Win ch O n Poli tics

~ after J. Goldman

These invisible hands are made
Visible unpointed to or unworked

To relate our reification in reverse
Is mirror case (portmanteau) to *this*

Inversion an obscurer camera for
Which camera obscura once...

Gordon Matta-Clark: A Taxonomy for Total Process*

Seeing Gordon Matta-Clark’s exhibition at the Whitney recently, Matta-Clark’s body of work seems more than ever a perfect example of a total process turned towards the actualities of social, political, economic and spiritual relation. The scope of this process can be located in Matta-Clark’s documentation of his otherwise ephemeral, “dematerialized” works—works that would exist as pure traces of performance actions, architectural deconstructions and communally decisive “business” adventures were they not so deliberately recorded by various means. Matta-Clark no doubt took his lead for an artwork of total process from Robert Smithson and other "earthwork" artists, whose works he first encountered as a student at Cornell University. In the drawing and film works accompanying the performance of “Tree Dance,” where for days Matta-Clark and others inhabited a tree on the Cornell campus through a series of cots, ladders and nets, a total process projects itself as that which may give presence to ephemeral and “anti-material” or "aproductive" works—works that should otherwise not survive but through hearsay as a trace of historical occurrence erased before the fact of its historical existence.

The following is a taxonomy which may be helpful to initially mapping the various moments in a process supplementing Matta-Clark’s a-productive works. I put it forward towards a larger work on Matta-Clark as a case for what I am calling “total process”.

I. “Original” work: the work of an action, performance, social transaction, or architectural action before they should be erased, more or less entirely, from their physically-bound historicities.

II. Reliquary; Metonymically “present” objects, and secondary orders of objects (photos, films, written description / commentary / discursus):
a. First order reliquary:
1. ex., the hair of “Hair Piece”;
2. ex., the corners from the “Splitting” house, and other parts of structures from “Bingo” and “Office Baroque”;
b. Second order reliquary:
1. The newpapers an audience is allowed to take from “Wallspaper”;

III. Film documents:
a. Those films recording an action or performance; after the fact of the film being “shoot” one notices in all film documents the importance of the editing to inflect the meaning of the action, as in the abrupt/accidental edits of “Fresh Kills,” and the camera work of “Splitting,” which would place itself very much in the action, resting within the splitting of the house as the house is being split: that is, as taking place *with* that action.

IV. Photo-documents:
a. Photo. of an ethnographic significance: “Hair-Piece,” “Reality Properties: Fake Estates,” graffiti works;
b. Anarchitecture: photos of sites of “anarchitecture,” where anarchitecture presents sites of social antagonism thru photo. processes—cropping, contrast, etc.
c. Photos with diagrams: in some photos a diagram drawn on the photo will actually highlight a potential intervention in a site, projecting this potential towards an actual intervention—as in “Arc de Triomph For Workers”…
d. Photo as mimetic: as in the case of the photos of pipes along the wall and ceiling of the Holly Solomon Gallery (1974);
e. Photo-collage: where the collage attempts to express a spatial-aural property of actual interventions (as in “Splitting” photo-docs.); or to “deconstruct” a content (as in “Reality Properties” and grafitti works—the horizontal photo.-collages producing disjuncture between each single photo in the series: a form for social antinomy/rupture?).

V. Drawings:
a. Drawings as sketches towards a performance or intervention;
b. Sculptural drawings: where cuts are made in a stack of paper projecting a cut in an (an)architectural object;
c. Drawings made diagramatically on photos: as in “Arc de Triomph”;

VI. Written documents:
a. Legal/business: documentation for “Food” restaurant—including menus, recipes, receipts, in addition to film footage of the restaurant atmosphere, staff, and clientele;
b. Psuedo-ethnographic: the documentation for “Hair,” which ironically reflects anthropological systems of representation: numbering zones of hair; graphing the human head phrenologically; recording “before,” “after” and in between and, as such, subjecting the human-object (—only subject/object turns back upen itself, becoming chiasmic, as Matta-Clark is both subject and object for himself, artist and art-work…)

VII. Correspondence:
a. “Photo-Fry” to Robert Smithson: product of “alchemical” processes;
b. Letters, drawings, and photos to projected “anarchitecturalists,” others…

*composed 3/10/07-present

If these tears are us. . .

