe, just maybe, there might be people in the audience OTHER than just Westerners, who might take issue. BADCo forgets that its audience might not be as homogenously Western as BADCo thinks it is.

BTW, I did not say that the performance itself was lazy. That’s a misunderstanding. I said that the performance was a total utter utter utter BORE. Honestly, I don’t see (and don’t care) what they could do to remedy THAT. Just to humor you: maybe they should leave the performance just the way it is, BO-RING, making their audiences too damn bored to even notice the racism, ahahaha! I certainly am not suggesting subliminal messaging here, cos that would make their boring performance more exciting that it is.

My comments re: the laziness posturing refer to a specific part of the script/text that Mr “Hahn am Kopf” was narrating from his cushy cushion in the back of the stage (that part of the text was acutally printed in the black/white booklet, which I got but which you said you don’t have), as well as to Cvejic’promo in the Tanz Im August flier. Hope that’s clear now.

Tex.

I haven’t seen the yellow booklet. Now you’ve got the upper-hand, cos now you have a piece of info I don’t have! ahahaha!

Like I said before, I don’t care if Cvejic states her support of BADco’s laziness posturing forthright/black-on-white or whether she kinda-sorta alludes to it. Her manner of writing is pomo thru and thru, and do these pomos EVER say anything outright, in plain language? The pomo lingo that Cvejic writes in is never clear-cut and never will be.

But: that doesn’t mean she isn’t saying things! I, for one, don’t expect her to suddenly change her pomo-blah based modus operandi and say: “Hurrah, finally a group of Croats who get up onstage in front of the Germans and call themselves lazy! I’ve been waiting to see something like this my whole life! Way to go girls+guy!”. Bojana thinks she’s too smart for normal language. But all it takes is a little bit of research to “get” just what she’s “getting” at.

The title of the BADco piece (Changes) as well as the subject of laziness, are not their own. Cvejic handed them the rope by which they hang themselves. Let me show you.

I have done some research and reading and I can tell you that the title, (Changes), the “work-in-progress” designation, and the laziness posturing, were ALL lifted from a Cvejic essay that she wrote back in 2005 titled “collectivity? you mean collaboration”:

http://www.republicart.net/disc/aap/cvejic01_en.htm

Here is the segment that BADco got their title from:

***
Take one of those imperatives of Living Theatre, like “Change is the natural state of being”, strip it from its 1960s-anarchist vogue, and what you get is a slogan “free, different, creative”, who? The sovereign individual chooser nowadays: the author, the programmer, the spectator.
***

Later in the same essay, Cvejic rambles on and on about the term work-in-progress, so it’s safe to assume that BADco added the work-in-progress to their piece, because of what they read about the term in this same essay:

***
The only tactic of resisting the institutional market for the freelance artist is to become the mediating machine him/herself, producing productivity and a self-governed networking. His/her work shifts to a multiplication of activities, contacts, formats of work, collaboration and presentation, allowing for the work-in-progress character to take on almost his/her entire opus, a working without work.
***

Bojana is saying here that the work-in-progress appelation idicates a “working without work”. Hardly a coincidence that BADco would use this next to the Changes title. The “working without work” already bodes well for laziness, but Cvejic gets even bolder than this in another part of the essay.

Here is the part that BADco got the laziness-posturing from:

***
Whether operated by state- or private-funded apparatuses or hacked by a free entrepreneurial self of the author, the artistic community likens a community without project and end-product, communauté desœuvrée, where desœuvrement (inoperativess and idleness) should be understood in politico-ethical terms.
***

As you can see, Bojana Cvejic is using a bunch of different synonyms, but she is talking about the same thing. Once again, Cvejic is too smart and too pomo to use normal words like “laziness”, so she replaces this simple word with pompous/pomo sounding synonyms, like “inoperativess”, “idleness”, and some French word I can’t even pronounce (dez-oof-rah-man = a man with no eggs/no balls?).

Like I said: Cvejic herself handed BADco the rope (laziness, changes, work-in-progress) with which to hang themselves. She gave them just enough rope to do so.

Cvejic herself is the one telling BADco that it’s cool to be lazy (or that it’s “politico-ethical”, whatever the hell that means, I’m guessing it’s pomo-blah for cool).

And again: this is a Serb telling Croats it’s cool to be lazy, they make a performance acting accordingly, then praising them for it in front of a German audience. This is racist. The more I realized Cvejic’s sheer influence on BADco the more I believe it is racist.

Another thing: Cvejic will never qualify that outright delusional statement in the Tanz im August BADco promo about “the new fetishization of labour” (=?! do you have a clue as to what she’s talking about?!), which according to her plagues the ENTIRE “political scene in Europe”… that’s right, Bojana goes for the broad stroke here, for she claims that the ENTIRE, the WHOLE political spectrum, left to right, is plagued by this supposed “fetishization of labour”.

