tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5678469114142259292024-03-05T18:24:01.023+00:00skywritingsdavid williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.comBlogger281125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-2376911236646069672023-08-16T14:10:00.000+01:002023-08-17T12:49:54.357+01:00the singing of the real world<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">‘If I could catch the feeling I would: the feeling of the singing of
the real world …’ (Virginia Woolf)</span></i><br />
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<span lang="EN-US">At times like
this, when so much feels divided and broken, when public discourse has
dissolved into a cacophony of colliding opinions, and our politicians seem to have
ground themselves into an acrimonious stalemate, there is something genuinely necessary
and moving in Action Hero’s intimately epic project <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oh Europa</i>. In a gently playful and invitational way, their reimagined
mapping of Europe in a time of apparent unraveling seeks to affirm connections
and exchanges between people, through an affective cartography of places,
encounters and feelings given resonant body in hundreds of love songs. All of
the materials in this multiform art work – the 6-month journey undertaken by
Gemma and James in their motorhome last year, the songs they collected, their
video ‘postcards’ along the way, the live performances after the journey’s end,
and this video installation with its ‘atlas’ detailing the location of the 41
beacons transmitting songs across Europe – all of these things celebrate our
differences as well as a deeply felt sense of what we have in common, across
borders and languages. The event of love, and the resilience and compelling
mystery of its deep currents. Longing and its tangled relations to belonging
and to ‘home’. The courageous intimacy of song as an embodied address to
others: singing as soul-portrait, a gift of oneself in which breath becomes
music and calls us together in the heart-land.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The choice of
locations for the beacons was determined by a number of different conceptions
of threshold, border and edge. To date beacon placements have occurred at sites
of current administrative, political or cultural divisions, or of disputed
territory; liminal spaces, hovering between territories; sites of encounter,
blurring, mixing or integration – of rivers, seas, cultures; deep-time
geological structures or rifts; sites of historical protest or activism in the
emergence of democracy; redundant historical borders and archaeological remains
at places of past conflict; sites bearing traces of cultures no longer in
existence, or of unfinished projects (the disappeared ‘dreams’ of the past);
rivers and former connective routes between zones, now disappeared or closed;
and territories with mobile, fluid or indeterminate boundaries (notably, in the
far north of Europe, the shifting position of the Arctic Circle, and the
uncertainty of the Sami people’s geographical terrain). </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The beacon
locations detailed in this atlas offer an alternative mapping of Europe that is
off-centre, and complexly layered in time and space. Conventional fixed notions
of ‘centre’ and ‘edge’ are reconfigured here; old hierarchies of place give way
to something plural and in flux, and many supposed edges reveal themselves to
be singular and interconnected centres in their own right. Cumulatively this
mapping produces layered networks of places and people in relation, rather than
the fixity of discreet territories. Some of these places are ghosted by their
social and political histories, but without melancholy; for alongside the
presence of the past – the re-membering of conflicts and divisions, ancient and
recent – there lies a quietly insistent invitation to actively imagine other
possible futures. Other ways of being in relation to others. The journey, the
sharing of songs and the placement of the beacons are all interwoven elements
within an art project that is both poetic and political; they each <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">perform</i> the possibility of connection,
passageway, repair, change and exchange. Like acupuncture points on the body of
the land mass of Europe, marking a diversity of thresholds, fault lines and pressure
points, the beacons seek to vibrate and reanimate circuits and flows that risk
becoming blocked, forgotten or overlooked. In this way, sites of separation can
become contexts for the staging of reparation and free, unimpeded movement. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">After watching the
video from each of the beacons in turn, I was struck by the dynamic presence of
different kinds of water in so many of these contexts, and the degree to which
landscapes are sculpted and territories defined by bodies of water and their
flows. The videos invite us to contemplate various seas and inland lakes (Lake
Virmaj</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">ä</span><span lang="EN-US">rvi, for example, on the border of Finland
and Russia), as well as watersheds, confluences and many individual streams and
rivers that ultimately find their way towards the seas, and wider connections
and dispersals. All four of the cardinal points in this atlas – the extreme
north/south/east/west edges of Europe – are liquid, as is Europe’s epicentre.
Fittingly, Action Hero placed a beacon at the very heart of Europe’s land mass,
beside the triple watershed of the Lunghin Pass in Switzerland. From this point
on the so-called ‘roof of Europe’, invisible streams from melt water eventually
grow in size to become the Rhine, the Po and the Danube, major arteries which
run their meandering courses through different countries to three different
seas: the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea. The transmission of
songs from beacons in these watery contexts, and others in this atlas, brings
to mind the astonishing gesture of Tibetan Buddhists releasing material from
their exquisitely crafted sand mandala paintings. Once the painting is
complete, the monks dismantle it by sweeping up the sand and releasing it into
a neighbouring river. These particles are carried away by the river’s
gravity-fueled flow to be dispersed in the world’s oceans. For the monks, each
grain is animate and continues to pulse, containing as it does the full image
of the original sand painting in miniature: a peaceful, reverberant anti-toxin
or prayer circulating forever in the world’s blood stream.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Like the songs
themselves, the videos are also invitations to an attentive listening that is
actively receptive. Each of the videos registers a still point in which
everything moves: the sky and its weather systems, vegetation, animal and human
life, vehicles, light. Each sequence reveals a place to be a complex
world-in-process. The only video which comes close to immobility presents us
with a surviving section of the Berlin Wall in close-up. However, the wall’s
apparently immutable inertia is offset and destabilized by the layered
background dynamic of bird song, human conversation, slowly drifting clouds in
the small strip of visible sky - and of course the knowledge of the wall’s
ultimate demise as impenetrable barrier. Its residual survival here acts as
memorial and hope-ful testament to the ephemerality of imposed division.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US">In addition, the
ambient sounds recorded by the camera reaffirm the complexities of place
through the dynamically layered ‘songs’ of ongoing life. Each video offers us
an auditory ‘situation involving multiplicity’, as John Cage said of Robert Rauschenberg’s
combine paintings. Chance compositions draw on wind, sea, river, trees, birds
(almost always there), insects, traffic, sometimes voices and fragments of
passing conversation in different languages. We hear the sounds of the rural,
the urban, the littoral, the elevated, the remote, the ongoing and the
fleeting. A chorale of the world’s vibrant murmuring. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Listen, for
example, to the dense overlay of city, traffic, riverboats, human voices and
lapping river water at Margaret Island in Budapest. Or the chance aeolian
percussion of flags and their guy ropes in the breeze at Juoksengi in Sweden. Then
there’s the haunting spiral of bird song at the woodland ‘language border’
between Wallonia and Flanders, in Belgium, or the dog bark from a passing
vehicle in Beremend, Hungary. Or listen to the brilliantly unself-conscious bee
that buzzes the camera, then lands and explores the frame of the lens in the
meadows at Tr</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">ó</span><span lang="EN-US">jstyk Granic, near the
border tripoint of Lithuania, Poland and Kaliningrad. The placement of a beacon
at this and other policed border zones enables the love songs to be heard in
different territories. In this way the ‘travel’ of the songs, their reach as
transmissions, renders such political separations porous, permeable,
insubstantial – as does the movement of birds, or bees, and all such creatures
whose passage ignores the arbitrariness and artifice of human borders.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">To date this atlas
remains unfinished; perhaps it is unfinishable, like all of the richest art and
life projects. Further journeys, encounters, recordings of songs, beacon
placements and video postcards ‘from the edge’ are planned. The travel/travail
of mapping, tracking ‘the feeling of the singing of the real world’, placing
matters of the heart at the heart of the matter, continues …</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US"><i>Text published as 'Mapping the heart-land', an introduction to Action Hero's book</i> Oh Europa: Postcards from the Edge<i>, an annotated 'atlas' accompanying the </i>Oh Europa<i> installation, alongside performances of </i>RadiOh Europa<i>. On tour in the UK and Europe from May 2019: premiere at <a href="https://transformfestival.org/event/oh-europa/" target="_blank">Transform</a> Festival, Leeds</i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><i>For further details of Action Hero's </i>Oh Europa<i> project, and touring/performance details, see <a href="http://www.actionhero.org.uk/projects/oh-europa/" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://oheuropa.com/" target="_blank">here</a></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><i>For a Guardian interview with Action Hero </i></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span lang="EN-US"><i>about </i></span></i><span lang="EN-US">Oh Europa</span><i><span lang="EN-US"><i>, 'A Love Song for Europe', see <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/apr/26/a-love-song-for-europe-couple-drove-20000-miles-record-731-tunes" target="_blank">here</a></i></span></i></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US"><i><span lang="EN-US"><i>Photographs by David Williams </i></span></i></span><br />
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</style> david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-18209257306322443152023-08-03T14:38:00.000+01:002023-08-05T22:22:30.300+01:00birdland (patti & max)<span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFhJLODJeUR-JUXk0KJuXtREKkEZBgaa7lIIYypZxlA1JYz5K7AJzwrST4MSSPS6-sYi5IYiAHGn3uROhBOM4qThnOt46MoFE21S9vqBIsyrlriVgo9OaE7b6Pwwgrf9R5onrWT6KIlVc/s1600/patti+smith.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5568748098579021538" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFhJLODJeUR-JUXk0KJuXtREKkEZBgaa7lIIYypZxlA1JYz5K7AJzwrST4MSSPS6-sYi5IYiAHGn3uROhBOM4qThnOt46MoFE21S9vqBIsyrlriVgo9OaE7b6Pwwgrf9R5onrWT6KIlVc/s200/patti+smith.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 166px;" /></a><span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">'<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">But if I see before me</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">the nervature of past life</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">in an image, I always think</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">that this has something to do</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">with truth. Our brains, after all, are always at work on some quivers of self-organisation, however faint, and it is from this that an order arises, in places beautiful and comforting, though more cruel, too, than the previous state of ignorance. How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?' (W.G. Sebald, 'Dark Night Sallies Forth', After Nature)</span> </span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">On Saturday, after the funeral of an old friend in a witheringly cold north Norfolk, we drove to Aldeburgh to see Patti Smith at Snape Maltings. She was performing 'Max', a spoken word and song tribute to WG Sebald, as part of a symposium to mark the 10th anniversary of Sebald's death - with Richard Mabey, Rachel Lichtenstein, Robert Macfarlane and others - and the launch of <span style="font-style: italic;">Patience</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">(After Sebald)</span>, Grant Gee's new film essay in response to <span style="font-style: italic;">The Rings of Saturn</span> (which includes contributions by Tacita Dean, Iain Sinclair, Adam Phillips, Dan Gretton etc.).<br /><br />Patti was astonishing. At the age of 64, in white dress shirt trailing cuffs, black jacket, jeans, boots, and Lennon glasses, she looks like a cross between Keith Richard and an Easter Island statue, her long face breaking into a disarming smile, her voice a blowtorch. Her marshaling of blooded energy in songs that she heats over time and brings incrementally to a shamanic boil wholly belies her apparent 'age'. At times she vibrates and burns like magma, at others she's like a wistful kid, then in a flash ancient, weathered, beyond the clumsiness of gender, a voice from elsewhere.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">'Whispering madness on the heathland of Suffolk. Is this the promis'd end?' (Sebald, After Nature).</span><br /><br />At one point, a woman near the front shouted, 'Patti, you're a goddess!' 'A shabby one', she replied, with a quiet laugh. </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-style: italic;">('With a laugh that's a rustling turned inwards</span></span></span><span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">', Sebald, <span style="font-style: italic;">After Nature</span>). At another point, a young pissed guy shambled up to her at the lip of the stage, shouting and flicking v-signs: 'This is shit, man. And your audience is shit!' With an exquisite softness and without judgement, she tried to give him his money back. The young punk and the mother of punks; it was clear where the radical energy, openness, humanity and attack lay. After he left, bundled unceremoniously out of the door by an unnecessarily assertive punter, she said: 'Too bad he left when he did. Cos the next song features 27 punk guitarists, and it's specially for him'.<br /><br />She combined readings from Sebald's associationally layered meditation/poem <span style="font-style: italic;">After Nature</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">('what is this being called human?') </span>with accompaniment from her daughter Jesse on piano and a young composer Michael Campbell on guitar and vibraphone, with songs (including the song she wrote with Springsteen, 'Because The Night', 'Pissing in a River' and 'Ghost Dance', and a startling cover of Neil Young's 'Helpless' - <span style="font-style: italic;">'Big birds flying across the sky / Throwing shadows on our eyes'</span>). In addition she read a poem she'd written about Sebald, and shared musings on her own circuitous links to this place via Herman Melville and <span style="font-style: italic;">Billy Budd</span>, Benjamin Britten, her Norfolk ancestry (the Harts), her love of Sebald - her friend Susan Sontag had first recommended him to her - and of the sea.<br /><br />She opened up the quiet apocalypse of Sebald's poem, made it immediate, available, pulsing, an animate and fluid landscape of memory, illumination, displacement and loss edging towards lament and song. And - a white-hot highlight for me - she sang a staggering, ecstatic version of 'Birdland' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Horses</span>, her wing-flutter hands articulating and sculpting space, taking flight, lifting us all up up up in to the belly of the spaceship within a theatre whose beamed roof mirrors the ribcage of some vast upturned sea vessel:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">His father died and left him a little farm in New England.</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />All the long black funeral cars left the scene</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And the boy was just standing there alone</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Looking at the shiny red tractor</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Him and his daddy used to sit inside</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And circle the blue fields and grease the night.</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />It was if someone had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />'Cause when he looked up they started to slip.</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Then he put his head in the crux of his arm</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And he started to drift, drift to the belly of a ship,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Let the ship slide open, and he went inside of it</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And saw his daddy 'hind the control board streamin' beads of light,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />He saw his daddy 'hind the control board,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And he was very different tonight</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />'Cause he was not human, he was not human.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">And then the little boy's face lit up with such naked joy</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />That the sun burned around his lids and his eyes were like two suns,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />White lids, white opals, seeing everything just a little bit too clearly</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> And he looked around and there was no black ship in sight,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />No black funeral cars, nothing except for him the raven</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> And fell on his knees and looked up and cried out,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />"No, daddy, don't leave me here alone,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Take me up, daddy, to the belly of your ship,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Let the ship slide open and I'll go inside of it</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Where you're not human, you are not human".</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">But nobody heard the boy's cry of alarm.</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Nobody there 'cept for the birds around the New England farm</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And they gathered in all directions, like roses they scattered</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And they were like compass grass coming together into the head of a shaman bouquet</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Slit in his nose and all the others went shooting</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And he saw the lights of traffic beckoning like the hands of Blake</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Grabbing at his cheeks, taking out his neck,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> All his limbs, everything was twisted and he said,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />"I won't give up, won't give up, don't let me give up,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> I won't give up, come here, let me go up fast,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Take me up quick, take me up, up to the belly of a ship</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And the ship slides open and I go inside of it where I am not human.</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />I am helium raven and this movie is mine",</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />So he cried out as he stretched the sky,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Pushing it all out like latex cartoon, am I all alone in this generation?</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />We'll just be dreaming of animation night and day</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And won't let up, won't let up and I see them coming in,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Oh, I couldn't hear them before, but I hear 'em now,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> It's a radar scope in all silver and all platinum lights</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Moving in like black ships, they were moving in, streams of them,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And he put up his hands and he said,<br /><br />"It's me, it's me,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"> I'll give you my eyes, take me up, oh now please take me up,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />I'm helium raven waitin' for you, please take me up,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Don't let me here, the son, the sign, the cross,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Like the shape of a tortured woman, the true shape of a tortured woman,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />The mother standing in the doorway letting her sons</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />No longer presidents but prophets</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />They're all dreaming they're gonna bear the prophet,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />He's gonna run through the fields dreaming in animation</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />It's all gonna split his skull</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />It's gonna come out like a black bouquet shining</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Like a fist that's gonna shoot them up</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Like light, like Mohammed Boxer</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Take them up up up up up up</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Oh, let's go up, up, take me up,<br />I'll go up,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"> I'm going up, I'm going up</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Take me up, I'm going up, I'll go up there</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Go up go up go up go up up up up up up up</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Up, up to the belly of a ship.</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Let the ship slide open and we'll go inside of it</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Where we are not human, we're not human".</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br />Well, there was sand, there were tiles,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />The sun had melted the sand and it coagulated</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Like a river of glass</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />When it hardened he looked at the surface</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />He saw his face</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And where there were eyes were just two white opals, two white opals,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Where there were eyes there were just two white opals</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And he looked up and the rays shot</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And he saw raven comin' in</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And he crawled on his back and he went up</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Up up up up up up</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Sha da do wop, da sha da do way,<br />sha da do wop, da sha da do way,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Sha da do wop, da shanna do way,<br />sha da do wop, da shaman do way,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Sha da do wop, da shaman do way,</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />We like birdland.</span><br /><br />A spirit passed, and the hair on my flesh stood up.<br /><br />Yes yes, my god, we like birdland too. A (not so) shabby goddess took us there by the hand, a force of nature, an old old soul.<br /><br />This being called human.<br />___________________________________________<br /><br />W.G. Sebald, <span style="font-style: italic;">After Nature</span> (trans. Michael Hamburger), New York: Modern Library, 2002<br /><br />For Aida Edemariam's <span style="font-style: italic;">Guardian</span> interview with Patti Smith (22 January 2011), see <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/jan/22/patti-smith-saturday-interview">here</a>. For Stuart Jeffries' <span style="font-style: italic;">Guardian</span> article (25 January 2011) about <span style="font-style: italic;">Patience (After Sebald)</span>, see <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jan/25/wg-sebald-suffolk-walk?intcmp=239">here</a>. For a <span style="font-style: italic;">Guardian</span> podcast of a conversation with Grant Gee about Sebald, see <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2011/jan/21/books-podcast-robert-burns-sebald">here</a>. For the original 1975 recording of 'Birdland', see <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mINo9lhT0hM">here</a><br /><br />Photo of Patti Smith by Annie Leibovitz</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Text first written in January 2011 </span></span></span>david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-82136637585569086292023-04-27T14:50:00.008+01:002023-05-15T10:17:31.959+01:00visible daydream<p class="MsoNormal"><b><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">time for a break / a break in time</span></i></span></i></span></i></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></i></span></i></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">In memory of Rodney Graham</span></i></span></i></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></i></span></i></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Working
notes from my weekly ‘spotlight talk’ in the Rhoades Gallery, during
the Rodney Graham exhibition 'Getting It Together In The Country',
Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Feb-May 2023</span></i></span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> <br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">In what follows, I will focus on the “smoke-breaks” in Rodney Graham's lightboxes as moments of pause or
interruption in work (productivity), identity (one’s role), and in particular
time (space).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then I’ll open this up
to the wider series of images in this gallery, collectively called ‘The Four Seasons’. At the outset, I had one question in particular in my mind: what does a break break, and what does it produce?</span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"></span>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">First
of all, two images that Rodney Graham formally titled ‘smoke breaks’: the cigarette break
- <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Light up / Time out / Space out</b> … in
some ways like our moments of encounter with these images as viewers: we’re invited
to have a kind of ‘smoke break’, to pause and ‘kill time’ in the presence of
this image-world, to allow another space-time in our imaginations to open up.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">These
are images of in-between moments of suspension – moments of inactivity, private
reverie, reflection, contemplation. They also represent moments of a heightening
of interiority that is not accessible to the camera - moments of absence and of
an ‘elsewhere’ made, at least partially, visible … Most of these lightbox self-portraits
might be thought of in terms of moments of suspension, both out of time and woven
into particular layers and cycles of time<i><b>.</b></i> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></i></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-themecolor: text1;">1. ‘Betula Pendula ‘Fasigiata’ (Sous-Chef on Smoke Break</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-themecolor: text1;">)’ (2011)</span></b>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN5XKKkZ8zay3qQ6soHpYFY2VJA0GCV-tlg9-06QnXDRFYS-gN66NE3Y6IrMXH07lrPhhp2P7Oc03uqksA4aDkEzmMBJB9i7OFkmebt7X1MN391rzdzdnIehJ-lEzVrsvr4QgoeV_4Aw1uL2l_PhoWk5gIRvkKNFqOudeNYAoI6LPlA_ULZ765nNUtUQ/s1171/sous-chef.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1171" data-original-width="883" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN5XKKkZ8zay3qQ6soHpYFY2VJA0GCV-tlg9-06QnXDRFYS-gN66NE3Y6IrMXH07lrPhhp2P7Oc03uqksA4aDkEzmMBJB9i7OFkmebt7X1MN391rzdzdnIehJ-lEzVrsvr4QgoeV_4Aw1uL2l_PhoWk5gIRvkKNFqOudeNYAoI6LPlA_ULZ765nNUtUQ/w301-h400/sous-chef.jpg" width="301" /></a></div> <p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">A
pause in the performance of a role, the sous-chef costume still in place, but
the work itself is interrupted, on hold. Just a tired worker having a quiet
reflexive break outside of the heat of the kitchen. A still-point in time, a
suspension in the past and future of his role at work.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">The
title tells us that the weeping white birch is the main subject, the sous-chef
is secondary (he is literally ‘sous-arbre’, under the tree). So something of
the hierarchy from the kitchen lingers. </span>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">It’s
summer, everything’s in leaf, but it’s a ‘weeping’ tree – and there’s a certain
melancholy in the chef’s exhaustion: he’s tired, stained, wounded (the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">punctum</i> of the plaster/cut on his finger),
he’s unraveling, and internal.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Smoking
as unproductive wasted time (in labour/work terms): ‘time-waster’. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Paradoxically,
this moment of ‘in-spiration’ opens up another unstructured internal space -
although the escape is only temporary. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">A
cigarette also has its own dimensions of time: it is sometimes used as a kind
of timer by smokers (‘time for a swift smoke’) – and indeed the Hungarian-French
photographer Brassai, celebrated for his night photographs of Paris street
life, used the time particular brands of cigarette took to burn to measure
(roughly) the required duration of the photographic plate’s exposure in
different levels of low light: a Gauloise for this kind of light, a Boyard for
this even darker light (a slightly thicker cigarette) … </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></i></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-themecolor: text1;">2. ‘Smoke Break 2 (Drywaller)’ (2012)</span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN3v37s6kAZSq5BaOZHKZm4-uqzIWA9rSh3puj5SexLUO7Qv1FOKxn6Qc0j8dOgn1l0hUUvCVNslluxvk46QCWJpd5FX6kcj-2DMpwvI2AFhgrIXGyZlNiy7Yt8Ioq2cO6AzLeblItzT0AA6Xsuis6d3y_x-XD0q7GQUnLIF8gEjfJAxycwkvsZYGdqw/s1339/dry%20plasterer%202.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1069" data-original-width="1339" height="319" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN3v37s6kAZSq5BaOZHKZm4-uqzIWA9rSh3puj5SexLUO7Qv1FOKxn6Qc0j8dOgn1l0hUUvCVNslluxvk46QCWJpd5FX6kcj-2DMpwvI2AFhgrIXGyZlNiy7Yt8Ioq2cO6AzLeblItzT0AA6Xsuis6d3y_x-XD0q7GQUnLIF8gEjfJAxycwkvsZYGdqw/w400-h319/dry%20plasterer%202.jpg" width="400" /></a></div> <p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Another
image of something seen by chance by Rodney Graham in Vancouver: another slightly
comic and melancholic image of a worker at rest, still in ‘costume’ but out of
his ‘role’ – both are images of affectionate compassion, and of a gentle
surrealism in the everyday. (Cf. ‘Dracula’ having a coffee and a smoke, Las
Ramblas, Barcelona, mid-1990s).</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Again,
we see a moment of exhausted pause in the time of work: physical labour is
temporarily on hold, allowing for a compromised moment of ‘freedom’ (‘time out’)
- a private daydream escape into an ephemeral landscape of the imagination: an
internal landscape, a psychic topography if you like <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(space out) - winter, snowfall, the great
outdoors, a campfire, animal tracks, perhaps skis – a dream of wilderness white-out
far from everyday work – a ‘visible daydream’ (in the words of </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-themecolor: text1;">Théodore
de </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Banville, the
19<sup>th</sup> century French poet, writing about smoking and the aesthetics
of the exhaled smoke’s fleeting, sinuous dance & disappearance).</span>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Luc
Sant</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria; mso-themecolor: text1;">é</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">, ‘Our friend the cigarette’ (2004
essay, from his book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kill All Your
Darlings</i>, writing about solitary smokers, waiting): <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“A cigarette is a friend that helps pass the time, sharpens memory and
concentration, channels inchoate emotion, sands down rough edges, blurs things
when need be. Cigarettes occupy the hands, occupy the mouth, segment passages
of time like ritual observations, fill the room with a screen of smoke on to which
anything can be projected” …</i> (light up / time out / space out).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Cf.
