A Devotion

~ for Nathaniel Dorsky

Coincident to this legibility learning newly
How to see or be duration sometimes an image
Is only an image we take this to heart the time
It takes to make out bends beads like light
Itself emergent from life sequent like a thousand
Stars were numbers that weren't the dark any
Longer nor separate seemingly from water

The words for images broken here we call them
Articulate we say they present articulation itself
An interruption of the present tense while we
See we see a lot of branches tracking branches
Forest focus black sun then don't light up the world
Again one flown stem I knew I was hallucinating

Then the world woke up each new sequence
For what potentia the bright ambiance the solitude
Of the image like a singing of the eyes to attention
In variance forest focus film the things moments
We won’t forget because we will them to not
Become forgotten because the memory is coincident
To this will because we are all short or long takes

Duration has a life of its own image coincident like
Suns suddenly vacant like close-ups of pavement
Matter like spirit or throwing the ball back or
“or” itself as a hinge for all perception language
Flickered and was a magnet for the attention
The appearance of the world and the world itself

A prayer said with the help of lenses cropping cris-
crossing one’s somnolence in distraction also
A pattern of attention that fabric of waves chain-
linked those eyes groping for some purchase shadows
Or any outline overlapping shade leaves separate
One reflection from another the mannequins lips part
What light replaces a lens flare so here burns up.

Last Man

My heart your paradise called
Secret water by the Sioux hack
Supplies first then hack spirit

When we don’t have anything
Left but this dance assimilation
Calls our names that is what it

Does like Hannah taught us to
Be silent what boundaries must
These hands forge to say any

Thing the spirit came and went
Don’t forget to write witness
When the shit hits the fan

Sitting Bull was the last man
Standing to what do you banish
Permanent exiles but to undeath

Promise me the imminent end
Of all white culture so all names
May return eccentric to need.

The Weeping

(seasons greetings to Robert and Daria)

That you weep and in weeping
are both the mother and child

mother of that difficult delivery
child of that difficult birth

that you are me and I am you
given to a relation of difficult
sympathy sympathy of the "God-

head" who can never be both
whole and created except when
we pray except when we attend

letters sympathy of the whole
for its creation these broken

shards of Being their radiance
sympathy of that which turns

to its creator as a broken thing
with the never-assembled never
all-known whole when you said

this that you were both mother
and child weeping I almost cried
for difference when you say

such things I die into life
sympathetically difficult tonight

the voices of plastic snow flakes
lit-up receded when "we" was

similarly difficult walking
the broad sidewalk together
with no hand to touch us just

the apprehensions of “otherness”
without eyes to commence
what sight sees when we can’t

what site what cant in eyes there
is no ‘disinterest’ except when I

is interrupted larger desires begin
Self with a capital “s” everything

had the look of interior actually
being exterior the train platform
felt narrow and was narrow in

fact from all the body could feel
thereby tell the plaster peeling
off the wall a wreck with history

so history itself was also us so
touched and the whereabouts of

words the wherewithal of all words
we couldn’t taste were doubts

there are forms that do Express
ionism better ‘say saying’ cry
a cry of exile we are given to

the difficult births of this season
the “holiday season” one should
not say Christmas this is not

a Christmas card one should
not for the far-flung difficulty of

every light plastic or not the
ground of which being should not

purchase this isn’t 'epic' nor is it
ordinary the way those flakes
don’t fall given to their reproducible

sense forms which continue of
every consumer conscience the
economy which gives us I wanted

to cry for them too since they
are also created plastic is also

a product I wanted to cry for
them as we do for us alone and

the coffee house with its good
intentions that wasn’t you and
the duplexes and other houses

one normally doesn’t see in the
city that wasn’t you and the little
restaurant with its organic

foods that wasn’t you all such
intimacies and good intentions

that must amount to something
if only what they exclude in this

season of the undead when one
tailors their pants with their
shrinking bones in this season

when one suffers distantly the things
the sensations of the world war
didn’t bring home the reduced

numbers of a body count cele
brated as peace distractions from

another brewing war so we were
before it the "you" and "the camel"

the camel and us both I hope we
are not merely being eschato-
logical nor should our sympathy be

reduced to season’s greetings
anything that could be gained
by wishing alone as you recognize

this sympathy our tears are a
susceptibility to everything would

countersign us counteract in a
friendlier fire of 'pure means' become

body we wanted to know what a
'subtle body' could do welcoming
of antigens adieu supple to any

thing might otherwise destroy it
its real power in listening attuning
and adapting so I hear these guns

far away as unreal as they are here
in my head and become them

a buzzing of bees want their friend
ship to destroy me to not do

this world any further harm these
tears this cry was the cry of every
antinomy given to ‘weeping as not

weeping’ a ‘remains’ when we
should not be "I" any longer
we seek such Charitas in ducts

gusts of every brief madness fever
that heals we seek this Charitas

in guns will have no other site than
to be revealed by veils becoming

eyes torn at them what potential
tears you and I you as you me as me
in difficult sympathy susceptibility

"ever-lasting" 'perceptual eternity'
liveforever my tears and die outside
make them a sign of life and no

longer death-affirming grasp this
preanimate means which was ‘my

life’ whether genetics or the face
one would lose to save "highness".

