At the latest in the dark fifties of the 20th century, the historian Ernst Kantorowicz must have had the beguiling idea that kings in the Middle Ages always had two bodies: earthly and supernatural, mortal and imperishable, private and public. Forty years later, in the peculiar decade of the 1990s, a slender, gender-skeptical, black “tweenager” grows up in New York’s East Village, discovers a possible future in the “budding performances” of chat rooms and online forums and would rather wish for two bodies none.
It is the time when the internet is still an empty space and a promise of transcending cultural boundaries, after the abolition of politics. Out on the graphite-lined streets her name is Legacy Russell, but at home on the internet she’s called LuvPunk12, like everyone else who hung around on messenger services with obtrusive signal tones, who burned MP3s onto CDs and shared with their friends via hotmail, gmx and web.de send miserably long emails with no paragraphs and sometimes even no punctuation.
Measured in Internet time, that was light years ago, the Lower East Side is now gentrified down to the last garage, the Internet is at least as polarized a living space as the outside world. And because people now mostly simply use their real names for their digitally equipped “multiple selves”, Legacy is called Legacy Russell again and no longer LuvPunk12, lives in Manhattan again, but somehow still on the Internet at the same time.
Legacy Russell: Glitch Feminism. A manifesto. Translated from the English by Ann Cotten, Barbara Eder, Franziska Füchsl, Mark Kanak, Jakob Kraner, Claire Palzer, Fiona Sironic, Lotta Thießen and Bradley Williams Cohen. Merve, Leipzig 2021. 151 pages, 16 euros.
They – although the fashion of the time and their self-description as “digital Orlando” suggest using an equivalent of the gender-fluid pronoun “they” at this point -, Legacy Russell so today is an incredibly successful, incredibly networked, incredibly disciplined curator, copywriter, art educator, and art theorist. After working at MoMa PS1 and the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Goldsmiths graduate, who was born in 1986, has been running the legendary for a few months New York art institution “The Kitchen”, considered by many to be the world’s premier non-profit experimental arts venue. In addition, there is a lively lecture and publication activity: art criticism, lecture performances, video essays, exhibition texts, Instagram posts. A 22-page downloadable curriculum vitae also lists the following research interests: digital lifestyle, Internet idolatry, rituals in new media, gender/performance.
It’s all in Glitch Feminism, Russel’s 2020 debut book, translated into daring German by a highly motivated translation collective of nine led by Ann Cotten. “Glitch” is a term from digital culture that describes an unavoidable but unpredictable disruption in the system, a sudden deviation from protocol, an unforgivable lapse in program flow: “In technoculture, glitch is part of the fear of machines, an indication that somewhere something went wrong.” In techno culture, glitch is everything that accident is.
For Russell there is a precious “potential for denial” in this techno-demonic sabotage of the norm. She takes it as the starting point of her ambitious “Manifesto”, which “flexes” itself in twelve dense short chapters through all kinds of feminist theory, experimental contemporary art and advanced online behavior, while maintaining contact with an Afro-American cultural canon, which gradually turns out to be Legacy’s actual “legacy”. , proves to be her most intimate legacy.
During industrialization, bodies worked in factories; today they generate data
LuvPunk12’s youthful dream of escaping one’s own skin by turning to the digital may seem hopelessly naïve today. But Russell’s main opponent is still the body: as an instrument of dressing, as an old European binary construct of male and female, dead and alive, sick and healthy, soul and body. This restrictive body regime, which even the underage LuvPunk12 found “aggressively meaningless”, it is important to slip away again and again through artistic, poetic, discursive and also technical interventions.
What is at stake is nothing less than the complete control of our digitally networked selves through data extractivism: while in the 19th and 20th centuries it was still a matter of siphoning off the cheapest possible labor from as many bodies as possible, now it is about tapping data on preferences and preferences behavioral patterns to the fore. Contemporary feminism cannot be satisfied with individual body liberation. He must “encipher” the bodies, making them more difficult to read for the algorithmic power concentrated in the hands of a few tech companies.
In demarcation from a feminism that is too body-fixated, Russell’s “Manifesto” is directed against any form of “identity art” and the political programs associated with it. It’s not about searching for and finding ever new positions of identity, to which always new attributions and labels should correspond. It is not about making the supposedly different body visible, about giving the marginalized a voice. She is concerned with distorting the voices, alienating and encrypting the body: Feminism as a gender “disarmament program”, glitches as a way of life.
It’s about disrupting the “hetero-rhythm”, “ghosting” the standardized body
But how do you make a body algorithmically unreadable? This is shown in an outstanding way by a black American artist who calls himself “American Artist”: His pseudonym makes him a generic artist par excellence on the one hand, and an ungoogleable ghost on the other. If you are looking for this artist, you first have to look at Hopper, Basquiat and Warhol click past. But if you just want to quickly skim off a little material on US American art history, with a bit of luck you will come across the only American artist who really deserves this name from now on.
Other protagonists, commented on by Russell’s “glitch feminism”, offer alternative strategies for similar goals. Some concentrate on the spoken word, the disembodied sign, the writing on the wall, while others transform their bodies into a performative experimental field for image snippets, sounds and projections.
Still others adopt the gesture repertoire of average society through drag, butō and similar arts of exaggeration, only to be able to reject it all the more insidiously the next moment. What they all have in common is the intention to disrupt the “hetero-rhythm”, to “ghost” the standardized body, to challenge the “snazzy marginalization” of people and aesthetics on behalf of progressive Realpolitik.
Russell’s style is phonetically akin to anemic exhibition texts, but clever
In terms of the history of ideas, this is not always quite as radical as it appears, after all, organized refusal has always been part of feminist core business. Two other merits of the (ultimately unnecessarily narrow) essay performance characterized as a “manifesto” should therefore be highlighted. On the one hand, Russell succeeds in convincingly depicting a contemporary Internet culture that uses productive nostalgia and numerical cunning to build new, complex environments from earlier stages of the medium’s development, instead of simply celebrating uncritically what is masquerading as somehow new and exciting. On the other hand, she gives the dominant phenomenon of the theory-sour art description prose a more than overdue upgrade.
Anyone who occasionally strays into contemporary art exhibitions knows the anemic exhibition texts, in which mercilessly “blurring boundaries”, “questioning categories” and “exploring ways of thinking” are being relentlessly described. The sonic affinity of “Glitch Feminism” with such lyrics is hard to miss, but Russell refines them in a precisely observing style that never hides his exalted cleverness, gleefully drops names and shies away from neither pathos nor silliness.
And so back to the translation. Not content with simply managing its template’s glitch inventory, it continually overshoots targets, in places to the point where it amplifies and doubles the cracks and noise that Russell says is the most promising open space. In a playful violation of the rules of correctness in translation, “trust-fund-children” become spoiled “building society contract kids”, “blackness” becomes “blackness”, LuvPunk’s “skewed romance” with the Internet as empty space becomes “weird romance”. from Legacy’s queer feminist cyborg fantasy. With this, Cotten & Co. not only achieve a remarkable mediation, but also secretly add a thirteenth chapter to the twelve. Its headline should read: Glitch is translation.