Renaissance painting – diptych portrait and allegory: music, fire/hearth –
perhaps also the cigarette as a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">memento
mori</i>, an intimation of the finite in the ephemerality of this suspended
time (half of the cigarette has already disappeared), an intimation of time’s
passage and of mortality. Like performance, which might be defined by its
disappearance, cigarettes entail practices of an ‘active vanishing’.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Also
a reference in the pattern of these marks on the plaster (covering nail holes) to
the abstract Swiss painter Niele Toroni, and his recurrent working method: regularly
spaced paint marks/daubs, at intervals of 30 cms, using an identically sized
brush (no. 50): a practice he called ‘Travail-peinture’, ‘work-painting’ -
freeing painting from authorship, subjectivity, representational prescription
> an infinitely repeated gesture of material mark making / a touch on walls
and other surfaces, usually white surfaces. Like plastering, or smoking, or
indeed Rodney Graham in his self-portraits - always the same, always different
(Toroni: ‘You can look at the ocean every day, but it is never the same sea’).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">These
two ‘smoke break’ images were the initial trigger for this wider series of four
images: ‘The Four Seasons’: summer, winter, autumn, spring. Each of them a
moment of suspension, out-of-time, still points, a vertical cut in the ongoing,
unstoppable cycle of time - and it is unstoppable: the cycle of the seasons, of
a life, of the earth itself …</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></i></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-themecolor: text1;">3. ‘Paddler, Mouth of the Seymour’ (2012-3)</span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFHtwE85DW47eQMiGuij4AzpwD5OGeAajLBGCBNCWq20jO5-h1tatBAORIx8sm7Gnqez4K9KgDH4WV34a-XWMWK5YlbPUErzwVyMDz8VrV0CLk-UBSjTkhRsjvrhy4mNEg6ZhtGBSlGjaZsfJO14PS0LXGC8RQqVcpqm_Tn_hT9dueoNVi8hFpdQ6mbw/s1339/kayaker.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="717" data-original-width="1339" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFHtwE85DW47eQMiGuij4AzpwD5OGeAajLBGCBNCWq20jO5-h1tatBAORIx8sm7Gnqez4K9KgDH4WV34a-XWMWK5YlbPUErzwVyMDz8VrV0CLk-UBSjTkhRsjvrhy4mNEg6ZhtGBSlGjaZsfJO14PS0LXGC8RQqVcpqm_Tn_hT9dueoNVi8hFpdQ6mbw/w400-h214/kayaker.jpg" width="400" /></a></div> <p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">A
layering of times/spaces – it’s a version of Thomas Eakins’ 1871 painting, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Max Schmitt in a Single Scull</i> (resting
after a race), in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY. Here a single kayaker, in
the ‘autumn of his life’, apparently interrupted in a solitary moment of repose
by an unknown photographer. He looks out directly at us, the only figure in the
series to do so. So it’s a different kind of pause, rupture, interruption – as
if the moment of rest and private reverie has been interrupted / broken by the
photographer, or the viewers of the image.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Spatially,
a displacement from the original river in Philadelphia to an early 21<sup>st</sup>
century post-industrial context near Vancouver. </span>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">In
the original painting, there are several other rowers in the background, the
closest of whom is not far behind Max Schmitt (and it’s a self-portrait of
Eakins). In Graham’s version here, it is collapsed into one self-portrait figure at
the centre of the image. One of Eakins’ core influences was Diego Velazquez;
and the portrait of Rodney Graham directly references certain self-portraits by Velazquez,
including his self-portrait of 1630 – the hair, beard, angle of the head, direct
gaze …</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></i></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-themecolor: text1;">4. ‘Actor/Director, 1954’ (2013)</span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQS5PUE3wCfT4xcF6YL_wiLLi6cTRObualHpX96XbHcq0gIOhJ-wXr0bG9kLntDY967kiJ6JSTcJq_ASe2Uj7QLtb6twV4gjhXpHlzicWZzucwdXSkGC1YsLzOpCnqjrkO3kINZHeJJIODqtvB4tT0vpi5MsnnbY4p5-l6KYtncJEkaSwn6FJtYvRhpA/s1339/actor%20director_spring.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="939" data-original-width="1339" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQS5PUE3wCfT4xcF6YL_wiLLi6cTRObualHpX96XbHcq0gIOhJ-wXr0bG9kLntDY967kiJ6JSTcJq_ASe2Uj7QLtb6twV4gjhXpHlzicWZzucwdXSkGC1YsLzOpCnqjrkO3kINZHeJJIODqtvB4tT0vpi5MsnnbY4p5-l6KYtncJEkaSwn6FJtYvRhpA/w400-h280/actor%20director_spring.jpg" width="400" /></a></div> <p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">The
final image in this series, an entirely artificial ‘spring’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The sky/backcloth, the artificial cherry
blossom, the fake trappings of a French chateau gardens – the costume, the
camera, the giant eye-like film light … it's a film set (or the pretense of a
film set, constructed in Graham’s studio in Vancouver).</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Inspired
by a photo of Austrian-American actor/director Erich von Stroheim, filming <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blind Husbands</i> (1919), smoking in
costume while standing behind the camera. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Further allusions to Rudolf Valentino film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Monsieur Beaucaire</i>, and its comedy
remake in 1946, with Bob Hope ('one of my favorite films', RG).</span>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">This
version comprises three layers of time: this lightbox image was realized in
2013; it represents the filming in 1954 (when this kind of camera was still in
use), of a fiction set in 18<sup>th</sup>-century France (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Monsieur Beaucaire</i>), The costume of the actor/role is in place, but
it’s redundant for a moment: the gaze of the director, lost in thought</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">The
card on the camera identifies the shot as ‘Beaucaire hat insert’: a still cutaway,
a slice out-of-time, a pause (like the smoke break). So, vertical time (the
moment, a still point held in suspension), set alongside cyclical time (the film
/ the ongoing seasons).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Here's one way to picture it: When
you walked into the gallery, you were moving at about 2 or 3 miles per hour.
And everything seems relatively still in here. But as we stand here, in fact
the earth is continuously spinning around its axis at about 650 mph (that cycle
takes a day). And at the same time, the earth is rotating around the sun at
about 67,000 mph; that’s its orbital speed (that’s a year, four seasons).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, our lives are inescapably at the
intersection of still points & perpetual cycles and movements. In reality,
the still points are perhaps illusions …</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">>
Light up – time out – space out <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 16pt; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 16pt; mso-themecolor: text1;">5. Postscript: ‘Media Studies, ’77’
(2016)</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisATbbunz0Fu4isev-O7jQOlyS4HY2ToOnJHnL0pSh2tm1vqJ5nLyuucVOwSTOFGTVkdzm-7NFn3yYX0JwX7rSfR5DPWQfHiMS9Teyq9HtMM59BlgC705Ty5AzmnPK-hS-J0njfBq28oes-8u9vNPGPzYCTpST5OV9sIrpJoyKqYVOohoy_7f59MqBoA/s1339/media%20studies.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="831" data-original-width="1339" height="249" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisATbbunz0Fu4isev-O7jQOlyS4HY2ToOnJHnL0pSh2tm1vqJ5nLyuucVOwSTOFGTVkdzm-7NFn3yYX0JwX7rSfR5DPWQfHiMS9Teyq9HtMM59BlgC705Ty5AzmnPK-hS-J0njfBq28oes-8u9vNPGPzYCTpST5OV9sIrpJoyKqYVOohoy_7f59MqBoA/w400-h249/media%20studies.jpg" width="400" /></a></div> <p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Media
studies draws on a wide array of disciplines – including philosophy, sociology,
anthropology, linguistics, semiotics, critical theory, and film studies.
Broadly, it’s the study of how we make sense of media ‘texts’; and it focuses
on the entanglement of culture, technology, representation, identity (remember
these lightboxes are a series of self-portraits of ‘possible selves’, fluid
temporary identities) and audience (modes of communication, reading, meaning-making).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">It’s
1977, the early days of media studies as a subject in universities and colleges
– a new discipline that was suddenly very hip in the mid-‘70s. This precise
moment in time is reflected in the architecture, design, clothes, materials, style;
the technologies (the U-matic video – Sony’s ‘state-of-the-art’ new format
released in 1976; the analogue remote); the styrofoam cup, the Philip Morris
cigarettes. We see a lecturer either ‘holding forth’ (Rodney Graham’s words), or having a reflexive
pause in the wake of a seminar class (this was my initial response). The video is
turned off, blank; the blackboard erased, almost all traces of language have
disappeared. One word I can find, only just visible and legible: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">VOILANT</i> – ‘obscuring’, ‘veiling’,
‘masking’; ‘making hazy or cloudy’, ‘misting over’. The board now a kind of indistinct
smoke screen, into the surface of which a wisp of cigarette smoke dissolves
& disappears (some have compared the patterned swirls of this framed
surface to Cy Twombly’s ‘blackboard paintings’ from the late 1960s). Even the
lenses of his glasses are ‘smoked’, tinted. Time stands still (the clock). </span>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">A
kind of gently comic homage to all those smoking French cultural studies
academics and philosophers who were at the very centre of media studies (Louis Althusser,
Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault etc. –
online, one can find countless images of them puffing away in a lecture theatre
in front a blackboard – cf. my own memories of Deleuze seminars in St Denis,
Paris in the early 1980s: the impenetrable fug in which everyone smoked, it was
obligatory). Smoking here in this image seems to be part of a ‘style’, a gestural
repertoire, a performance, with the cigarette as a core ‘prop’ - and an object
that in its own right has been a topic for cultural studies, film theorists, etc.
Here Graham almost looks like a parody performance of the dandy smoker-intellectual
Roland Barthes.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">‘Media
studies’. How many media are represented here? It’s a complex multi-media
environment. The video/TV, the blackboard, the screen for projections, and of
course the lightbox itself are all technological mediations.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">‘The
medium is the message’ - Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s celebrated slogan/concept,
originally illustrated with reference to an electric light: pure information
without message. (McLuhan, who smoked a pipe, died in 1980; in 1977, he
appeared in Woody Allen’s film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Annie Hall</i>).
The ‘content’ of a medium, McLuhan said, is always another medium: e.g. the
content of a book is language – and the ‘content’ of light here is this photograph
(via the technologies of camera, computer, printer), an artwork that reproduces
a simulacrum of the surfaces of a style (the architecture, technologies,
design, fittings, clothing, of a particular historical time and a particular set
of practices). The ‘content’ here is also media studies itself (the teaching/studying
of different media as cultural practices, and the process of thought as both illumination
(enlightenment) and uncertainty (the erasure of language, its transformation
into indistinct smokescreen). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">In
McLuhan’s terms, this work combines instances of both ‘hot’ & ‘cool’ media.
