Review of Heather Kravas's The Green Surround (@ The Brooklyn Rail)

here

Throughout the performance we witness the dancers both consenting to these regimes and resisting their situation in the performance itself. As we take our seats they face us, standing in a line across one side wall, as in one of Vanessa Beecroft’s tableaux vivants. They are wearing white smocks, kerchiefs, black bobby socks, and mirrored, panoptical sunglasses, which shield their eyes. The bright white lights that fill the black box theater only make it more difficult to tell where the dancers are looking. Counting occurs throughout the evening, starting with the nine women standing together, ticking off on their fingers while they repeat the words “boot lick.” The submission theme continues, and it is often unclear whether the viewers are dominating or being dominated, the boot lickers or the ones having their boots licked. “Boot lick boot lick boot lick” glides into “lick boot lick boot lick boot” echoing the ambiguity of subject and object.

Rights of Participation (II)

If this is called inclusion
Count me out

Love absorbs an order of the cops

Patrolling their reward
In paradise purportedly

Where a billion affects have failed
There is a feeling

Of freshness for you in me

Absorbed like a dream of losing you
Or being left behind

In the messaging of our waking dream
Affection absorbs a structure

Invisibly touched, patrolling its reward

If hell is friendship where a billion
“likes” have failed

What failed regard won’t make us lose?

Coerced purposively in a perceived
Paradise to the point that I could feel

Anything, this body, I could feel,
Me in you

Absorbed like a dream of losing you
Lost in a messaging I am senseless to

The sun, like a blind-spot in reflexivity
If this is exclusion count me in

Call me your remnant patrolling
Its little reward

Redemption of the world called us
With the words struck through.

5 Questions with Not An Alternative (@ Art21)

Check out my latest feature at Art21 blog, on the Wllmsbrg-based art group Not An Alternative:

Capitalism is constructed to instrumentalize any form of engagement. How can we refuse this? Can we participate productively within a context where it’s either vote, engage, participate, or you’re apathetic. Can we vote no? We were inspired to create an organization that experimented with a form of engagement that was aimed at confronting the limits of liberal capitalism.
--Not An Alternative

Poetry Dinner (@ Four & Twenty Blackbirds)

It is a few weeks off, but the lovely people of Four & Twenty Blackbirds and Movement Research are putting together a dinner party/poetry reading for Sunday, June 5th.

Readers include Robert Kocik, Eva Yaa Asentawaa, Willa Carroll, and myself.

RSVP here

SPT's Reliquarium

This Saturday at Small Press Traffic you can bid on small bottles in which will be contained the remains of contemporary poets...

If the end of the world is coming…Celebrate it with Small Press Traffic
at
THE RELIQUARIUM
an apocalyptic fundraiser

Join us for the end of days (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_end_times_prediction) at this end of season bash featuring:

+reenactments from scenes of the end of the world
+the co-generation of a literary time capsule
+an auction of poetic reliquaries
+an end times dance party
+drinks and MORE!

May 21, 2011 at 7:30pm
California College of the Arts Graduate Writing Studio
195 deHaro at 15th
San Francisco, California

entrance a mere $10!

with reliquaries by:
Steve Benson
Charles Bernstein
Rachel Blau duPlessis
Julian Brolaski
Enrique Chagoya
Thom Donovan
Elaine Equi
Coco and Rob Fitterman and Kim Rosenfield
Kathleen Fraser
Bob Gluck
Judith Goldman
Tracy Grinnell
Nina Katchadorian
Kevin Killian
Joanne Kyger
Nathanial Mackey
Harryette Mullen
Eileen Myles
Sina Queyras
Ariana Reines
Larry Rinder
Camille Roy
Fiona Templeton
Edwin Torres
Amy Trachtenberg
Kaia Sand
Tyrone Williams
and MORE!

Can’t make it to the event? You can still bid on poet reliquaries online! Send in your absentee bids to smallpresstraffic@gmail.com

SHIFTER 17 : RE___ING launch (at Printed Matter)

SHIFTER 17 : RE___ING

Book Launch at Printed Matter

Saturday May 14, 5-7pm

195 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10011

Editors:
Sreshta Rit Premnath & Matthew Metzger

Contributors:
Thom Donovan, Tamar Guimarães, Patricia Esquivias, Susan Jahoda, Eric Wenzel, Patrizio Di Massimo, Alicja Kwade, Adrian Williams, Mike Schuh, Lisa Zaher, Zachary Cahill, Arnold Kemp, Jean Marc Superville Sovak, Corinna Kirsch

Please join us this Saturday for the launch of Shifter Magazine's 17th issue, Re___ing at Printed Matter. We will also have back issues of Shifter on hand for purchase.