Silent Teacher Remembered

Here is a link to a piece I wrote for Casey McKinney's FANZINE after "A Reading for Hannah Weiner's Open House" at St. Mark's November 28th:

http://www.thefanzine.com/sections.php?s=features&id=201&a=articles

An Astral Project

~ for Conrad

1.
For a discourse you are like a dust
in the glass half-drunk outside us
or me an eternity of cells reanimate

aims recognitions zig-zag make
energy rise out of body counts four
suicides per second the way capital

keeps time in China live elevators
dead labor but your body won't
be a slave to no body susceptible

projects learning astrally virtual be
cause one has to die to make the
poem one sings of crystals Berkeley-

like worlds of bodies taking images
of bodies bodies taking-in these
images should we be univocal energy

in any other form your conversation
loans me a place of debt is where
I comes from becuase our life of pet-

itions is not objective your haunted
places became batteries for loops
surviving chakras displaced number.


2.
Like that glass ½ empty yet full of you
we found our names in a 'now time' we
Would try to describe you site the pla

ces of a city that once were you and are
still you in some sense of the facts 'if
one is to resort to a simile the simile

better be pretty fucking good' numbers
were energy and crystals images indica
tive of bodies in motion organicity is his

tory written because it’s here where we
walk and talk between alleyways and all
the carriage houses snug with outcry

from that beyond of our life as it is lived
and constitutes an economics beyond
money or force alone no other metonym

than what says how we were here and
sometimes now and thereby redeemed
by waiting by simply waiting among

these ‘Cartesian phantoms’ other folk
subjects before the thoughts of the dead
came back sore sparkling a wreck of I’s.

Kyle Schlesinger's *Hello Helicopter* (Blurb)

*Hello Helicopter*. Or hello *helikos*? As Robert Smithson tells us of his Spiral Jetty film, not so distantly from Kyle Schlesinger’s poetics: “For my film (a film is a spiral made up of frames) I would have myself filmed from a helicopter (from the Greek helix, helikos meaning spiral) directly overhead in order to get the scale in terms of erratic steps." Much after Clark Coolidge’s own “depositions,” and affinities as disparate as Larry Eigner, Larry Fagin, Frank Kuenstler, Bernadette Mayer, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Ron Silliman and Rosemarie Waldrop in Schlesinger's poetry language bifurcates geo-glyphically forming mantles (veils, plates) for a metapolitics of the person determined by intense logics of sense. Joyrides into exteriority, these lapidary (drilled, mined, refined, chiseled) texts find form in an “everyday” (read: actual!) practice made ambivalent by the twin indiscernible points of paramnesia and paronomasia, rushing upon History and the *instant* where “memory survives necessity,” forging “a fold between these folds / / then helicopter”. “It all comes down to this…”--literally. So dig it! “Fossils have terms of their own” and these poems endlessly propose, so carefully degreed.

After Aimé Césaire

What wish your season in hell
affirms pus rejectamenta Species
beings what wants your time
forms Necessity given history

so lowly heaven asks the price
of culture prosaically tattooed
on the body claiming ressenti
ment productive for identities

despair of muck dejects contin
ents incontinent ungainly how
could we do anything other than
whip inventing sciences other

projects telescope I want you to
have this pound of flesh accept it
as a gift of death but there are
no take-backs no words enough

for anger management to not be
false a kind of finger to the flood
history is not just a nightmare when
it comes down to it but a hell we

must affirm should anything be
transformed an image of the col
lective a historical subject over
come if I would ever be you if you

would be I 'I is an other' you keep
doing it to me how to take the
names of all things "bad" or "good"
and fling them forget to forgive.

Me Death

~ for Daria, Eleni, Fiona and Robert
after RobbinsChilds' C.L.U.E.


It helps to fall to sleep listening
to words poured out the side
of your chest a paradise
it helps
to listen to the sounds these words make
broken down to their least elements 


‘textual units’ to educate
to heal the body in pain one asks
‘Are you suffering?’ you reply

‘I am always suffering’
to be alone at the place

where I breaks from you
consequentially called back from our
‘blindness envy’ this must be
Grace ‘if I be in a state of Grace
then may it continue’

suffering just to be HERE (Here
too...) to continue being
shot through
blood becoming
place rides out the wine
you will take that staircase down

discover you truly in relation
in that dark event you will descend
into dark's likeness
communicating voice I want
the body to be a voice a socius ex-

tricated from a content
versions of the Amor 
Fati
all the hills had eyes
in this gauzy incidence light winding
away from life

as they did all that was East
and West conveyed its ME DEATH
in myths occluding an actual
pomegranate a cadaver is to us
as we are to this dance

the supple intelligence of the dancer


for dance to be the case a couple locked
in place two bodies
for a field more erogenous

in not being 'modern'

power risks the body's borders
interferent outlying our
substance 
forms the subject
objectless in movement
already an event what paper

cups produce center
they threw their clothes into
the abyss of being 'feminine'
otherwise of-a-sudden

climbing from life in reverse

climbing for their lives really
falling while doing this
so it
seemed two screens project
the NO ONE we are when we move
any center whatever was.

