Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices

by Nicole Antebi (Editor), Colin Dickey (Editor), Robby Herbst (Editor)

With a design that's half pocket book, half zine, this provocative volume offers an array of essays, interviews and artworks that describe a minor history of failure. Tracing the idea of failure through contemporary art, activism, literature and philosophy, the work cuts against notions of forward-moving progress, instead exploring various dead ends on the timeline of history. Edited by Nicole Antebi, Colin Dickey and Robby Herbst, Failure! offers directions for mapping our lives along paths that go nowhere--or worse. Contents include an illustrated study of the afterlife of Valerie Solanas and her Scum Manifesto; an exploration of the Morningstar Commune in Northern California, which was deeded to God; a comparison between the architecture of the Three Stooges and Frank Gehry; explorations of the legacies of the Weather Underground and a series of interviews with contemporary artists including Sam Durant, William Pope.L and Assume Vivid Astro Focus.

218 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2007

Reviews

[Alicia]

Enjoyed the ending of Tommy Williford's contribution, "The Ontology of Failure: Marxism, Revolution, and the Enlightenment":

"By attempting to mobilize individuals, [leftist movements] have ensured individualism, competition, and in the end exploitation and alienation. In the end, failure to challenge capitalism is ensured, and this failure only continues to secure the power of the capitalist system itself. The only way in which to construct a collectivist system is to live a collectivist existence. In other words, we must come to understand that there is no internal self at all, that ‘I’ am simply the recording and operationalization of the external experience recorded. It is not a question of being, “I am,” but rather a statement of ‘it is.’ I am merely the external. Failure is only possible within an existence that relies on this dualism, and until leftist systems move past this dualism, the zero-sum game, where we are the subject within the power struggle of individuals, failure is ensured, even if it succeeds” (162)

[Bria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very clever to choose failure as the theme, as it means I can't really complain about any mistakes or editing errors or anything really, since it's all probably just part of the project. I found this book in a little free library and hoped it would have something insightful or interesting to say on the topic, which I'm interested in by necessity, but other than a few interesting stories here and there most of it was a bit too esoteric literary technique kinda stuff.

[Jacob Wren]

In her essay Notes On Beatification: The Case For Valerie Solanas, Catherine Lord writes:

The counts on which Valerie [Solanas] is usually convicted of failure are the following: she was not a lesbian, she was a lesbian, she didn't comb her hair, she was a hooker, she was poor, she held extremist views, she was humorless, her humor was inappropriate, she picked on an artist who would become important, she was clueless about the workings of the art market, and she missed. She did not, fortunately, kill Warhol, or anyone else. By the time she got to him, William Burroughs had already shot his wife, and Norman Mailer stabbed his. Louis Althusser had yet to strangle his. Let us not even begin to speak of Carl Andre. The only woman to survive her man was Mailer's wife. Did the critical reputation, credibility, or perceived contribution of any of these men suffer more than a temporary glitch?