Long Legged Linguistics

From their first publication Kidnapping Mountains (Book Works, 2009) to the more recent Khhhhhhh (Mousse | Moravian Gallery 2012), the collective has consistently turned to language as a tool for disruption, humour, and unexpected meaning. By challenging an understanding of language as exclusively rational or semantic, Slavs and Tatars emphasize its potential to be affective and sensual, concealing as much as it reveals—even becoming a platform for sacred wisdom, rather than a mere vehicle for secular knowledge or profane, everyday, use.

For their exhibition at Art Space Pythagorion, Slavs and Tatars present Long Legged Linguistics, an investigation of language as a source of political, metaphysical, even sexual emancipation. With their trademark mix of high and low registers, ribald humour and esoteric discourse, the artist collective addresses the thorny issue of alphabet politics—the attempts by nations, cultures, and ideologies to ascribe a specific set of letters to a given language—with a series of sculptures, installations, textiles, and printed matter.

The march of alphabets has always accompanied that of empires and religions: Latin script along with the Roman Catholic faith, Arabic with Islam and the Caliphate, as well as Cyrillic with Orthodox Christianity and subsequently the USSR. But here, it is not peoples or nations that are liberated, but phonemes from attempts to restrain and rein them in.

With Long Legged Linguistics and works such as Tongue Twist Her, Madame MMMorphologie, Qit Qat Qa and Other Peoples’ Prepositions, Slavs and Tatars’ performative approach to language takes a decidedly morphological, if not erotic, turn. The will necessary to assign a grapheme (letter) to a phoneme (sound) carries within its bosom issues of power, submission, domination, and resistance—told here not only via the political, but also through the less-explored perspective of the ecstatic and sexual.

At first glance, Slavs and Tatars can be slid easily into a category defined by Claire Bishop as “the social turn in contemporary art,” or participatory art. The group exchanges individual authorship for that of the collective, supplanting individual acts of the artist-virtuoso with collaborative actions intervening directly into the surrounding world—effecting change within it. The central objective of their practice is the “creation of a new type of sociality,” forging their own minority nation—the yet-to-be-defined community of those who inhabit the space “between the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China.”

Perhaps we could see Slavs and Tatars themselves as a kind of minor art within participatory art, a subversive element altering its trajectory. They are not about, as Bishop might have it, a “new sociality” aiming to institutionalize practitioners and advocates of participatory art. This kind of sociality turns out to be old news: the type of moral code that the “social turn” holds up as aesthetic echoes the liberal-bourgeois morality of democratic materialism as the modern world’s dominant ideology. If indeed participatory art could change its bourgeois mentality into a revolutionary one, then it would follow that such an art could better prime the political situation for radical politics than what we’ve seen the last two decades.

But, it is possible that, in the case of Slavs and Tatars, we are dealing not with modern, or as we now might call it, contemporary art, but with the art of the future—where contemporary art factors in only indirectly. Such an art of the future would provide immediate access to a field of revolutionary politics. This field is one not limited to the sphere of man, but one where animistic mountain ranges, consonants, fruits, demons, historical figures, architectural ensembles, Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, and mirrors might take up arms as members of different factions, rising up against their own reactionary shadows...

The three distinct cycles of Slavs and Tatars’ research and practice can serve as guiding lights in the study of techniques necessary for achieving this art of the future. First, there was the commitment to indeterminacy: the group’s earliest cycle—Kidnapping Mountains or “a celebration of the Caucasus as a case study of complexity”—connected with “the active choice of choosing not to choose.”

Non-partisanship and disengagement may be the best position to take within an imperialist war, but any war can—and should—be transformed into a civil one, where there can be no question of passive observation. Potential fault lines between revolutionary and reactionary elements must be articulated on each side, as in the second cycle of Slavs and Tatars’ practice, Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz. Here, the conversation moved on to identifying the contours by which elemental facts and figures could be transformed. The explosive power of the phoneme Khhhhhhhh takes centre stage in Slavs and Tatars’ third cycle, The Faculty of Substitution—or the ability to actually transform and alter a given set of boundaries. This latest phase not only explains the substance of a new understanding of revolution, but—through its investigations into an area “beyond sense,” and its multiple entrances into the realms of the mystic, the numinous, and the magical—it also raises the question as to what extent a work of art can be used as a wedge driven in between the layers of reality.

Through their particular type of humour, Slavs and Tatars’ materialist conquest of the magical eventually results in the third cycle of their work collapsing into the first. We once more find ourselves confronted with the commitment to indeterminacy, transforming itself from one of the means into the goal itself, a kind of causa sui. But by taking it up, the revolutionary class transforms into what it has marginalized: a group of dreamers, plunging into a catatonic dream come true.

Catatonia in humour and humour in catatonia—is this an inescapable loop? It is precisely the resolution of this issue on which the fate of the art of the future hangs. Slavs and Tatars’ humour provides a platform where this kind of question can be meaningfully formulated.