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"

Same Age

For the people of that flow
Are new, the old
New to age as the young
To youth
~ George Oppen

All the consequences return
contemporary to our research snow

after all of “us” has gone into
which misprision nothing begets

because you are here or I am
any one across that darker

always the distances the mind
that begets them so ice ellipsed

ice a syntax I want that mind
your mind as it can’t be here

for me given to its strangeness
your body blanked-out by the light

up there itself a kind of information
no one should actually sense

our sex given to shade or find
larger circumference elsewhere

space you look into multiple
in its vacuity also looks out

at us as once desiring in this
city we seemed the same age.

A Multitude of Elsewheres

Vito Acconci A Live Reading Swiss Institute November 7th

Being better acquainted with Acconci’s language-based performances and photographic works from the 60’s and 70’s it was a refreshing surprise to hear him read from unrealized architectural and design projects this past Wednesday evening.

During the reading the artist read four ‘chapters’ from the writing project, each chapter dealing with a different architectural theme (e.g. ‘Buildings Inside/Out’). Between chapters Acconci played ‘interludes’—CD tracks of some of his 70’s recording projects. That the 70’s recordings should be interposed Acconci’s mainly 90’s and 00’s architectural writings proved a bit like time-travel (“Vito” then, “Vito” now), yet also consistent with a sense of delay pervasive throughout Acconci’s entire work.* For instance, the series of performances he did in the early 70’s involving the transportation of his library back and forth from his West Village apartment to a gallery where he was showing Uptown; when he wanted to peruse any of his books he would have to get on a train, delaying research. Or the infamous St. Mark’s Poetry Project “reading” consisting of a series of phone calls to the audience at the Project from different phone booths throughout the city. Acconci’s represented voice arrived, as well as his coordinates on the “grid,” however never the bodily presence of the performer one expects from a poetry reading context.

If any delay is at work in Acconci’s reading of last Wednesday it is that of architectural endeavors that also never embody or presence themselves for any number of reasons (because the money doesn’t exist, or technology hasn’t become sufficiently developed; because a particular location is not available or convenient). Among the projects Acconci proposed one of my favorites was his plan for a “research station” in Antarctica. Here the metaphysical thrust of the artist’s writings was felt as Acconci announced ‘an Antarctica of the mind’ and imagined ‘seeing the mind’ itself through the ‘blankness’ of Antarctica. ‘Think of this world as a blank piece of paper’. The ‘beacon’ of the Antarctica research station, likewise, would project a light not for ‘anyone’ (as hardly any one goes to Antarctica and fewer still inhabit it) but for ‘itself’. A communion or conveyance with the stars (‘information gets pulled down from the stars’). A space-age movie house for a cold, iconoclastic geography (‘a movie that is the air we breathe’).

Many of the spaces Acconci chose for his implausible projects may be considered utopian in a literal sense, the term deriving from the Latin for “no place”. In the spirit of Italo Calvino’s *Invisible Cities* or (closer still) Arakawa/Gins’ *Reversible Destiny* projects Acconci enumerates spaces of potentiality, the drafts of an accomplished artist-architect’s imagination unloosed.

Other projects I especially liked were for a garden at W. 24th St. in New York City along Chelsea’s “Highline”. Here a ‘crisscross of moving greenery’ would allow the occupant to ‘move through a magic carpet’ eventually ‘becom[ing] a spaceship [him]self’. Other aspects of Acconci’s utopian projects were to confuse opposed categories such as “nature” and “culture,” “appearance” and “reality,” “identity” and “non-identity,” “surface” and depth,” “inside” and “out,” “public” and “private”. As the utopian must admit the all-too-specific as well as the wildly implausible Acconci also projected a National Quilt museum for Indiana where each room of the museum would showcase a different type of quilt, or quilt by itself. Here the artist acknowledged the quilt as an American art form exemplary for its “multitude of elsewheres”: places, identities, substances, beliefs, fabrics and stitching patchworked.

Other projects included a “Plaza of Plazas” for Strausbourg whereby the elements of the typical plaza should be set into motion creating a plaza its occupants ‘never knew they wanted until they formed it by accident’. Also a ‘Sculpture Jungle’ for the Czech Republic (‘another world that’s somewhere but isn’t here yet’) and a ‘transfer’ for an airport in Atlanta.

