Bukaka spat Here

‘Don’t read it! Fuck it! Smash it! FORGET IT! DEMOLISH IT! PISS ON IT!’ Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz advise the reader of their scatological, scatter-fire manifesto Bukaka Spat Here. This slim volume is a disposable piece of anti-literature which combines wild flights of fantasy, Bataillean erotic excess, half-baked poetry and ‘primitive’ illustrations with sober theories of cultural and social revolution. It’s accomplishment is to create a book which is non-serious and unimpressive in its style, yet imaginative, entertaining and inspiring in its political passion.

Bukaka tells the tale of a colossal, indestructible, heroic black female with an insatiable appetite for cross-species sex and revolutionary escapades. True to superhero form she is endowed with a special power – her venomous, viscous, acidic and sometimes deadly spit. She is also able to transmogrify into a fly and, despite being torn limb from limb by a nail bomb, survives in the form of an enormous deadly tooth. In their quest to discover ‘anti-technologies of RESISTANCE’, Brener and Schurz transform the body’s incoherent excreta and libidinous drives into the inassimilable weapons of revolt. Rejecting terrorist violence (the sign of the left’s demise), critical art (the fuel of the capitalist art market) and the opportunist reformism of anti-capitalist groups like Globalise Resistance, these notorious iconoclasts offer us the politics of direct democracy fused with an insurgency of the body.

In keeping with Negri and Hardt’s theory of constituent power, (and despite their condemnation of ‘fucking Michael Hardt!’), they promulgate the language-defying sea of singularities which comprise the multitude as against its vicarious and oppressive representation from above. But where Negri and Hardt focus on the insurrectionary potential of the internet, Brener and Schurz focus on the unanswerable effrontery of saliva, shit, sex and farts. ‘Anti-technologies of RESISTANCE are like a fart at a cocktail party with guests dressed in evening attire.’ But no matter how refreshing this departure from the technophilia of so many adherents of the postmodern politics of the multitude, their technophobia and condemnation of industrial production per se could augur a worrying return to the swamp of primitivism.

Josephine Berry <josie AT metamute.com> is deputy editor of Mute. Her PhD on net art is available on M-files [http://www.metamute.com/mfiles]

Bukaka Spat Here // Alexander Brener & Barbara Schurz // Vargas Organisation // London 2002 // ISBN 0-9520274-4-5