Broadly, ‘hot media’ encourage passive consumption; ‘cool media’ encourage active
participation. The lightbox (and photography itself, one of McLuhan’s core examples)
= ‘hot media’: high in information (high-definition). The blackboard and its
abstract patterning + the U-matic video/lo-definition TV screen + the seminar
itself (again, one of McLuhan’s core examples): a conversation > each of
these is a ‘cool medium’: lower definition, less closure, more effort required
to determine meaning, more active participation required. So this work is a
kind of staging of some core themes/tropes of media studies itself, with you
the viewer invited to navigate these different media and their mediated
‘messages’ (like a student in the seminar). Ultimately, for McLuhan, the real
contents of any medium are the users and the meanings they make. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Finally, notice the layered
relationship between idealised hyperreal surfaces / disembodied ‘style’ &
the mess / movement of bodies / embodiment: the grubby fingerprint smears on
the video player controls, the scuffed soles of the shoe, the worn chair on the
left, the work of erasure on the blackboard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Pristine rectilinear surfaces in conjunction with dynamic particulate
disorder (chalk dust, dirt, wear, smoke, ash) – structure & post-structure
(Bataille / the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">informe</i>) ...<br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></i></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-50828705289667457282023-02-07T21:08:00.000+00:002023-08-29T16:00:40.979+01:00plumbbob<style>
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</style><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #cc6600;">eleven songs for the hydrogen jukebox</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkMhK9qYF8tGSMtUkapdDdKFXqBwyTOcokIaxqCCkLWUcJgHkJN2E5G0XMZHHKIdRaqly506F768ol9bEiz7yo4DfHyNayHCA2ili-eQ6u_CZuGpru2D18zf_QzGpzo7Z6nHx62BUDOPI/s1600/%2527YOU%2527+ad.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542508626965422498" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkMhK9qYF8tGSMtUkapdDdKFXqBwyTOcokIaxqCCkLWUcJgHkJN2E5G0XMZHHKIdRaqly506F768ol9bEiz7yo4DfHyNayHCA2ili-eQ6u_CZuGpru2D18zf_QzGpzo7Z6nHx62BUDOPI/s200/%2527YOU%2527+ad.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 163px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>‘everything, even the explosions in the distances might stay as long as they were to no purpose … as long as no one had to die … couldn’t it be that way? only excitement, sound and light, a storm approaching in the summer (to live in a world where </i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">that<i> would be the day’s excitement), only kind thunder?’ </i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">(Thomas Pynchon,<i> Gravity’s Rainbow</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">)</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><b><br /></b></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><b>Introduction: eleven songs</b></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">In 2003, I made a performance called <i>Eleven Songs</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"> with a friend Katja Wolf, as part of the Goat Island summer school in Chicago. It was in 11 parts. The materials I generated came out of drifting around an area on the South Side of Chicago to consider what remained of things that were no longer there – and where sounds went when they’re not heard anymore. In particular, I was drawn to the Slaughteryards – ‘Packingtown’ – ‘Porkopolis’ – the biggest meat processing site in America which had closed in 1971 after more than 100 years in operation. It was huge - a square mile of scientifically rationalized ‘dis/assembly lines’, in which it was claimed that every part of the pig was used ‘apart from the squeal’. By 1893 1/5<sup>th</sup> of all Chicago workers were employed there in notoriously appalling conditions. It’s clear it was an extreme place, full of noise and blood and poverty – and the primary air polluter in Illinois for many years.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">In Upton Sinclair’s famous book about the Union Stockyards <i>The Jungle</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"> (1906), he wrote: ‘One could not stand and watch very long without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe. Was it permitted to believe that there was nowhere on the earth, or above the earth, where they were requited for all this suffering?’</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirKz4_Lc-T6-Bo8Qt-a7kJ7eqRuqNL2jXxOOlaxIo7e5EYPu6XZy0lHD6cCxoMUcUf4qWyvkh1eIGPVodzxdVf13ykZk1tInbM7qNLEDVqC61poSEhLt9HRXNYC7hrS-ggwxebKs2K5nU/s1600/hearing+glasses.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542495451454525090" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirKz4_Lc-T6-Bo8Qt-a7kJ7eqRuqNL2jXxOOlaxIo7e5EYPu6XZy0lHD6cCxoMUcUf4qWyvkh1eIGPVodzxdVf13ykZk1tInbM7qNLEDVqC61poSEhLt9HRXNYC7hrS-ggwxebKs2K5nU/s200/hearing+glasses.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 65px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 200px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">In one of many books about hauntings in Chicago - mysterious presences located in particular places around the city - I came across the story of the pig’s squeal that some people claimed could still be heard in this area.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">So, I walked and drifted in search of whatever traces I might find: in particular I was looking for whatever remained of one building. After a great deal of getting lost, eventually I found what I was looking for: or rather the empty space where it once stood …</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">On the edge of the former Slaughteryards, at 4300 Halsted, an abandoned site that had been the International Amphitheatre - this was where the Beatles had played a concert in 1964, on their 1<sup>st</sup> national US tour, it was the time of ‘Beatlemania’, the Ed Sullivan show, and so on. A young Lin Hixson was there with her older sister. All she could remember were tiny figures in the distance, she could barely see them – and the incessant screaming. During my research, I discovered that the Beatles were showered with thousands of jelly-beans after a casual remark by George Harrison that had been picked up by the media – it was his ‘favorite snack food’.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">They played for 34 minutes – they played 11 songs – and were paid 30,000 dollars.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyc3kz368w46svXjxYqSXAwdmycXj_mdJiUKf26MjAz1txjBvnT3XEB9a5Qs3dKPGqRd0DqM3tMj_IhIZGW3C-eBR87iFSmKFK7ZFZ-S7PWk_Io9x5y2AVhRxUoewD4Lgi2DChyphenhyphenwrNmdY/s1600/gleem+ad2.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542511223008115698" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyc3kz368w46svXjxYqSXAwdmycXj_mdJiUKf26MjAz1txjBvnT3XEB9a5Qs3dKPGqRd0DqM3tMj_IhIZGW3C-eBR87iFSmKFK7ZFZ-S7PWk_Io9x5y2AVhRxUoewD4Lgi2DChyphenhyphenwrNmdY/s200/gleem+ad2.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 156px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 200px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">This same building had been used for big political conventions: during the Cold War era, half of all Democratic & Republican National Conventions had been held there. Including in 1968, the infamous Democratic National Convention – scene of anti-war protestors, the Yippies’ “Festival of Life”, Mayor Daley’s notoriously hard-line police crackdown – conflict between the ‘flower children’ and the ‘pigs’ was broadcast on national TV. Allen Ginsberg, who was there with Jean Genet and William Burroughs, wrote about it. These chaotic and repressive events led to the trial of the so-called Chicago 8 in 1969: a high-profile scapegoating of 8 people indicted for conspiring to incite riots – including Abbie Hoffmann, Tom Haydn, Bobby Seale – all of them were eventually acquitted.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8nxGZh053yoFVA7StBSWH4D4sYyB4YlAVsKjHQ7CVMZvqv5l9-UsaqM8NIqBiWe1NB7AAmRZG9Cw0gGj0t9BU_3ylIsyabWDGRIn8kOmFbxN2Q1M22OX72KQc97xO0ciOSffejHbUPmw/s1600/atomic_bomb_vip_observers.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542505747745956930" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8nxGZh053yoFVA7StBSWH4D4sYyB4YlAVsKjHQ7CVMZvqv5l9-UsaqM8NIqBiWe1NB7AAmRZG9Cw0gGj0t9BU_3ylIsyabWDGRIn8kOmFbxN2Q1M22OX72KQc97xO0ciOSffejHbUPmw/s200/atomic_bomb_vip_observers.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 135px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 200px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">Nothing remained of this huge complex in 2003: just bare earth, some blue and white wild flowers, some footprints in the dried mud: an empty space. It had been bulldozed in the 1990s after playing host to its final events: a Mexican rodeo, and a Halloween season of the ‘world’s largest haunted house’. Now it was just a still point in the turning world: a place of erasure, disappearance, absence – although perhaps its emptiness still contained holes in time-space, after-images, echoes, if one only had the eyes to see and the ears to hear …</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">On the way back towards the train station to go back to the city, I stopped in a café for a bacon sandwich, a kind of small perverse thank you to all of those pigs. Outside on the wall, a sign which read: ‘the world’s best chili, beef ground daily on premises’. Inside, an old guy called Lou, wearing a rather battered Stetson, was doing animal impressions for the waitress. He would make a noise, and then there’d be a pause while she thought about what it might be. After one particularly mysterious sound from Lou, she thought long and hard, and then finally said: ‘Is it a zebra?’</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBrEJhtBy17iPsdWGitFxrKf-NnbNBZxBii4f6HqCYqovljiSsdCc0iSKCPLX5q08PZOP_czd8-dqQekdbIcQNKBhwPp51yxz-TImEfX00SHvf7T3w1EG84k92JWRpZIV7SIgH7LTJ4vs/s1600/fallout+drawing3.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542499174006769618" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBrEJhtBy17iPsdWGitFxrKf-NnbNBZxBii4f6HqCYqovljiSsdCc0iSKCPLX5q08PZOP_czd8-dqQekdbIcQNKBhwPp51yxz-TImEfX00SHvf7T3w1EG84k92JWRpZIV7SIgH7LTJ4vs/s200/fallout+drawing3.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 116px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 200px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">My materials today are also in 11 parts: ‘11 songs’. But whereas the Chicago material was about layered temporal strata within one place, and the connections their contiguity seemed to enable, today I’m proposing to hover around a particular moment in time as a mechanism to invite a fleeting gathering of other places, people, events occurring at that same time. So, a spatial drift within a precise temporal frame.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">The time is early June 1957, when I was born into a nuclear family in the southern part of central Africa, with scar tissue on my lungs from intra-uterine foetal TB.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">In large part the materials I’ve assembled today – including almost all of the images projected behind me - spill out of a copy of LIFE magazine that I found in Chicago in 2003; it’s the edition from the week of my birth. The lead stories concern misgivings about the safety of nuclear tests in the Nevada desert; and the joys of big game hunting in Africa. Elsewhere, and at exactly the same time, in San Francisco Shigeyoshi Murao and Laurence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books were arrested and charged with obscenity for the distribution of Allen Ginsberg’s <i>Howl</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"> - and in Hollywood, at MGM studios, Elvis Presley was shooting <i>Jailhouse Rock</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">. Along with Gillian Welch, and some fragments from her album <i>Time: The Revelator</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">, these are my coordinates and companions on this associational drift. Oh, and my mother …</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg-ZGJkCtYzgeYGiuLZZfaET8-gL70dsn2NwT0j2frUEE-6vUSwCfOI6-tpekUZ14r-O6fqgF1kXCbPiPEkNSQTcVHFlxSAgDJ0KX66R3gmP0qFG0GxeboP-LjCgV37IyS_VktVWsKbTc/s1600/elvis+1957.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542498491346712146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg-ZGJkCtYzgeYGiuLZZfaET8-gL70dsn2NwT0j2frUEE-6vUSwCfOI6-tpekUZ14r-O6fqgF1kXCbPiPEkNSQTcVHFlxSAgDJ0KX66R3gmP0qFG0GxeboP-LjCgV37IyS_VktVWsKbTc/s200/elvis+1957.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 136px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">When I was a kid, I remember two cards my mother had tucked into the corner of her mirror in her bedroom: one was of a young Elvis Presley, from the late 1950s; the other was of George Best, looking like a Beatle. Her name was Brenda. Just before she died in England, I sent her a card from Australia with a Glen Baxter cartoon of a man in a pith helmet sprinting away from a towering volcanic eruption & ducking for cover from the cloud of debris. The caption read - ‘I’ll never forget the first time I met Brenda’. After she died I found it propped up in front of her mirror, between two ivory pigs.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><b>1. I want to sing that rock and roll</b></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>I want to 'lectrify my soul,<br />'Cause everybody been making a shout<br />So big and loud, been drowning me out.<br />I want to sing that rock and roll.<br /><br />I want to reach that glory land.<br />I want to shake my savior's hand,<br />And I want to sing that rock and roll.<br />I want to 'lectrify my soul,<br />'Cause everybody been making a shout<br />So big and loud, been drowning me out.<br />I want to sing that rock and roll.<br /><br />I been a-traveling near and far,<br />But I want to lay down my old guitar,<br />And I want to sing that rock and roll.<br />I want to 'lectrify my soul,<br />'Cause everybody been making a shout<br />So big and loud, been drowning me out.<br />I want to sing that rock and roll. </i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0dumxD9wgleKKYuj4WyidUZi8H7F5PeFJZ2mlBJL9Qr0qgMQ1pg51Bt_nceSstJq9ZiVqHyovzgE40sFVztvz39SdfBmy7cGJEpMXfuJi_8MDrLje11c_yypfdTcor5m4fgjkiDkwPJg/s1600/licornefull.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542491953791027714" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0dumxD9wgleKKYuj4WyidUZi8H7F5PeFJZ2mlBJL9Qr0qgMQ1pg51Bt_nceSstJq9ZiVqHyovzgE40sFVztvz39SdfBmy7cGJEpMXfuJi_8MDrLje11c_yypfdTcor5m4fgjkiDkwPJg/s200/licornefull.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 153px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 200px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">Operation Plumbbob was a series of 24 nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site between late May and early October 1957. They included effects tests on military and civilian structures, radiation and bio-medical studies – with bombs placed on tall towers, suspended from high-altitude balloons, and the first ever underground test. One test involved the largest troop manoeuvre ever associated with US nuclear testing: 18,000 military personnel. Another – Hood, on 5 July – was at 74 kt the largest ever atmospheric test in the continental US – 5 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The flash of this thermonuclear device was seen by an airline pilot flying over Hawaii, over 800 miles away.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">The radioactive fallout from the Plumbbob tests drifted widely, as far as Oregon and New England.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">Priscilla, a 37 kiloton bomb exploded on June 24<sup>th</sup> 1957,was the fifth in the Plumbbob series. Near Ground Zero at Frenchman Flat were 719 live pigs dressed in specially tailored military uniforms to test the fabrics’ abilities to protect against thermal radiation. Other pigs were placed in pens at varying distances from the epicenter behind large sheets of glass to test the effects of flying debris on ‘living targets’; they were harnessed in such a way as to force them to meet the blast face first, and their eyes were taped open. The explosion was bigger than expected …</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUsry2x-aC-eg3oUWXUSrJdbtnnMARCp3V2ocaqicBTnhpG0EpcaX-FpEveVaeaLRenL6powd8KEGMo6pKc7tVhb1ZtJHHFQW4hWKJ_cyzBPdq_pDfOckpT4arC3VJOp-hPIcgT0KwzhU/s1600/dickies+ad.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542513400352529890" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUsry2x-aC-eg3oUWXUSrJdbtnnMARCp3V2ocaqicBTnhpG0EpcaX-FpEveVaeaLRenL6powd8KEGMo6pKc7tVhb1ZtJHHFQW4hWKJ_cyzBPdq_pDfOckpT4arC3VJOp-hPIcgT0KwzhU/s200/dickies+ad.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 138px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">Slightly further away were soldiers in trenches, one of whom, Marine Lieutenant Thomas Saffer, wrote a first-hand account: ‘A thunderous rumble like the sound of thousands of stampeding cattle passed directly overhead, pounding the trench line. Accompanying the roar was an intense pressure that pushed me downward. The shock wave was traveling at nearly 400 miles per hour, pushed toward us by the immense energy of the explosion. Overcome by fear, I opened my eyes. I saw that I was being showered with dust, dirt, rocks and debris so thick that I could not see 4 feet in front of me … A light many times brighter than the sun penetrated the thick dust, and I imagined that some evil force was attempting to swallow my body and soul … ”.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><b>3. A little hoarse</b></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH_agGZ1p1ifjtO2TVYmEC7C8pskUtNr4lW8lnYEjee0nmerXpbg3syQioplFtBBLTTmPP1ZAvJ8NtILhMSH5AnhXKIPm6eKy2diOQQLlZcSjRBtZPNiVLEbYQ3Qj4k947_yTJM7hZHaU/s1600/Bill%252BHaley%252B-%252BElvis%252BPresley.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542491948930982034" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH_agGZ1p1ifjtO2TVYmEC7C8pskUtNr4lW8lnYEjee0nmerXpbg3syQioplFtBBLTTmPP1ZAvJ8NtILhMSH5AnhXKIPm6eKy2diOQQLlZcSjRBtZPNiVLEbYQ3Qj4k947_yTJM7hZHaU/s200/Bill%252BHaley%252B-%252BElvis%252BPresley.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 140px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 200px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">A few weeks earlier, on the second day of shooting <i>Jailhouse Rock</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">, 22-year old Elvis Presley was working on Alex Romero’s prison cell dance sequence. He threw himself into it with such abandon that he swallowed one of the temporary caps for his teeth as he was sliding down a pole. Elvis told the assistant director that he thought he could feel something rattling around in his chest. A doctor was called, but he told Elvis it was all in his imagination; he was fine. Everyone scrabbled around on the floor looking for the cap, but with no success. An hour or so later, Elvis said, ‘You know that scratch that I think I feel. It’s moved. It’s over to the left now’. ‘No, no, it’s all in your mind’. ‘It’s in my mind, is it? Listen to this’. He breathed out and you could hear a whistling sound.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">It turned out that Elvis had aspirated the cap, which had lodged in his lung. The next day a surgeon removed it. ’We got it’, he said, ‘we just had to – we had to part the vocal chords and put the tool through and get in the lung. Then the damn thing broke in two, and we had to get one piece out, and then … the other’.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">Elvis was a little hoarse for a couple of days.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><b>4. Sea-journey on the highway (<i>Howl</i></b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><b>)</b></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night […]</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-size: 85%;">back yard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront borough of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja9ci_RrT14lmcfSm7NiNJ584OmYL6h1KsNhdlTfKgqIMsK39kbTGW8KQCH1S709OYlPulkcDRY-e_PAmlS9iRndvwfsh5-YRO1jNJCsSufeZsNtgYZJJ6ByAgWKG97qVj-NuW4TG7Z-k/s1600/AtomicCake2.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542490279597181554" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja9ci_RrT14lmcfSm7NiNJ584OmYL6h1KsNhdlTfKgqIMsK39kbTGW8KQCH1S709OYlPulkcDRY-e_PAmlS9iRndvwfsh5-YRO1jNJCsSufeZsNtgYZJJ6ByAgWKG97qVj-NuW4TG7Z-k/s200/AtomicCake2.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 183px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 200px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on Benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo […]</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox […]</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">aaah, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time […]</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><b>5. Just in case</b></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_mVDyAMlKfmkCPYJJzl2ib-BBsimkaBgxkf-XJXRWsKNqA5QrjGIvqz-iHquZ91ETlK66peFIo61eIoeijsa4s0dRaRsRhiCwTvR8ucy5To2C01u49RTwY1pRqCeF7wNQ9EHGrDpjZME/s1600/cinecam+ad.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542495100012666082" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_mVDyAMlKfmkCPYJJzl2ib-BBsimkaBgxkf-XJXRWsKNqA5QrjGIvqz-iHquZ91ETlK66peFIo61eIoeijsa4s0dRaRsRhiCwTvR8ucy5To2C01u49RTwY1pRqCeF7wNQ9EHGrDpjZME/s200/cinecam+ad.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 162px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 200px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">The Japanese-American photographer George Yoshitake was one of a number of civilian photographers employed by the military to document the nuclear tests in Nevada, and later in the South Pacific. In a <i>New York Times</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"> interview earlier this year, George (now 82, and one of the few test site photographers still alive) remembers: ‘In Nevada we were maybe 5 or 6 miles away, and we could see the shock waves rolling across the valley floor, the dust being kicked up. We were prepared for the blast when it came, and we could feel its heat when it came about 10 or 15 seconds afterwards. At that time I thought it was only a job and I really didn’t give it much thought’.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwx_uY_9MDgCrLO_jvbhQAgLvpvUUdv6MU93vuFMuJJ0BBcqdeeVarKL6qyjC9G4CtEiu5TSORELputkjE-55WPoBfKC61R8JIAWGoJ6YsauszufpYsyT9p0ZEFUZ4i6jenBkDdwK71js/s1600/atomic_bomb_volunteers_genie.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542505725178775890" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwx_uY_9MDgCrLO_jvbhQAgLvpvUUdv6MU93vuFMuJJ0BBcqdeeVarKL6qyjC9G4CtEiu5TSORELputkjE-55WPoBfKC61R8JIAWGoJ6YsauszufpYsyT9p0ZEFUZ4i6jenBkDdwK71js/s200/atomic_bomb_volunteers_genie.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 162px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 200px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">'One afternoon I was at Lookout Mountain right here in Hollywood, and I got a call from a Woody Mark. He said: `George, I need you out here tomorrow for a special test'. I got there that night and he said: `Tomorrow morning you're going to go out with five other guys and you're going to be standing at ground zero'. I said, `Ground zero?' He said. `Yeah, but the bomb's gonna go off 10,000 feet above you.' I said, `Well, what kind of protective gear am I going to have?' He said, `None'.<br /><br />'I remember I had a baseball hat, so I wore that just in case'.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><b>6. <i>Elvis Presley Blues</i></b></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>I was thinking that night about Elvis </i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Day that he died, day that he died<br />I was thinking that night about Elvis </i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Day that he died, day that he died</i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Just a country boy that combed his hair<br />He put on a shirt his mother made and he went on the air</i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>And he shook it like a chorus girl<br />He shook it like a Harlem queen<br />He shook it like a midnight rambler, baby,<br />Like you never seen / Like you never seen / Never seen</i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>I was thinking that night about Elvis </i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Day that he died, day that he died<br />I was thinking that night about Elvis </i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Day that he died, day that he died<br />How he took it all out of black and white<br />Grabbed his wand in the other hand and he held on tight</i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>And he shook it like a hurricane<br />He shook it like to make it break<br />He shook it like a holy roller, baby<br />With his soul at stake / With his soul at stake</i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>When he shook it and he rang like silver<br />He shook it and he shine like gold </i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>He shook it and he beat that steam drill, baby<br />Well bless my soul, what's a-wrong with me?