Me Death

~ for Daria, Eleni, Fiona and Robert

It helps to fall to sleep listening to words poured out the side of your chest a paradise
it helps to listen to the sounds these words make broken down to their least elements
‘textual units’ to educate to heal the body in pain one asks ‘Are you suffering?’ you reply
‘I am always suffering’ to be alone at the place where I breaks from you consequentially
called back from our ‘blindness envy’ this must be Grace ‘if I be in a state of Grace then
may it continue’ suffering just to be HERE (Here too...) to continue being shot through

blood becoming place rides out the wine you will take that staircase discover you truly
in relation in that dark event you will descend into dark's likeness communicating voice
‘I want the body to be a voice’ a socius extricated from a content versions of the Amor
Fati all the hills had eyes in this gauzy incidence light winding away from life as they did
all that was East and West conveyed its ME DEATH in myths occluding an actual pom-
egranate a cadaver is to us as we are to this dance the supple intelligence of the dancer

for dance to be the case a couple locked in place two bodies for a field more erogenous
in not being 'modern' energy risks the body's borders interferent outlying our substance
forms the subject objectless in movement already an event what paper cups produce
center they threw their clothes into the abyss of being 'feminine' otherwise of-a-sudden
climbing from life in reverse climbing for their lives really falling while doing this so it
seemed two screens project the NO ONE we are when we move any center whatever was.

NO ONE's Autopathography

for Eleni, Rob and Taylor
after Muriel Rukeyser's "Book of the Dead"

Power becomes you dear endangered body skin so thin with armor
amorous Isis Osiris scattered becomes us compels you this subtlety in over-

sensitivity as the hills which once were white-mottled Romantic models as
Rukeyser would make ironic alloy call a rose a rose and us by any other aim

would recognize no other power but in degrees of this world transcendent so hell
is also MY SELF on earth because we made the factories time convolute
Vertov touted the machine age Williams never sang the Passaic for labor per se

that other Eternity power always exists the problem is what to do with it
how NOT to USE is sometimes how to direct writing from a white heat O Love

O downy picturesque particulars and pastoral spotlessness pimps your poem

“glassy moons” confound the social every rose wants to be a rose merely
every nation just a nation but can not because we fall to rise every rose begs

to be both interrupted and ongoing a paradox tautological as every pane
of glass which thisness inheres that bears witness a SOUL for every violence
committed to someone in this world of force and nothing else a gun sites the said

dialectics tread on where desires go into the Open of control my sovereign
my brain-sickness my body my head prevented the tongue as well he asks HIM

SELF “am I alive?” a ghost of sorts while she pursues her actual Bardo power at
the price of exploitation hatred at the price of force so illness transformed her.

Jane Sprague's *Danger Flash || Army Flash*

The following is a poem Jane Sprague sent me, scanned. "Fuel Low / Steal more..."!!!

War and Peace on A pics & ad*

Peace On A

presents

War & Peace vol. 3 (NYC launch!)

with readings by:

Bruce Andrews
CA Conrad
Michael Cross
Thom Donovan
Brenda Iijima
Paolo Javier
Susan Landers
Evelyn Reilly
& Rodrigo Toscano

Tuesday, November 27th 2007 8PM ( gab session followed by reading at around 9 pm )

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A (btwn 10th and 11th), Apartment # 2

about War & Peace vol. 3

War and Peace 3/The Future, edited by Judith Goldman & Leslie Scalapino,
Borrowing Tolstoy’s title and basing our manifestation of War and Peace on the conception that everything goes on in war and peace, the editors, Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino , have gathered forty poets on the theme of “The Future.” The future arises with (at the same time as) history and the present. Included in the forty are Lyn Hejinian, Fanny Howe, Lisa Jarnot , Bruce Andrews, Rodrigo Toscano, Anselm Hollo, Paolo Javier, Laynie Browne , Anne Waldman, Jen Hofer…

“the migrating cranes—whose lines of flight misalign what *will have been* with what’ll be no more …” ~ Rob Halpern

*photo credits go to Mika Johnson, who generously captured the night's proceedings.

