The Stew

Amid what Roberto Bolaño calls the melancholy folklore of exile, he evokes a phantom experience preceding a chimerical one: “I had practically no friends and all I did was write and go for long walks, starting at seven in the evening, just after getting up, with a feeling like jet lag – an odd sensation of fragility, of being there and not there, somehow distant from my surroundings.” Here, the perpetual state of being there and not there corresponds with a sense of profound alienation from the world. Alternative formulations for this suspension between presence and absence flicker across the boundaries separating the here and now from some kind of elsewhere. The Stew at ayayay is a form of literal departing from elsewhere that is, as an exhibition format, the localization of an aesthetics and an anesthetics for a here and elsewhere. In accordance with the format and against it. The studio (Neu Workshop) beacons a point of departure from which the exhibition unfolds with and against its own nature, taking the localization and standardization of time (the culture of production), within new attempts at meaning and the myths of artistic practice into consideration. The Stew recollects, carries and relocates Neu Workshop, Studio processes, publications, curatorial and interdisciplinary production as a function of an ongoing discourse rather than a given thematic. The most monumental artistic attempt to create a total environment was Richard Wagner's design for music drama as a Gesamtkunstwerk, in which poetry, music, and theater were combined in order to create, as Adorno writes, an intoxicating brew (surmounting the uneven development of the senses and reuniting them). Unity is superimposed. Whereas, "under conditions of modernity," in the "contingent experience of the individual" outside the opera house, "the separate senses do not unite". Borrowing from philoso­pher Clement Rosset's L’objet Singulier and from CNRS scientist Vincent Lostanlen to affirm (1) the reality of all music, (2) the infidelity of all audio data, and (3) the impossibility of strictly repeating sensations, the studio is defined as a space that is there and not there, outside the opera house: A space that does not unite. The exhibited studio as an exhibition regarding the studium of the studio becomes difficult to sustain as a sensual experience that distinguishes itself precisely by its separation from "reality". An intoxicating stew.