</i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>I’m itching like a man on a fuzzy tree, on a fuzzy tree – fuzzy tree</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><b>7. ‘Language & themes’</b></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRgY_Ar2HZowV1SzXMDPsdKSQpDwKv4RCwQCAflCXZTppJqBuWu8ETcEhRKYthVGVv1mHAhG30KQ2RhuhqOYRR1MTgFLCViCABM1JqPJmLSJ2wi7gAbyhlWm8xj8BjdR0WKihu-MRmK-Q/s1600/blonde+ad.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542491996318770706" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRgY_Ar2HZowV1SzXMDPsdKSQpDwKv4RCwQCAflCXZTppJqBuWu8ETcEhRKYthVGVv1mHAhG30KQ2RhuhqOYRR1MTgFLCViCABM1JqPJmLSJ2wi7gAbyhlWm8xj8BjdR0WKihu-MRmK-Q/s200/blonde+ad.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 157px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">The American Library Association reports that, over the last 20 years or so, the themes in books that are most likely to arouse the greatest number of complaints are – in descending order – sexual explicitness, offensive language, occultism and Satanism, promotion of homosexuality, violence, anti-family values, and subject matter offensive to religion.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">Titles that recur at the head of the list of so-called ‘dangerous’ books are: <i>Slaughterhouse Five</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">, by Kurt Vonnegut (promoting deviant sexual behaviour, sexually explicit); <i>Catcher in the Rye</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">, by JD Salinger (sexual references, undermines morality); John Steinbeck’s <i>Grapes of Wrath</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"> (vulgar language), and <i>Of Mice & Men</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"> (filth); <i>Harry Potter</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"> by JK Rowling (anti-Christian Satanism); <i>I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"> by Maya Angelou (language & themes); Toni Morrison’s <i>The Bluest Eye</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"> (language).</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">Two classics that have made recent lists are Chaucer’s <i>Canterbury Tales</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"> (lewdness), and Shakespeare’s <i>Twelfth Night</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"> (teaching alternative lifestyles).</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><b>8. Open secret</b></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU_WTemVp3cMvfHxnA1tNPPk2TFkbcW9Jq2f6XLq62_Ygm0glXBH_eVvjs_su-kH90x2IShfe18zfzDZbuEFL77LDztpybhjevWYesXstSG7XucEZ-I-gELboHSm8LwDBsC83wlzRM5s4/s1600/rancher+nevada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542500442380528674" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU_WTemVp3cMvfHxnA1tNPPk2TFkbcW9Jq2f6XLq62_Ygm0glXBH_eVvjs_su-kH90x2IShfe18zfzDZbuEFL77LDztpybhjevWYesXstSG7XucEZ-I-gELboHSm8LwDBsC83wlzRM5s4/s200/rancher+nevada.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 146px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">The Sheahans were just one of the families unwittingly caught up in the Nevada nuclear tests. They’d been mining silver at Groom Range since the 1890s, in an area the military conceived of as ‘largely unpopulated’. In the early 1950s, they had a visit from a ‘polite’ man from the Atomic Energy Commission who told them that there would be some testing at nearby Yucca Flats. The Sheahans had just built a new hundred thousand dollar mill.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">One night before dawn their house shook, the front door burst open, and several windows shattered.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">Some months into the tests, some AEC men arrived to tell the Sheahans there may be some danger from radioactive fallout; they left monitoring equipment for the family to take samples after the blasts. The clouds kept coming, like rainstorms sweeping over the valley, except that dust rather than water fell. The Sheahans began to see cattle with silver-dollar-sized white spots on their backs, found dead animals with the same white spots, and noticed wildlife becoming scarcer.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">On one occasion Dan Sheahan encountered a herd of wild horses that had wandered on to his land, with their eyes burnt out, empty sockets left by a blast.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">A year later, the airforce began strafing the Sheahan property with planes. Then one day, during lunch, a high-explosive incendiary bomb hit the mill and blew it up.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcremKvu2W77tvo5ax2_9LxfcwdfsW8veqvQLTaOkK8jmDnCRqPXYZfG2wDYWd5Os4jkP_wgfSQEIVUCS_FAFBYmdrLx_TuEHK86qTv-RJrFzZ1lHeD2StaS8rGMXfmrLCN1rhMdA-iVM/s1600/whirlpool+ad.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542507339511626994" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcremKvu2W77tvo5ax2_9LxfcwdfsW8veqvQLTaOkK8jmDnCRqPXYZfG2wDYWd5Os4jkP_wgfSQEIVUCS_FAFBYmdrLx_TuEHK86qTv-RJrFzZ1lHeD2StaS8rGMXfmrLCN1rhMdA-iVM/s200/whirlpool+ad.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 146px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 200px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">After Dan and Martha Sheahan both died of cancer, their sons continued to try to work the mine until 1984, when the land was suddenly declared off-limits for ‘national security reasons’. 89,000 acres of Nevada public land – 144 square miles – was forcibly closed, creating a buffer zone: a zone of invisibility, insulating what is now Area 51, purportedly the site of so-called ‘Black Projects’. Formally, to this day, this area ‘doesn’t exist’ - it’s literally ’ob-scene’ / off-stage; although of course it’s an ‘open secret’, and it’s there for all to see on Google Earth …</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><b>9. Whichaway to turn</b></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuMFaBJh3PYyYJX825184Nic2ilIsRs19LdUnPARt2t3zQrjyAOHOcvkV7C5LEFiR5WAoF9xic7EjfF9Kcns1jKTPGrbmgD4OjMHPQWfDZPROrl_P88QbYyqHBbLZy9dPwkR6VsUiO5us/s1600/Olds+car+ad.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542496009104106498" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuMFaBJh3PYyYJX825184Nic2ilIsRs19LdUnPARt2t3zQrjyAOHOcvkV7C5LEFiR5WAoF9xic7EjfF9Kcns1jKTPGrbmgD4OjMHPQWfDZPROrl_P88QbYyqHBbLZy9dPwkR6VsUiO5us/s200/Olds+car+ad.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 162px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 200px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Someday my baby, when I am a man,<br />and others have taught me the best that they can<br />they'll sell me a suit, they</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "; font-size: 85%;"><i>’</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>ll cut off my hair<br />And send me to work in tall buildings</i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">Meanwhile, over at the MGM studios in Hollywood in early June 1957, Elvis was being interviewed by a journalist during a break in filming.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">In the first few weeks in LA he’d met Glenn Ford, John Ford, Yul Brynner, Kim Novak, and Robert Mitchum. One evening in Elvis’s penthouse apartment at the Beverley Wilshere, Sammy Davis Jnr. had scared the hell out of Elvis with his impression of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>So it's goodbye to the sunshine, goodbye to the dew </i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>goodbye to the flowers, and goodbye to you<br />I'm off to the subway, I must not be late<br />I</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "; font-size: 85%;"><i>’</i></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span style="font-size: 85%;">m going to work in tall buildings</span></i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY8RxFHJoq79n-xg3nLN-2G8QIauLFn0zxPdsEYHnlux15_-mS4UeAvamjAZemlsAumIEBRqC-qK243wPb_zl3ZNC18RaptWA8VfgZYlmyKpU5D1hZ3GVuY5RrUkSpN9Amfy8tuM6gApE/s1600/suave+ad.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542497532459381794" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY8RxFHJoq79n-xg3nLN-2G8QIauLFn0zxPdsEYHnlux15_-mS4UeAvamjAZemlsAumIEBRqC-qK243wPb_zl3ZNC18RaptWA8VfgZYlmyKpU5D1hZ3GVuY5RrUkSpN9Amfy8tuM6gApE/s200/suave+ad.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 84px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">At MGM Elvis had been given Clark Gable’s dressing rooms; and while he talked to the columnist, Joe Hyams, he ate his lunch. A bowl of gravy, a bowl of mashed potatoes, nine slices of well-done bacon, two pints of milk, a large glass of tomato juice, a lettuce salad, six slices of bread, and four pats of butter.<i><br /></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>When I</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "; font-size: 85%;"><i>’</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>m retired, my life is my own<br />I made all the payments, it's time to go home<br />and wonder what happened betwixt and between</i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">'I don’t feel like I’m property’, Elvis told Hyams. ‘I can’t get it into my head that I’m property. People tell me you can’t do this or that, but I don’t listen to them. Ain’t nobody can tell you how to run your life. I do what I want. I can’t change, and I won’t change … If I had to drop it all I could, but I wouldn’t like it … I get lonely as hell sometimes. A lot of times I feel miserable - don’t know whichaway to turn …’<i><br /></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>So it's goodbye to the sunshine, goodbye to the dew<br />goodbye to the flowers, and goodbye to you<br />I'm off to the subway, I must not be late<br />I</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "; font-size: 85%;"><i>’</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><i>m going to work in tall building<span style="font-weight: bold;">s</span></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><b>10. </b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times";"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><b>Visitations</b></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi247P2s8PJ6FJYqQyxjCa06ewn6-kRjo8VTDl1UlxSqyTg39i00XxKY0sj6Hxt5KPExPme0MehDXVcg-vShnnahx0Km23R5p3YpSAt7cVzqFm1kasp5g_DADvz8CJ2MBKIrsSBATHhbXk/s1600/bed+ad.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542491980126305138" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi247P2s8PJ6FJYqQyxjCa06ewn6-kRjo8VTDl1UlxSqyTg39i00XxKY0sj6Hxt5KPExPme0MehDXVcg-vShnnahx0Km23R5p3YpSAt7cVzqFm1kasp5g_DADvz8CJ2MBKIrsSBATHhbXk/s200/bed+ad.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 166px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 200px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 85%;">In the night, the door to my room swings open oh so slowly and in comes my mother, looking elegant and much younger than she was when she died over 20 years ago. She is pretending to be a ghost. She creeps towards me playing the game of spooking her kid. She jumps on top of me on the bed, making ridiculous theatrical ghoul noises, oohs and aahs, and we wrestle. For a moment, I'm genuinely frightened and try to bite her, my heart pumping. After a moment, we pause. My head comes up from under the covers, our eyes meet, and I realise it's a game.<br /><br />'Hello love', she says, sitting up, smiling. 'I'm a ghost'.<br /><br />When I wake up in the morning, the door is still open ...</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-size: 85%;">A few nights later, we’re creeping alongside a wall at night, hand in hand, in silence. We don't want to be caught, and are walking quietly but freely on the grass. The wall goes on and on. We keep going where we are going. Then a small warm animal noise in the darkness in front of us: horse breath. We stop.<br /><br />To one side - the direction we are heading - a group of horsemen are gathering quietly: they look like hussars in uniform, their swords are drawn, the horses' flanks catch the low light. The brief flare of a brass cuirasse, the glint of an eye. The horses paw the ground.<br /><br />Then to the other side - the direction from which we've come - other horsemen walk slowly into the half-light, like actors quietly taking their place on the stage, their swords also at the ready. Gradually the numbers grow until all are present.<br /><br />A silent stand-off, as the horses fidget; tiny sounds of metal, bits and blade. The calm before some sort of storm in this field of intersecting gazes.</span></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTQzKbsz4Cq8CNpERAgbquJcxt242ODIef-ePwdRJkO_I8MPPl08AwjmbpPnc9FDi-3LVXByMr1uXsS2pK1H1SIClMtqSFbQw97aPXbC6AzIe9UwGTBcTKGPRIUANbRxZ71Nca6Rf4sis/s1600/fallout+image.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542512550906875090" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTQzKbsz4Cq8CNpERAgbquJcxt242ODIef-ePwdRJkO_I8MPPl08AwjmbpPnc9FDi-3LVXByMr1uXsS2pK1H1SIClMtqSFbQw97aPXbC6AzIe9UwGTBcTKGPRIUANbRxZ71Nca6Rf4sis/s200/fallout+image.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 135px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 200px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">We are caught in the middle, looking one way then the other. The confrontation is nothing to do with us, but we have no choice but to be there as it unfolds around us. Witnesses.<br /><br />We wait. No one makes a move.<b><br /></b></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"><b>11. Silver vision (<i>I dream a highway back to you</i></b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 85%;"><b>)</b><i><br /></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times";"><i><span style="font-size: 85%;">I'm an indisguisable shade of twilight<br />Any second now I'm gonna turn myself on<br />In the blue display of the cool cathode ray<br />I dream a highway back to you.<br /><br />Hang overhead from all directions<br />Radiation from the porcelain light<br />Blind and blistered by the morning white<br />I dream a highway back to you.<br /><br />Sunday morning at the diner<br />Hollywood trembles on the verge of tears<br />I watched the waitress for a thousand years<br />Saw a wheel within a wheel, heard a call within a call<br />I dreamed a highway back to you.<br /><br />Step into the light, poor Lazarus<br />Don't lie alone behind the window shade<br />Let me see the mark death made<br />I dream a highway back to you.</span><span style="font-size: 85%;"> </span><span style="font-size: 85%;"><br />What will sustain us through the winter?<br />Where did last year’s lessons go?<br />Walk me out into the rain and snow<br />A silver vision come molest my soul<br />I dream a highway back to you.</span></i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg21JK_cH15cn-fCEZXHouZYhG4OOLBx1pjcqLEfFsVB7EqZb8gNVR7kwBFvMQvpR0AU3ydNf3SlPFRzFK_Z8d4dMQja1gay_pjiFiMphApn8z3pEl1oPzRkbg6Ohci98JeTR0XtLku7_0/s1600/gazelle+hunt.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542502710319129938" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg21JK_cH15cn-fCEZXHouZYhG4OOLBx1pjcqLEfFsVB7EqZb8gNVR7kwBFvMQvpR0AU3ydNf3SlPFRzFK_Z8d4dMQja1gay_pjiFiMphApn8z3pEl1oPzRkbg6Ohci98JeTR0XtLku7_0/s200/gazelle+hunt.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 146px;" /></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">Material drawn from Rebecca Solnit’s <i>Savage Dreams</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">; Peter Guralnick’s biography of Elvis Presley, <i>Last Train to Memphis</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">; from Allen Ginsberg’s <i>Howl</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">; Peter Kuran’s <i>How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">; Bill Morgan & Nancy J Peters (eds), <span style="font-style: italic;">Howl on Trial</span>; Upton Sinclair's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Jungle</span>; Catherine Caufield, <span style="font-style: italic;">Multiple Exposures</span>; Gillian Welch’s <i>Time: The Revelator</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">, and her version of John Hartford’s ‘In Tall Buildings’.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;">Images from <span style="font-style: italic;">Life</span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 85%;"> magazine, June 1957, and elsewhere.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Big thanks to Sue for singing with me ...</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyYQM4tVa7BW4XYhW24sgq2Iygoe986Rnb9MPd_rXhv2izD9zwjSmjd0z-XD2pCOm_iwwQkQX55a50XQOFXbhCTFcMq5VJguXyNRq3Aj9WczOW-z-Iespzg44GjQG5G45CEUxZCCd587o/s1600/DW+manchester.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548068077696460786" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyYQM4tVa7BW4XYhW24sgq2Iygoe986Rnb9MPd_rXhv2izD9zwjSmjd0z-XD2pCOm_iwwQkQX55a50XQOFXbhCTFcMq5VJguXyNRq3Aj9WczOW-z-Iespzg44GjQG5G45CEUxZCCd587o/s200/DW+manchester.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 155px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 200px;" /></a><span lang="EN-US">A version of these texts was first presented as a solo performance-presentation as part of 'The Doers, The Dreamers, The Drifters' at Islington Mills, Salford, on 6 November 2010. The festival was curated by Swen Steinhauser and Laura Mansfield, and supported by ACE, Salford University and Islington Mills. For further details, see <a href="http://doersdriftersdreamers.wordpress.com/">here</a></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Later versions of these materials were also presented at an AHRC network symposium 'Representing Environmental Change', The Anatomy Theatre, King's College London (May 2011); and as part of the PSi cluster symposium 'Encounters in Synchronous Time' at Bios in Athens, Greece (November 2011)</span></span></div>
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david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-21129625082699055112022-10-25T13:40:00.000+01:002023-08-29T16:01:40.429+01:00representation's swoon<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiESN5CQW7HCgJCdEcAWFHsekKyCVK8b2WuRXlpxsV_ChiJVgkgfdoEwQVuho-NlJKGIsFGu4WIxQhpy6IW7zWmRhehZ5VkiEOJzTq_Vrgsav5VMlIV9KtXn-eM892m5n_x6bM0WUU3xSu-/s1600/Trionfo+della+morte.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiESN5CQW7HCgJCdEcAWFHsekKyCVK8b2WuRXlpxsV_ChiJVgkgfdoEwQVuho-NlJKGIsFGu4WIxQhpy6IW7zWmRhehZ5VkiEOJzTq_Vrgsav5VMlIV9KtXn-eM892m5n_x6bM0WUU3xSu-/s1600/Trionfo+della+morte.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US">Perhaps something of Palermo’s psychic
ambiguity is suggested in the relational axis between two remarkable paintings
held in the Museo Abatellis, a few steps from Lo Spasimo down Via Alloro.
Firstly, an anonymous 15<sup>th</sup> century Gothic fresco, <i>Il Trionfo della Morte </i>('The Triumph of Death')<ins cite="mailto:David%20Williams" datetime="2012-12-22T16:19"></ins><ins cite="mailto:David%20Williams" datetime="2012-12-22T16:20"></ins> startling
in its scale (6 square metres) and grim impact. An enormous skeleton archer,
riding a flayed, bare-ribbed horse that seems to prefigure Picasso’s suffering
beast in <i>Guernica</i>, gallops through a
lush hedged garden dispatching volleys of arrows at popes, cardinals, nobility,
and courtiers; they twist and clutch at their wounds as they fall. To one side,
a gaggle of the poor seems to call out for an end to their misery, but they are
ignored, or favoured. In their midst, an expressionless figure looks directly
out at the viewer, a brush in his hand – the artist. Elsewhere a group of
elegantly attired aristocrats hunt with dogs and a falcon, chat and listen to
music by a fountain: revelers unaware of or indifferent to the proximity of
Death’s ‘triumphant’ quiver. As a result of war damage to the <i>palazzo</i> that originally housed the
fresco, this didactic allegory had been cut into four sections and reassembled
in the Abatellis. The ensuing scar remains unrepaired, and rips a peeling X
through the very centre of the image, like the overlay of blurred crosshairs in
the eyepiece of a rifle, its target the gaunt flank of the horse.</span>
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixm-CjMuB4OzOht8OnTknqcFjLXTXSEZPG35br75UsQ2kEp08f344Ig4zW_1MFJxMXys_SeN7wHbPh7-9bqBy1a3cbI3Ut__sNL9-u5Y2BFGYAZVgIegBj87kO4h2mJwZNYyWkqh-vDkpx/s1600/antonello_da_messina_annunciation+small.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixm-CjMuB4OzOht8OnTknqcFjLXTXSEZPG35br75UsQ2kEp08f344Ig4zW_1MFJxMXys_SeN7wHbPh7-9bqBy1a3cbI3Ut__sNL9-u5Y2BFGYAZVgIegBj87kO4h2mJwZNYyWkqh-vDkpx/s1600/antonello_da_messina_annunciation+small.jpg" width="149" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US">Secondly, Antonello da Messina’s <i>L’Annunziata </i>('The Announced', 1476), <ins cite="mailto:David%20Williams" datetime="2012-12-11T19:48"></ins><ins cite="mailto:David%20Williams" datetime="2012-12-22T16:20"></ins><ins cite="mailto:David%20Williams" datetime="2012-12-11T19:48"></ins>an
exquisitely composed, icon-sized representation of the Biblical annunciation,
Mary’s encounter with the Archangel Gabriel and her reception of his message.
This restrained humanist image is the very antithesis of the fresco’s graphic
apocalypse, for it distills a narrative sequence into an enigmatic moment, like
a single frame of film in which everything is discreet, suggested, withheld,
mysterious. A solitary woman, her luminous face framed by a blue headscarf and
a black background, is interrupted while reading. Her left hand holds the scarf
lightly over her chest, while her right hand is raised slightly towards the
viewer in an ambiguous gesture - of surprise, perhaps, or instinctive defence,
self-steadying, or even, in its intimation of the viewer’s presence, a
blessing. Her quiet angled gaze focuses on a point just to the lower left of
the viewer, as if reflecting internally. The angel remains invisible,
unrepresentable. The surface of Mary’s body, like a minutely sensitized
seismograph, registers the fleeting presence of something radically other and
incarnates its passage - and we are cast as witnesses to the barely manifest
signs, both intensive and extensive, of this passage: the dynamic stillness of
her suspended hand, the gravity of her contemplative expression, the raised
page of her open book as if lifted momentarily by a tiny current of air.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNxWduIGdR97lqhhDXDrmLqiMo6TpGER7NwkxqKsIqmFkCZMFEIp-SMsFU_vsd6k8QAZXq8Hd043X5Et4EuLYL0qw38XGB_G71uCh6qPKzH12o6IvUgcyWOpJ13OOnPjV1tUKxCmua71ab/s1600/7.+spasimo+crucifixion1+small.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNxWduIGdR97lqhhDXDrmLqiMo6TpGER7NwkxqKsIqmFkCZMFEIp-SMsFU_vsd6k8QAZXq8Hd043X5Et4EuLYL0qw38XGB_G71uCh6qPKzH12o6IvUgcyWOpJ13OOnPjV1tUKxCmua71ab/s1600/7.+spasimo+crucifixion1+small.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US">In the space between the narratives and
representational economies of these two images – enfolding mortality and
becoming, unrelenting threat and fragile possibility, explicit excess and
ineffable secret - representation itself seems to spasm and swoon. This (overtly Catholic) axis between panic and
grace informs the uncertain ground on which Palermo’s dreams and nightmares are
played out.<i> </i></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US"><i>Extract from an essay, 'Performing Palermo: protests against forgetting', originally published in Nicolas Whybrow (ed.), </i>Performing Cities<i>, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014</i></span></span></span></div>
david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-48519649969414921942022-10-24T18:29:00.006+01:002022-10-24T18:36:05.552+01:00the play of panic and grace<p><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqrvDHy4lWte6oOMaigHH-Rtu8aHw6oRWSGP3rHvJBKT4AS6OJ3ToNat9lGbNA9o-_afzcRb_85_uLDO_6Gqr7XVEiFJqVglaZTQy4IXdkLbo9zwfRxhny-dP8lWclu_YKUw83N5XjpF6_7vBuiGIIP2tPuCYzTpl3j2xwJ65aWiU0W8vUgRcwxuJEcA/s992/composite_assorted%20crop.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="980" data-original-width="992" height="395" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqrvDHy4lWte6oOMaigHH-Rtu8aHw6oRWSGP3rHvJBKT4AS6OJ3ToNat9lGbNA9o-_afzcRb_85_uLDO_6Gqr7XVEiFJqVglaZTQy4IXdkLbo9zwfRxhny-dP8lWclu_YKUw83N5XjpF6_7vBuiGIIP2tPuCYzTpl3j2xwJ65aWiU0W8vUgRcwxuJEcA/w400-h395/composite_assorted%20crop.jpg" width="400" /></a></i><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘I
shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But show the
rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way
possible, to come into their own: by making use of them’ … Walter Benjamin</i><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Since the summer of 2017, the performance
maker and visual artist John Rowley has produced a substantial and compelling
series of mask photographs on Instagram (</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">@john.rowley.17)</span><span lang="EN-US">. To date there are over 500 of these images, each of them a ‘self-portrait’
wearing a particular mask of his own devising, a new and different ‘face’
layered over his own face. The photographs are almost always taken in the same
location, by the back door of John’s house in Cardiff. The framing reveals
John’s body from the middle of his chest to the top of his head; his torso is
naked, throwing our attention up towards the facial sculpture of the mask. The
collection of images in this book represents a selection from this brilliantly
eccentric catalogue of playfully performed, possible selves.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">With great economy and humour, all sorts of
practices and categories are teased at and critically questioned in this body
of work. The self and its proliferative performance in the time of the ‘selfy’.