"'Hannah's Bifurcation'"

The following I read at the tribute to Hannah Weiner this past Weds. at St. Mark's Poetry Project along with selections from Weiner's *Spoke*, a book of 'transferences' as Weiner herself recognized it:

"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."
~ Hannah Weiner, from a letter to Charles Bernstein, 5/25/1989

I first read Hannah Weiner in the Fall of 1997. One of the things that made her writing stand out to me—among other writers linked to LANGUAGE—was Weiner’s sense of empathy, if not her tendency to identify. Identification has been a “no no” for a while now, after various critical theories, and after alterities more celebrated. My readings of Weiner in the past few years have helped me to attribute and recognize the otherwise in Weiner, whose mind-person were continually turned towards an outside of information, other people, discourse—language itself as that 'ultimate' other.

A particular identification or transference that has long drawn me back to Weiner is that with “the oppressed”. In this category I would lump the AIM activists with whom Weiner had longstanding friendships, African-Americans whose economic struggles are dramatized in Weiner’s book *sileNt teachers/remeMbered sequel*, the earth as it continues to be ecologically ravished, and women as Weiner often pokes fun at gender politics, and especially those within her most immediate communities.

Beyond these particular commitments one of Weiner’s ultimate concerns is with power itself, and most of all the status of her own powers in relation to others ("clairvoyance," "silent teaching" etc.). In this concern I believe she attained a kind of innocence. Not an innocence of reversion or regression, but to a place where her will could be involved with everything she felt, and came into contact with, and not least of all with the page on which she composed and gave aesthetic fact to her intentions. Only here—in the seat of the will—could Weiner not only claim the name of AIM leader Leonard Peltier as “I,” but conversely that of the neo-conservative American president, Ronald Reagan.

Not having had the opportunity to know Weiner, from the stories I’ve heard about her from others over the past decade, and thru her texts, she would seem emotionally privileged. Through this privilege she conveyed the person as an entity utterly singular through which events are named as powers, singularities among an open multiple.

Our Immunity (Antigone)

for Robert Kocik & Eleni Stecopoulos

Impersonating the void we no longer
play in the dark
~ Eleni Stecopoulos, from *Autoimmunity*

1. Next of Kin
what ken we follow the blood down where future
should have been wherever ‘we’ goes geneo-
logies of monsters step teeth follow from them
productions from despair swords search-out

a limit to this body in the limitless dark ‘you’
are a cave for NO ONE will be forgiven 'kill
them all' he said the undead who shore words
against sense ascend if ever to follow them down

into a field of open letters into a force followed
a hollow all ours wound to a Balkan blankness
ensconced at the bottom of the self yet for them
something persisted believing in no grammar

no syntax in need but the words in your mouth
spill out myths spell mnemotechniques as
possible conditions in this wind 'I''s occluded
by sight who proffers an anthem excludes.

2. Our Immunity
declaratives operatives ‘I’ distends 'you' 'you' 'I'
we spoke of empathic radicals you are Greek to
me of that community of believers holding
Wisdom straps-up the bombs again hailing us

through smoke how could we do anything dif
ferent corruptible mortal immunizing whims
of progress difference saves face put the blood
and don’t triangulate don’t trilateral unilaterally

submits no more signs make fools of us con
tracts of letters debts others paying through the
nose for culture makes our culture totally fucked-
up some holistic imbalance points to ‘I’ doesn’t

want to make sense at a certain point sense be
came senseless where anger deafened flights
of degrees no one into those buildings swell with
history and forget their promise like a rainbow.

3. I Don't Go to the Movies
these two bodies belie emergency in the inside
getting sick to progress democracy purges itself
of justice the physician brothers Cosmos Damian fall
and we call this death two postmodern crystals

capitalist in their unwishing a sheen to all economic
indolence scrim subsides like butter does like healing
but in healing is laid waste real bodies accumulate
risk real bodies of exchange second life that was

none other than the other magic lantern x10
preparing for this lack of sense the bunkers were
them on the screen fantasy of us deterritorialized
or 'germy' what was in this code that told us

to be us while capital waited for a cure wishing
its jaundice on the world retroactive presentiments
of terror greener pastures property rites and rights
of the undead flung to the wind tell trauma slant.

Strategies of Occupation (Ad)

Strategies of Occupation: Grabbing Land, and the Political Agency of the Artist
Thursday, November 29, 2007 – 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.
The New School
66 West 12th Street, #510
New York City
Admission: $8, free for all students, New School faculty, staff and alumni with valid ID

The exhibition “Land Grab” at Apexart gallery in New York, on view from November 7 through
December 22, presents an anthology of “grabbing” or claiming territory in current art practices.
Extending that inquiry, this accompanying workshop discusses the specificities and significance of
such occupations, shedding light on the artist as political agent.


