What external forces press from without to create a subject that perhaps resembles the hard rectangular protective shell of an archival box?
Submission was produced in response to an invitation to participate in the exhibition When Artists Say We at Artists Space in 2006. The exhibition was organized by Andrea Geyer and Christian Rattemeyer.
Submission consisted of an archival box containing a ream of Cease and Desist orders directed at the exhibition. Fulfilling the request of the organizers, the documents contained as a footnote a fictitious narrative of Camel Collective's formation. This narrative relates the founding of a collective and its eventual compromise due to the psychic residues of capitalist subjectivity latent within the group. The purpose of drafting the narrative was to understand the outside pressures (economic, juridical, political, and personal) that press upon self-organizing bodies from both the outside and from within.
"The Lumpen Headache," a published transcript of the editorial board of the short-lived art magazine The Fox was helpful in identifying the internal pressures and antagonisms attendant to collective projects.
The title was inspired by the language of gallery solicitations, which proposition artists to "submit works and proposals" and by the Sex Pistols' 1977 Submission.
You've got me pretty deep baby
I can't figure out your watery love
I got to solve your mystery
You're sitting in out in heaven above
Sub mission
Going down down
Dragging her down
Sub mission
I can't tell you what I found*
The obtuseness of the Sex Pistols' lyrics make the song intriguingly applicable as a figure to understand the affective economies and passionate attachments of knowledge/power relations in participatory art.
Submissionwas an attempt to represent the non-affirmative implications of collective organization and its potential folding over into intellectual property. The legal aspect of collective naming--the signature Camel--were here mimicked or rehearsed as a means to connect the collectivist spirit of self-organization and its entrepreneurial other under capitalism.
*Subsequent editions of Submission to Archive for Exhibition contain the complete lyrics on the interior cover.
Exhibited at:
When Artists Say We, Artist Space, New York, NY, 2006
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