During the 1980s, Guattari visited New York several times. That was the time when Semiotext(e), Columbia University, and Autonomedia in Williamsburg published many French texts, including Deleuze and Guattari’s. When Guattari visited NY, he stayed in the loft of his friend, painter Lucio Pozzi, in Soho, in the process of being fancified. Several times he visited Williamsburg to discuss his publications, still a heavy duty slum.
Sometime in 1983, when Félix Guattari was staying with Pozzi, Guattari made a drawing. Pozzi took a photograph of it and produced a photogravure. He made three editions, one of which, through contingency, has come to Group guattari. Perhaps this is one of the few drawings Guattari produced in his lifetime.
In Japan Guattari also experienced two faces of the city. He liked to connect himself with art and architecture, especially in his later tendency of cherishing the aesthetic domain, while at the same time never ignoring social struggles. For instance, when he went to the day-laborer’s ghetto in Tokyo, Sanya, to communicate with local activists and workers, in an assembly he admiringly stressed the heterogeneity of the discourses of struggles, which academic categories cannot properly grasp. His approach to struggles and art produced multiple cross-overs, opening an ethico-aesthetic category. |