Representation. Ends, Means, Desires and Capitalia
A Seminar with Amanda Beech

We invite you to this Desire and Capital post-scriptum, fronted by Amanda Beech, at Rib. During the seminar titled Representation. Ends, Means, Desires and Capitalia, Beech will present her work on the subject of representation (politics) in contemporary art. It will be followed by a response from Maziar Afrassiabi as himself: as embodied representative of Rib. The event is meant to facilitate an encounter so we may interrogate and reevaluate our positions regarding questions of representation in the art, capital and desire triad.

This event is organized by Sonia de Jager, Maziar Afrassiabi and Amanda Beech.

Has the primacy of subjectivity and the rejection of reason disabled art to comprehend and represent our current crisis? In what ways do ideologies of expectation condition art? We are excited to have continued our dialogue with Amanda Beech with the seminar titled Representation. Ends, Means, Desires and Capitalia, in an effort to understand the genealogy of these questions and their possible implications.

During the seminar Amanda Beech presented her work on the subject of representation in contemporary art. She criticizes an “inability to deal with representation; that is, how we might account for art as a field of representation, a space of knowing, that goes beyond traditional metaphysics or the ontology of art as a mirror of what is – art as nature“ (p.2, Art’s Intolerable Knowledge, 2021) in contemporary art. To her, the naturalization of pessimism about epistemology and representation in art is a consequence of anti-realist positions that are concerned with immanence rather than transcendence, rejecting the idea of objective truth and rendering the apprehension of reality as entirely subjective. This art stops wanting to represent the problem or the condition of the human and instead works with the idea of being in the world as a form of unconscious automated action, crisis thereby becoming the stuff of our existence. In opposition to this, Amanda Beech asks whether art can work in a non-subjective form of realism that can say something about the abstract complex that is reality and go beyond the reproduction of the current crisis. Realism is here defined in reference to Kant as the question of articulating that which we cannot imagine, nor have any analytical grasp on. She stresses the potentiality of a rational materialism in art as a proposition for a methodology that can “release reason and subjectivity from its negative typecasting, and […] endow art with much needed and stronger epistemic credentials” (p.7).

To illustrate this form of practice, the presentation ended with a screening of Amanda Beech’s work Covenant Transport Move or Die (2015), a multi-channel video installation that is interested in the fetishization of mobility both by capitalism and artistic critique. In the video five characters who know everything about everything, having mapped out past, present and future through a game-like system “wade through the terrain of global capitalist power from a collective psychology that transcends the political stagnation of technology, industry and the mire of our present imaginary.”

We concluded the seminar with a conversation between Amanda Beech, the audience and Maziar Afrassiabi, reflecting on the presented diagnosis and its proposed consequences for art.

^{—Text by Louisa von Moreau}