In the ‘transfer’ piece the connection between the “no place” of Acconci’s unrealized projects and writing itself was evident in the many puns at play (‘you have lost your head, you have gained still another head’), as well as the conceitful position of Acconci’s narrator (first he tells his reader he is home in NYC, then says he has lied, he is in Atlanta, then says he is ‘nowhere’, he is at an airport, writing). Indeed we have perhaps always been nowhere before Acconci’s work, which consistently pits its audience between here and there, arriving and departing, potential and actual, on paper and off. For Acconci, who began his career as a poet and in so many ways still acts as one, language itself finally seems the ultimate elsewhere.

*for more about Acconci’s ‘delay’ see Craig Dworkin’s introduction to Acconci’s 2005 MIT Press book, *Language to Cover the Page* (ed. Dworkin).

Context’s Dream

Adam Pendleton *The Revival* Stephan Weiss Studio November 1st

The gospel service can’t exist without complete prior agreement about the nature of the image/vision and its truthfulness. You can’t doubt and sing with abandon. The identification, the location of the singer within the image has to be total. There is no room for the distance of irony.
~ John Taggart

Despite the stunningly gorgeous and accomplished Gospel-style of Adam Pendleton’s *The Revival*—with preaching by Pendleton himself, full two-bandstand Gospel choir, and three-piece band—perhaps the most striking thing about Pendleton’s work was his original recontextualization of performance models rooted in African-American spirituality and cultural history with texts by “experimental” writers such as John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Paolo Javier, Jena Osman and Leslie Scalapino.

Historically there has been a disjunct between (mainly) white, “avant garde” language experiment and Black arts movements. Books such as Nathaniel Mackey’s *Discrepant Engagement* and scholarship by Kamau Braithwaite, Adelaide Morris and Aldon Nielsen have done much recently to reconsider the problem. Likewise an upsurge of radically formal writing by African Americans in the past 30 years have done much to alter the problem by adding new voices to the terrain. Some of these writers include Will Alexander, Tonya Foster, Erica Hunt, C.S. Giscombe, Harryette Mullen, Nathaniel Mackey, Julie Patton, Christopher Stackhouse and Tyrone Williams. In Pendleton’s performance the connections between radical formal experiment and adverse cultural content are not so much explicit, as embodied by an appropriative enunciation of diverse texts.

Such a binary is further complicated by Pendleton’s inclusion of texts from Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign, whereby Jackson acknowledges and mourns his loss among supporters, and texts by Gay writer and health activist Leonard Kramer. Through the play of these texts and others, but especially those with a specific political occasion such as Jackson’s and Kramer’s, Pendleton tarries in the most literal (and textual) of ways among various conflicted, if not antagonistic, cultural-political identities.

That Pendleton mediates and reinvents Black Christian “revival” is as much a throw back to the communal forum that *is* African-American religious practice, as much as to the tactical experiments of the Language Writing communities of the 70’s through the present. In the writings of Charles Bernstein (whom Pendleton “lifts”) and Bruce Andrews (who fortuitously was in the audience for Pendleton’s performance) one encounters modes of writing that consistently trouble unified enunciation as they set different subject positions, speech acts and affective registers against one another to ethical, political and amoral ends. Such modes can be witnessed as early as Bernstein’s mid-70’s chapbooks collected in his book *Republics of Reality*— *Parsing*, *Shade*, and *Poetic Justice*—as well as (in)famously in Andrew’s book *I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up*. Before Language Writing one could detect similar tactics in New York School poets such as John Ashbery (also appropriated by Pendleton’s monologue), Barbara Guest and James Schuyler, who interrogated “lyrical subjectivity” through similarly appropriative techniques and ironic modes of address.

The recourse to ironic address in Language Writing and the New York School seem a deliberate and strategic wrinkle in the Gospel revival format. Yet I would never call *The Revival* strictly “ironic”. In Pendleton’s negotiation of the various voices and intertexts he weaves within his monologue, 'an uncommon dream of language’, a critical distance from the emotive thrust of Gospel musical accompaniment was always in play. In this provision the performance felt Brechtian at times, as though Pendleton were preventing sympathetic identification from his audience to affect critical distance. Simultaneously, there was something all the more “moving” in the play between Pendleton’s “remix” and the revival format—as though each complemented one another, or better yet realized the effects of the one through the other.