Photographic portraiture and its enduring claim to register the real.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Social media as a site for creative practice.
Negotiating and recycling a culture of acquisition and disposal, consumption
and waste. And the status of a mask today. This series was underway long before
the pandemic and its rolling lockdowns; but in the contested light of the
enforced restrictions of Covid and its protective masks, these images assume a
further critical charge, as an emancipatory realigning of our relationship to
the mask, and of imaginative ways to people our isolation.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Cumulatively as a series, the images
reference a wide range of art and cultural practices, consciously or otherwise.
For example, there are comic resonances with Renaissance portrait paintings and
the composite fruit’n’veg heads of Archimboldo, with Hieronymus Bosch, modernist
visual art practices (particularly Surrealism and Dada collage, Constructivism,
Picasso, Francis Bacon) and body art, as well as the work of certain
photographers, including Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman. There are also
buried echoes of British folk art practices, of Oceanic and African mask art,
and tongue-in-cheek renderings of traditions of masked theatre: ancient Greek
drama, commedia dell’arte. More explicitly and insistently, the images draw joyfully
on the tropes, stereotypes and material traces of popular culture: B-movies, TV,
sci-fi - clunky representations of early hominids, ancient warriors, assorted
monsters and animals; cartoons, children’s drawings, doodles; amateur dramatics
and school plays; perhaps even the construction of scarecrows and bodgy backyard
snowmen.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Some of you will be familiar with John’s
work over many years as a live performer, with Brith Gof, Mike Pearson and
National Theatre of Wales, good cop bad cop, Forced Entertainment, Heiner
Goebbels and others. And to my mind he brings some of his characteristic
attributes in those experimental theatre contexts to these stagings of masks –
the very sign of theatre. Above all, a profound tonal ambiguity that straddles
the apparent opposition between laugh-out-loud-funny and not-funny-at-all. His
performances consistently affirm a willingness to embrace and inhabit the
desultory bare life of the browbeaten, wounded, pathetic, limping, lonely and
broken; he knows how to adopt the shape of the ache of loss, dereliction and
abjection. At the same time, these dented wasteling figures possess an enduring
resilience, and present us with a resistant self who’s still standing, looking
back, doggedly life-ful. A wilful spark glimmers in the eyes of these
Beckettian clowns, their ‘pilot lights’ still ablaze, triumphant and still playing
in the face of despondency and failure; although it’s a precarious balancing
act, somehow they avoid being consumed by the mess of it all. In this way, John
becomes a kind of suburban trash shaman, or a redemptive bouffon, buoyed as
much, it seems, by a greasy bacon bap as by Francis Bacon. At times there’s
also a whiff of that naughty attention–seeking kid at school pratting around
with pencils up his nose, elastic bands scrunched around his ears, fingers
distending his mouth – making faces for silly laughs, for the shock of it, pushing
things just a little too far. Funny-haha/funny-peculiar.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">When I have seen John perform, I have often
been struck by his animation of these ambiguities, his recurrent ability to
conjoin a poignant, hunched, lurching fragility with a stroppily upright ongoingness.
It feels as though we are witnessing a layered and complex creature happening
right here and now in all of its uncertainty, its fucked-up-and-yet-ness. I
have come to think of John the performer as a defiant, playfully purposeful
celebrant picking over the brokenness and waste of a culture, mirroring it back
at us. A shapeshifting survivor finding a way through the chaos, all too aware
of it, with his eyes locked on ours. And I am reminded of the American director
and writer Herbert Blau’s description of how, through performance, he was
always trying to work out ‘</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">some liveable unison
between panic and grace'. I see something of that brave juggle-dance in both
John’s performances and in these photographs.</span><span lang="EN-US"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">As with the creative ‘messing around’ that
devising performances entails, John’s approach to these masks involves
bricolage and montage. His aesthetic is rough, artisanal, home-made, his
decision-making swift and intuitive. Found materials, the abandoned and
forgotten by-products of domestic everyday life - the use-less remainder, a
kind of living dead - are reclaimed and repurposed in new combinations that
leak a mysterious potency and affect. Excavate, retrieve, accumulate, select, experiment,
improvise, reinvent. Sometimes these combinations are minimal (three pieces of
string - #barelyamask - tied tight around the face to rearrange it, one eye
stretched wide, the nose flattened, the mouth stretched uncomfortably to
somewhere between wince and growl); sometimes they are cumulative, stratified
and elaborate. Specific materials are selected from whatever’s at hand in the
home: food, packaging, clothing, soft furnishings and toys, decorations,
objects and products from the kitchen, bathroom, garden and shed, junk mail, celeb
magazine covers - including an astonishing series of ‘shredded’ politicians - and
other found images. These elements are combined, attached to the face or draped
over it, then recorded on a phone camera and uploaded with a slew of comedy
hashtags, in this way transforming both raw materials and face into a new
temporary ‘persona’ (the Latin term for a mask, and for the self presented to
others, one’s social ‘role’). Compositionally, these constructed faces are
knowingly arranged around the eyes, or occasionally John’s glasses, a comically
effective stand-in for the eyes as well as a practical means to hold the mask
in place. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">John’s images make me think of the
subversive power of children’s play, an experiential ‘becoming-worldly’, as
conceived by Walter Benjamin: repetition with infinite variants as the
organizing principle presiding over the rules and rhythms of the world of play,
which in its world-making can propose a disorderly threat to the prevailing
order: and Benjamin’s affirmation in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Arcades</i>
project of history’s ‘ragpickers’, scouring the debris of the residual
dream-worlds of obsolete commodity fetishism, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">making use</i> of the rags and the refuse, enabling them to take (a)
place and to do their work. And I think of Roland Barthes’s reflections on the
body, and how to write it: “Neither the skin, nor the muscles, not the bones,
not the nerves, but the rest: an awkward, fibrous, shaggy, ravelled thing, a
clown’s coat”.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Traditionally, masks have been conceived of
as instruments of concealment, a deceptive covering deployed to withhold the
self. Paradoxically, however, the best masks seem to reveal and expose
something that’s hidden; they enable an archetypal shape, a ‘soul portrait’, to
seem to flare into appearance. However, in John’s non-illusionist images the
seams of seeming never quite disappear. Although we recognise a typology of
different kinds of being-in-the-world in these masks, we never lose sight of
their made-ness, the edges and joins, the string and tape, John’s skin and
body. And in this ambiguous aggregation of John/not-John, invariably John is
partially present AND temporarily elsewhere. His masks are presentational,
to-be-looked-at, but more often than not he also looks back through the
architecture of the fiction, through the cracks in the made thing. Of course his
capacity to see is what’s needed in order to be able to take a photograph, but
it also has the effect of making the mask both proximate and held at a slight
distance, like a role in the theatre of Brecht, never all-consuming as a
seamless illusion. And within this gap there is a critical friction, a give, a
space for play. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Given that these images are named as
self-portraits, where’s John in all of this? He presents us with a series of
arrested, temporary identities, ludic signs of a plural, mutable and unstable
self-in-process made up of fragments of our culture. The others who are us. In
the ruins of the notion of an essential self and of a single, fixed, ‘true’
mask, perhaps that’s what a contemporary self is: an ongoing and unfinishable
series of ephemeral identities, a parade of the borrowed and constructed, the
hilarious and the tragic. Fleeting shapes that emerge and are encountered,
before they melt away again, like the tips of passing icebergs. For we know
that there is always more to this than meets the eye. And that there will be
others still to come, hopefully …</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN-US">Introduction to John Rowley's </span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="_aacl _aaco _aacu _aacx _aad7 _aade"> 'Ludic', a book of mask/self-portrait photographs, designed & published by Terraffoto, 2022. </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="_aacl _aaco _aacu _aacx _aad7 _aade"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="_aacl _aaco _aacu _aacx _aad7 _aade">There's a large format, limited edition,
hand-crafted risograph edition, and a digitally printed version. Big thanks to John for inviting me to write something to accompany his brilliant images ... <br /></span></span></span></span></i></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHy7_rK-IxKMkdST9hlQAHEnxL0DMtkNHimzgLKaaW2itaEJCG3yVgK20eMOSpkVsmn4PD6A2q6d9XLZbQdp5K6GyUCpsKF_IUcqRuJRl9c2LSssZltDWgrTh-iByqFcKsS4JnEw1FlahDGlVXUym1b5yB6lR8dXPzbzwpkL-LuoPQ7rci2UnKeRPfYA/s992/fake%20leg%20head_prosthetic%20w%20string.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="992" data-original-width="817" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHy7_rK-IxKMkdST9hlQAHEnxL0DMtkNHimzgLKaaW2itaEJCG3yVgK20eMOSpkVsmn4PD6A2q6d9XLZbQdp5K6GyUCpsKF_IUcqRuJRl9c2LSssZltDWgrTh-iByqFcKsS4JnEw1FlahDGlVXUym1b5yB6lR8dXPzbzwpkL-LuoPQ7rci2UnKeRPfYA/w330-h400/fake%20leg%20head_prosthetic%20w%20string.jpg" width="330" /></a></div><br />david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-81789288922456912632021-09-14T10:45:00.001+01:002021-09-14T10:45:52.213+01:00quieted, housed (oak time)<div><span title="Edited">Over the past three years or so, I have
photographed this oak tree many times from the same position, tracking
its changes and the shifts in the weather. It's on a regular cycling and
walking route; and pretty much every time I pass, I look at it and take
a picture. There are dozens of them now. An archive of tree(s). </span></div><div><span title="Edited"> </span></div><div><span title="Edited">I
think of it as 'my' oak, although of course it isn't. Somehow it has
acquired a particular place in my affections - a moving still point,
always there. An enduring continuity. </span><span title="Edited"><span title="Edited">A kind of <i>axis mundi</i>. </span>When someone
close has passed away, I have
placed some rose petals from the garden (dried or fresh, depending on
the season) in a little hollow at the base of its trunk ...</span></div><div><span title="Edited"> </span></div><div><span title="Edited">Beginning last October,
this chronological sequence records something of the past year in the
life of the oak, autumn to the end of summer, with one image for each
month. Twelve trees, the same tree. </span></div><div><span title="Edited"> </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span title="Edited">*****</span></div><div><span title="Edited"> </span></div><div><span title="Edited"></span><span title="Edited">‘Occasionally, in a moment of peaked emotion ... we will truly see
something, a tree, an animal, a neighbourhood, a loved one, in their
idiosyncratic actuality, as we suspect they truly are, and we are
overwhelmed, while quieted, housed, by the detail of their being. Before
this moment of recognition, they existed, of course, but now they stand
out with an aching clarity, which seems at once identity and a notion
of our relationship to it' ... Tim Lilburn, <i>The Larger Conversation:
Contemplation and Place</i>, 2017</span></div><div><span title="Edited"> </span></div><div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWMscEzdxXwwbhCFc-TUxIg0uBw_Oe4nzkgmD1kM96VTMzmRwkaB_MTCKMOemIdlG317kV6x0colBP5ztbuu9uH6-8XmjHQAUspm2p09bycYAUvomc53kKh-tWHZsipE27sTKQ3dYcX_6s/s992/*1.%2Boctober%2Boak.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="744" data-original-width="992" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWMscEzdxXwwbhCFc-TUxIg0uBw_Oe4nzkgmD1kM96VTMzmRwkaB_MTCKMOemIdlG317kV6x0colBP5ztbuu9uH6-8XmjHQAUspm2p09bycYAUvomc53kKh-tWHZsipE27sTKQ3dYcX_6s/w400-h300/*1.%2Boctober%2Boak.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdNy7sU5ISdKxprl1a6yQ3PJUcI5cHrSyokLzRctl_QVgKku5j71FBcOLg954j7N_VIiLvLgaKJBOQcbti_SsPPaeIsRipwx1bOaKPih0HEKTPWHjdnZKvQoSXWhPoxbWFvWZVuQ3meGLM/s992/*2.%2Bnovember%2Boak.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; 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</p><br /><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYaJOg8HrM2NUqpB7jOCd-MRTc2TciDcVdFVVz1XLrUnfW2FCr6ynAuA75gFksdxLR0lUK7bcYDXq6Q2ncf03aqmjqBJBw-jmil4ty-Wdx2jfLUvl8M_cN-G1xT__nvQdaiORXZWWdx8aO/s1134/feather_lo+res.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1134" data-original-width="906" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYaJOg8HrM2NUqpB7jOCd-MRTc2TciDcVdFVVz1XLrUnfW2FCr6ynAuA75gFksdxLR0lUK7bcYDXq6Q2ncf03aqmjqBJBw-jmil4ty-Wdx2jfLUvl8M_cN-G1xT__nvQdaiORXZWWdx8aO/w160-h200/feather_lo+res.jpg" width="160" /></a></i></span></div><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">For
Jane</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></i></span>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">These
texts are a response to travelling to Chicago for the 2003 Goat Island summer
school at the School of the Art Institute. Two weeks in an American city I had
never visited before, although it left its fingerprints all over my
imagination. I read this text as a final presentation on the last day of the
summer school, with unedited video footage of the city accompanying me on Bryan
Saner’s laptop. </span></i></span>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></i></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">The
presentation was prompted by certain lingering feelings from the school: by the
work itself, by conversations, and by Mark Jeffery’s presentation on endings.
It was also informed by the particular group of collaborators, a sense of a
wider community of ‘goats’, and certain events at home while I was away. What
follows is written in fragments, the ‘little by little suddenly’; it includes
extracts from a number of found texts, emails, a letter, some bendings of the
truth, the odd out-and-out lie. It’s an attempt to be playful in a purposeful
way. It touches on displacement, connection, transformation, ephemerality, and
the ways in which memory had taken (a) place for me in Chicago. It’s an attempt
to re-member.</span></i></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></i></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Let’s
start with two poets who wrote in French. Firstly, Charles Baudelaire:
‘Countless layers of ideas, images, feelings have fallen successively on your
mind as soft as light. It seems that each buries the preceding, but none has
really perished’.</span></i></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></i></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Secondly,
Edmond Jab</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">è</span><span lang="EN-US">s: ‘There are no words for adieu’.</span></i></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-US">*****</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">What
is a goat? (1)</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A while ago, you asked me: what is a goat?
I’m not entirely sure, a goat is many things, and probably not a thing at all,
more a process or an event – but here are four qualities I’ve come to suspect
are at work, or at play, here:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">1.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A
goat is a kid who has matured somewhat.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">2.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is said that goats were implicated somehow at the very beginnings of
theatre. The word ‘tragedy’ means something like ‘goat singing’, but I’m
unclear as to whether it was the goats themselves who sang, or whether song
hovered in the air around them as they munched – the good citizens of Athens
bursting into song in their honour. En-chanted goats, literally. But it may
well have been neither of these, maybe this is just a trick of memory …</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">3.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Never leave a goat unattended in your garden. It will eat everything and
anything, including your laundry.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">4.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Sometimes a goat isn’t a goat at all. It’s a bird.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Skywalk</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A few days after my arrival, Matthew lent
me a book called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chicago’s Famous
Buildings</i>: the first of a number of thoughtful generosities, exchanges and
circulations. Coming from a small village in the south-west of England where
tall means 6 foot 2 and the bus leaves for town on Tuesdays, it was with some
wide-eyed bewilderment that I read pioneering architect Louis Sullivan’s
account of the chief characteristic of the tall building: its loftiness.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">‘Loftiness is the very organ-tone in its
appeal. It must be in turn the dominant chord in the architect’s expression of
it, the true excitant of his imagination. It must be tall, every inch of it
tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of
exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing,
rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a
single dissenting line …’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">By this point, there was some excitant in
my own imagination, and I felt the urge to experience loftiness such as this,
within which every inch of it was tall. Feeling relatively brave, I chose the
second tallest building in the city. My ears popped in the elevator on the way
up. Then, from an open platform called ‘the skywalk’, I surveyed the city. I
saw a man floating alone in a pool on top of a high-rise building. I saw a
peregrine falcon riding the thermals, spiraling still as a stone above Michigan
Avenue. I saw many things from up there.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">And here’s some of what I didn’t see but
might have seen from up there. I didn’t see but might have seen a lot of things
from up there.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A young woman rocking backwards and
forwards in the subway, singing the spiritual ‘Silver and Gold’.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Spray can marks on a railway-line wall that
read: ‘Chica, estas fuerte!’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A man in a leather jacket carried inches
above the sidewalk by a silver heart-shaped balloon.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Isabella Rossellini at Virgin Records,
she’s just bought a Bj</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">ö</span><span lang="EN-US">rk DVD.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Two guys locked in conversation, passing an
old man begging, and not hearing his plea: ‘But I voted Republican!’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A white T-shirt with the Innuit word in
black: QUINUITUQ.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A black dog chasing a white plastic bag.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A man trying to inhale the world.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">John Dillinger reading the sports section
of a newspaper before heading on to the Biograph movie theatre.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Two cigarettes in the ashtray.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">An old man with a very long beard, playing
‘Yesterday’ on a saw.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A girl with a box bearing the words: ‘Kit
for paddling through stars floating on a lake’.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A man with a fire in his head.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A neon sign that reads LET’S DANCE, only
the final E is missing.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A man barely able to stand up after
breakfast at Lou Mitchell’s. The waitress clears away his half-finished meal,
and asks him: ‘Would you like the complementary ice cream?’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Indiana Jones at the Oriental Institute.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A man at dawn whispering to the lake
through a megaphone: ‘The air is filled with the moves of you’, he says.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A woman who cooks curries that make her
friends hallucinate.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A man whistling and sawing away at the
branch he’s sitting on.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">The smell of chocolate hanging heavy in the
air over the river.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A man on a cellphone in a hotel lobby: ‘We
are all Americans at puberty’, he explains, ‘we die French’.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A woman who keeps valium in her sugar tin.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A jetlagged man who wakes at 4.33 a.m.
precisely, sees the time and thinks he’s at a performance – or perhaps is one.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">An old man directing the traffic with his
stick.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Two nuns on a pedalo in the lake.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A woman wearing a necklace made out of
pistachio shells.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A runaway horse skidding through the
suburban mall.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">The way she laughed.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">‘There is no place not the reflection of
another. It is the reflected place we must discover. The place within the
place’ (Edmond Jab</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">è</span><span lang="EN-US">s).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Exactitude</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">As I walk at ground level, Chicago triggers
memories, although I’ve never been here before. ‘Like those birds that lay
their eggs in other species’ nests, memory produces in a place that does not
belong to it’ (Michel de Certeau). Memory as cuckoo.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">I walk and walk, and try to arrive, and one
day something arrives at me. A feather floats down from a lofty building and lands
in front of me … </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Then I see that there are others falling
out of the sky, a slow silent downpour.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">‘FEATHER’:
from a Greek root meaning ‘wing’</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">appendage, plumage, display, decoration, mark of honour, badge of a
fool, emblem of cowardice (a white feather in a game bird’s tail is a mark of
inferior breeding): a commodity (‘to feather one’s nest’): a tuft of hair on
humans and horses</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">a very small part of anything, almost weightless, of little strength
or importance: lightness, discretion, secrecy, flimsiness, a trifle</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">weaponry (arrows), ballistics: to pierce or wound (‘to bury an arrow
to the feather’)</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">a blemish, flaw, imperfection having a feather-like appearance (in
an eye, or a precious stone)</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">hunting: quivering movement of a hound’s tail and body while
searching for the trail</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">related to wealth, health, weather (‘in fine or high feather’)</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">in writing, a quill: usually a swan or goose</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">I remember Italo Calvino: ‘For the ancient
Egyptians, exactitude was symbolized by a feather that served as a weight on
scales used for the weighing of souls. This light feather was called Maat, the
goddess of scales. The hieroglyph for Maat also stood for a unit of length –
the 33 cms of the standard brick – and for the fundamental note of the flute’ (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Six Memos for the Next Millennium</i>).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Questions
for psychics (1)</span></b></p>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYPxWvE4fekG4BGYP3P3cXQhOohPzaKhUrasEet4pk44jI9nDqsiFs4vVO0m4bqjABcOBoMpyxnfjVAKjAO34zktOLHzu-gOF_Elx3Uj4XLhNzQQNYfDOts3eQ0p1cI9B9Qv7DlO9URjjU/s1134/jeanina_chicago+psychic+.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1134" data-original-width="973" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYPxWvE4fekG4BGYP3P3cXQhOohPzaKhUrasEet4pk44jI9nDqsiFs4vVO0m4bqjABcOBoMpyxnfjVAKjAO34zktOLHzu-gOF_Elx3Uj4XLhNzQQNYfDOts3eQ0p1cI9B9Qv7DlO9URjjU/w172-h200/jeanina_chicago+psychic+.jpg" width="172" /></a><span lang="EN-US">Almost every day during my walk back from
the studio, in a gallery space in Greektown, I am handed a piece of paper in
the street. </span>On the third or fourth occasion, when I
have a little pile of Jeanina flyers, I think what the hell, and I give her a
call. I get her answerphone, and feel slightly disappointed that she didn’t
know I was going to call, but leave her a message anyway. For I have one free
question: ‘Hi Jeanina, I have a question for you, well, several of course, but
here’s one for starters. It doesn’t quite fit the list of what you can tell me,
but anyway, here goes … Umm … what is a goat?’
