Posts (page 2)
June first marked the official kickoff to Elsewhere's Artist Conversation Series, an 18 week series of artist talks, performances, screenings, etc. Sarah Witt gave her live performance to a crowd of about 25 people which was comfortably enjoying the event. It was quite a success I thought, the whole evening. The work became a fantastic exploration of failure, a design or opportunity to fail based around the artistic engagement with a technical process. In some sense the work explored the two sides of praxis/practice, the technical and scientific engagement with knowledge and human capacity versus the artistic presence and exploration of such ideas in and of themselves outside the production possibilities of human capacity. Of course ask and you shall receive, and while flying was never accomplished, failure was in an electromagnetic melt down that caused digitized quirks in the video screening when the camera was placed too close to the tv. I found myself at the center of the mess, not sure whether to keep showing the video or cut it off, and after a desperate back stage plea I cut off the video and entered Witt, flustered and pissed off, angry, humiliated, saddened. I forget what exactly she said to the audience but it was heartfelt and hysterical. The audience laughed with her as she expressed her humiliation and pain, anger, and frustration at the inability to show her work. Backstage she cursed and was mortified, trapped in the Aqwherium tent fuddling with a costume change that was necessitated by the sudden technical failure. After fielding a few questions about the work the situation was being worked out and the video was shown, making the whole thing look like an intended piece.
We were discussing that night what it is to set oneself up for the opportunity of failure and Sarah's relation with the space and the multiple personalities that she was exploring. One of the thoughts that I came to during the discussion was the notion of the immensity of visual information and possible knowledge that is immediately present in the space. The overwhelming nature of information and possibilities as they present themselves to artists is daunting for sure, and the process of acclimation, of overcoming that which one intends with the experience as it arises and provides itself for artistic insight offers an opportunity to look beside oneself at their own production and process tasks and see how it is that they make decisions. Choice shares a stage at all times with failure. As we limit whatever it is we have to chose from the act of determination directs the flow of ideas away from multiple possibles as they arrange themselves outside the realm of distinction. Collection then becomes a primary objective, the opening up and presenting to oneself multiple possibles. One question from the audience was to what extent the flying character and the Witt character were related, and Sarah said plainly that they were not, that she had grown fascinated over her time here with multiple choices and options and had the desire to merge and present even though they sprang from different sources. This conjunction was admirable and thorough, conjoining concepts and approaches, multiple characters and evidences for art making, object collecting, etc.
Failure exposes an end outside of design, an end that is unexpected or unintended, a collapse of hypothesis, a disproof. The failure of the performance, the moment in which the work collapsed brought a sudden and unexpected end, a sharing of another character, that is, Sarah herself, but within a context that when revealed through the successful showing made the unintended interruption appear to be part of the show. We met three characters and not just two as one supposed, and so instead the technical failure forced an artistic opening up, a true disclosure that was necessary to complete the circular structure. The girl "sarah" freaking out in the video about her own silliness was made public in the costume of Washing with Witt in relation to a failure of the overall performance. In the end all worked out and my suggestion for Sarah's next impossible feat was to pursue x-ray vision.
Perhaps this performance will expose the nothingness and truth beneath her skin, as that which is at all moments a character of her self, and an identity that makes up the audience upon which she feeds.
--thank you Sarah.
It has just been recalled to me that i must speak about the visibility of insides and outsides. If i pass a threshold and then in glancing forward notice the terrain is different and from this judgment of a memory (joined with a perception or premonition) come to a conclusion, or rather a reaction, then I might begin to notice the differences between my present stance and that of the memory that I hold with myself. Thus I become divided in the sense that I don't recognize the currency of my own self, that is I've exchanged with what I was by placing it in the comparison of what I am, which fades away as fast as I can count. Oh the time does pass when you stair up at the ceiling. The steps seem to come from the ceiling more often than not, but this is in fact only the comparison of the present or apparent with the remembered or recalled. How could that which I see, colored by how I project myself from the past, not constitute the more brightly colored pair (remembrance and the self).
Does it seem viable to detach oneself from the visible which is never manifest solely in the present. To detach the self from the perception of the present still leaves the invisible which I am by fact of not being solely the present presence and being instead the partially visible which is reflection upon or reflection of the past. If the partially visible is reflection, that is, the recollection of ones self as part of a situation that has passed, and that partially visible is the past part of the present, then how can we move forwardly into the invisible? The invisible is akin to an unconscious but at that point the sign and signifiers have been set afloat and recollection is already involved. One is already looking for the invisible at this point and thus it has pointers whether or not they hold any relevance or accuracy.