The artistic positions considered here are not concerned with extra real estate or
anti-institutionalism. They contest a larger reality—the prolonged condition of emergency, for instance; the
global state of war and Orwellian group-think. Curators, theorists and artists (many participating
in the exhibition) will introduce their own strategies of occupation or ways of documenting and
criticizing them. The participants are also invited to analyze the positions taken up in the
exhibition: What does re-inscription of land stand for, as formulated in today’s art? What means do we
have, physical and intellectual, to occupy “land,” and how can this act be understood in a
post-colonial age? In a market-driven democracy, is occupation possible beyond capitalist desire? Who
is the ally, who is the audience? Finally: how can we define revolutionary subjectivity, the
power and potential to change the existing global order today, and what is its relation to “land”?


At the end of the workshop, a declaration will be created concerning the agency of the artist as
“land grabber,” a new definition of occupation, and a list of critical strategies of real,
utopian, or precarious occupation. This written or drawn work, together with transcribed parts of
the recorded discussion, will inform the matrix of a planned publication on strategies of (land)
occupation in the arts.

Facilitators:
Lillian Fellmann, Zurich, co-curator of “Land Grab”
Sarah Lookofsky, New York, co-curator of “Land Grab”

Participants:
Amy Balkin, artist, This Is the Public Domain, Los Angeles
Eteam (Franziska Lamprecht, Hajoe Moderegger), New York/Germany
Andrea Geyer, artist, New York
Jens Haaning, artist, Denmark
John Hawke, artist, New York
Albert Heta, Kosovo (invited)
Sergio Munoz Sarmiento, Clandestine Construction Company International
Vyjayanthi Rao, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, The New School for Social Research, New York
Martin Rosengaard, wooloo.org, Berlin
Felicity Scott, historian of modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism, Columbia
University, New York
Nato Thompson, curator, Department of Land and Space Reclamation (DLSR) (invited)

* This event is co-organized by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and
presented as part of the center’s program cycle on “agency.”

Enthusiasm (II)

Let poets be poets artists artists
academics academics

what you say you want to be
the person you want

to be there is a shortage
of coal in Vertov's world

but five year plans must go on
there are shotages and

then there are shortages the
empty boxes strewn around

that yard would appear to any
one else potentialities but

the things we write to each other
are beyond wishing

or hope Pushkin writes no
thing has led to so much hopelessness

as the fact there once was hope
in Vertov's *Enthusiasm*

they are taking the steeples down
cleaning out the churches

smoke stacks in the background once
signs of progress seem

sinister I like the way
the soundtrack changes

from shot to shot like
we could finally see with our ears

your problem you say
is with "the image"

and I have given up
on being anything.

What Weight Raised (Quote)

Our body with its weight strives toward its own place. Weight makes not downward only, but to its own place also. The fire mounts upward, a stone sinks downward.... My weight is my love; by that am I carried, whithersoever I be carried. We are inflamed by thy gift and are carried upward: we wax hot within, and we go on.
~ Augustine, quoted in Jean-Francois Lyotard's *The Confession of Augustine*

Some Intentions of the Document

'You Didn’t Have to Be There' RoseLee Goldberg et al New School University Nov. 14th

What is the relationship between live performance and its documentation by photography, moving sound-images (film/video/DV), audio recording and writing? How does this relationship inflect questions of truth (what “actually” occurred) and mediation (what stands between the supposed truth of an event and what is known about the event retrospectively)? The panel that took place this past Wednesday at New School University, 'You Didn’t Have to be There: Photography, Performance and Contemporary Art', moderated by Performa director RoseLee Goldberg who was joined by artists Maria Abramovich, Vanessa Beecroft and Babette Mangolte, explored both of these questions extensively.

The panel began with opening remarks by Goldberg, who discussed the importance of documentation to her work as a scholar of live performance in visual arts. During these remarks Goldberg situated problems of historical reconstruction tracing them back to photographs and sound records of the Dadists and other early 20th century avant gardes. For Goldberg, the historian must bring all of her powers of imagination to understand an original event through traces, hearsay and artifacts of its occurrence. What’s more, the historian must create ways of ‘reading’ documents (Golberg’s term) specific to live performance. That so few were “there” at performances by Judson, Schneeman, Beuys, Kaprow, Acconci, Higgins and others in the 60’s and 70’s both intensifies and renders instable the importance of eye-witness accounts. That, as in the case of Beuys’ *How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare*, photo-documentation was not planned or even welcome for that matter raises yet another issue of intention.

Babette Mangolte, who was first to present after Goldberg, addressed early documentary intentions in relation to 60’s/70’s live art. Mangolte admitted when she began documenting performances by Richard Foreman and (most famously) Trisha Brown she did so out of a sense of urgency and experiment. To document in “those days” meant making decisions intuitively, having few if any examples to follow otherwise. The result of such intuitions are, as we now know, some of the most significant documents we have of performance-based art, period.