</span></div><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: medium;"> </span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Now
and now and now</span></b>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Some years ago, we met in London and she
took me to see a German film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Himmeln </i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">ü</span><span lang="EN-US">ber Berlin</span></i><span lang="EN-US"> (‘Wings of Desire’). Broadly, it’s about angels hovering around the
city of Berlin before the fall of the wall. They are able to hear and see
everything in people’s embodied lives, to record but barely able to intervene.
One of the angels is frustrated by his detachment from the world of the
material, the temporal, the human. He yearns to be able to say, ‘’Now and now
and now’, and no longer ‘since always’ and forever’’. He longs to be weighted, gravitied,
attached to the earth. In one sequence, he comes across a man who has just been
knocked off his motorcycle by a Mercedes; the man is badly injured and in
shock. The angel comforts and calms him through a whispered list planted in the
man’s consciousness: an orienting list of particular places and things the man
has loved, a map of coordinates and phenomena and everyday fragilities. After a
few words, the man’s voice picks up the list, they are now his own thoughts,
and the angel walks slowly away listening to him whisper these words:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">‘The
fire on the cattle range. The potato in the ashes. The boathouse floating in
the lake. The Southern Cross. The Far East. The Great North. The Wild West. The
Great Bear Lake. Tristan da Cunha. The Mississippi Delta. Stromboli. The old
houses of Charlottenburg. Albert Camus. The morning light. The child’s eyes.
The swim in the waterfall. The stains from the first raindrops. The sun. The
bread and wine. Hopping. Easter. The veins of the leaves. The colour of stones.
The pebbles on the stream bed. The white tablecloth outdoors. The dream of a
house inside the house. The loved one asleep in the next room. The peaceful
Sunday. The horizon. The light from the room shining in the garden. The night
flight. Riding a bicycle with no hands. The beautiful stranger. My father. My
mother. My wife. My child …’</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">My
favorite place (luck days)</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Every day when I go and check my email, I
find a text from someone who has been working on the same computer, a Korean
woman studying English in Chicago. I have come to think that her words are left
there deliberately, as messages for me. This is what she left for me yesterday:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">‘My Favorite Place. Ka Mir Park, Jul. 4,
2003</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">One of my favorite pace is empty swimming
pool. I used to go to swimming pool in the morning. Some luck days, there where
no people in the swimming pool except me. When I swam alone, the feeling was
really gorgeous. The surface of water looked really peaceful. The feeling that
when I divided the calm surface of the water, I cannot expression by word. Just
I cat say that I love it so much. And I do not have to worry about next me, it
made me relief. Some time, there are many people in a swimming pool I have to
hurry up even I stay in short of breath. When I depressed I saw the dull, it
makes myfelling much better. That lucky days, I spent hole day in good mood
from the feeling of swimming pool’.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">What
is a goat? (2)</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">In Michel Tournier’s novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Friday</i>, Andoar was born on a tropical
island, the very same island on which Robinson Crusoe was stranded – and
although Andoar ended up as a kite, he was of mixed human/goat heritage. The
human side comes from Friday, whose own ancestors (we are told) were probably
coastal Indians from the central part of Chile. Friday was playful, light,
solar; he greeted everything with laughter, not a naïve laughter but one that
emerged from a sophisticated form of acceptance. In his eyes, there is always
‘a hint of derision, a touch of mockery defeated by the drollery of everything
he sees’. Friday was aerial: for example, he had a passion for shooting arrows
to see how far and long they could fly. As for the goat side of the mix, we
know that Andoar’s other parent was a powerful and fearless goat with startling
green eyes and a terrible smell which, we are told, could be detected from a
great distance.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">But to understand Andoar, you have to know
not only the elements of his hybrid crossing, but also the miraculous
circumstances of his birth. After several combative encounters between Friday
and the goat, they engage in a great final contest. At the end of it, entwined
in each other’s bodies, they tumble over a cliff and emerge as a new composite
creature. Andoar (and/or) consists of the man formerly known as Friday, now
thoroughly impregnated with eau de goat and sporting an aerial accessory – the
old goat’s skin, now scraped, cured and polished, is attached to a frame of
twigs and connected by a vine to the old Friday’s ankle. Andoar spends his days
‘battling with the tricks of the wind, diving to its sudden gusts, turning when
it veered, sinking when it slackened, and in a soaring bound regaining the
altitude it had lost’, as the more terrestrial parts of his body and its
awkward shadow dance alongside on the sand.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Tournier’s novel as a whole is a tale of
how to become solar, ‘an angel of helium’. And I am drawn to Andoar because of
his talent for boundless flight, for lightness and mobility, while retaining
some contact with the ground. Andoar activates the wish to fly, to extend the
limits of one’s current embodiment; to escape the confines of biography,
culture, training; to expand the horizon of the conceivable. Andoar’s mobility
activates a desire for what Tournier calls ’something else’. He offers
encouragement for the space to become otherwise. For the exercising of
faculties. For playing around. For shuffling the deck. For changing places. For
messing with things. For responding to shifts outside and in. For keeping one’s
foot in contact with one’s shadow on the ground …</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Encounters and crossings bring new things
into being. A goat-man-kite becoming.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Specific
natures</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Opposite my apartment on State Street, just
underneath a sign for Ossama’s Hair Designs, there’s a vacant storefront. Above
the windows in gold letters: ‘Incomparable Quality’ – ‘Impeccable Fashions’ –
‘Exclusive Styles’. In two neighboring windows, two life-sized casts of human
bodies – a naked man and a naked woman, lying down on their backs beside each
other. Asleep. Or dead, maybe. Each body is caked with earth, and inlaid from
head to toe with thousands of grass seedlings. In this piece (‘Specific
natures: a living installation’) and other work by the two British artists Heather
Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, the grass grows to the point of its natural depletion,
then withers and dies. On my first day in Chicago, the specific form of each
body was visible, the grass no more than stubble length: a beginning. By this
morning, all distinguishing features have been blurred and concealed by the
grass. They are now generic bodies, ungendered, turfed outlines.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">I imagine two goats grazing in the vacant
storefront on State Street, quietly discussing their meal, ignoring the
traffic, the passersby. ‘Mmmmmhhmmm, this grass is incomparable, impeccable.
How’s yours, gonzo?’ ‘Exclusivo, compadre. Hey hey, ain’t this the life’. I
imagine the grass spreading gradually out of the storefront, across the
sidewalk, making its way oh so slowly up something really very lofty … grass
that is every inch a proud and soaring thing …</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">How
deep in your mouth (laughtears)</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">I loved it when she laughed. It was like
discovering a tree was still alive, although it had no leaves because it was
winter.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">At her 21<sup>st</sup> birthday party, she
laughed as if laughing was the joke, and the joke was spinning the world around
faster and faster so that only the joke held and didn’t get dizzy, it just
threw off light and flecks of laughter and grains of sugar and with its head back
swallowed vino spumante, and played with the bubbles and gave them to her
friends with a kiss when they joined in her laughter.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">We were partners for about two years when
we were undergraduates. I studied French, she studied German. We have been
friends for almost a quarter of a century. Then a year ago, she became ill.
Last Thursday I dedicated my talk about animals to her. She was the person who
told me that Kafka called his cough ‘the animal’. Earlier this week on Monday
morning, this email from her sister fell out of the sky and landed in front of
me in Chicago. A breathturn.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Dear David</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Jane finally died at 1.15 this
morning. She had spent the previous couple of days in a coma and was very
peaceful. Whilst we are devastated at losing her, we are all relieved that her
suffering is over. She has been so incredibly brave over the last 13 months,
but has had to put up with more than any one person should have to bear.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I got your email yesterday evening,
having been in the hospice for the past few days and nights, and fortunately I
spoke to Kate who was there last night and made sure that she whispered your
message into Jane’s ear. I believe she could hear us right up until the end,
and we have been reading and chatting to her for the last few days. I like to
think that she heard your message.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I will let you know what the funeral
arrangements are once they are organized – I don’t expect you to fly back, but
I am sure that you will want to think of her at that time and maybe mark it in
your own way.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Much love, C x</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A few months ago, in late spring, I sent
Jane the following text from a section called ‘Our Cancer’ in Matthew Goulish’s
book (Matthew is quoting Odysseas Elytis); Bryan Saner spoke a version of this
text at the end of Goat Island’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sea
and Poison</i>:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">‘I felt abandoned by everything. A great
sorrow fell upon my soul. I walked across the fields without salvation. I
pulled a branch from some unknown bush, broke it, and brought it to my upper
lip. I understood immediately that all people are innocent. We walk thousands
of years. We call the sky ‘sky’ and the sea ‘sea’. All things will change one
day, and we too with them’.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">I mentioned the goats, told her about
coming to Chicago for the summer school. Some days later, she phoned me with a
question: ‘What is a goat?’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">I loved it when she laughed.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Questions
for psychics (2)</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">I try Jeanina three more times. Always the
answerphone, never anyone there to respond. As my questions remain unanswered,
I figure I still have one free question each time I call.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Here are my questions:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">1.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>‘Jeanina – I want to be milked from the udders of a cow. I want a pine
tree to grow inside me. I want to hang by my fingertips between the tops of two
mountains … And you?’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">2.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>‘Hi Jeanina, me again … what if I just suck?’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">3.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘How
do you say goodbye?’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">The
only dream worth having</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Dear David</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">There are other worlds. Other kinds of
dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible. Honorable. Sometimes even worth
striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance
or human worth. There are plenty of warriors whom I know and love, people far
more valuable than myself, who go to war each day knowing in advance that they
will fail. True, they are less ‘successful’ in the most vulgar sense of the
word, but by no means less fulfilled.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">The only dream worth having is to dream
that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Which means exactly what?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">To love. To be loved. To never forget your
own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the
vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To
pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated nor complicate
what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try
to understand. To never look away. And never to forget.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">What
is a goat? (3)</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Before I left, you asked me: what is a
goat? I’m not entirely sure, a goat is many things, and probably not a thing at
all, more a process or an event, but here are some qualities I’ve come to
believe or suspect are at work, or at play, here:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A goat is the mystery of an encounter.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A goat is responsibility in the
face-to-face.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A goat is connection and exchange.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A goat is attentiveness,
exactitude/imprecision, interruption, contradiction, invitation, possibility,
small miracle, crossing, overflowing.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A goat is a widening of wishes.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A goat is loftiness in small things.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A goat is an active vanishing.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A goat is the arrival of memory.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A goat is a letter to the dead, and a
letter to the future.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A goat is a sensuality accomplice for the
one that is one of a kind.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">A goat is a breathturn.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Goat is also a verb: to goat. To goat is to
be light (embodied, gravitied light – light as a bird, not light as a feather:
Paul Val</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é</span><span lang="EN-US">ry). To goat is to hold
on tightly and let go lightly. To goat is to fall into the open, to fly a
little with one’s foot touching one’s shadow – a shaggy, raveled thing – on the
ground. To goat is to give the gift that gives.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">To goat is to graze.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">To goat is to laugh.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">To goat is to whisper.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">To goat is to listen.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-US">*****</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Chicago, SAIC, 25 July 2003. Includes texts
from Italo Calvino (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Six Memos for the
Next Millennium</i>), Peter Handke/Wim Wenders (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wings of Desire</i>), Jane Bennett (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Enchantment of Modern Life</i>), Matthew Goulish (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">39 Microlectures in proximity of performance</i>), John Berger (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">To the Wedding</i>), Arundhati Roy (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The End of Imagination</i>), Charles
Baudelaire. Edmond Jab</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">è</span><span lang="EN-US">s, Paul Celan,
Roland Barthes, Alfonso Lingis, James Joyce, Deborah Levy, Ka Mir Park. </span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-72224634809577307612021-04-07T18:53:00.014+01:002021-04-11T18:26:45.913+01:00care (push-pull)<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlHlY285iH9mgpUbitdNiSXehyonsBTnaahc9XEea_GYypWyQYfUPVLuhaZLht0Ro1SOmk0dxamn5m-eceOWAyV_4pZKoB3oI4EGW_Qn6eUG1hA_GlZASsWSYFK-aEzHNQsu1FkL_It0qb/s850/thermals.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="668" data-original-width="850" height="172" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlHlY285iH9mgpUbitdNiSXehyonsBTnaahc9XEea_GYypWyQYfUPVLuhaZLht0Ro1SOmk0dxamn5m-eceOWAyV_4pZKoB3oI4EGW_Qn6eUG1hA_GlZASsWSYFK-aEzHNQsu1FkL_It0qb/w219-h172/thermals.jpg" width="219" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When I last saw G, my neighbour in Western
Australia, he was in his early eighties. A delightful, sensitive man who had
once been an engineer. We used to chat at length over the fence or out walking with
our two dogs. For over forty years, G had been caring for his bed-bound
partner A; she had a rare brittle-bone condition so extreme it meant that
even a sneeze could result in a broken rib. Sometimes we had tea with A
around her bed; she was both fragile and extraordinarily radiant.<span lang="EN-US"> Out with the
dogs, over time G revealed his frustration and exhaustion. After so many
years the imperative to care for A, the push-pull of having to meet her
every need and demand, had ground him down. He loved A but wanted her to let
go now, to slip away; it was time, he said, while there was still time.
Sometimes, despite himself, the weight of his tiredness manifested as
irritation or even anger towards A, and he felt crippling guilt for not
always being up to giving away his life for another.</span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">G had an escape, and
perhaps, he said, it was now ‘the love of his life’. Once a week for a few
hours he would go gliding by himself, and whenever he talked about it, he was
utterly transformed, lit up. The sheer joy of riding invisible thermals, the
miracle of soaring and hovering, the wedge-tailed eagles. The silence, adrift
in skyspace with the world laid out far below like ‘a beautiful old faded
carpet’ (his words). Freed, for a moment, from gravity and care, while A lay
immobilised by her illness on her bed, as light as a bird. When he came home afterwards,
he said, he was troubled about whether it was okay to feel such pleasure. I
told him I felt sure it was, more than okay. He invited me to come gliding with
him. But then A died, and for months G was bereft. Grounded.</span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span><i><span lang="EN-US"> </span></i></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span><i><span lang="EN-US">Extract from </span><span lang="EN-US">
<span lang="EN-AU">‘Diffractions: record of a passage’, an afterword for the forthcoming collection </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span lang="EN-AU">edited by Karen Christopher
& Mary Paterson</span></span></i></span></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span><i><span lang="EN-AU"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, </span></span></i><span lang="EN-AU"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Entanglement: duet as form and practice</span></span><i><span lang="EN-AU">, Intellect Books, to be published in August 2021. Image from www.aerospaceweb.org, 'Birds, thermals & soaring flight'</span></i></span></span></span>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-85028645466928080242021-03-15T10:44:00.000+00:002023-08-29T15:59:32.891+01:00tamper (the play in it)<br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">‘The playing of the game is the playing of
the game with that object, and the object of the game is therefore in part
always to undertake a forensic trial of the object’s possibilities. One plays
with the object in order to put its properties and possibilities in play, to
discover and determine what play there is in it’ </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">(Connor 2011: 123)</span></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">‘The children seem to be fighting, but they
are merely learning to inhabit their country’</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";"> (Barthes 2007: 47)</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">My contexts here are in my own past: a childhood playing sport with
genuine pleasure and commitment, while never really taking it fully seriously. I
still conceive of it as a joyous folly, a kind of absorbing, immersive absurdity (1).