What stands before me this day? I need to finish sorting the press office, however I am severely limited by the amount of things and the amount of space. For example I have a large sewed sign and a underwriter diploma, each in a frame, that must be placed around somewhere. I wonder if its time for the press office to go up with the Times. I should look into this. I could take wire and run from it a sort of clamp that will hook to the top and bottom of a magazine with paper clip.
There is always an intercepting line that coincides with two parallel lines and feeds from one over the other until the moment comes that the interception is to take a place, the position determined by the indeterminate aspects along the vector, an uncertainty manifest in the condition or the situation of the interception. "There," the position vis a vis the lines become apparent in the motion of a convergence. Do we place a stake of remembrance and allow the narrative of a history represent itself as it rolls forward or allow the moment to pass into its possibles and continue to roll forward without mark, to become another intercepting line of alternative parallel dimensions?
Today I was forwarded a letter that my uncle sent to his Toyota dealer as a political protest. I have very little to comment on here or judgment to make. But I would like to reprint the letter here alongside a series of scans that I made of an old G.I. Joe advertisement I found in Elsewhere. If you see no relationship between the letter and the pictures thats fine, there really isn't one except that they both deal with commercialism and American idealism.
Dear Mr. Rice:
I had my oil changed yesterday and noticed the Citgo Label that is used as a reminder of my next oil change. This disturbed me very much and is the basis for this email. I would like to first of all tell you that I have personally purchased two Toyotas from your dealership and referred my daughter who has purchased two Toyotas from your wonderful salesman Tom Sawyer. I have been very satisfied with the cars and with the service that is provided until I saw the Citgo label. It is my understanding that Citgo is the name used to sell Venezuelan oil in the US. Venezuela is a country run by the Dictator Hugo Chavez. Recently he appeared before the UN and made very childish and unprofessional comments and gestures about President Bush. Representative Charlie Rangel, D-NY was even critical of this Dictator coming to the US and saying the things that he said and has repeated on numerous occasions. This Dictator has become friends with the President of Iran, Ahmadinejad who has threatened to wipe Israel off the face of this earth. Another one of his friends is the Cuban Dictator Castro. These three men are evil people and desire the destruction of our Government. I feel strongly that companies and individual citizens should not conduct business with our enemies.
I am writing to you in the hopes that you will change your supplier away from Citgo. I personally will not have my oil changed at your dealership and will definitely consider not buying any more vehicles from your company as long as you purchase oil from the Dictator Chavez.
I am sending this email in good faith in the hopes that you were not aware of the facts that I have presented to you. I would appreciate the courtesy of a response as soon as possible. Thank you
Sidney Gray
Car barked at me, she frowned and followed up with a good gulp. The sickly snail curled helplessly around her palm. "Squissh" said sickly, and that was all he knew to say. The after effect was less shocking than everyone had thought and so she shifted her hand restlessly as if holding a cognac. Sickly began to snooze and laid his soft head against the curl of her finger joints. "Sickly," she declared, plopping herself on the curb and closing her eyes for a moment of exhausted recollection. "I can't help but feel that the shadows are closing in around me and that the weekend fell right into the week, and I never see that happening but his time I did see it and I don't know what that means." She closed her eyes again and recollected once more. Sickly yawned and nestled his slimy head against her skin. "Sickly, we are going to do something today. Not like yesterday when we did something about the day before, or last week when we failed to do something the day after that, but today we'll do something about tomorrow and tomorrow's tomorrow and we'll do something about all the todays that ever were." She didn't stand up. Today's action needed none of the bravado that most actions need when they declare their intentions with very excitable adverbs. Today's action happened calmly, it refused even the hint of a threshold or passage, a change in terrain or a differentiation in causeways. Today's action would be the most imperceptable it could be and that way it was sure to last well into tomorrow's yesterday without being detected. "Detection is the worst thing for an action because then it becomes reaction and then I find myself no longer in today, let alone tomorrow, and I have to deal with yesterday over and over." She smiled at sickly who was always peaceful upon her palm. She gently stroked the back of his shell and breathed onto his antenna causing them to retract and bristle sweetly. "Squissh" said sickly, streching his neck and slowly moving to the tip of her finger where he looked over the edge and down at the pavement several feet below. "Squish...Squish...squish." She laughed and set off to the toy shop where Edger was working in the stock room...