Re___ing, co-edited by Sreshta Rit Premnath and Matthew Metzger exists both within Rethinking Marxism's new issue (Vol. 23 No. 2)* as well as a new issue of Shifter. This folding of one identity into another, a re within a Re and the resultant destabilization of both frames of reference, is precisely the nature of Re___ing.

While re proliferates additives, doubles and fissures within the sphere of cultural production, it also implies multiple temporalities - to renew and to rewind. ing on the other hand, asserts the present continuous, it is always and already.

Paradoxically, re is also to reify. When you call me and I respond I am born. When I call you and there is no response I feel the threat of erasure. I therefore call with the strongest faith that you will respond and when you do we cement our relation. The abstract becomes concrete.

At what point does the attempt to exonerate representation from its intrusive counterpart, "the aura", become a concern around appearances rather than labor? As with Borges's Pierre Menard who rewrites Don Quixote word for word only to produce an anachronistic and inadequate adaptation, perhaps pure repetition is impossible. Therefore, although re attempts to proliferate multiples, the insistent ing, always in the present disturbs this veracity.

Here, contributors engage a variety of gestures tied to reproducing by deploying palimpsestic archives culled from historical documents, proposing morphological relations as historic fact and ultimately forcing procedures of mimicry, translation and interpretation to their limit. This limit or threshold in many instances is defined here through the body and its traces, actions, delusions and dreams which may often remain utterly irreproducible.

Re___ing is currently available for free download, online purchase as well as at Printed Matter, NYC and Motto, Berlin.

Eleni Stecopoulos: on "Somatics"

For my last post at Harriet for the month, I gave Eleni Stecopoulos a questionnaire about "somatics," which she responded to most generously. So generously in fact that only her first response appears at Harriet. The others will hopefully be appearing at Wild Horses Of Fire soon.

It’s all psychosomatic. And somatopsychic. I don’t think you really escape your formation; you can only become aware of it and move towards some other understanding/practice that is remedial. I remember this New York Times article which opens with an anecdote about a medical conference on the ways those in “developing” countries somatize their depression in stomachaches, dizziness, and other mysterious physical symptoms: “Toward the end of the meeting, a doctor from India stood to speak. ‘Distinguished colleagues,’ he said, ‘have you ever considered the possibility that it is not that we in the third world somaticize depression, but rather that you in the developed world psychologize it?’” (“Mending of Hearts and Minds,” NYT 5/21/02). In the West the body is othered, but also in the sense of being displaced onto “the other,” whose labor disburdens or delivers the colonizer of his body. (And at the same time this other gets mystified as a healer who can resurrect the absent body. Think of Artaud among the Tarahumaras.)

Arthur Echo Echo (@Harriet)

Here is a little write-up I did about my "incubation" session at the Movement, Somatics, and Writing symposium this past February, featuring somatic exercises by Petra Kuppers, Rob Halpern, and Bhanu Kapil:

What I wanted to do through the workshop were two things: prompt writing through a series of exercises which could enable participants to write through their distraction—distracted modes of perception, of focus, but also things one does involuntarily, when the body is indisposed with a specific set of tasks.

Rob Halpern: on "Somatics" (@ Harriet)

For my last few posts at Harriet during National Poetry Month, I have asked a few different poets to respond to the term "somatics" with regards to their work. Here is Rob Halpern discussing the term.

Maybe the passively voiced question, “what is being done to bodies?”—together with our potential resistance to that—helps get at what you are referring to, Thom, as the “biopolitical” in my work? And I’m thinking here not only of incarcerated bodies, but our own bodies as well. What is being done to them? It’s a question that complements the question What is to be done? For me, to think this question requires a shift from an emphasis on an over-valued notion of agency toward a very different idea I call patiency, which has less to do with the body as the sovereign scene of its own actions, and rather with the body as scene of disabused sovereignty. Patiency refers to the suspension of our proprietary relations to our and others’ bodies and life processes, the recognition, and perhaps even the affirmation, of the corpus as open, disarmed, and vulnerable. I want to find in this figure of the patient not only passivity and submission, but the latent material—affective, erotic, and social—for movement just waiting to be aroused by uncoded sound and unanticipated touch. Maybe this is “somatics”?

To let it out

--after Not An Alternative

To let it out so that [______]
Can’t use, blank that
Won’t produce, that for now
Won’t be a subject

Negates their using our
Emotions up in a public way,
Blocked by virgin forests
Participation reigns

Blocked by reified relation
Blocked by these tissues
The way this tear in the eye
Becomes commodity

An intellectual thing blocked
By the things we would share
So that [______] can’t use
So we communicate today

What images won’t remain
And names negated
By creative potential
Blocked by consuming the social

All that doesn’t remain
Will be let out,
The tear in your eye when it
Won't become.