During Mangolte’s talk, she also spoke critically of her use of photography over Super 8 and early video technologies. That photography neither showed continuous movement nor could capture sound pointed to the inadequacies of the medium for documenting live performance, a sentiment seconded by Beecroft and Abramovich. Mangolte also expressed reservations about her own uses of photography, which she considered ‘interpretive’ as they often added significance to certain moments in performance those moments should not have had otherwise. In such photographs Mangolte said ‘insight’ triumphed over ‘artifact’. Where the historian is concerned, Mangolte and Goldberg agreed one must go back to the photographer’s contact sheets to get a better picture of live events as the singular photograph can only point to movement. Magolte added that contact sheets are especially important after the dances of Judson, who took the ‘deconstruction’ (Magolte’s term) of dance manners as one of their principle intentions.

Beecroft began by approaching the problem of documentary practices in performance by meditating on an “unofficial” performance she gave at the last Venice Biennale. This performance featured twenty or so Black women ‘refugees’ dressed head-to-toe in black tights and sprawled across a large, Pollock-esque canvas. The video showed Beecroft walking in and out of the canvas as she spread blood-red paint over the refugee-models. Beecroft’s reuse of the 70’s “street art” format (Beecroft set up her live painting event in a tent independently of the official Biennale organization) and of “action painting” radicalized both visual art formats as she brought to them the content of the ongoing genocide in Sudan.

Beyond the issues raised by such a work (the dramatization of spectatorship in regards to relationships of power; the obfuscation of living “subject” and art “object”; the complicity of object and subject, victim and persecutor-witness both), the work’s documentation allowed Beecroft to consider her own approaches to documentation in relation to the history of live performance documentary practices. Through an anecdote about being on a panel with Allan Kaprow and Paul McCarthy at MIT before Kaprow’s death, Beecroft marked three stages of live performance documentary history. Allan Kaprow was most ‘innocent’ in that he preferred not to document his performances. McCarthy was of a different generation (and level of ‘purity’) in that he decided to document his performances only after others would not ‘believe’ he had done them. Beecroft found herself at yet another generational remove (and considered herself most impure) inasmuch as she never thought twice about documenting her performances despite her admitted ‘guilt’ about documentation. At this point the panel became somewhat mystical as Beecroft and Ambramovich both articulated a melancholy about the loss of original presence through live performance doucumentation—the purity of events unrecorded, lost to representative history.

Beecroft’s longing for purity above both the commodity fetishism of the documentary object—a document’s salability in “the marketplace”— and the object’s ‘symbolic’ value—a document’s ability to communicate what occurred to a particular moment—led into Abramovich’s presentation, which involved an enthusiastic diatribe against photographic documentation as well as praise for Mangolte’s documentation of her 2005 performance at the Guggenheim, *Seven Easy Pieces*. In terms of her performance Abramovich discussed how she worked with documents to reconstruct well-known performances by Beuys, Acconci, Export, herself and others. She and Mangolte also considered Mangolte’s documentation of the reenactments as they were to supplement both the original performances and their reenactments by Abramovich. Here, a feedback loop between a documentary imagination “then” and “now” was curious as it seemed to point to a larger problem of live art in our present in relation to documentary practices. Is it a widespread nostalgia for original presences (“if I only could have been there”) or market-forces that are driving such reenactments as Ambromovich’s? Has a renewed historical consciousness not irrupted into our present marking an era of reenactment? That many works in the Performa07 biennial are involved in reenactment—Tony Conrad’s *Window Enactment*, Allan Kaprow’s Happenings “redo”*, Yvonne Rainer’s *Rite of Spring Indexical*, International Festival’s *On the Town*—seems evidence of a larger cultural trend….


To close Abramovich showed part of Guy Ben-Ner’s video *Stealing Beauty* and an infomercial for money laundering (that is, cleaning money) by an artist whose name I did not catch. Before showing the videos Ambramovitch left the audience and panel with the provocative question: ‘When do we have documents [of art], and when art in artifacts?’ In terms of a fine line between the artist “supporting” herself and feeding a marketplace hungry to fetishize aesthetic production by any means, Abramovich’s question fanned the flames of those in the audience who dominated the Q&A. In answer to Ambramovich’s original question, and a question asked by an audience member, Beecroft stated “the market is the market,” qualifying that it is a challenge for the artist to tarry with the marketplace as opposed to more comfortable and typical places for art. “Try to make art in a store full of bags,” Beecroft quipped in reference to a work of hers commissioned by Louis Vuitton. As earlier that night Golberg mentioned current anxieties about the U.S. economy Beecroft’s comment seemed a fitting, however ambivalent, close to the panel’s substantial offerings.

*thanks to Shamim Momim for this term.

The Course of Particulars (Intro)

The Course of Particulars: introduction for Terry Cuddy

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence
Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
~ Walace Stevens

This immediacy, in the fullest sense, of relation to artworks is a function of mediation, of penetrating and encompassing experience...
~ Theodor Adorno

Since I have known Terry Cuddy, his work has existed between design, the printed book, multimedia, video, site-specific installation, live music performance (including a rock opera, *Dr. Steadfast’s Last Migraine*), sound recording, and an ongoing investigation of sound and visual image, image and text. For anyone of lesser energy and commitment such a synthesis of approaches to making art would result in a dilletantishness. With Cuddy, his variety of approach seems natural, even necessary.

