Brandon is a Network Not a Name: Fictocriticism &amp; the Cyberfeminist Art of Shu Lea Cheang

Zach Pearl

doi:10.16995/olh.6391

Abstract

The cyberfeminist art practice of Shu Lea Cheang evinces a particular relation of generative complicity with the art object—what Canadian cultural theorist Jeanne Randolph referred to as 'the amenable object' (1983). Randolph, who pioneered 'ficto-criticism'—a method of writing that intentionally blurs theory, poetics and narrative—wrote of the amenable object as an incomplete creation whose 'ambiguous elements' allow the viewer to make 'subjective interventions' in the work. Likewise, Cheang’s participatory installations and non-linear online narratives operate as amenable object-texts, requiring the user to not only navigate but contribute to them through acts of critical play and improvisation. Across Cheang’s oeuvre is also a nomadic politics of border-crossing that resonates as loudly with Donna Haraway’s cyborg as it does with the experimental feminist writing that became associated with fictocriticism. In this paper, I examine correlations between fictocritical approaches and formal tactics in Cheang’s studio practice to consider them as interrelated cyberfeminist strategies of resistance and dissent; ones that arose in counterpoint to the proliferation of deterministic, technocapitalist narratives. In particular, I look at how the fragmentation, partiality and double-voicing seen in many fictocritical texts were echoed in the user-experience of Cheang’s Brandon (1998), a sprawling network that posited the queer body as a collective series of actions. I conclude by looking at how these same techniques recall methods from Dadaism and Surrealism in the early 20th century and reflect on the recurrent role of indeterminacy in art and literature more generally to stem the entropy of binary paradigms.

Highlights

Another characteristic that can only be subjectively known is the capacity to sustain a response that is unsettling or thrilling
I examine those tactics of indeterminacy embedded in several of Cheang’s more famous works, including her ground-breaking piece, Brandon (1998), through the lens of Jeanne Randolph’s theoretical writing on ‘the amenable object’ and her subsequent experiments to make this critically playful theory of art interpretation manifest in art writing, a process she later coined ‘ficto-criticism’ (Randolph, 2020; Flavell, 2009)
The day-to-day life of the characters in the film is told through the perspective of a queer family enduring the loss of their only child, and subsequent questions of reproduction and futurity are jointly interrogated through a gender and race-sensitive lens that adroitly embodies the entangled subjectivity of Haraway’s cyborg and the anti-technoscientific logic it mythologizes

Summary

Amenable Texts

Another characteristic that can only be subjectively known is the capacity to sustain a response that is unsettling or thrilling. Here, I argue that the generative aspects of cybertext have less to do with unconventional structure than conventions surrounding the perception and consumption of a particular text This stance is largely informed by Randolph’s essay, ‘The Amenable Object,’ first published in 1982 and reprinted in 1991, in which she draws on her background in psychoanalysis to explore fundamental questions about the role of subjectivity in writing art criticism. In it, she suggests that artworks are unique in their status as amenable objects; meant to be ‘pliant’ in their multiple potential readings and, nearly exclusive in their ability to incite or inhabit a certain mode of adult play in the viewer, returning us to a less logical mode of ‘primary process’ Whether a slippery microphone on one’s lapel or a malfunctioning slide projector (Randolph, 2003: 32–33), writing fictocritically reflects the dubious and somewhat antagonistic capacity in which we engage communication technologies, underlining their infidelity as well as the inevitable entanglement of the ‘I’ with its given interface

Brandon: A Fictocritical Network

Fictocritical Futures