She's Lost Control Again

Prepare to be disappointed. Mondo Bummer just put out a 'chapbook' of my poem, "She's Lost Control Again," in their super lo fi format (folding, one staple in the upper left-hand corner, stickers, 8 x 11 office paper). Thanks to Amy Berkowitz, publisher of Mondo Bummer, for asking me to contribute work. You can learn more about the press project, which features work by CAConrad, Brandon Brown, Kendra Grant Malone, Anna Vitale, and many others, here.

If above or below
These powers the boxes
Kept moving
If this was a game
We were making the rules
Up as we went along
As though within our
Own bodies without control
She's lost control again
We're just beginning
To manage her limbs
Like assemblage we shit
We perspire autonomy
When they tell us to
Only there is no me
And there is no you
There is no beginning
In other words to this
Process this continuous
Product producing our
Exception

You Are My Friend

--to Brenda Iijima

You are my friend, hi!
The bones know us and so do I

So I is just little eyes, little I's
In the belly my friend Brenda

One does have a naval
Animal-suffering-membrances are we

Extended into the sea and here (and hear)
Somewhere in the collective

Imaginary do I imagine you affected
Like every moment was a birthday

So our bones grow again
Resurrected two years at a time

I with a lower case i
I learned that today in my belly

My friend, Brenda, who we are?
Animal-suffering-membranes.

Somatics, Movement, and Writing

Here are some pics I took at the Somatics, Movement, and Writing symposium this past weekend in Ann Arbor. Praise and thanks to Petra Kuppers for inviting me to be a co-organizer for the symposium, and to all who participated. More reflections to follow!*





















*last two pictures courtesy Neil Marcus

Virtuosity and the Survival of the Subject: on Catherine Sullivan (in Afterall)

Afterall 26 just came out, and features an essay I wrote on Catherine Sullivan, "Virtuosity and the Survival of the Subject: on Catherine Sullivan." Check it out in bookstores or here:

Catherine Sullivan’s work involves nothing less than the problematic of virtuosity. The virtuosic as it pertains to performance history (film and theatre), but also, to quote the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno, the virtuosity of ‘post-Fordist’ labour practices, practices which entail an ‘immaterial’, ‘living labour’ of the contemporary subject. Before I come to Sullivan’s oeuvre, however, let me dwell on Virno’s notion of virtuosity for a moment. To be a virtuoso, in the traditional sense, is to be able to perform a score in some extraordinary way. In Virno’s book A Grammar of the Multitude (2004), he poses the question: ‘If the entirety of post-Fordist labor is productive (of surplus-value) labour precisely because it functions in a political-virtuosic manner, then the question to ask is this: What is the script of their linguistic-communicative performances?’ What, in other words, constitutes the score which the contemporary labourer qua subject performs and how do the conditions of the contemporary labourer qua virtuoso – whose product is immaterial – differ from the conditions of labour which preceded them, those in which a visible ‘product’ or ‘object’ was produced? How, likewise, does one judge the value of ‘work’ when what is produced are affects or ideas, and when this production process relies on improvisation? Virno and his contemporaries, the Autonomists, provide a number of concepts which I believe can help us approach contemporary art practices, and particularly the practices of artists who make the connection between labour and performance explicit through their works. What might connect contemporary labour and live art are questions of virtuosic labour – contemporary live art being both reflective and critical of practices of virtuosity in the global work place.