Cuddy’s practice is an intensely local one that nevertheless always touches problems of global importance. Minute particulars move towards universals, extending themselves as such, twisting like an arras in this extension. In this way Cuddy is a distinctly North America ‘nominalist’ (Emerson) during a time when it is most regrettable—ethically, politically, culturally—in many ways to be one. Like Muriel Rukeyser, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, Susan Howe and other Modernists before him he represents a genius of place as the local always remains in relation to other localities and individuals in his work—a world at large.

During a time of goth. revival, hyper-appropriation, virtual realities, and neo-psychadelia in popular visual art there is something unfashionable, and therefore difficult, about Cuddy’s commitment to a Modernist legacy indebted to traditions of film and video art (Hollis Frampton, James Benning, Tony Conard, Nam Juin Paik and others come to mind) as much to poetry and critical theory (Barthes, Benjamin, Adorno, Wittgenstein). After these confluent Modernist strains Cuddy returns compulsively to problems of representation, how sound, image and text synaesthetically mediate our understandings of the world as political, ethical and social beings; how, what’s more, a citizenry is inculcated in an era of American democracy’s last gasps.

In a video from 2004, Cuddy poses as the host of a home improvement program. He explains that in last week’s episode he was doing some work on the basement of a house and now he will show that work to the viewer. When, in the next scene, we find Cuddy in the basement he provides commentary on the renovations. While Cuddy talks a box appears in the center of the room. The presence of this box is unsettling in its familiarity, a text-book example of the uncanny. Before Cuddy leaves the shot ostensibly to show the viewer another room of the house he explains that he will take a photograph of the basement to document the renovation. A hand appears in the frame of the video and snaps a photograph; the photograph takes unusally long to flash, producing a stroboscopic light effect. The hand of the photographer, ominously, is wearing a white glove. The hand looks official, authoritative—like that of a doctor, or inspector. There is the pervasive sense this hand represents "the law," and that we have been at this scene of a domestic crime—a crime of interiority—many times before. In the following scene we are asked to compare the photograph just taken to another one. This later photograph is yellowed and pixellated, and shows the walls and ceiling of a room damaged by water.

When I saw Cuddy’s video for the first time I had not seen the photographs of Abu Grahib yet. I couldn’t bring myself to look at them, couldn’t make a “friend of horror” to quote Chris Marker after Marlon Brando’s Kurtz in *Apocalypse Now*. I sometimes wonder what my reaction would have been to Cuddy’s video had I seen it after encountering the Abu Grahib photos, especially that of the hooded man standing arms outspread with electric wires dangling from his chest. In the following scene of Cuddy’s video we see a television. While a program plays a hand begins to draw on the television screen with a magnet (a technique of vintage video art) slowly revealing the silhouette of the now iconic Abu Grahib prisoner. As the figure is gradually revealed a voice-over explains something about the relation between figure and ground; meanwhile the channels start to change, and eventually surf rapidly.

Through such forms of mediation—the parody of popular home improvement programs like *This Old House*, the use of historic video techniques, and appropriation of television footage—Cuddy fuses attentive and distracted attentions, diverging from both. The result is moral critique in the form of negative consciousness. The images we receive in the video are made things—that is, they are visibly produced—and Cuddy's viewer remains aware of this throughout. Beyond such awarenesses of form, Cuddy describes a haunted content. The memory of Abu Grahib as it is both affixed by indelible iconicity (the silhouetted image of the prisoner magnetized on the tv set) and erased by an attention deficient spectatorship (that of channel surfing and home improvement programs both).

As we might also say after Chris Marker's *Sans Soleil*, Cuddy makes us see “the black” in lieu of deferred contentment--"happiness". Procedure creates a blindness the origin and termini of an imaginative-critical faculty (and this is the dream of an anachronistic Modernist aesthetic practice as it collides with politics, the socially ‘real’, to this day). Form renders its contents senseless, anti-mimetic, and so produces meaning, has effects, instead. What is at stake in Cuddy’s work is finally consciousness itself as a form of action. Historical mediation via 'intermedia' as useful, if not instrumental. Playfully instrumental. Creatively didactic. A moralism that hints and points and winks.

In Cuddy’s most recent video, *The Harriet Complex*, we move among a series of scenes informing a controversy about Harriet Tubman’s commemoration in Auburn, New York, the final resting place of Tubman’s body and incidentally Cuddy’s home town. The specificity, the concise localness of Cuddy’s video, which features children performing a play about Tubman’s life in a local grammar school, a town counsel meeting where arrogant counselmen (and they are all men) argue whether an interstate that runs thru Auburn should be named after the seminal Abolition leader (in the end, an argument prevails the interstate should not be named after Tubman since this would make race an “issue” in the town, and therefore divide the citizenry along racial lines), a beautiful sequence of animated topological maps tracing Tubman’s Underground Railroad routes, and synthesized video images of town monuments commemorating Tubman, as well as photos and other documents of Tubman’s person.

