The Chris Korda shock strategy, last hope before extinction?

by Ingrid Luquet-Gad

A total artist, Chris Korda has for three decades led a provocative and uncompromising infiltration of urban and media spaces, the aim of which quite simply concerns the survival of the human species. His retrospective, at Confort Moderne in Poitiers until August 28, extends and amplifies the best-known part of his practice: the Church of Euthanasia.

A meter was installed above the doorway to connect, at Confort Moderne in Poitiers, the concert hall and the exhibition space. The ten figures scroll by, with the usual frenzy of measuring systems. No one seems to pay much attention to it. No millennial anxiety in the air, nor excitement of the imminent crash.

However, through this preliminary clue, and the attention that we pay little or no attention to it, we can nevertheless read the chronicle of a foretold death. That of all of humanity, whose horizon of survival is inversely proportional to the humans who compose it: the very people whose number continues to increase, before our eyes. In mid-July, the eight billion were missing barely ten million births.

Remotely, it is also possible to follow, this time informed, the countdown on the Church of Euthanasia website. But it is precisely because information is not enough for consciousness, and even less for this critical awakening which arms action, that Chris Korda has been producing for three decades a work that fires on all woods, and on all media diversions .

This will therefore be music, installation, performance, activism or software design, infiltrating the mass entertainment industries as much as the public spaces of American cities, the virtual factory of reality as the viral urban guerrilla or again the infiltration of clubbers' biorhythms.

“Save the planet, kill yourself”

Born in 1962 in New York and now based in Berlin, the polymorphous transgender artist founded the Church of Euthanasia in 1992. Or a religious group, recruiting its members, whose first and only commandment has the simplicity that befits total ambitions: “Thou shalt not procreate”. And its four pillars – suicide, abortion, cannibalism and sodomy – are parodic seriousness, which provides moralistic outrage with its best fuel.

Still preceded today by its micro-supports of virality, it may have been through a t-shirt, a sticker or a badge that the unexpected meeting with the Church took place, with white-on-black slogans such as “Save The Planet Kill Yourself” or “Thank You For Not Breeding”. During a presentation as part of the Paris Internationale fair in 2018, the independent art space and the publishing house Goswell Road, in Paris, put said anti-promotional items on sale, before dedicating, in the spring 2019, a first French exhibition in the Church archives.

Three decades of viral actions united

In Poitiers, Goswell Road is also the venue for the retrospective dedicated, this time, to the multiple spectra of Chris Korda's work, bringing together the visual and musical aspects. With The (Wo)Man of the Future, its title, it is also through the Church of Euthanasia that the journey begins. Barring the large, yet monumental, hall from the main space, the hand-painted banners and signs of the first urban actions give the measure of the confrontation – principle of virality versus physical saturation.

Punctuating them, a “sperm bench”, a “sperm dress”, a mutant rubber chicken or an inflatable doll, including a carnivorous child and a crown of barbed wire, introduce the frontal provocation and the clashes generated, with the souls upset by the reaction, just as much, moreover, as with the police, as also evidenced by a video projection room and a set of photographs documenting the actions.

This does not mean that the Church of Euthanasia has chosen its target, rather than by the dissemination of its message, although oriented towards the survival of the human species through the prism of ecology, of the right to abortion and sexual freedom, and therefore traces the dividing lines in its expression. In itself, the Church does not occupy a negative position, does not rely on a binary dialectic of simple inversion of the social forces present.

Last hopes of survival for sleeping humanity

And, nevertheless, the front lines are now clearly emerging. Those who must be reached are not only the Christian extremist fringes, nor even the anti-abortion activists or the owners of the means of production. Because the same goes for the bulk of the population, those who tacitly fuel the consumerist consensus and alienation through television sedation.

The core target would be those who were not yet called the “multitude” (Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, 2020) and who had not yet experienced themselves as the 99% (Occupy Wall Street). This mass – and, as we will have understood, the quantitative weighs – silent, consenting in absentia, individuals preoccupied with their personal comfort rather than making the near future habitable. Those that Chris Korda will ironically challenge from the airwaves, with his hit 6 Billion Humans Can't Be Wrong, from the eponymous album which was released in 1999 on Deejay Gigolo Records.

In the second part of the exhibition, color takes over and the representation fades. The final room brings together a collection of recent works: kaleidoscopic and undulating video-projected kinetic sculptures, friezes depicting infinite random variations of the same motif or shape. All were generated from software programmed by Chris Korda and available as open source, bringing, as well as a thought of the reappropriation of tools against their control by the new vectorialist class, also a thought of a being-in-the-world fluid and infinitely changing.

Organizing self-determination: strategies and tactics

The relevance of Chris Korda's message is vivid, its reception all the more acute as the urgency is now felt, the pragmatic consequences of an extractivist system are already there, and the threat to self-determination bodies is material. But his strategies of intervention, which we could read through the prism of affiliation with the avant-gardes of the 1920s, Dada or surrealism, and with the post-May 68 situationists, are just as important.

In reality, it would be more, rather than strategies, tactics: the distinction is made by Michel de Certeau, distinguishing, for the former, the operating mode of the power in place, for the latter, those of the subalterns organizing themselves. In this regard, Chris Korda, a stellar singularity, could rather be seen as the extension of the tactical media of the 1990s, these satirical and media artistic practices aimed at the disruption of the globalized neoliberal status quo through the infiltration of dominant media – which, too punctual, however, did not experience the longevity of Reverend Chris Korda.

The preceding is a translation. The original language is here.