The optometrist awoke with his ears tacky with wax. The night before, just as he was contemplating the line between wakefulness and dawn, and before the forgotten moment that tallied all his day's activities and lulled him to sleep, he had lodged in his mind an unexceptional nugget of remembrance. There, like a lump of coal, the fascinating object of memory proclaimed its existence in the form of a chart. In his lengthy years as a professional he had held his eye to many an other and stared into their sinewy depths at optical illusions and detach tissues and retinas, but this thought was drawn in bright overlays and transparency sheets and arrows and words. Everything he saw was entirely text book, a bit glanced at in the first year of his residency at the Saint Mont Claire Hospital in Halifax. But the words, tiny and angular, pointing with abbreviated correspondence to the picture, were unlike what he had ever seen before though they arrived from a not so forgotten, yet never so easily remembered space in his mind. First he thought he was reading a foreign language, a chart drawn from a medical encyclopedia he had picked up in a flee market in Portugal. But as e looked closer he discovered the words were in fact made of tiny pictures, each a small depiction of the thing itself to which it was signifying. Retina spelled out in tiny diagrams of eyes, ocular film, little wisps of lines each showing a variation of some degenerative disorder. In his memory before his mind he turned the words on their sides, the little diagrams retaining their form as the meanings their congregation displayed passing into an even lesser known gibberish. The optometrist shook this vision from himself just as a linear lash of wind took his curtain and curled it into a wound knot beside the bed frame.
He rose from bed, first his first foot hit the floor then his second. He reached for his glasses and found them upon the bedside table where he had left them, just to the right of the magazine that had slipped from beneath the lamp where it had been propped. By now the sun was fully fresh and the cool air had begun to compete with the warm air rising to fill the atmosphere. He rubbed his eyes. Climbing from bed the toothbrush by the water basin hastened his morning ritual. After dressing and eating he made his way down the four flights of stairs counting the third railing as he slid his arm along its frame. He made his way to the office, just about noon, and there he arrived in time for his first appointment.
The optometrist shared a wall and a filing cabinet with a podiatrist. The arrangement, struck many years ago, was by now quite unnecessary. Each man had since developed quite an extensive profession with many more clients than that first four draw filling cabinet could possibly suit, and yet despite the wings that had been added to the building, the multiple cabinets and draws, rooms for surgery and examination, the filing cabinets had remained where they were, placed equidistant to the main receptionist desk of each other's office, on the optometrists wall, just three meters from the door that behind which was another door, behind which was the podiatrists office. Both doors were kept locked after business hours, and the first person to arrive in the morning would open their side and await the second person to arrive to open his side. Directly opposite the filing cabinet, on the podiatrists side of the wall, was a small glass cabinet with a collection of dentures and fossilized teeth, a museum like display with shiny brass tags explaining the prehistorical origins of each specimen.
LUUUUUCCCCCeeeeeeNdaaaaaaa!
She just rolled by with the xylophone recorder, capturing corners of the space as she moves about its frame. Her work is quite good up on the third floor and on the stair case heading there. There is something about the scale of a room and the effect of the linoleum's colors as they rises to meet one's eyes that feels a bit out of line as it were, out of touch? Hovering above the work the viewer is displaced by a piece that is best viewed through one's knees and the balls of one's feet. The careful observer is not the one who sees everything but whose feet avoid crushing small communities, farmlands, and rivers easily diverted by the viewing force. I think what strikes me the most is that once you enter the proper scale there are multiple paths by which to re-apply one's eyes to the piece. The eyes come second in this work as a factor of a scale determined by the movement required in the room. My first journey to the room I took, perhaps, the most obvious path, following the mirrors from spot to spot, bent down spying where the next sent me around the corners looking for the reflective lights of a room that was not present.
__HISTORIES ARE THOSE THINGS ALWAYS PRESENT AND ALWAYS ABSENT FROM THE FUTURE___
There is a horse shoe over the door of Lucinda's room. It is said that my mother slept in that room when she was young and that David, my uncle, was there in a crib. My mother remembers blue swans on the wallpaper. there are no swans, but there are blue bouquets that peel off like brittle candy wrappers. A horse shoe is quite a magnificient thing to believe in--a superstition about fortune symbolized in an object and shape, a tool and an outline, both mystical and practical, foreign and utterly functional, with an undeniable material weight. I also noticed that one of the condolence cards in Joe's in-box has a horse shoe on it. Steph has a horse shoe on her desk, I have one on mine. There is one over the door of 606 and now one over the door of Lucienda's room.