Such a confusion of effects attests to a larger intention at work in *The Revival*. For one of the things that may truly bind an African-African cultural discourse with ongoing Modernist literary experiment is the sense that Transcendence so-called may only emerge in Immanence itself given to “life” by embodiment, historical complexity and material interconnectedness. In many of the texts Pendleton “remixed” inheres the idea that redemption should not be found in any “beyond”—a world “outside” this one, a Transcendental or fundamental Being—so much as in a force that binds any number of individuals existing within a larger “community” or multiplicity. So the attention is thrown off “God” and “redemption” to the difficulties of the “created”. The following is language I transcribed during the performance:

“it’s almost two years now” “the brightness filled” “it’s as if the war never happened” “not the ghost of the novel” “the memories you ground down” “the shape of a beautiful table remains” “and some day a name day” “will go unrecorded”

“it’s almost two years now and your deliverance is right here” “and your God betrayed you” “no wave of recollection comes gushing back in his love” “and your salvation is inside you” “and the them was articulated” “the brightness filled in” “your glory it is inside you” “it’s over here” “and his salvation is inside you” “and I said his glory”

“the them was” “the brightness filled in” “the war never happened” “not” “no one who saw me” “would ever believe me” “in your God”*

The immanent tendencies of the revival format binds Pendleton’s *The Revival* to 20th century “avant garde” language practices and performance insofar as both geneologies would propose an anti-transcendence, or a transcendence that only may occur as a kind of revival through mediation—the mediation of a socius in embodied linguistic fact. “Our” deliverance “is here” if only because “we” are here and “inside” at the same time. Against the racist political system of the United States government (which Jackson’s speech presences rhetorically), and the neglect of Queer health issues and emergencies by the same government (which Kramer’s text renders pathetic), Pendleton would finally recognize in the writers he has chosen to lift and in *The Revival*’s format a relationship shared by ritualized spirituality (religion), social responsibility and language/expression.

That Pendleton included “testimonies” in his performance highlights yet another relationship between language, performance and ethical behavior. Both the visual artist Liam Gillick and poet-scholar Jena Osman provided “testimony” interrupting Pendleton’s monologue and the music of *The Revival*. Osman’s testimony specifically concerned the poet Charles Reznikoff who in the 30’s wrote two volumes of poems entitled *Testimony* by transforming legal transcripts from the 1890’s throughout the 1910’s into verse. In Reznikoff’s poetry all of the language is “found,” however in its selection and transformation dramatizes real ethical dilemmas and responsibilities as they are given in and by language. A particular phrase Osmon quoted from Reznikoff seemed to comment on Pendleton’s own intentions as a language-based performance artist: “I didn’t invent the world, I felt it”. However “critical” or “analytical” my experience of *The Revival* was and was geared to be, in the end it was all “felt” where feeling becomes its own critique. Where beyond critique and feeling lies the arduous path of meaning itself.

*quotation marks indicate breaks in live transcription.

A New York Poem

~ for Jane Sprague, 10/24-25, 2007*

Fall finally came like an index to this space of the page cities
Memories I finally read the postcards you sent me yesterday

Bound like a Dickinson fascicle told me in a clipped way your
Husband had a bicycle accident while the fires have their way
In Southern California “four migrant workers dead” a headline

Reads predictably then moved on to another topic as postcards
Tragically do is this the voice New York poems put on in all

Their ironic feeling and what they suppress a remnant of all was
Actually felt we are all tragedies and accidents these days it seems
The weather’s trying to tell us something a space between places

We try to put the ‘mind’ incessantly thinking and the ‘eye’s mind’
As if the two were anything different the actual matter of print

Advertisement abounds this is a New York poem after all and
What would a New York poem be without advertisement other
Banalities gossip a little run-on conversation goes a long way

To understand the tragic that precious space cleaves thinking
And action shakes the leaves exhausted by an autumnal heat.

