Saturday, March 03, 2012

"An exercise is the heart"


--for Conrad

An exercise is the heart
Before there was any attachment
To the garbage that was man
That died, that was, again

“I heart,” do you remember when
It was cool to say “I heart”
Words like hearts drift down
The pages, animated gifts
They even remember recent
Conflicts US taxes pay for

What the poets forget
Too avant-garde or not avant-garde enough?
Hard to decide
The way class warfare and genocide
Stick to the ribs

Project your own anthems without them
Lodge your skin your soul in public space
Anathema to this war against the dead
War against animal potential inside us
Fertility to change existence

A (glory) hole if I am blind to no suffering
Writes these lines someday someone will know what
They mean contemporary to them but
Maybe not now smear the world on your body
No one owns your body I will be present to
You if you promise to be present to me
When we are dead what it matters what
We have loved

Intended to be silly disobedience qua innocents
Fuck the world up in reverse reverse the
Smack down in backward motions descend
To rise like a film I want to believe

In the fire crowning our heads
Unspeakably real like fearless speech
Proceed through the misshapen
Sloughing-off eternity
Social antagonism
Like ghosts do

They project space
They perfect a public
Speech in private
With their private parts
Of speech

Phonemes democratize
The mouth one is really
Here because we are all
Here in hell, together
“Why can’t we all
Pull through?,” Robert asks,
The patient being
Universal condition of
An embodied commons

Words form objective existence of love
The order they’re in
Mediating
Love for the
Body/world

Garbage even—

Write our names profane
Instruments so the world
Will be better

Crown our tongues with flame

The point of poems is recognition
Recognition of death so there is no more fear

The terrible things the world has done to us vanish
The terrible things we have done
To the world inspire us to act.

Friday, March 02, 2012

Enframing the Brink... (with Brandon Brown, at BOMBLOG)

Really excited about this correspondence that will be appearing at BOMBLOG in installments for the next month. With the brilliant poet-translator, Brandon Brown.
Many thanks to BOMBLOG editor, Clinton Krute, for his editing and encouragement.

http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/6427

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Andrea Geyer (@Art21)

http://blog.art21.org/2012/02/28/5-questions-for-contemporary-practice-with-andrea-geyer/

"There are many different forms of expression that are named “art” or “culture.” What relates them for me is their potential to offer an experience, a space of reflection, a place to ponder complex issues, to ask difficult but necessary questions, a site of knowledge, a poetic document of the context and time and conditions of their authorship. I think art is needed because it allows a public space inclusive of a complex diversity of ideas and forms that are otherwise difficult to experience, address, or even recognize. As a collective social space it gives possibility for these ideas to reinsert themselves into parts of a public consciousness. I am interested in a public space of (slight) discomfort, unexpected emotions and pleasure that only art can create. Offering an anchoring point, art has the potential to engage places we don’t know or can’t acknowledge—places of uncertainty. It helps us to recognize the fringes of our own comprehension not as a threat but as potential. Art is a collective space, even if the viewing of the work does not necessarily happen collectively. The idea of the shared experience remains with artworks thus framing it as a political site. The viewers appears bodily and socially as vulnerable and incomplete to herself and to others and is invited to understand this condition not as a shortcoming, but a productive site of actions."

An Appropriated Form for Spectacular Action (@J2)

https://jacket2.org/commentary/appropriated-form-spectacular-action

"Dance emerges less as a metaphor, and more as an appropriated form for spectacular action, in the Spanish group flo6x8’s video, Body Versus Capital (2011), which compiles video of the group’s dancing and singing Flamenco in banks throughout Seville. This work, unlike any other work in the exhibit, documents a form of protest that I find extremely compelling for its tactical reappropriation of a traditional cultural form. Were the members of flo6x8 who perform these songs and dances not virtuosic, I do not think that their work would be nearly as successful. Harnessing the power of this cultural form native to Spain, which relies almost completely on the body (with the exception of basic prosthetics such as heel-toed boots and acoustic guitars) the group activates and agitates a social body. In one video from the compilation, we see a member of the group spill pennies on the floor of a bank then begin to dance over them. In another, no less than twenty dancers “swarm” a bank, forming rows and then a circle. Bank security guards seem at a loss about how to remove the dancers. At one point we see a security guard in pursuit of a dancer as she twirls away from him, continuing to dance."