As Steven Connor suggests in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Philosophy
of Sport</i>, sport is ‘triumph and disaster; everything, nothing; important,
unimportant’ (Connor 2011: 48). The initial trigger for this
revisiting of aspects of my past from over 40 years ago came in a file of
school reports (from the ages of 5 to 18) handed to me by my father with a sigh
about 18 months ago. These distilled, haiku-like assessments of a child’s
abilities and aptitudes are illuminating and rather troubling in their fragmentary
and elliptical account of an education in the 1960s and 1970s, its expectations
and ‘tamperings’, its stratifying of different orders of ‘knowledge’, its explicit
reiteration of what is valued and privileged, of what constitutes ‘success’ and
‘failure’, and the extraordinarily partial perception and construction of a
young self-in-process. Clearly I was failing to understand that particular
‘game structure’, its rules and protocols. Ultimately the reports offer a
litany of disappointment at my apparent lack of interest and attention in most classes
(apart from art and music), with far too much staring out of the window,
dreaming, chatting, an approach that is deemed altogether ‘maddeningly casual
and easy-going’. They include this Latin report at the age of 9: ‘He has tried
all the spivvish tricks, and has only now discovered that work is the best
solution’ (what tricks were they?); and a despairing summary comment from the
headmaster when I was just 11: ‘At present he is rather a stupid and idle boy. Despite
our best efforts, I’m not sure we will ever be able to save him’. These
failings are consistently offset and partially mollified, it seems, by my rather
pointless sporting prowess – for example, this from a report on ‘games’ at the
age of 12: ‘David is an expert thrower and an accurate bowler of considerable
skill, but he lacks discipline and is not capitalizing on his gifts’ … (2).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">In what follows, in part I am interested in reclaiming and valuing something
of what the choreographer Alain Platel has called ‘suppressed virtuosities’ -
redundant, devalued or forgotten techniques, currently functionless embodied skills
or areas of expertise: in my case, in particular between the ages of 7 and 18, eye-hand
coordination, and a peculiar aptitude for play with a variety of balls,
bowling, throwing, catching, kicking, hitting, as well as an array of fairly
esoteric techniques for ball tampering in cricket <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">matches.</span></span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;"> Also in the back of my mind hover some attributes prized in the
aesthetics of Italian football. Of the three vital ingredients required for the most accomplished football players and teams, Italian aficionados suggest that the unruly passion of English football lacks all three. These qualities are: <i>technica</i> (technique, skill); <i>fantasia</i> (the ability to do unpredictable and surprising things with the ball, inspired instinct, imagination, flair); and <i>furbizia</i> (cunning, guile, slyness, a tactical bending of the rules, aspects of gamesmanship).</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: xx-small;">*****</span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">‘He obviously enjoys acting – on and off
stage!’ </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">(School report,
aged 16)</span></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">Cricket is a game of infinite repetitions, and attenuated discontinuous rhythms
- long periods of apparent low-level activity (or even non-activity) and sudden
flarings of intensity, in a durational game structure of great complexity that
enables significant ‘play’ and unpredictabilities within that structure
(including, for example, its porosity to the material effects of weather, cloud
cover, wind etc.). For Steven Connor, like all ball games it is ‘a
choreographed meteorology of speeds and durations’ within which the ball acts
as ‘the switcher and transmitter of these speeds’ (Connor 2011: 77).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">Over a period of about eleven years, I spent a significant amount of
time during the spring and summer months playing school cricket as a medium-paced
‘swing bowler’ or ‘seamer’, a specialist in the production of unpredictable
movement, swerve and bounce. As a bowler, one endeavours to set up the conditions
for unpredictability, always projecting an object both related to and
independent from you on a forward trajectory into the future, towards the ludic,
agonistic encounter with the anticipatory and reflex skills of a batsman. My particular
abilities, which remain at some level wholly mysterious to me, were ‘late swing’,
a sudden alteration in the rate of change of the ball’s trajectory, amplified
bounce or ‘kick’ off the pitch’s surface, and a cut-back off the seam at the
moment of the ball’s striking the pitch, suddenly redirecting the ball in a
different direction from that of its original swing through the air. To
paraphrase Connor, the aim of this particular game was to play with your
opponent by trying to prevent them from playing (with) you (131).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In all ball sports, the nature of the ball is paradoxical: inanimate and
animate, object and subject, it seems to move in and out of its own agency; and
in its passage and exchange, its status as intermediary, it weaves relations and
constructs complex entanglements and intersubjectivities. The cricket ball’s structure
comprises smooth leather surfaces on two halves of a sphere, with a raised,
stitched seam encircling it; in this way, uniformity is combined with an
element of unpredictability (Connor 2011: 138). The physical mechanics of swing
(the ball’s ‘movement’) are intimately related to the transformation of the ball
in time, its mnemonic registering of its histories of contact and collision,
the biographical traces of what happens to happen to it; for ‘the cricket ball
is designed to soak up accidents of all kinds’ (142). Over time its flawless, smooth
surfaces roughen and soften slightly, the seam loosens and becomes uneven, and
the object assumes a ‘lunar asymmetry’ (ibid). In some ways, the ball mirrors the pitch
itself, a ‘sphere, as it were, rolled out’ (139), a flattened and extended smooth
surface that in itself becomes worn, marked and damaged over time by the
contingencies of the game; it decays into ‘a scarred cartography of accidence’
(59). This gradual entropic deterioration of the idealized, immaculate integrity
of two of the game’s core structural elements – ball and ground – is actively
assimilated within and exploited by the game structure of cricket; and this
growing material imperfection serves to compromise predictability and thus multiply
the possibilities for a bowler keenly aware of the game’s intimate imbrication
in processes of change over time.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">According to articles 2.2.9 and 42.3 in the laws of cricket (sections
concerning the alteration of the condition of the ball in the International
Cricket Council’s formal ‘Code of Conduct’), the bowler and fielders are
permitted to clean and polish the ball, sustaining its shine. They are prohibited,
however, from using any other aids apart from bodily fluids – sweat, spit – and
their own clothing (ICC 2017). One side of the ball is polished and carefully maintained,
while the other is allowed (or caused) to deteriorate, therefore creating increased
drag - ‘turbulent flow’ - on that side during its movement through the air as
it travels along the line of the seam; in this way, the friction on the rougher
hemisphere produces a bending of the line of flight – the swerving movement of
a ‘curve-ball’.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">‘Ball tampering’ is a term that refers to illegitimate means of gaining
advantage by accelerating the deterioration of the condition of the ball, thereby
unfairly interfering with the ‘orderly’ aerodynamics and legibility of its
trajectory, and increasing swerve and unpredictability. There are long histories
of tampering, documented since at least 1918 (see for example Birley 1999: 217,
316); and whenever it is exposed, it is decried as ‘not cricket’, ‘not playing
the game’. In professional contexts it results in substantial fines and
penalties. For example, the England captain Mike Atherton was seen on TV using
dirt in his pocket at Lords in 1994; the Pakistan captain Shahid Afridi was captured
on camera biting the seam in a match against Australia in 2010; and the wonderfully
named South African bowler Vernon Philander was caught gouging the ball with his
nails in 2014. In 2016, Faf du Plessis, the South African captain, was fined
his entire match fee from the second test against Australia when TV images
revealed him applying sugary saliva from a sucked mint to the ball. Most
recently, during the fourth Ashes Test in Melbourne, Australia, in late
December 2017, the England bowler Jimmy Anderson was recorded by Channel 9 TV
cameras running his fingernails along the quarter seam of the Kookaburra ball,
although any intentional ‘foul play’ was subsequently denied and dismissed by
England officials as ‘Pommie-bashing’ gamesmanship.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In my early teens I was taught how to ‘work the ball’ (we never used the
term ‘tamper’) by a warm, funny Yorkshireman who was the school cricket coach,
a retired England and county cricket player celebrated as a canny, unreadable
swinger and seamer. I was a sweet sucker and sugary polisher, although the ball
was sometimes scuffed or further shined covertly by a couple of <i>frotteur</i> teammates in the field on its
circuitous route back to me. I think I conceived of this as just part of the
game and its tactics, an amoral adolescent understanding and play-ful
acceptance of <i>furbizia</i>: a minor
amplificatory tweaking of the ‘give’ in structure, the craft in ‘crafty’, and
the meaning of ‘in mint condition’ …</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">Tampering techniques aim to produce subtle modifications of the game’s
core object. Typically there are three core modes of tampering – picking and lifting
the seam, roughening one side of the ball, and shining the other with concealed
materials. Less commonly and more mysteriously, marking or scuffing the surface
of the pristine, polished side, or picking, lifting and fraying the finer
quarter seam that bisects that unblemished hemisphere, can also produce what is
known as ‘reverse swing’. An inventory of tampering tools might include: for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">polishing and shining,</i> Vaseline
(concealed on one’s trousers, forehead or a handkerchief), lip balm, hair gel, sunscreen,
saliva from sucking sweets; for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">roughening
and scuffing</i>, trouser zip, studs, dirt or gravel, or throwing the ball into
the ground; and for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lifting seams</i>,
finger nails, penknife, nail clippers, metal bottle top, zip. Each of these interventions
has to be realised invisibly, and gradually, so as not to attract undue
attention. The umpires have the right to inspect the ball at any time, to
verify its integrity and the credibility of its gradual wearing and minor
deformation as part of the game’s material knocks and frictions; and indeed they
can decide to replace the ball with one of similar age and condition prior to
tampering if the ball in play is deemed to be excessively damaged. </span><span style="font-size: small;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">So tampering involves deception, simulation and disguise, discreetly and
necessarily concealed within a performed and illusory pretense of playing by
the rules and ‘playing the game’, while incrementally introducing a kind of
sinister deviation in the predictable and orderly, a swerve of difference in
repetition. Steven Connor suggests that cheating in such contexts is an affront
to sport’s claimed ontology. For, he proposes, ‘sport is in its essence
zealously non-symbolic and unillusory’, and its function is ‘to provide a place
and an occasion from which all possibility of simulation has been scorched
away, and in which one can be sure that whatever happens will reliably and irreversibly
have happened’ (Connor 2011: 175). In some ways, perhaps there is an echo here
of those absolutist claims made for performance art as manifest action and event,
the actual happening of the ‘real’, in contrast to the subterfuges, shapeshiftings
and tawdry pretense of a particular (and limited) conception of theatre, with its
purported privileging of the underhand over the manifest, of seeming over
being. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Postscript</span></i></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Two
months after submitting this text for publication, ball tampering briefly
became the focus of the international media, and triggered the performance of a
great deal of indignant moral outrage, as if the fact that such tactics could
be at play within the game of cricket was the most unforeseen and alarming of
revelations. During the third Test match between South Africa and Australia in
Cape Town in March 2018, television cameras and live-feed monitors in the
stadium picked up Australia’s Cameron Bancroft rubbing the ball with a
mysterious yellow object that he then concealed, with comically inept
sleight-of-hand, down the front of his trousers. Approached by the umpires,
Bancroft showed them a dark grey sunglass pouch from his side pocket, and no
penalty was imposed at that time. However the close-up images of Bancroft’s
actions had been widely disseminated, and the heightened media attention
prompted an immediate investigation. Subsequently Bancroft and Australia’s
captain Steve Smith admitted that in fact there had been an attempt to
interfere with the ball’s condition, using sand paper as an abrasive tool, and
that the tampering plan had been hatched during a lunch break by a ‘leadership
group’ within the Australian camp. Formally charged with improper conduct by
the ICC, Smith and Bancroft were heavily fined. In the wake of the players’
admission, the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (‘it beggars belief’)
and a range of international commentators publicly condemned the players’
actions, and a formal investigation was undertaken by Cricket Australia.
Ultimately Smith, Bancroft and David Warner, the Australian vice-captain (a
notoriously aggressive competitor, and the apparent instigator of the tampering
plan) were found guilty of cheating, lying and bringing the game into
disrepute; they were sanctioned with lengthy bans from all international and
domestic cricket. In addition, the Australian coach Darren Lehmann resigned. On
their return to Australia, all three beleaguered players gave tearfully
apologetic press conferences to the international media, in which they spoke of
their shame, their failure as ‘men’, ‘leaders’ and ‘role models’, and their
commitment to forthcoming reviews of the team’s culture and the conduct of
professional sportsmen. </span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">Notes</span></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">1. An earlier version of this material was presented as part of ‘The
Things They Do’, an event curated by Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout at the
Barbican, London in July 2016, in response to the major retrospective
exhibition by Ragnar Kjartansson at the Barbican Gallery.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">2. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">A decade before my arrival, Derek Jarman attended the same secondary
school. In his bleakly withering account of its educational ideologies and
disciplinary regimes, he characterizes his experiences there in terms of ‘a
vicious fraudulent gentility’ that ‘masks a system of bullying and repression,
coupled with a deliberate philistine aggression towards learning and
intelligence, which are only acceptable if saturated with the muddied values of
the rugger pitch … The aggression carries over into many aspects of the
teaching which serves not only to enlighten but to repress. A systematic
destruction of the creative mind, called ‘education’, is underway … A subtle
terror rules, thoughtfully preparing us for the outside world. I feel
threatened, isolated and friendless – I’m hopeless at all the communal
activities, particularly ball games’ (Jarman 1984: 51-2). Like Jarman, I found
refuge in the astonishing openings and relative freedoms offered by the very
same art teacher, an inspirational enthusiast and mentor to many ‘failing’
elsewhere; unlike Jarman, I was fortunate to be able to find other pleasures
and enduring friendships in the complicities, physical release and escape that sport
allowed, for some.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">References</span></b></span></span>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">Barthes, Roland (2007). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What Is
Sport?</i> (trans. Richard Howard), New Haven: Yale University Press.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">Birley, Derek (1999). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Social
History of English Cricket</i>, London: Aurum Press.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">Connor, Steven (2011). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A
Philosophy of Sport</i>, London: Reaktion.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">ICC (International Cricket Council) (2017). ‘Regulations – Playing: Code
of Conduct for Players and Player Support Personnel – Effective September
2017’, <a href="https://www.icc-cricket.com/about/cricket/rules-and-regulations/playing-conditions" target="_blank"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ICC Rules and Regulations: KeyDocuments</i></a>, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">accessed 10 December 2017.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">Jarman, Derek (1984). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dancing
Ledge</i>, London: Quartet Books.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">Images</span></b></span></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">1. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">Seam: photo David Williams</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">2. Old hand, new ball (‘whispering death’): photo Sue Palmer</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">3. A tampering toolkit: photo David Williams</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">First published in </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">Performance Research</span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";"> 23: 4-5, 'On Reflection: Turning 100', October 2018: commissioned text for special 100th double issue of the journal</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: small;">
</span></span></div>
david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-1836187685089728572020-07-22T12:41:00.042+01:002020-09-23T13:11:16.012+01:00only you<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkxNahnwk5ZMe63ljwm5eBSpnGcrB-Le_MNSCc7wHs8MVf-OQ4DfjqxBegHLp2jMB17Lc57peesfMUikbd_AMLsZbCFuuIYoMTqqZM4akN3iyfAHhfHTkzO_GQhSk1Zim6-sUxtkwr0zaJ/s850/dominique+mercy_ari+rossner+pic.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="850" data-original-width="674" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkxNahnwk5ZMe63ljwm5eBSpnGcrB-Le_MNSCc7wHs8MVf-OQ4DfjqxBegHLp2jMB17Lc57peesfMUikbd_AMLsZbCFuuIYoMTqqZM4akN3iyfAHhfHTkzO_GQhSk1Zim6-sUxtkwr0zaJ/w159-h200/dominique+mercy_ari+rossner+pic.jpg" width="159" /></a></b></div><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br />1.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dominique Mercy, in Pina Bausch’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nur Du</i> (‘Only You’), viewed from the
wings backstage at the Barbican in the summer of 2012, just prior to his
entrance for his final solo, the final sequence in the performance</b><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span lang="EN-US">He spends three or
four minutes in the wings offstage silently marking the solo-to-come in a very
reduced, minimal fashion, while smoking throughout. He wears a brown suit, open
jacket, white shirt, tan leather shoes. As he goes through the solo in distilled
form, the movements barely bubble up to the surface; the focus is internal, on
what is to be done. So, for example, what will be a wide arcing sweep of an arm
is here just a soft unfolding of a wrist and hand. Then a slow flexing of his
neck and shoulders, and one last check of his shoelaces, ensuring they are
perfectly taut and neat. A pause, cigarette still in hand. Then, at the moment
of his entrance into the performance space, he takes one final long drag of his
cigarette, stubs it out in an ashtray on a table just offstage – then walks
into the performance space blowing smoke directly in front of him. So that as
he appears in the lights, he moves into and then trails a luminous grey-blue
cloud around his face and shoulders. In this way his own exhalation creates a
dynamic medium which is stirred by his movement through it. It parts and folds
in wisps behind him. As if he were carried by it, floating.</span><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">2.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Al Pacino, in David Mamet’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Buffalo</i>, London in the early
1980s</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span lang="EN-US">His entrance for
his opening scene is through the door of the junk shop from the (fictional)
‘street’ beyond. The shop bell jingles and there he is, palpably in character:
nervous, edgy, ‘difficult’. Immediate and unrestrained applause for the actor,
who has now paused at the top of the stairs leading down into the space. He
drops out of his character, his body changes shape and energy as he
acknowledges the applause, a small bow and hand acknowledgements. As silence
gradually returns, he then folds seamlessly, mysteriously back into character
and begins to walk down the stairs to start the scene. But after two or three
steps he trips and falls, slipping down a couple of stairs on to his ass. An
audible intake of breath from the audience, a collective whince. This second
fall out of character produces a slightly different body shape; another Pacino
appears, momentarily ruffled, vulnerable, disarmed. He gets up quickly, then
smiles self-consciously at some relieved laughter and scattered applause from
the audience, sympathetic, willing him on. He dusts himself down, and carefully
moves down the remaining stairs, settles again. Some fresh applause,
supportive, expectant. As silence returns, he folds back into character,
precisely and legibly the same architecture and fidgety energy as at the top of
the stairs when he first appeared, and the scene is underway again …</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">3.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Patti Smith, Pyramid Stage, Glastonbury
Festival, June 2015</span></b>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span lang="EN-US">In an amorphous noise
transition between ‘Gloria’ and a cover of the Who’s ‘My Generation’, with the Dalai
Lama and his entourage watching wide-eyed and smiling from one side of the
stage, she runs across the stage trailing her long white hair, a wild teetering
edge-of-balance kind of run. She trips and falls heavily, spilling the mic -
then surprisingly quickly gets back to her feet, retrieves the mic, spits
copiously, and shouts as she lurches back towards the middle of the stage: ‘I
just fell on my ass, but I don’t give a shit cos I’m a fuckin’ animal!’ Then
it’s unstoppably into a ragged, clattery ‘People try to put us d-down …’,
before she starts to rip out her guitar strings one by one, yanking them off
with her bare hands, grimacing; they make little strangled electric wails and
pops. It looks like it must really hurt.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span lang="EN-US">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Texts invited by Vlatka Horvat for her performance </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Third Hand</span></span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">, commissioned as part of the
Goat Island exhibition and archive ‘We have discovered the performance by
making it’, Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in Fine Art, Chicago (April 2019),
IN>TIME Performance Festival; and at the Chicago Cultural Center, June. Supported
by City of Chicago’s Year of Theater program. Photo of Dominique Mercy by Ari Rossner</span></i>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-40397340513101126892020-02-06T22:06:00.000+00:002020-02-14T12:24:04.451+00:00plant intelligence (the architecture of trees)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">‘A tree breathes without lungs, feeds
without a mouth, digests without a stomach, sees without eyes, hears
without ears and, most exceptional of all, reasons, communicates, and
solves problems without a brain. It is even able to remember and solve
problems more effectively each time they arise. That is, it is capable
of learning. It is all this without having a brain, or something
similar, to which these tasks can be delegated. In other words, trees do
not have a centralised organisation, everything in them is spread out
and not delegated to specific organs. We could define their structure as
modular ... </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">In a sense, the way they are structured is the quintessence
of modernity: they have a modular, cooperative & distributed
structure without command centres, able to perfectly withstand
catastrophic & repeated predation without losing functionality. They
are basically every engineer’s dream. Next time you look at a tree,
stop & think about it’ </span></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">From ‘Plant Intelligence’ by the plant
neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso</span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">Photographs of Somerset trees in winter by David Williams </span></span></i></div>
david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-28763282759575493532019-10-07T11:47:00.000+01:002020-02-13T21:47:12.758+00:00night flying<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="textexposedshow"><span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black;">Night Flying</span></span></span></span></i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="textexposedshow"><span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black;">: a performance conceived, devised and performed by Jane Mason and David Williams. Dramaturgical support from Luke Pell, Paul
Carter and Wendy Hubbard. Lighting design: Mark Parry</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="textexposedshow"><span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black;">Residencies at The Point, Eastleigh; Pavilion Dance, Bournemouth; Mark
Bruce Company, Frome; Dance4, Nottingham; The Phoenix, Exeter; Exeter
University</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="textexposedshow"><span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Premiere at Exeter Phoenix, then Bristol Old Vic, and
Siobhan Davies Studios, London (as part of the ‘Open Choreography Performance’
programme 2019). Further touring in spring 2020 (Plymouth, Cornwall, London) - details to follow</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="textexposedshow"><span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">For a review of <i>Night Flying</i> in Bristol, by Ian Abbott, see <a href="https://writingaboutdance.com/festival/ian-abbott-impermance-presents-bristol-old-vic/" target="_blank">here </a></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="textexposedshow"><span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black;">Photographs in tour pack (above) by Benjamin J Borley, Aaron Davies, Tessa France. Post-performance photograph below by David Williams</span></span></span></span></div>
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</style> david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-37366515708043940982019-09-02T16:34:00.000+01:002023-08-29T15:58:28.398+01:00be a mountain<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjobCMvMg3ssvX_O6ggDhtvHAnwUk1l1Cogch5lQStGdwe1HNr3-HUxHJWlPaXoYb7RA6WUuHn5S-DsG_O1fozkvtBxSHq0Ues1RYqjUYDqwAUIIU1t4RmhwOhea_J91h7mp9zpRnxuOgYW/s1600/Mount+Stromlo_night.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="756" data-original-width="1134" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjobCMvMg3ssvX_O6ggDhtvHAnwUk1l1Cogch5lQStGdwe1HNr3-HUxHJWlPaXoYb7RA6WUuHn5S-DsG_O1fozkvtBxSHq0Ues1RYqjUYDqwAUIIU1t4RmhwOhea_J91h7mp9zpRnxuOgYW/s400/Mount+Stromlo_night.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">‘To
sit, to listen, to be, to observe, to breathe, to think, to remember – the most
urgent choreography’ (Lepecki 1996: 107).</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">‘Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will
sense them. The least we can do is try to be there’ (Dillard 1998: 10).</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">***</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Deep space</span></b>
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<span lang="EN-US">For two years
in the mid-1980s I lived on a mountain in Australia, some miles to the west of
the national capital Canberra. My rented home on the mountain – Mount Stromlo -
was one of a number of 1950s single-storey wooden houses in a small community attached
to a major observatory. A little further around the mountain towered half a
dozen huge, brooding, domed telescopes. My neighbours were astronomers,
astrophysicists, PhD researchers, computer engineers; they usually worked at
night, and I rarely saw them out and about during the days. This was a place of
deep looking of a specific kind. Initially established as a solar observatory,
research at that time was focused primarily on galactic astronomy, notably supernovas
and the rate of change of cosmic expansion, as well as the monitoring of space
weather. To walk at night amongst the structures housing the reflector
telescopes was an uncanny experience. These silent monolithic sentinels would
suddenly crank and whir into life without warning, their slowly revolving
aluminium domes winking in the moonlight as they opened to the infinite
pearl-strewn intricacies of the night sky. Once I lay on the ground beside
them, looking upwards, trying to imagine something of what they were seeing. </span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Awakening: ‘the 10,000 beings’</span></b></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">‘Don’t be a mountaineer, be a mountain’ (Snyder 1999:
20).</span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Lucy Cash and
Simone Kenyon’s short film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">How the earth
must see itself (a thirling)</i> offers a distilled, poetic mapping of an area
of mountain terrain – Glen Feshie on the western side of the Cairngorms in Scotland
– through embodied engagement with and perceptions of its particular material
attributes and energies. The film concerns itself with modalities of seeing, sensing
and knowing, ecologies of place making, an explicitly gendered economy of
respectful attention and exchange (in sharp contrast to the ‘heroic’ assaults,
conquests or catastrophes of so many mountaineering narratives), and a resonant
wonder that both recognizes the provisionality of its understandings and
affirms the abundant complexity of a wilderness environment which exceeds the cognitive
reach of the self. In image and sound, it proposes to displace any singular
perspective in favour of a more modest, contemplative, ecological immersion in
the protean dynamics of present process. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The film draws
on and refashions material developed for a series of live performances directed
by Kenyon with a group of women collaborators, their work inspired by Nan
Shepherd’s astonishing book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Living
Mountain</i>, originally written during the second World War and first
published in 1977. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shepherd’s book might
be read as a kind of modernist mystic’s love song to a place she knew
intimately, and the amplified sensory attention and devotion of her enquiry are
in many ways tonally and thematically reminiscent of Annie Dillard’s exquisite
writings about Tinker Creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Both women
elaborate a grace-ful pedagogy of seeing and sensing. And while Shepherd’s
Presbyterian materialism perhaps offers a particularly Scottish counterpoint to
Dillard’s ecstatic questioning pantheism, both seek a profound interpenetration
of body, consciousness and place – they are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">thirled</i><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?rinli=1&pli=1&blogID=567846911414225929#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 12pt;"></span></span></span></span></a>
(1) - that undoes the self and sets it in motion, casting it into an unfinishable,
contoured endeavour to understand an abundant, auratic here-and-now that will never
fully give away its abiding mysteries.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">In his
perceptive introduction to a recent edition of Shepherd’s slim volume, Robert
Macfarlane characterizes her writing in terms of ‘a compressive intensity, a
generic disobedience, a flaring prose-poetry and an obsession (ocular,
oracular) with the eyeball’ (Shepherd 2011: xiii). Consciously or otherwise, Cash
and Kenyon appear to have conceived and moulded their film at least in part in
the light of these qualities, and they condense fragments of Shepherd’s acutely
pensive text to accompany and guide us in voice-over through the film. Spoken
by the Scottish performer Shirley Henderson, these voicings are marked with a
distinct gender, accent, timbre, and a flinty, weathered grain (in Barthes’s
sense, grain as the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">body</i> in the
voice) that reminded me of Linda Manz in Terence Malick’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Days of Heaven</i> (I can think of no higher compliment). Like Manz’s,
Henderson’s voice is indeterminate in terms of age and historical time, as if
archetypal – a benign revenant version of the pre-Christian <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cailleach</i> of the highlands, perhaps. And
what she says come to us in a dream-like close-up, at times whispered, little
more than shaped breath, like thoughts on the threshold of consciousness and at
the cusp of articulation. Hers is the voice of an old soul, like Shepherd’s:
faraway and so close.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The film as a whole
seems to be discreetly rounded with sleep, framed by the very first voice-over words
we hear in terms of the fresh perceptions activated when one emerges from a
night spent on the mountain. From its opening blurred pan across the dormant
body-like folds of the Cairngorms, set against a misty skyline, one might
perhaps conceive of the film itself as a soft, porous ‘awakening’ into an
attuned, uninsulated receptivity in an immersive, quasi-animist present. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘Noone knows the mountain completely who has
not slept on it. As one slips over into sleep, the mind grows limpid. The body
melts. Perception alone remains. One neither thinks nor desires nor remembers.