Memorably, in the final scene of the video, Cuddy’s friends, family and community read letters written by locals and published in the local newspaper concerning the naming of Auburn’s highschool after Tubman (a commemorative controversy prior to debates about the naming of the interstate). During this segment each shot presents a close-up of the speaker’s mouth. That one only sees the mouths of the speakers is estranging, and distances what is said from what is seen, image from voice, ventriloquist from that thrown. That the letters are spoken by people of all different ages, genders, shades of skin, etc. provides yet another degree of reflection. The content of the letters, in their sequencing, demonstrate racial antagonism as it occurs rhetorically through the typical “letter to the editor” forum. In the very words used to state the problem of commemoration, the often absurb and illogical rhetorical arguments against the naming of the highschool, racism is revealed as banal, a quotidian evil. Unpressed by events more exigent than the seemingly apolitical decision to name a school or highway, racism remains unexamined critically and therefore abandoned as an "issue" in the town.

Through a variety of techniques and tactics Cuddy consistently returns his viewer to the fact that something is being watched, and reproduced as such (if the viewer is in fact a coproducer of aesthetic objects, and not merely subject to a work’s or author‘s authority). While certain techniques of *The Harriet Complex* would appear in loving tribute to early video art—a moment Cuddy certainly feels himself located by, and to take-up—I think they also revitalize video art’s relation to content. The content in this case is racism observed at an extraordinarily local level while extending towards problems of global import: who gets remembered, and how so on the basis of their skin-color? At a micro-political level, Cuddy’s video contains many of the problems we must still confront if racial ressentiment is to be overcome.

The key to activating this overcoming, as Cuddy’s video substantiates, is not to make speech a dirty silence clarified (to paraphrase Wallace Stevens’ poem, "The Creations of Sound"), but to make silence 'still dirtier'. That is, the more levels of mediation between a work of art and its content—the more semblance and the 'real' are related by craft—the closer we may feel to the actuality of a social problem in all of its messiness, contradiction, and the different positions of its interlocutors and actors. Or, to put it in the terms of Theodor Adorno: it is only through the mediation of artworks that social contradiction will be presented as truth *beside* political actions, consequences and effects. I feel this being *beside* as I encounter Cuddy’s work again.

'Or of your time sense in no time'

for Eléna Rivera

'[...] the vast sorrow in between
what is reported and what one sees'
~ Eléna Rivera

'now-time' or of any century sut
ured so 'this is this' what is meant
"I" was that 'cincture endemic to
no one we boarded a non-sense
non-entity of trains the police

police they asked for the man's I.
D.--"you understand I.D.?"-- lik
e he was a moron and not one un
derstanding he was human at th
at moment utterly interpellated--

accused as always so difficult to
get the animal 'breath' back it's no
t easy being undead when we wro
te the poem the poem wrote us b
ack into life we asked to have ey

es but all we were given was com
munication--a 'bare life' for sign
ificance--referents towering com
mand our sorrow in fact you are
in Sante Fe and not here and I am

not in Sante Fe and not here also
what distance must I occupy to
have sight to save face from hard
ship proximities with which we
"deal" otherwise--'a many girded/

where mercy sleeps soundly'*--if I
am to fathom anything at all it is
the smaller frame of your words
their distance as Oppen taught us
to trust words as things otherwise

in their seeing than 'reportage'--
an event all our own but shared
if to overhear is to see I saw him
say 'swimming is to cadence as
music to breathing' but we are al

ways drowning likewise by rhetor
ical possibility 'at the war' we fou
nd another time other times and
these were sometimes adequate
to continue to face reality as if to

continue in some assurance or s
urety to continue with the names
as they fall away to sound to clu
tch a fragment figment vast in its
presence against 'society' per se

to endure 'age' as it flows upon
us an external pressure Stein sa
ys WWI made everyone 'Modern'
so what does that make us a ser
ies of ones valued for being con

temporary a civilian war of the m
ind and body as it continues in t
heir market aether 'Not Saleable'
one disclaimed but then she ide
ntified herself principally with the

market crash that seems immin
ent against any historicity will on
e build a better commons made
from waste products the sky has
become hasty and the ground no

t much better with impatient dan
cing 'mother fucking crazy' an ir
onic twist on the Rap song if the
re ever was one--'all I want to do
is - - - - - and take your money'

--while the 'real' guns fire in a di
stance of sense an ironic sense o
f 'missing in action' as if missing
itself were without an alibi--rep
orted though never actually seen.

*this line and the epigraph above are taken from Rivera's unpublished "Movement in the Upper Region"