Reenactment

A blank expanse we reenact
Because there is no beginning
To this rememory, no origin of
Your crying, how any one continues

Subtracted from this feeling
Of joy another monument, runs through
Our breath like green, like a lung hasn't
Taught / any / one / to / breath / yet

Incites horizons, green of what
Hasn't been said, punctures the world
One world-sized ear or lung
Undifferentiated with witness

Creamy expanses written before
A mark was, written before
A mark was the world.

School Nite with the Commons Choir (@ Festival of Ideas)

MAY 7th & 8th
COMMONING MEETING,
a FILM and a performance by THE COMMONS CHOIR

This COMMONING event is part of SCHOOL NITE: a weekend long iteration of the Future City, inspiring reforms through art exhibition, lecture, performance and/or installation. Held in conjunction with the New Museum's Festival of Ideas for a New City.

LOCATION: School Nite will inhabit five stories of the OLD SCHOOL at 233 Mott Street

SCHEDULE:

MAY 7th
10:0PM in the Courtyard of the Old School with 30 performers:

The Commons Choir (conceived and directed by choreographer Daria Fain and poet architect Robert Kocik) will perform RE-ENGLISH. By means of choreoprosodia (the fusion of movement and prosody) the Commons Choir will draw upon hormonal hymns, movement-amulets, phonic garlands, spells, the optative mood, poetry and a reparative narrative to re-tune and de-delude our language. Is English an inherently commercial, mercenary, duplicitous tongue or is that just human nature? The premise of RE-ENGLISH is that today's ecological, economic, security and equity crises are direct consequents of the sonic and connotative qualities of superpower english.

Performed by:

Hadar Ahuvia, Christina Andrea, Lorene Bouboushian, Corinne Cappelletti, Jessica Cerullo, Chun-Chen Chang, Levi Gonzalez, Mare Hieronimus, Hazuki Homma, Akira Ito, Masumi Kishimota, Athena Kokoronis, Eliza Ladd, Martin Lanz, Melanie Maar, Douglas Manson, Mina Nishimura, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Eva Perrotta, Peter Sciscioli, Larissa Sheldon, Kensaku Shinohara, Samita Sinha, Hadley Smith, Jhon Sowinski, Despina Stamos, Julia Ulehla, Larissa Velez, Ami Yamazaki and Kota Yamazaki

MAY 8th
2:00PM

COMMONING MEETING with a talks by Robert Kocik and Thom Donovan. The focus of the meeting will be money as commons: what to do about the current income disparity crisis. Dozens of countries in the Global South have begun programs that simply give money to the poor, often unconditionally. Though the emphasis in the U.S. is on work-not-welfare and privatization, social programs yet account for over 40% of federal spending. (Clearly income inequality increases social spending.) How can we re-structure income and growth so that money is not inequitably distributed to begin with? This meeting is a call for discussion, proposals, actions toward a broader, more munificent prosperity.

4:00PM

Common: Filmic interpretations of "commoning" directed by Iki Nakagawa with contributions from Caterina Verde, Douglas Manson, Mike Taylor, David Thompson, Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik.

The Phoneme Choir at St. Mark’s Poetry Project (@ Harriet)

Last Friday night I attended Daria Fain's and Robert Kocik's Phoneme Choir at St. Mark's Church. Here is a link to a write-up I did about it, including extensive video footage of the performance.

Something which strikes me seeing the Phoneme Choir perform together for the fourth time, is to what extent the group has perfected their blend of movement/dance, song, and gestural/proto-semantic poetry (what Kocik refers to as “prosody,” “phonemics,” and “choreoprosodia”). At certain moments the work’s ‘development’ would seem entirely dependent on movement and choreography; or, on the other hand, some combination of recitation and song. Yet the whole piece culminates at a few different moments in a kind of controlled frenzy in which moving bodies, voices/sound, and word (loosely defined) would seem to become interdependent–coextensive, coeval. In the tradition of the “total work,” Fain’s and Kocik’s somatic opera–one I would argue approaches the scale and virtuosity of a Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, or Robert Ashley–seems something both old and new for poetry. A return to things Greek–a Dionysian atmosphere redolent with 60s theatre and intermedia performance. But also a new way to conceive of poetry through modes of collaboration and group process in the interest of mutual care, healing, and a radical re/channeling of both proprioceptive and proto-linguistic energies. For a taste of Fain’s and Kocik’s choir, I encourage you to take a look at the video footage compiled (below) from the performance at St. Mark’s Church for the Poetry Project’s Friday Night Series (currently hosted by Brett Price).

Their reigns, my reigns, our reigns

When art does what they say
When art obligated them to move
When art fulfills this sense of movement
Into consent--is this a commons?

When art is a failure to move within the commons?
When the freedom drive idles?