___RECENT STORIES LIVE IN LEMINAL SPACES WHILE MAKING BRIDGES TO HISTORY__
This is now the second time i have lost my writing, third perhaps. I really don't know that I can overcome this FACT to re-repeat what I was trying to say. Instead I'll turn to the question of F.S. whose Course on General Linguistics has been of recent concern. The development of an entire post structural genera based upon a recorded lecture taught by a man who was uninterested in teaching his topic and yet simultaniously introduced the primary division between the sign and meaning. Was this move, or rather is deconstruction and most of structuralism/post-structuralism a religious action wanting to divide this move from the cartisian cogito that tries to usurp it. We find subject/objects stemming from either side of the break. In the move of the sign it becomes a object of fixation for the subject who turning inward on the back of association locates the self. Conversely, the subject, faced with the language name and finding its meaning arbitrary seeks for a broader subject to construct the space surrounding the language game. Either way it seems we arive in a cartisian space. But must thinking necessarily and essentially prove that I am or relate myself to the space of thought. Clearly the movement of body divorced from vision offers some manner of thought without name. Feeling one's way through space and the intuition of there not being someone behind us is the apparition of a sense preceeding thought. But still the construction is built in the shadow of the self. I LIKED MY PREVIOUS POST MORE. SORRY FOLKS, THIRD TIME IS NOT A CHARM.
A visitor just came into the shop and was surprised by Ross practicing in a life vest in the back of 608. There is something about this experience and about my attitude toward it as if to say we revert the extraordinary to normal or perhaps move the ordinary into the realm of the extra and exceptional. That which is without consequence and on the edge of the unmentionable within our context is entirely interventionist, absurdist, and as he remarked, something of an LSD trip. Yet I think nothing of it other than the happenstance of Ross' having found a life jacket and, despite the heat, put it on. I think what is striking to the visitor is that none of the performative staging is in place, that is the experience of the extraordinary is being come upon by accident as if to poke back stage of a circus but without the promise of an end or effect of the performance itself. Ross is practicing, the visitor knew enough to know that what he heard was not a performance caliber. Instead he was witnessing an event clearly marked as the pre-show and a performance at once, and unbeknownst to me so that the report was not perhaps startling but rather necessitating a certain rational expression. This is one of the objectives of an art theory or philosophy, simultaniously making the extra-ordinary inconsequential as the effort of rational expression, and at the same time making it extraordinary in the use of a calculus that seems to exceed what is known by what is seen. The unraveling of a magic trick that is nothing more than a series of conditions properly engaged.
i have recently been mulling over the notion of the inconsequential. I think the word itself has a fascinating face, as it suggests a certain cause and effect that is not exactly reversed but superseded by a lack of importance that carries away, usurps, displaces the causal attitude by the mere unmentionable or anti-value. What is the other side of in-consequentiality other than a cause for which there is a consequence preceding the effect? Something like a splinter of wood that remains largely unnoticed except that it lodges itself within the machines and parries with their calibrated perfection upon the surface of a board, forming a wavy and fractured fascade from a minuscule element.
At Elsewhere the in-consequentiality of everyday life, practice, art making, kitsch, etc. is caught up in a quite apparent context that drives a certain performativity in the face of everyday tasks. This somehow does not quite get at the point, a point that is the very rise and fall of social behavior, which as a property of exchange functions simultaniously on an imaginary and real plane. In the artistic paradigm compiling these dual systems, the real being is very much the in-consequentiality of the space of creation and the imaginary being the practice implemented within that space as it finds a particular element of force, prop, energy, object, something that transforms a perception of in-consequentiality into significance. We ride these tides of idea presentation as if in the presence of a switch of fate that turns on or off multiple paths of identity, dualisms we store to reference "who we are" as the possibilities of our life. Yet these dualities are all derived from a symbolic plane that only exists in a system in which everything as anything becomes massively generalized like an example standing in for a set and a singular being.