~ for Daniel Berrigan & Douglas A. Martin

"... and drew my eyes a space
that had seen God, back to His human face?"
~ from Daniel Berrigan's "Lazarus"

"... Description is
Composed of a sight indifferent to the eye."
~ from Wallace Stevens' "Description Without Place"

If these tears are us no longer
Seeing before or after any "God"
So-called the socius ONE otherwise
Might witness that blood bath this
Distance from "us" the undead thus

Occlude no place can't imagine its
Description like a pen before
A draft whose skies should disappear
For movement to occur "for future
Generations" be of our beginning

In ink beyond what sounds string
Between whose souls strummed
To their adjacencies which can't
Hear none sung --that portal tracing
What blood back around the air.

To Tim Peterson

I think I want to turn the body into a voice...

America is Hard to Find

"A nightmare is its own legitimation."

...

"Political man is a synonym for believing man."

~ Daniel Berrigan from *America is Hard to Find*

For Open You Became the Cut

"My body salvating in hell is my home."
~ Nina Simone

In this relentless
Wind beyond and in
Our hands I feel
This world again
And that sky of sight
Lines or Nonsites call
To me infinitely
In this infinite
Wind of disaster
What is not answerable
Adequately what
Calls but so we are
Disaster is
Our business a frequency
Of forms turning.

*

Patch me in. Give me some skin
Skin trader. Leather regard
Exchange value. That montrosity
This animal. Become a thing
Hypertelic. So shorn shadeful
Shine cephale. Acephale seal
Vigilance make. A mold for when
A mill for where. Grist coded
To its rust. Boring off another
Coast of anwhere. Economics not
No place if we posit. "Utopia"
Always timely. Always soon-to-be

Always contemporary. Rocks now
As if every name. Partakes of this one
Name phylum of the dead. Matters all drift-
Wood as once I imagined. Cage or Reich
So hearing. Off a peninsula. Waves detritus
As such. Was a horizon for us or algorhythmic
Birds virtually born there. Into a material
Dillemma of mass and number. Crunch
Numbers (literally) but remain. With me my
Univocals die into this life twice dead
Become a thing for the making--

Tim Peterson's Review @ Mappemunde

Here's a review of the reading I gave with Andrew Levy last Monday at The Poetry Project... Thanks to Tim, who may be the hardest working man in NYC poetry; our man "on the scene"...

http://mappemunde.typepad.com/mappemunde/2007/03/ill_be_your_mir.html

Upon receiving Hannah Weiner's *Open House*...

I turned to this, from a letter to Charles Bernstein from Weiner May 25th, 1989:

"The mind obeys unconsciously giving strict orders that are agreed upon by someone who twice dying explains without giving clear motives like once clairvoyant journal explained."

Composition as Undeath?
Explanation as unintented, imprehensile...

Thanks to Patrick for sending me a complimentary copy of *Open House* for review. Hannah is fortunate as are we who loved her to have such a considerate and careful editor for her work. Looking forward very much to "digging in," however the book design and selections already radiate clairvoyance (clear seeing!)...

from "Drawing"

But today, maybe, we have to create a new trend of politics, beyond the domination of the places, beyond social, national, racial places, beyond gender and religions. A purely displaced politics, with absolute equality as its fundamental concept.

This sort of politics will be an action without place. An international and nomadic creation with-as in a work of art-a mixture of violence, abstraction and final peace.

We have to organize a new trend in politics beyond the law of places and of centralisation of power. And in fact, we have to find a form of action where the political existence of everybody is not separated from its being, a point where we exist in so intense a fashion that we forget our internal division. Doing so we become a new subject.

Not an individual, but a part of a new subject.
~ Alain Badiou

Tears Are These Veils (Scanned)

Below is a scanned version of my collaborative book with Abby Walton of 2004 (Wild Horses Of Fire Press).

April 7th, 2007: 2nd Ave Poetry @ Lolita

You are invited...

For Now

"Every step is move move moving me up"
~ Arthur Russell

Sense me not dear one hear me
Up to channel mold mulled loam loan high

Degrees sing a color not for the eyes
Alone the spine rambles rumbling what
A brain became this clearing like

Open notes tones in space an end to
Each instrument begins like this

--outmoded

Daniel Berrigan's "Lazarus"

Recently I have begun researching the Berrigan brothers, Philip and Daniel... The following is from Daniel Berrigan's book, *Encounters*, and one of the most beautiful handlings of the Lazarus story I've come across...

Brenda Iijima's "Rock Facings Many Days"

Thanks so much to Brenda Iijima for the following poem dedicated to myself and Rob Halpern...