"Superficial Engagement" (Cont'd)

3.
Or the particular / the particularization / of conflicts / in their generality / specificity or uniqueness / of bodies lost or mutilated / defaced beyond recognition / or twisted / disappeared (in total appearance) / dehumanized by a Western / specificity to lose specificity / in violent diffusions (a “mass / media” imaginary) / lacking what we always have of course / this violence / and the ambivalent / an all-important ambivalence / of artworks may be the only / means to show the mess we are in / clearly / the noise that should yet effect clarity.

This violence / the occupation of Iraq / and of “the world” by the United States / or last gasps of empire / the general “human war” / engagements like contracts / are often violent / “en-“ a prefix of war? / to engage or put into relation / albeit violent / it turns the stomach / (it twists) / the face turns / (it untwists) / to hear / to turn to God in the human / animal / one must listen to see / accretion / the conflicted / messages of someone / existing in it (our “mass media” / imaginary) / if to see is to have at a distance.

If I use / the prose / or conflicted forms / of / a constructivist / it is because / I am the unassimilating yet / in-formed mirror / of Thomas Hirschhorn / whose newest “public monument” / or "installation" / at Barbara Gladstone / gallery in Chelsea / presents a new challenge / to an ever growing / resurgence of "meditational"-"fantastic"-"psychadelic"-"imaginative"-"hallucinagetic" works currently fashionable.

For a few years now / I have imagined making / a longer / poem / using Paul / Sharits’s film / *Piece Mandala End War* / as a formal analogy / this longish poem / as I have conceived of it so far / would have / for its number of words (and/or lines) / the same number / of frames / from Sharits’s film / (something like 1,275) / only instead of individual colored frames / the poem would employ / words for their tonal values / certain words / replacing / the pictorial content of the couple / from the film / engaged in sexual intercourse.

These later words / I had always imagined / as having a “violent” / “shocking” / or sublimating effect / interdispersed / among the tonal words / an effect / that would cut / utterly against / the meditational inwardness / of the tonal words in pseudo-numerical arrangement / and / however simplistic / I have long-thought of this / unfinished project / as one possible solution / to the problem of effectively conveying / radical social-political contents / through forms which may be said / to be ethical / insofar as they instance / divine verticality / and spiritual inwardness.

It would be / I have always hoped / an ambivalent negotiation / of spiritual necessity and socio-political exigency / agit. prop. didacticism / and ecstatic mystical practice.

What reminded me of this / abandoned (or hopefully deferred) / project this past weekend / were Hirschhorn’s juxtapositions of photo print-outs/ of mutilated corpses / (low res. however / graphic / to the point of being revolting / making this / viewer at least / turn away) / with a variety of geometric / color pencil drawings/ and kinetic paintings (also low res. photo print outs).

Hirshhorn’s juxtaposition / of drawings by / Swiss Theosophist / & artist Emma Kunz / and images from the synaesthetic instruments of / Richard Land with images / from the ongoing American- / Imperial “engagement” / in Iraq / and ubiquitous and stealthy / “war on terrorism” / dramatizes a central ambivalence about / artistic response to / geopolitical violence / where currently the “art / world” turns inwardly / towards a spiritualist imagination and an imagination of / popular media / counter to the materialist urgencies / of more direct critique / and intervention.

So perhaps / what we must value / in Hishchorn is / his ability to show this ambivalence / thru / the determined / messy-ness of his installations / where conflict / reigns over resolution / and where messages (headlines in / this case / like “immaterial witness”) contend for the viewer’s attention / among a host of other / cathective points / mannequins with / screws driven into them / CD’s with jewel case covers made by kid's “spiral art” kits / large pine coffins / covered by ironic messages / of mourning and / “cheesey” de-cals.

As if all of the current art trends / "art data" if you will / were swept / into Hirschhorn’s angelic storm of installation-work/ and put face-to-face / the very urgent / and yet incomprehensible or unpresentably / present data of war / an "engagement" the artist might like/ to particularize / to make "specific" / but which becomes obfuscated / by an unmitigating rhetoric of headlines / and the repetition of violent facts.

Walking Chelsea this past / weekend / among so much art / lacking both necessity / and rigor / I could think of no work more necessary / for our current moment / in its mode of presentation / a mode as indeterminate as it is urgent / as monumental / as it is ephemeral / as noisy as it is clarifying / in its ambivalences.

Hirschhorn’s “Superficial Engagement”

1.
If installation was environment
And environment public monument
And monument non-
monumental
And the non-monumental
the nearest
Approximation to the realities
of culture
Subsumed by superstructures and the horizontally
Striated the gallery
walls wouldn’t appear
To build themselves white and formed
eternally Out of air
we would tend to be heir to These histories
of malice
and violence incalculable.

As human nature is
to the animal, the Mind (human
mind
or immanently
creative force) within
nature
is to culture, culture
which can only eventually surpass
what it is to be human
animal and animal.

2.
Beauty – that is presentable – and Beauty un-presentable – a veil – like trauma – patina of pain - do us the pleasure (where pleasure is horrifying) – to not unshow these bodies - repulsive bodies Beauty – that is also un-presentable – and from which one must turn - away compelled taken aback or flung

By Beauty – or a legible – noise pervasive – written large again – on the coffin lids – of culture written – large again – on these makeshift walls – the constructivist mutilations - constructions always in reverse - of what can not be shown – and yet must

What must – be legible also to not unshow – the also presentable – patterns of our overwhelming numericity – number our overwhelmingly flung patterns of blood – weaving the repeated wounds screws - mutilations which are never not images only

Not fictions entirely not of flesh – the mannequin flesh and color music – unsubstitutable for soldiers – “civilian” victims – of the image bio-dynamic – energy to rest time to oscillate – with time mutilated – and time harmonious – rested a geometry
a – healing geometry – her Theosophy of rock – weave of Kunz’s forms

Or Land’s synths – in flickering – contrasts how can there be – rest how can there be – rest for the motion of Spinozan bodies – shapes all com-passionate pattern against - and yet partaking of this particular war – the human war in general – infinitely unjust

The shape of this war – this particular – war and these particular images – of corpses images – of the dead no one – can show them all – no one cover – the unique particulars – no one can show – the unmutilated – universal yet we must to rest – to act within this war – to partake of human nature as culture – inaesthethic presentables

Devotion I & IV*

Devotion I.
Reich (brief intial)








Slow the birds showing pulse flocks

Locus of power but reversed

The name we share a dispersion
to what effect.

