ANIMAL COMMUNISM (in Shifter17: Re___Ing)

The new SHIFTER just came out, which includes an essay I wrote on "animal communism" with regards to the cinema of Artavazd Peleshyan. Check it out (in PDF and hardcopy) and support a great publication! Thanks to Rit Premnath for his editorial skills and to the editors of Rethinking Marxism where the essay will also appear in a forthcoming issue.

"Something often noted about Peleshian (in the little criticism I have found about the filmmaker) is his use of telephoto lenses—a lens often used for surveillance, and to obtain close-ups from a distance. Film scholars remark that this peculiar use of the camera was to produce candid, documentary/ethnography-style footage. My own take on Peleshian’s use of a telephoto lens is that it has something to do with the filmmaker’s ontology, an ontology that strives to create both a form of closeness and a form of distance through apparent closeness. To use the telephoto lens the way that Peleshian does is no doubt to have at a distance. But it is also to lose at this distance, inasmuch as it is to allow the view to be obstructed in often random ways, thus to break the illusion of proximity. As such presence and absence, concealment and disclosure intertwine—a spiritual modulation."

“AS NIGHTFALL DOES NOT COME ALL AT ONCE…" (@ The Brooklyn Rail)

Here is a little review I wrote about Yvonne Rainer's performances at the Baryshnikov Art Center last month. Hopefully a sketch for a more extensive offering about Rainer's work (I had too much to say, and too small a word count).

"During much of the piece the dancers flock, proceeding around the dance studio in a rectangular formation, walking with their hands out as though about to receive a manicure. Periodically a dancer will call out a command—“toast” or “freak-out”—and the pack will respond in unison. Other times a dancer will break off from the group, soloing or reciting a text. As in Spiraling Down, Assisted Living: Good Sports 2 is structured through a series of passages by disparate writers and thinkers, including Lydia Davis, William James, and Rosalyn Deutsch. Many of these passages, which indicate the breadth of Rainer’s reading, are of a political nature, especially the recitation that closes the performance, which imagines political despair as a pair of eyes adjusting to the dark. They play off of the choreography itself, creating various frictions."

Others Letters :: Amber DiPietra & Denise Leto

A selection from Amber DiPietra's and Denise Leto's forthcoming epistolary poem, Waveform, is now up at Others Letters.

"We began with conversations about how to hold ourselves in space, as both Denise and I experience considerable trouble getting out of bed in the morning due to our separate forms of chronic illness. We also exchanged images and made collages as part of this collaboration. This collage contains: the waveform (captured with sound editing software) of Denise and I laughing hysterically after a long night of editing, Denise’s MRI, photos of a warm pool where I swim, swimmer torso photo, and a brochure I received prior to glaucoma surgery."
--Amber DiPietra, on Waveform

Permanence (at Immigration Movement International)

When I see the Land-Art pieces which could remain like permanent exhibitions, or at least temporal exhibitions for some decades – in the appropriate conditions to be experienced inside or outside the institution –, or when I see that institutions have achieved a system to work and collect non-object works, I ask myself: Why are there no institutions doing the same thing today with art of social implications? Why is there no long term commitment by the institutions when they want to have social insertion pieces in their exhibitions and collections? Why is social art collected in the format of a traditional art medium alien to the demands of social art experience? Why do people want to have a conclusion before their eyes when public art works are not seen but understood, experienced, discussed…?
--Tania Bruguera, Paris, before the project starts

from All I Want is to be in a Band, Man (X)

All I wanted is to be in a band, man, I guess
That makes me an expressionist, I guess that makes
Me an anti-specialist, to want to trade instruments
With you non-instrumentally, mid-show
Like a K Records band or maybe Factory
Because they didn’t know how to play them yet
We are off into some other way of being played
Some other commons in your hands and breath
Into the incalculable music plays irreducible
To number, how many we would number, what new
Powers playing our way out of power—if one
Were only in a band, I could talk to you, and idleness
Could interrupt us, and riffs. Being in a band
Would be the only mode of work—goddamn plentiful.