Yet what a thrill every moment in a totally inconsequential existence seems to be when we face it with a certain relation toward the possible usurpation of the consequence, or rather the usurpation of the effect that is left to spook cause like an out of touch ghost left over from a much more industrial and romantic era.
Mind, you, I do not mean to suggest that life is entirely inconsequential or that our actions are entirely inconsequential. I am only speaking of those particular symbolic symptoms that resonate like pop corn popping in a pop-modern machine, little wheels that keep turning multiple micro systems, which fit together into interlocking macro-machine that may or may not respond to any cause that we could possibly assign to them, whether science, nature or culture. That is to say, in this recent debate of Global Warming, the conservatives are probably right in calling carbon levels a red herring. Whether or not carbon is a problem, there is an intuitive fear that we are not good creatures for our earth, and thus we find an industrial scape goat to blame for the ills of our sloppy social needs. The attack from the left is warranted so much as it is a defiance of capital social needs that have arisen in an air of unrestrained consumption. This consumption itself is entirely inconsequential and perhaps that is what has the left so concerned. As is often suggested, the democratic choices I have between hundreds of thousands of shoe brands is entirely without choice as it is determined by an vast economic exchange concept that merely is producing desire and interest that posits itself so long as the network of currency can organize a supply chains to properly organized structures for labor practice and body management.
Here, at Elsewhere, labor practices are engaged in a currency of communal or social exchange, a factory of idea sharing. Before you accuse me of being Utopian or silly think about this in comparison to a conversation had by a group of friends that moves from one joke to the next, be it a friendly ribbing or a fluidity of punchlines, in either case the presentation of multiple set ups and deliveries follow one another, but through objects. A funny scene to note recorded at the end of one of the audio sessions blogged earlier. In this scene Sarah and Ross had a sort of rhyme off, where Sarah said something and Ross followed up to which Sarah responded and then Ross showed up with a smell card for which Sarah's feet were presented for a sniff, on and on. This exchange of one reference for the other , the competition of expressions tied to an experience or encounter that points to possible other expressions--another example, theme, reference, tying the ends of each sentence like passing objects and naming them. In-consequentiality is assigned a space in this system, which offers the point of contact between a tangent as the proof of continuity. The joke or rhyme continues with each new addition that may be expanded. What is tested is each players wit and playfulness, and what is at stake is not some ultimate switch but rather a shade to color the afternoon. A pocketful of colors picked like daisies from so many different people is the necessary for a complete curatorial experience.
People only like to look at pictures
Solo show
There has been some discrepency in the movement of a nature and a culture. For my part I'm unsure that anything natural does in fact exist or ever has. Even those natural phenomena that destroy our worlds are only considered as natural disasters upon the condition that the community of man made projects exists in order to be destroyed by something which is unable to comprehend the language of its movement.
there is a double logging here, everyone comes upon this blog space in order to log those "natural" things that happened during the course of a day between the rising and setting of the sun. Wander words, heres a note my sole audience. A conversation from a previous evening's party where Mary and Joseph found themselves blind and baby Jesus discovered the blindiness wrapped around his neck. Not a suitable scene for the street but a point hitting the nail squarely on its head.
Heres a short note on value
to: sole passerby,
a message to the opposite factory hanging at the outer ring of the association. Which parts do you have that are similar to mine? After the journey past the stain, keep an eye out for the object that sees you parting, there the demographier will step in with his bitter herbs.
--signed yours,
the autobiography of a tilted hammer.
Blog day has been declared by sarah and it is only 11:32? There is also a cake to be baked and a big day ahead. I wonder if it would give everything away if Lucinda were to read this blog post and learn about the skit that we are going to put on for her birthday. If perhaps anyone is reading my posts, please do not tell Lucinda.
On to other business in a race parking tickets, two $25 fines were levied on two very nice people yesterday. According to the ticket there was parking in a commercial loading zone which hasn't been active since GG was driving my mom's old buick and had a commercial tag. Strike that, the parking spot was also present when she was driving my mom's volvo. Anyway, the lines on the street that once traced this commercial zone on our threshold is now gone and they still ticketed people nonetheless.
Thinking about cutting the sign off the sign post.
Everyone is recovering from last night's dance party. I missed most of it during an intense conversation with an old friend.
There is a discussion about Bagpuss performances, and yak yak yaks. Its a fascinating habit, this yak yak yak that sarah says. I'll come back to that later.
Sorry my Sole reader.
Fading without interest for you.
--