*"A New York Poem" will appear in the forthcoming Boog City New York Poetry Anthology.

Delay in Glass Enacted

Tony Conrad *Window Enactment* Greene-Naftali Gallery October 30th

Tony Conrad is perhaps best know for his film *The Flicker* and his seminal contributions to early Minimalist music in the 60’s, and less well know for his work in visual art performance. His recent showings at Greene-Naftali gallery prove the tides are changing for Conrad as his entire career is being taken better into account by art critics, historians and fans alike. Since a seminar I took with Conrad at the University of Buffalo and through my encounters with Tony while living in Buffalo I have known him to be a consummate performer, if not principally performative, since 2001. Conrad’s singular personality, his mischievous and careful control of performance details, place him as a performer foremost before his formidable achievements as a musician and time-based media artist.

Conrad’s performance at Greene-Naftali, *Window Enactment*, left many in the audience seemingly baffled as to what he was up to. My own reception of the performance is conditioned by the fact that I could not see much of what was being “enacted” as it could only be viewed through a relatively small window set in a corner of the spacious and open gallery. As I consider other performances I’ve witnessed by Conrad, I don’t doubt it was his point to frustrate an audience’s view of the performance and thus their overall reception of the work.

The performance began with a projected video image of a house set-construction with a single window set within its edifice. This video played for an unusually long duration (five minutes or so) preempting frustration among many in the audience who sat and stood in anticipation of what would eventually occur. I suspect this video image, clearly a reproduction of a Super 8 film, was shot in the 70’s as the press release to *Window Enactment* places the work’s composition somewhere between 1970 (with a parenthesized question mark following the date) and 2007. So *Window Enactment* is something long in the making—a delay in (literal) glass—like many of Conrad’s projects which he has only recently taken up again after renewed interest in his career.

Following the projection were a series of scenes, tableaus and performance-‘events' whose only unifying logic seemed to be a meta-critical view of aesthetic participation, pleasure and spectatorship: what is seen and what can’t be seen, who sees who (through the window), what is called to attention as exhaustive (and thereby ironic) banality, and what as titillating perversion, exhibition, scopophilia, fetish, ambiguous ambient presence. The fact that the audience should view the performance enacted through a window seems both allegorical and effective, the window establishing a private space for the viewer to peer *into* and for the performers to see *out of*, watching the audience with binoculars at one point and by various other voyeuristic means at others. Regardless a panoptical ('two-way') gaze was heavily in play throughout the performance foregrounding the window itself in its obtrusive, mediating character.

Much of what I could see from my vantage in the gallery were naked bodies performing simple domestic tasks like setting and clearing a dining table, dressing and undressing, watching television, playing LPs, turning off and on lights, and having basic conversations by cell phone. Discerning some of the cell conversations (for example, “I can’t come right now ‘cause I can’t go right now ‘cause I am stuck right now. Why don’t you come over?...” I was struck by their utter banality; the performers would talk about what they ate for lunch that day and other small-talk in between heavy breathing and sexual innuendo. Some of the tableaus reminded me of the work of Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelly with whom Conrad has collaborated throughout his career, and notably before Kelly and McCarthy were the art world figures they are today. I was also reminded of the kitsch of Jack Smith for whom Conrad assisted on sound for Smith’s ‘underground’ classic *Flaming Creatures*, as well as George Kuchar and Abigail Child whose films and videos involve melodrama and kitsch similarly.

In Conrad’s performances an air of mystery and fascination is consistently over-determined by perverse behaviorist experiment. As soon as the audience has sunk with the performers to an extreme level of boredom Conrad will put on a light show with flash or “clapper” lights—post-psychedelic era “eye-candy”— or hold a nude Minimalist chamber concert to recall the audience’s active interest. Here there is a dialectic between the anesthetizing quotidian as it exhausts the viewer, and the spectacular wondrous as it maintains the viewer’s curiosity forcing the more patient viewer (more than half the audience cleared out before the performance was finished including many I know to be sympathetic with Conrad’s work) to continue attending the performance.

