Friday, March 30, 2007

No Not Nothings


~ after Brenda Iijima's "Rock Facings Many Days"

We are these mirrors to the world fissured birds make us move
Where in sympathetic brain tracts action thought-paths are for firing
Neurons friendlier spring stuttered under the gun again wake
The animal like it should act instead of eyes adjusted to save the Law
From laws justice from our jurisdiction so make caesuras here
Extract plans from I for you inspire spine heart our vertical relation
Conceals movement in motion weeds rapture to no not nothings
Sing of these beams too weeds strewn for virtual v's other wing
Formations substituted as ever the other is with us shuddering.

This is Vicki Hearne's Poem: an Ethology


Someone's got to give a shit about horses
Or develop a better framework
Why can't a framework be made for horses?
Their flesh "rippling" as you say
Who has been inveterately their rider

What golden rings abound in that Open
Ground the animal being coeval
To which ignited birth what Spinoza promised
A socius first for our powers to be so attuned
So as to discover what a body can do
To be for power and to praise

Horses joyful of each element their own
As they gallop they offend no body
No thing do they defeat but a nature
No thing is heir to no air too much
For breath nor silicone exigent to merely be

Giving Back


~ after Théo Angelopoulos

And all that whiteness sheets
We elapse for frames or windows
Open where eyes were not

Encamped burnt to their own
Refuge or flames in wandering

Fly as we like flags to this end

Less nuptial travel is as flame
Afterall to this theme fugal

Keep light occuring one was
Equally to dance not keeping
Time like history so overcast

*

While upon what white
Music leads you back
Blank upon a sea or that

River nearly between
Revolutions refuge lead
You back from the back

Or so close where you were
Called by name nearly
The same insofar as we are

These notes but always an-
Other stream leads us
Back to the flood which shame

Of all to write the disuniting
Under another phrase
Of darkness their bodies

Pursue as if after the gaze
Of fathers more was lost
Than a future music.

*

I also want them flung...

The blank flags of those
People shoreless the sky
Without expression or
Face those white sheets like
Flags suddenly for them-
Selves the any-place-what-
Ever before each wave is
Named by number.

The listener's inner body is illuminated...

The listener's inner body is illuminated, opened: a singer doesn't expose her own throat, she exposes the listener's interior. Her voice enters me, makes me a "me," an interior, by the fact that I have been entered. The singer, through osmosis, passes through the self's porous membrane, and discredits the fiction that bodies are separate, boundaried packages. The singer destroys the division between her body and our own, for her sound enters our system. I am sitting at the Met at Leontyne Price's recital in 1985 and Price's vibrations are *inside my body*, dressing it up with the accoutrements of interiority. Am I listening to Leontyne Price, or am I incorporating her, swallowing her, memorizing her? She becomes part of my brain. And I begin to believe--sheer illusion!-- that she spins out of *my* self, not hers, as Walt Whitman, Ancient-of-Days opera queen, implied when he apostrophized a singer in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking": "O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me, / O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you. . . ."

I follow a singer toward her climax, I will it to happen, and feel myself "made" when she attains her note.
~ from Wayne Koestenbaum's *The Queen's Throat*

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Win ch O n Poli tics


~ after J. Goldman

These invisible hands are made
Visible unpointed to or unworked

To relate our reification in reverse
Is mirror case (portmanteau) to *this*

Inversion an obscurer camera for
Which camera obscura once...

Gordon Matta-Clark: A Taxonomy for Total Process*



Seeing Gordon Matta-Clark’s exhibition at the Whitney recently, Matta-Clark’s body of work seems more than ever a perfect example of a total process turned towards the actualities of social, political, economic and spiritual relation. The scope of this process can be located in Matta-Clark’s documentation of his otherwise ephemeral, “dematerialized” works—works that would exist as pure traces of performance actions, architectural deconstructions and communally decisive “business” adventures were they not so deliberately recorded by various means. Matta-Clark no doubt took his lead for an artwork of total process from Robert Smithson and other "earthwork" artists, whose works he first encountered as a student at Cornell University. In the drawing and film works accompanying the performance of “Tree Dance,” where for days Matta-Clark and others inhabited a tree on the Cornell campus through a series of cots, ladders and nets, a total process projects itself as that which may give presence to ephemeral and “anti-material” or "aproductive" works—works that should otherwise not survive but through hearsay as a trace of historical occurrence erased before the fact of its historical existence.