Blamed by my sociality
This gift of war flames
Blamed by my locality
Three or four husband me

Like neighbors there is no
Connection between
Only proximity, only sounds
They make inside my insides

The scores of one displaced
Their movement there is a
Sound, of movement no one
Hears without a war

From which harsh gifts come,
That we were these gifts,
Their sharing and what
Can never be shared.


A deadened social potential
State name/shore up
The affect of “we have given up”
We are the robots and
No, no one will be given back.


We who play at waste

If at the end of this social potential, this potential of bodies in common and their common places in the language, there remained a rainbow--both covenant and broken promise.

Nothing will have been fair blow after blow. No awaiting holler inter(in)animating the time it took travel to undo. The upholstered air around our breath. The space left-over singing anything but me.

My voice like an area punctured by a wall of beats. What you can still feel as you swipe your card through the narrow slot. Feeling for the longed for beginning of feeling again. To create something other than “reaching your creative potential.”


For Dodie

No one comes back
But every one comes

Love cut-up again
Like a fantasy we project

In these states the asshole
The mouth we shared

Lips know their way only
Not where they’re going

The cunt like a fantasy
No thing returns as it was

All that was otherwise
Before our organs were.

Madeline Gobeil: Did you start writing to escape from solitude?

Jean Genet: No, because I wrote things that made me even more solitary. No, I don’t know why I started writing. What the deeper reasons are, I don’t know. Perhaps this: the first time I became conscious of the power of writing was when I sent a postcard to a German friend who was in America at the time. I didn’t really know what to say to her. The side I was supposed to write on had a sort of white, grainy texture, a little like snow, and it was this surface that led me to speak of a snow that was of course absent from prison, to speak of Christmas, and instead of just writing anything, I wrote to her about the quality of that thick paper. That was it, the trigger that allowed me to write. This was no doubt not the real motive, but it’s what gave me the first taste of freedom.

from Somatic Poetics (@Harriet)

Here

The poem has not yet determined what a body can do. Somatics? The poem sites the body’s (lack of) determination within a socio-political field. In this way is it both constructive and deconstructive. Feeling (affectivity) can over/indetermine any sense of the thing (poem) having been constructed or it having been taken apart. Lyric (what has traditionally been called lyric) is the typical mode of this over- or in- determination. Composition demonstrates (it exposits) but it is also a site where states of feeling, awarenesses, ‘being,’ and consciousness are undergone. Like a patient (or Orpheus) goes under. Eleni Stecopoulos: “Orpheus had to climb down the base of his skull because the message wasn’t getting through.”

5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice) with Tania Bruguera (@ Art21)

Check out the feature I did at Art21 blog with Cuban artist, Tania Bruguera, practitioner of Behavior Art and Useful Art and organizer of Immigrant Movement International, based in Corono, Queens:

While I practice that expanded version of aesthetics, my work is about the role of the artist in society and the possibilities for art to be directly involved in social endeavors. In order to get involved in social issues, it is important to truly commit to real action. The challenge is that artists are very often confronted with the institutional wall. So the work gets caught between a sort of hyperrealism and representationalism that affects the expectation of the artist, but also the ways in which the institutions are ready, or in some cases not, to deal with this kind of work. It is the old dilemma of responsibility in art and what the people in the institutions think the artist should be doing. Unavoidably the work starts dialoguing from an institutional critique standpoint. A new institutional critique where we do not wait for the institution, but we become “institution builders.” Sometimes within the inside of an already existing institution; other times ignoring them, so they have to catch up. It is positive institutional critique.
--Tania Bruguera

My Remains... (@Harriet)

Here's a little statement I wrote for Harriet, on the "emergence of the subject" through poetry and art:

After the armor has been forcibly removed by an adversary, after one has become vulnerable to attack — this is the moment when the “real” subject would seem to emerge, or at least a subject with more reality than it previously had. This subject is both more collective and more singular paradoxically, for it having given itself to a relationship of combativeness. What remains is something between what it was before that having become vulnerable to attack, and the armor scattered around it afterwards. Perhaps the art object or poem is the residue or remains of this event? This is at least something my book-to-come is attempting to explore.

If there were some rainbow at the end of a truncheon. Coerce the crowd and call it art. Call it organization, set the museum adrift. A horse shits on the shiny floor. The voice of the police forms into a voice again. Visual quotations of that commons we’ve never been. If there were some rainbow in those words "crowd control." The voice of the father like a reign machine. In the 30s in the 60s in the 90s. Before we could represent as art the things that were being done to us/that we participated in/that we were doing. Left over from some rainbow, the blood of some truncheon, some whip.

Commons questionnaire (@ Harriet)

Here is a little questionnaire I generated for a collaboration I am working on with Rob Halpern, as yet untitled. On commons/commoning...