Withdrawals

-for Adrian Piper

Wishing the mind
To touch anything
But this combat

Combatting, that is,
To touch you
And touching

Only dark, a room
Full of dark
All voices eyes

All I be hushed
Sensed so striken
As of in silence blowing

Whereupon the woman
You are the man
The skin sheds us

She singles herself out
Pointing out the lack of
Forms in her self-apprehension

A failure to withdraw from
Them because every
thing is in relation.

SEGUE series presents Judith Goldman and Adam Pendleton

Saturday, January 9, 2010
4:00pm - 7:00pm
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
New York, NY

Judith Goldman is the author of Vocoder, DeathStar/Rico-chet, and “The Dispossessions.” She co-edits War and Peace with Leslie Scalapino and teaches in the arts humanities core and in creative writing at the University of Chicago.

Adam Pendleton lives in upstate New York. His multi-disciplinary art has been widely exhibited internationally. Recent biennials and exhibitions include The Generational: Younger than Jesus (New York); Object, the Undeniable Success of Operations (Amsterdam); and Manifesto Marathon (London).

Michael Haneke: Filmmaker of Bad Faith (@ Harriet)

Here goes something I posted to Harriet blog tonight, regarding Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon:

"His films do not condescend as a von Trier or Bergman film do, but rather make one identify with the bad faith of its characters. How he does this is through the craft of a great storyteller and cinematographer. The flip-side of Haneke’s bad faith is a tenuous redemption Haneke proffers through his most humiliated characters. In The White Ribbon these characters—angels of mercy—are the pastor’s young son, who comes to his father bearing the gift of a caged bird after the pastor’s bird has been brutally executed, and in another scene bargains with his father to keep a pet frog. It is also the baron’s wife, who explains to her husband why she is leaving him: because the town over which he lords is filled with malice, and threatens the well-being of their son and the happiness of their marriage."

Santiago Sierra: Radical Cruelty and Second Reflection

I just posted my 2nd post at Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog, regarding "radical cruelty and second reflection" in the work of Santiago Sierra:

"The poems that I write (and much poetry that I find attractive) is nourished by a devotion to intermedia, and a desire to understand images by using the poem as a means of processing. In general, I am interested in these uses of the poem: the poem as intuitive plastic, as pedagogical tool, as preposterously critical, as (presencing of) second reflection. Perhaps, as Charles Bernstein suggests in his collaboration with Richard Tuttle Reading Red, one can write a poem that acts not merely ekphrastically (outside or about the image), but that somehow speaks with or from the position of the art work.* What, a la Wittgenstein, would the image say if it could speak?"

"For however long you will hide"

For however long you will hide
In those happy hour boxes making
Dissymmetry your living labor
Aporia a social process

Their faces give me the back
Living to be punished/published
Identity's wet dream
Pours polyethylene over
The place where difference would otherwise sing
Our alibis.