Conrad is for me a perverted performance artist who yet raises many exigent and critical questions about the relationship between audience and performer/artist as they embody problems of power, and visual-sonic empowerment especially, in post-Modern Western culture. That I could not see much of what went on finally during the performance (however I did sneak closer and closer to the most advantageous perspective before the window as much of the audience with the choicest seating cleared out) and therefore report ‘accurately’ on ‘what happened’ seems par for the course with much of Conrad’s performance work as the work deliberately underscores the relationship between performers, audience and artist-performer-director. As one gathers from much of the sound and visuals of *Window Enactment*, Conrad is also a master in control of his craft who knows how to deliver the beautiful, exquisite and frenetic in respite, if not respect, to his audience’s frustrated attention.

Thom Donovan

EMERGENCY benefit for Will Alexander (Ad)

Dear Friends in Poetry, in Life
Poet and artist Will Alexander has become seriously ill. He has no
health insurance. In order to help him defray the cost of treatment,
poets will gather and read Will’s work as well as poems for Will. If
you can't attend the reading below, please make a donation to Will
Alexander --he really needs the help of myriad communities right now.
(His mailing address is W. Alexander/ 400 South Lafayette Park Place,
#307/ Los Angeles, CA 90057.) Will is one of our GREAT/most singular
poets and thinkers. I understand that this is a time when many feel
"heavy burdened" but ... Please help if you can. Feel free (and in fact
feel encouraged) to forward this or post on your blogs, lists, groups
of friends who will help.
love and much,
Tonya Foster

BENEFIT READING FOR WILL ALEXANDER
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1ST, 6-8PM
BOWERY POETRY CLUB
308 Bowery / F to 2nd Ave, or 6 to Bleecker
$10 suggested donation, more if you can

JEROME ROTHENBERG
TONYA FOSTER
JOEL KUSZAI
BILL MARSH
MARCELLA DURAND
TOD THILLEMAN
JOHN HIGH
RODRIGO TOSCANO
ELIOT WEINBERGER

(and more tba)

Performa07

I will be blogging for Performa07 visual arts performance biennial this month...

http://07.performa-arts.org/performa_live.php

Exploitation is for Kids (& Dogs)

Nathalie Djurberg's *Untitled (Working Title Kids & Dogs)* at the Zipper Factory, Oct. 28th

The pervasive cleverness and craft of Nathalie Djurberg’s ‘Untitled (Working Title Kids & Dogs)’ lies in the continuous play between a non-live claymation video and live-soundtrack performed simultaneously with the projection of the video, and synched at times loosely with the video’s visual-narrative content: down-and–out children warring Untouchables-style with a pack of dogs over scraps of food and other dejected objects eventually to be given medical treatment and chow after the ‘war’. The inconstant delay between pre-made visual and live sound elements offers a satisfying game for an audience to play. The sound of dogs sniffing each other’s asses is seen and heard while viewing the video, then one looks down to Djurberg and fellow performers on stage before the video and sees one of the performers rubbing a pencil against a notepad (the sound of sniffing!). The sound of grenade explosions are offered by an aerosol-paint stenciled bass drum being struck with a mallet, and gunfire by one of the performers rapidly tapping their finger-tips against the contacts of a mixing board. When often there are images of gore and wounding the accompanying sound effects are provided by the squeezing of a ketchup bottle onto the stage by Djurberg herself.

As in children’s toys and media ‘Untitled’’s spectator gains pleasure from the tactility of the object of their attention—there is a remarkable visual tactility about claymation, a medium of children’s entertainment typically—as well as from the concomitant observation of the way something being seen and heard is constructed. Operative is the old dyad mimesis and diegesis whence the active attention must negotiate the realities of a living and performed present with multiple levels of representation (sound effects, drum and bass soundtrack, and purely playful performance actions—a head is bandaged or a back scratched in ‘real time’ redoubling the action in the video).