This is almost as stupid as that one promo for a workshop that Cvejic had posted on the PAF list (I’m sure you read this) in which she claimed that deconstruction was now dead, and was replaced by Massumi’s Affect. Sure, Massumi took the performance business like storm, and was turned into a kind of performance-business-guru. But to claim that the Massumi hype somehow killed decon? Ridiculous.

Pomos like Cvejic are obsessed with the race for the ever new, ever bold, and this obsession leads Cvejic to make such ridiculous statements. But because Cvejic’s writings are accepted at face-value (since she’s Ritsema’s girlfriend, and Samalon’s friend, etc etc, cronyism ad infinitum), and because everyone is so intimidated by her pomo manner of writing, no one ever takes the time to call Bojana Cvejic on her shit. As a Derrida fanatic, her manner of writing will only get more and more hazy and unreadable, and more intimidating, I might add.

But not to worry. Just get a copy of Bourdieu’s Distinction and read the anti-Derrida rant in the last few pages, you’ll ROTFL. Every time I get intimidated by pomo-lingo, all I have to do is read this again and I no longer feel intimidated. This, and Alan Sokal, of course!

This “fetishization of labour” concoction is Bojana collaging at random with half-understood (wait, make that: not understood) Marxist terminology. If there was a babblefish engine for Marxist terms, these are the kinds of randomized combinations of words it would spit out (Bojana = Human Babblefish).

I am sure that if I were to corner her about this (oh the thrill!) Cvejic wouldn’t be able to give a single example of this alleged fetishization of labour happening ANYWHERE at all in Europe.

All of this, and you are still calling ME the quichottic one? Bojana is the one you fire that one at, since she’s the one setting up political straw-men here, straw-men she can then move in to knock down by offering BADco up as an alternative practice – “alternative” my arse, laziness posturing goes all the way back to the bohos, villagers, hippies, beats, badco, bojana, the list goes on, but more on that in my own piece, in which I quote Stephen Duncombe’s highly lucid and succint history of the laziness posturing of every damn avant garde since Theophile Gautier.

But of course, no one ever asks Cvejic to qualify her statements providing actual evidence to back up her claims. Everyone is too intimidated by Cvejic’s pomo-speak to demand a mere clarification or single piece of evidence from that woman.

But enough about that moron, I kick her ass quite thoroughly in my own piece, so let’s move on to something more glaring about Badco’s booklet (the black/white one).

Now that you’ve read the booklet, let me first start by asking you a question about the Marx quote (the one I initially mentioned way way way above in this thread):

1) what do you think of this quote (sloganeering with Marx)?

2) according to this page
http://www.artsmw.org/heartlandproject//aspects/essays/stipancic.html
(can I use HTML here BTW?) the Marx quote is a fake. How do you feel about this? (sloganeering with a FAKE Marx quote, aka putting things in the mouth of a dead person that this person hasn’t even said?)

Now, I must say that when I first saw this quote in the BADco booklet, I immediately considered the possibility that it was fake. It seemed highly unlikely to me, who has actually read a bit or Marx, that Marx would ever say such a thing about work. Labour/work, after all, is an ontological necessity in Marxism. Marx never advocated a total absurdity like labour-free society. He did say that work, under capitalist conditions, led to alienation. But to call it a disease? I suspected that this was a fake, and lo behold it was. I don’t like the fact that such utter nonsense is attributed to Marx. I know that pomos think it’s good clean fun. Example: I have a pomo essay here about Ghandi, included in a Post-Colonial Studies reader. in which the writer pretends that Ghandi is still alive, attributing all sorts of nonsense to this “living Ghandi” character. I have a huge problem with pomos pulling such essayistic pranks.

In my own essay on BADco, which I have just written, I turn the tables on them and put all kinds of fake statements in their mouths. Let’s see how they like it (assuming they read it, which I don’t think they will)

3) Is this sloganeering with a fake Marx quote acceptable just because it’s another artist, Mladen Stilinovic, and not BADco themselves saying/doing these things? Is Goran justified just because he is speaking through Stilinovic, appropriating what he said before him? I think it’s just a performative “METOO!”

To give you an example of what I mean: In the Netherlands, a mainstream journalist can lose his job for calling George W. Bush an equal to Hitler in a piece, whether that’s a column, an opinion piece, a letter or whatever.

However (this IMO is the hypocrisy of the Dutch press) it is acceptable to quote Gore Vidal saying the same thing: “Gore Vidal says that GWB is equal to Hitler” <— why is this acceptable instead of a plain statement “GWB is a present day Hitler”. Why is it OK for me to state my opinion about GWB via Gore Vidal, and not via, well, myself?

Do I now have to wait for Gore Vidal every time to say something first about somebody, before stating my own opinion on the person or persons I wish to talk about?

Maria Technosux