The name we share





Slow the birds showing pulse flocks

Owe or words shower else

Lower aria poll flows

Over-head, low how pulse shook





Owe less stock
Owe ease shock
Vase sh
As
We risk address
We re-stack
Windows
Tow to endow





Slowed hold hold hold flocks of
flocks of slowed hold hold
hold hold slow birds of flocks
of

cathect




Registration drive this most simple
division

the motor of the heart of the motor










Devotion IV.







Duration that began her life-work.

To presence what is happening each book.

The not so voluptuous silence and the blank voluptuous – both imaginary.

Make evident the shape of interest formal appearing when there is an active famine or whether.

Ethics is sometimes thinkable place sometimes written.

Duration. That began








composed Fall and Winter '02, and Fall '04.

Devotion II & III*

Devotion II.


To know
if you can know

the flat portraiture
rectangle necessary

irrevocable memoir
of when we were not separable





Windmills stalk flat flat flat flat

all wind blown at wind push weather

push all mill wind through color the wash

the reeds of a plain and

flat the wind pushed through them





Towering in its gesture
their simple relay
like machines do

The wind conveyed
by points that flutter
drawn by wash












Flat cross assymetric make aerial

make conveyance make
courses through winds graves

flat cross
the mark from an aerial
my sole blank bird

be flat vanished arrow
by cursor pushing which way




What more endemic but wind?

weeds
reeds weeds reeds
weeds reeds
weeds

blank of a cross
pure reed simple move

smooth cloth
smooth cloth
cloth smoothed




What the child looks at while it has vision
of having a flower before its mind

and the flower
the flower holding her
face and breast

mute the start.
The child gazing beyond
the colors of the flower

vibration and eyes deep









If we were young child and
the face young and honest

depersonalized upon
a fold of your hand
clasping
some object

the brushstrokes would show this




With flesh contact

canvas gaze at

a slight bend over which we call landscape

not flatness, not merely time

to the horizon

world
where it begins and ends




Slight bud and bend swell
and blood obsess

alabaster, spirits
equation for making weather
sound as weather does

expansion through it and without
to a cold stretch of green gray land

the cheek to show me my own soft watch



Devotion III.
Ghost Riding




Being beside
others days humans

separate the flesh mass

thunder being beside
suddenly this fence




Sand
an impossible
waterway line

instinct
move for
phenomenal tuft

indiscriminate
a point to
a distance ahead

a distance ahead
a way




On the backs points and
desert tongue

reel from sweet music
memory of orgy

artillery in a distance
without history

madness
without joyful test





Test of truth
league of wish
for infinity
site of flight

savagery
from the photograph of work

there the ink

the screen my thought of it
while it is spilling

would be dark




We cried in games
bad air pact
bird in sub-state (substrates)
places where none march straight

we beat the graves
and covered earth with sound
of the real like a dark stone
between two dark stones





Pray for me too...

from nothing but distance
is each night born

where a mile is not a mile
where a sun’s not a sun

capitalize this refusal











Not the kids
the wrap-around dead

pushed up by car
to ladder

to him





Pushed up put guns
down words
hostage to light

dear deer above
scrape the dust

(more often the place we return to)

... small machines
deer redeemed from context

caption:
to none aimed in fog






Near enough to nearly touch
their fingers, their lapels

women and men in black
sign and small world
preposition is our silence













The eye in the cat’s body

flashes

the face
an animal’s intention

if sickness were grace




Where vision is removed the human

Where vision is replaced our thoughts tend

*composed Fall / Winter '02

"fire is not clay thus not only each" (coda)

in grace the center that is
is grace the center of our soon-to-be
innocence in grace the center that is

in grace grace the center that is is grace
the center of our soon-to-be
fire is not clay thus not only each

grace is the center
center of infinity or zero not being
only one not only itself alone with the earth
the center that is

is grace the center of our soon-to-be
fire the movement that neither amounts
to one we are either zero or infinite

in a concave scene concave our being
concave our being in a concave scene
fire is not clay thus not only each
the center of our soon-to-be innocence

Ozu*

1.
It is her face lit by that light
Contemplative light
Contemplative mask
Of a face
Lit by that light
That beats like a drum
Dwindling in his heart

It is her
Face lit by that light
Capable of being
Covered
Being covered
By hands
Being covered by light
Covering conclusive tears

That beats like a drum
Dwindling


2.
Augment the mask, mask of
Her face
The lighting design
Augments time

The camera which stays
All trains
As they pass
Not quite upon these lines

Augment the white, of shirts
On a line
For all time, for all
Designs

Show time finally
The covered face of
Her tears
Smoke cuts away.


3.
Lit by that light
Bright light direct light
That beats like a drum
Dwindling in his heart

This is the time for this
Incense whisking
Frames away –
Fragile shades

This, the time for this
Who knows no time
When you leave,
Incense whisking

Little boats away
Down stream,
Attenuating
Rates per frame

That know no schedule -
Light which covers
The covered face
No heart can dwindle.

*composed Summer '05