The fun of such ‘figuring out’—the revelatory art of producing the *mise-en-scene* *and* the representative object for the audience in tandem—is both complemented and disrupted by the video’s content, as it presents a cartoonish violence not unlike that of typical cartoons (Tom and Jerry) or recent parodies of them (The Simpson’s Itchy and Scratch) if only, as ‘Untitled’’s press release reads, to provide a litany of abject “twists” on the “innocuous” medium. That the video’s narrative features a “war” taking place between the triply marginalized—homeless animals and children of color—gives pause. The extreme visual and aural pleasures of the video and live soundtrack are always in relation (and troubled by) the fact of the work’s narrative content: figures (however fashioned by brightly colored clay) doing tremendous harm to one another (however ‘unrealistically’) eventually to be sutured, put ‘back-together’, and convalesced by light-skinned, human nurses with uniformly skinny, big-breasted bodies and puffy multi-colored hair.

In the end perhaps ‘Untitled’ takes most after 60 ‘s and 70’s exploitation cinemas in their various tactical deployments of socio-economic and racial stereotypes, and displays of brute force (however senseless much of ‘Untitled’s’ violence seems opposed to the complexities of much exploitation cinema). Beyond Tom and Jerry et al, ‘Untitled’ specifically recalled for me the Fat Albert cartoons of my youth in their own abject tweakings and telling slant of the children’s cartoon genre post-Blaxploitation and in lieu of what I sensed were Djurberg’s unique problems: how to maintain visual-aural pleasure and social critique in constant, yet dislocated, relation; how, what’s more, to interrogate the innocence of children’s entertainment in relation to adult decisions, effects, results, consequences; how, finally, to embody these problems through the formal involvement of live and non-live elements.

Some Intentions of the Photograph ~ after Lee Friedlander (II)

Lines (like thresholds) | thick
And blocking (something) not
Just the view } { essential the via
Negativa__of (all) things__material

No-other-world can pass-thru
Except_for_shadows/reflections
A phenomenology* for them (I)

Still haven’t figured out the
Rooftop >> how (it) looks so dark
And everything else those fish-
es frozen/stonework << so light.

*and them.

HANEKE (I)

Of mimicry 'I' sings a million helpless rebellions
until 'the end of history' or there is a 'We' to sig

nify all messed-up and bloody we became 'Heal
thy' 'heathens' in a world-battle not even made

bright by quotation or Chopin what music do w
ords approximate that 'We' can not what exper

iences her fingers gently pressing the keys thos
e cuff-dangling hands demonstrating 'the soul'.

L E E F R I E D L A N D E R

Changes come to control the weather clouds all
Angular visions puffy 'ice cream' ones (those!)

Signs of 'literal' reality (not) really being 'Reality'
The frontal depth (of a pole) frustrates one's view

To the (monumental) or-di-nary or is a revel-
ation waiting to happen (and happening, and...)

I Keep Imagining Your Sadness in Quotes

I don't know about you
But I would really like
For you to dispute the thought

Balloon that looms just like
A picture of ocean waves above
My head and wants to say

Everything to you in scare quotes
Like you've heard every-
thing I was going to say before

Or the authorship of my words
Was somehow doubtful or clearly
Attributable to someone other

Than myself I wish you would
Burst my bubble and discretely
Sing the song I couldn't

Sing myself because everything
I do feels false without you even
The simplest things like breathing

Or making a pot of coffee they
Seem substanceless even though
You told me on the phone tonight

No one can make me happy but
Myself that you had given every-
thing up for "art" your other lover

Your friends your city and me
And if you couldn't be sad you'd
Just assume not feel anything at all.

We Are Always In the Midst of Eyes

~ for Jane and Brandon

All we ever wanted it seemed was a certain
Gentleness and care content to reason
Things out or hold the door and be absurd

Sometimes now that we’ve got that I wonder
What place of number multitudes houses
Or eyes look to reflect meshes these leaves

Rustling near in a city pastoral with no other
Object than to ramble every time we meet
Or danced I think of what you will be together.

Never was or will it be about
Love per se but a relation
Forces grant each other
As number obscure dances

With number there was always
A dance party where we were
As leaves also buttress leaves
Separately we spoke of embodied

Waters that won’t run out on us
Or what it makes or who makes it
Otherwise than what we were
Just this *pound of flesh* to be

Doled out by the universe
Truly it is love that replenishes
Overwhelms all other responsibilities
The dailiness of *you as you*

Of *me as me* the fact that we
Danced at all or found the time
For tears we can never retract
Their joy was subtlest.