The following is a taxonomy which may be helpful to initially mapping the various moments in a process supplementing Matta-Clark’s a-productive works. I put it forward towards a larger work on Matta-Clark as a case for what I am calling “total process”.

I. “Original” work: the work of an action, performance, social transaction, or architectural action before they should be erased, more or less entirely, from their physically-bound historicities.

II. Reliquary; Metonymically “present” objects, and secondary orders of objects (photos, films, written description / commentary / discursus):
a. First order reliquary:
1. ex., the hair of “Hair Piece”;
2. ex., the corners from the “Splitting” house, and other parts of structures from “Bingo” and “Office Baroque”;
b. Second order reliquary:
1. The newpapers an audience is allowed to take from “Wallspaper”;

III. Film documents:
a. Those films recording an action or performance; after the fact of the film being “shoot” one notices in all film documents the importance of the editing to inflect the meaning of the action, as in the abrupt/accidental edits of “Fresh Kills,” and the camera work of “Splitting,” which would place itself very much in the action, resting within the splitting of the house as the house is being split: that is, as taking place *with* that action.

IV. Photo-documents:
a. Photo. of an ethnographic significance: “Hair-Piece,” “Reality Properties: Fake Estates,” graffiti works;
b. Anarchitecture: photos of sites of “anarchitecture,” where anarchitecture presents sites of social antagonism thru photo. processes—cropping, contrast, etc.
c. Photos with diagrams: in some photos a diagram drawn on the photo will actually highlight a potential intervention in a site, projecting this potential towards an actual intervention—as in “Arc de Triomph For Workers”…
d. Photo as mimetic: as in the case of the photos of pipes along the wall and ceiling of the Holly Solomon Gallery (1974);
e. Photo-collage: where the collage attempts to express a spatial-aural property of actual interventions (as in “Splitting” photo-docs.); or to “deconstruct” a content (as in “Reality Properties” and grafitti works—the horizontal photo.-collages producing disjuncture between each single photo in the series: a form for social antinomy/rupture?).

V. Drawings:
a. Drawings as sketches towards a performance or intervention;
b. Sculptural drawings: where cuts are made in a stack of paper projecting a cut in an (an)architectural object;
c. Drawings made diagramatically on photos: as in “Arc de Triomph”;

VI. Written documents:
a. Legal/business: documentation for “Food” restaurant—including menus, recipes, receipts, in addition to film footage of the restaurant atmosphere, staff, and clientele;
b. Psuedo-ethnographic: the documentation for “Hair,” which ironically reflects anthropological systems of representation: numbering zones of hair; graphing the human head phrenologically; recording “before,” “after” and in between and, as such, subjecting the human-object (—only subject/object turns back upen itself, becoming chiasmic, as Matta-Clark is both subject and object for himself, artist and art-work…)

VII. Correspondence:
a. “Photo-Fry” to Robert Smithson: product of “alchemical” processes;
b. Letters, drawings, and photos to projected “anarchitecturalists,” others…

*composed 3/10/07-present

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

If these tears are us. . .


~ for Daniel Berrigan & Douglas A. Martin

"... and drew my eyes a space
that had seen God, back to His human face?"
~ from Daniel Berrigan's "Lazarus"

"... Description is
Composed of a sight indifferent to the eye."
~ from Wallace Stevens' "Description Without Place"

If these tears are us no longer
Seeing before or after any "God"
So-called the socius ONE otherwise
Might witness that blood bath this
Distance from "us" the undead thus

Occlude no place can't imagine its
Description like a pen before
A draft whose skies should disappear
For movement to occur "for future
Generations" be of our beginning

In ink beyond what sounds string
Between whose souls strummed
To their adjacencies which can't
Hear none sung --that portal tracing
What blood back around the air.

To Tim Peterson


I think I want to turn the body into a voice...

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

America is Hard to Find

"A nightmare is its own legitimation."

...

"Political man is a synonym for believing man."

~ Daniel Berrigan from *America is Hard to Find*