There is nothing between me and the earth and sky’</i>. And the mountain itself
seems to stir into flickering life – a sprig of heather dancing softly in the
breeze, a scurrying beetle, the astonishing feel-stretch of a caterpillar
exploring a budding twig, the play of light on a spider’s web. The film’s
closing fade-to-black, set alongside the sounds of a women’s choir and bird
song, returns us to the darkness of (a different) sleep.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">On first ‘awakening’,
we are drawn into proliferative life and movement in image and sound, registers
of the teeming material world often referred to in Buddhist literature as ‘the
10,000 beings’. We slip (at first I wrote the verb ‘plunge’, but that’s much
too sudden a trajectory for this study in slow perception) (2) <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?rinli=1&pli=1&blogID=567846911414225929#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 12pt;"></span></span></span></span></a>– we slip gently into a world of dynamic complexity, delicacy, precarity,
resilience and interconnectedness, and over time we come to sense a tacit
invitation to ‘think like a mountain’, to borrow Aldo Leopold’s celebrated
phrase. For the film perceives and maps this mountain massif as an intricate
ecosystem, a biodiverse web of agencies, interrelations and interdependencies
between earth, rock, flora, fauna, water, weather, sky, all of them intertwined
and in process. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">As the film
unfolds, our orientation through seeing and listening pulses between crystalline
resolution and out-of-focus, proximity and distance, extreme close-up and wider
context. The camera knowingly makes of our vision a modality that is imperfect
and provisional, its rhythms contrapuntal and discontinuous, its points of view
shifting. At moments the materiality of the 16 mm film and the camera’s
mediation of seeing interrupt the ‘natural’ quality of these images, declaring
their contingent madeness. A range of evanescent visual textures and effects,
both deliberate choices and chance mechanical accidents happily embraced, briefly
undo the integrity and singularity of the filmed image, destabilising the
authority of the camera’s claim to truth, its ‘mastering’ of reality. These
include frame slippage – the split-frame judder that registers those spaces
between frames that are usually invisible to the viewer – the flaring
micro-tempests of light leak, over-exposure and solarisation, shifting unstable
focus and the sense at times of a softer peripheral vision, and the foggy blur
of halation around certain objects, like breath on a mirror. Although superficially
reminiscent of the work of certain other contemporary filmmakers in terms of
their heightened engagement with film’s textural materiality (for example, Ben
Rivers, Guy Maddin or Mark Jenkin), in Cash’s work, in addition to her
activation of duration itself as material – an analogue to the deep time of the
topography of this place - the very <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">act
of seeing</i> is foregrounded as mercurial, unpredictable and dynamic,
entailing an active process of negotiation of the partial and the compromised.
In this way, the film</span><span lang="EN-US"> enacts a kind
of formal equivalence to Nan Shepherd’s own nuanced phenomenological insights in
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Living Mountain</i> as to the unsteady
provisionality of vision, its morphing multiplicity and its inevitable implicating
- literally, ‘en-folding’ - of other senses in embodied processes of
experiencing and (always partial) meaning making. In particular, hearing and
touch.</span>
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<span lang="EN-US">Never silent, the
film’s complex sound track invites a kind of somatic ‘deep listening’, to use
Pauline Oliveros’s term. It layers Henderson’s voice over a montage of bird
sounds (corvids, a cuckoo, a skylark), the chattering flow of a small stream, footfalls
in heather, a tiny crunching like infinite insect legs scurrying across pine
needle debris, the soft thwoosh of bodies falling, and the continuous movement
of wind and air, which at times suggests the tidal susurration of a distant
spectral sea. In addition, a choir of women sings Hannah Tuulikki’s meditative vocal
score, its compositional arc rising gradually towards collective celebratory flight
towards the film’s ending. Combining sonic materials that are both spatially
close-up and further afield, this heterogeneous sonic environment elaborates a detailed
topography of holistic entanglement in a textured braiding of elements, sensations,
creatures and perspectives. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘For the
mountain is one and indivisible … all are aspects of one entity: the living
mountain’ ... </i></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Look out</span></b>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">‘I knew when I had looked for a long time, that I had
hardly begun to see’ (Shepherd 2011: xix).</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The mountain observatory
that was my home in Australia all those years ago was a designated place of
looking in other ways too. At weekends during the summer months, I worked a
6-hour solitary shift as a fire ‘watcher’, spending a sustained chunk of
daylight hours at the top of a tall circular metal lookout platform on one side
of the mountain. In this windowless space high above the pine canopy there was
a tall chair, a curved bench table, a logbook, binoculars to scan the
surrounding ranges and valleys for any trace of smoke, a phone and a 2-way
radio to file hourly reports to a central fire office in the city. I remember
maps, a radio for weather reports, and a printout detailing different kinds of
smoke plumes and how to read their specific colours in terms of the combustible
materials involved. At the top and bottom edges of the framed panoramic field
of vision were compass points etched into a metal strip, a version of the old
32-point wind rose. The direction of any smoke seen in the distance could be
gauged relatively accurately by suspending a line vertically through the field
of vision and aligning the plume with the compass coordinates above and below.
A number of such readings from partner lookout points in the area, with
intersecting fields of vision, would enable the central office to triangulate
and fix the whereabouts of the fire. The semiotics and mapping of smoke.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">My rhythm was
to scan steadily and formally, backwards and forwards across the 180 degrees of
visible landscape to be surveyed, then step away from the binoculars to rest my
eyes in a softer drifting mode of looking, an undirected hazy pan of reverie<span style="color: blue;"> </span>or a jump-zoom in on something much closer at hand. A
tuning in and out. Whenever I was distracted from the methodical, meditative
engagement with what lay in the scalloped distance, it was triggered by
registering change of some kind, something ‘fleet and fleeting’ as Annie
Dillard might say: the interruption-event of a boisterous flock of white
cockatoos, a loping wallaby or kangaroo foraging in the undergrowth at the base
of trees nearby, an unfamiliar insect or spider alongside me in the lookout
space, a caterpillar edging forward hesitantly with invisible information, a
shift in the cloud cover, the breeze, temperature or light on my face.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">One Saturday
afternoon, I fell asleep up there, I’m not sure for how long. Looking out just
folded slowly and softly into a looking in. When I woke up with a start,
flushed with self-consciousness as if someone or something might have seen me
sleeping, above all I was anxious as to what I might have missed; I immediately
looked up and out. And I saw that it was almost dusk, and that there were no
visible smoke plumes, and that everything had been transformed utterly and
remade while I wasn’t even looking. And I saw ‘in a blue haze all the world
poured flat and pale between the mountains’ (Dillard 1974: 41) …</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">***</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"></span><span lang="EN-US">Almost twenty years
later in January 2003, long after I had left Mount Stromlo, in the height of a
summer drought a devastating firestorm consumed the mountain utterly, sweeping
through the pine forests on its flanks and destroying five of the telescopes,
their aluminium domes, mirrors and lenses literally melted away, along with
years of research data. The fire also razed to the ground many of the research
buildings and houses, including my former home, and the lookout tower. The
residents were given 20 minutes warning for their evacuation. Only one
telescope survived the inferno.</span>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Seeing touching</span></b>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">‘I walk out; I see something, some event that would
otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some
enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten
bell’ (Dillard 1998: 14).</span></i><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Like
Shepherd’s book, Cash and Kenyon’s film activates a perceptual and conceptual
terrain that sits astride a number of apparent binaries: looking/seeing,
proximity/distance, small/large, subject/object, human/non-human, material/immaterial,
speed/slowness, deep time/the present moment, knowing/mystery, sleeping/waking,
living/dying. In both book and film each of these is unstable, in flux, the
axis of a potential becoming. Each term is implicated in the other. To this
list must be added the core pairing of seeing/touching, a conventional Western clefting
that is actively frayed and then repurposed in this film. The women performers
– quietly receptive explorers of and somatic witnesses to the mountain - embody
the vibrant connective tissue in the space between these two kinds of
perception. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">As a range of
writers, philosophers and phenomenologists have suggested over the past half-century
or so – Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emanuel Levinas, Luce Irigaray, H</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">élè</span><span lang="EN-US">ne Cixous, Elizabeth Grosz and others – touch, the first sense to
develop in the human foetus, involves a corporeal doing that exposes the sensitivity,
porosity and vulnerability of the self to the world. As act and metaphor, touch
represents the impingement of the world as a whole upon subjectivity; and
touching locates oneself in proximity with the givens of the world, rather than
in opposition to them. At the threshold of inside and outside, touch as
encounter and interface with the more-than-oneself, the event of another. Touch
as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a modality of difference</i>.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">As the film
unfolds we see one, then three, then five women on the mountain: </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Jo Hellier, Claricia Parinussa, Caroline Reagh, Keren Smail
and Petra Söör</span><span lang="EN-US">. Their clothes - hand-knitted jumpers,
leather belts, trousers, an elegant contemporary version of what women hikers
would have worn half a century ago – reflect the textures, shapes and colour
spectrum of their surroundings. They appear to belong in the mountain. They practice
movements and states of being-in-place that are akin to what are known as ‘The
Four Dignities’ in Chinese literature, fundamental modes of being mindful and
present (‘at home’) in one’s body: Standing, Lying, Sitting, Walking. First we
see one of the women standing immobile, dwarfed by a tree, contemplating its
soaring presence, before softly placing her hand on its trunk and stepping
‘into’ it. Then the women as a group, walking slowly and silently through the
heather. We see their eyes seeing, their bodies sensing, feeling the air on
their skin and through their hair. At one point they lie folded in the heather,
their arched woolen backs like scattered boulders that slowly stir into
movement. A hand dips into running water, lingering with its energy and
temperature, drinking them in. Another hand, then bare feet, carefully explore
the qualities and architecture of thick spongey moss. The pleasure of tender exchange
in the rust-coloured moss’s give and return, the responsive dance of toucher
touched in the flesh of the world. Subsequently the women perform a simple collective
choreographic cycle of organic emergence and return, appearance and
disappearance: individually rising from the heather, standing, swaying in the
breeze, gradually provoking imbalance by bending backwards and inverting their
perception of the world - ‘unmaking’ the habitual - before finally letting go
and falling back softly to earth. At times the camera adopts the fallers’ point
of view, tracking the backward slide of their visual field across the sky. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Ultimately perhaps
the film invites us to see a range of tactile encounters in proximity, with a
view to the experience of the film itself offering the viewer an engagement
with a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">haptic</i> space rather than a
singularly optical one. No opposition is established between these different
kinds of sensing; instead the film encourages us to recognize the possibility
that the eyes can see - and the ears hear - in a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tactile</i> fashion, apprehending and lightly brushing the epidermis of
the world. If we are to find a trajectory ‘into’ any environment through open embodied
contact, it seems to suggest, our journey will necessarily entail something of that
pulsing world entering and taking (a) place within our own internal topography.
For the edges of our bodies are membranes for two-way traffic …</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">So let us take
time, make space. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Dissolve the
mind, walk out of the body.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Allow what’s
out there to in-here.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">That’s the
invitation, the most urgent choreography.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">‘Lick a
finger; feel the now’ (Dillard 1998: 99) …</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">***</span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US">Footnotes</span></b></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US"></span></b><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">1. </span><span lang="EN-US"><span lang="EN-US">Online Scottish dictionaries offer an uncertain etymology for the term <i>‘thirl’</i>, with possible links to the
words ‘through’, throw’, ‘thirl’ (a hole, aperture, nostril), ‘hurl’, ‘thrill’
and ‘thrall’. Formally, as a noun or verb ‘thirl’ suggests the creation of an
interconnecting hole or passage way, a perforation that enables an intersection
and interpenetration between spaces; the sensations and symptoms of intense
emotion, physical stimulation or piercing cold (trembling, tingling, throbbing,
vibrating, a literal and figurative ‘thrilling’); and a binding connection to a
particular place (see DSL). The glossary appended to Shepherd’s book simply
contains the following short entry: ‘<i>Thirled</i>,
bound, tied’ (Shepherd 2011: 114).</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><span lang="EN-US">2. </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span lang="EN-US"><span lang="EN-US">Ren</span><span lang="EN-US">é</span><span lang="EN-US"> Daumal: ‘There is
nothing quite like the mountains for teaching slowness and calmness’ (Daumal 2010:
19).</span></span></span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">References</span></b><span lang="EN-US"></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"></span><span lang="EN-US">Dictionary of
the Scots Language (DSL). ‘Thirl’, entry in the online ‘Scottish National
Dictionary (1700-)’, <a href="https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/thirl_v1_n1">https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/thirl_v1_n1</a></span>
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<span lang="EN-US"></span><span lang="EN-US">Daumal, Ren</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é</span><span lang="EN-US"> (2010. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mount Analogue</i>,
New York: The Overlook Press</span>
</div>
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<span lang="EN-US"></span><span lang="EN-US">Dillard, Annie
(1998). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pilgrim at Tinker Creek</i>, New
York: Harper Perennial</span> </div>
</div>
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<span lang="EN-US">Lepecki, André
(1996). ‘Embracing the stain: notes on the time of dance’, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Performance Research</i> 1:1 (‘The Temper of the Times’), Spring, 103-7</span>
<br />
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<span lang="EN-US">Shepherd, Nan
(2011). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Living Mountain</i>,
Edinburgh: Canongate Books</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Snyder, Gary
(1999). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Gary Snyder Reader</i>,
Washington DC: Counterpoint</span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-US">Photo at the top: Stuart Lindenmayer - Mount Stromlo, burnt out observatory at night, 31 August 2017 (remains of one of the original telescopes, which now exists alongside new observatory facilities). Wikimedia Creative Commons <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mount_Stromlo_Burnt_Out_Observatory_Building_at_Night.jpg" target="_blank">license</a></span></i></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-US">This essay was originally written as</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"> a response to a film by Lucy Cash. Entitled ‘'The
most urgent choreography’: reflections on seeing and sensing in </span></span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">How the earth must see itself (a thirling)</span></span></span><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">', it was commissioned by Lucy Cash in 2019</span></span></span></i><br />
<span lang="EN-US"></span><span lang="EN-US"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 10pt;"></span> </span></div>
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}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Cambria; }p.MsoFootnoteText, li.MsoFootnoteText, div.MsoFootnoteText { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Cambria; }span.MsoFootnoteReference { vertical-align: super; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color: purple; text-decoration: underline; }span.FootnoteTextChar { }.MsoChpDefault { font-size: 10pt; font-family: Cambria; }div.WordSection1 { }</style>david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-33908805678322097812019-03-12T15:01:00.000+00:002019-05-05T00:19:36.386+01:00look again<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzaD01Kk72t6j1fMkCST6McvK4tLO2hykPb4pUp1als1fWG82kSOMbUfGVyEkynPjR5BGWp_cwOpgZI6OjNqRONcDZUcyGSmwywdIiYaZSkp4mRUOz0IfwhyphenhyphenDgLBjroCeGPC5TdNG2_EV5/s1600/laib_walnut+pollen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="850" data-original-width="1134" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzaD01Kk72t6j1fMkCST6McvK4tLO2hykPb4pUp1als1fWG82kSOMbUfGVyEkynPjR5BGWp_cwOpgZI6OjNqRONcDZUcyGSmwywdIiYaZSkp4mRUOz0IfwhyphenhyphenDgLBjroCeGPC5TdNG2_EV5/s400/laib_walnut+pollen.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><i>'Ordinary human beings do not like mystery since you cannot put a bridle on it, and therefore, in general they exclude it, they repress it, they eliminate it - and it's </i>settled<i>. But if on the contrary one remains open and susceptible to all the phenomena of overflowing, beginning with natural phenomena, on discovers the immense landscape of the </i>trans-<i>, of the passage' (Cixous 1997: 51-2).</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">Within the humanities and social sciences
in British universities, a particular conception of material histories and
practices, broadly post-Marxist, has dominated discursive thinking, academic publishing
and teaching for the last forty years or so. Unquestionably the invaluable
array of conceptual tools and languages these critical perspectives have afforded
has been enormously generative in diverse disciplinary contexts, providing the
ground for radical reconceptions of history and its occluded others, and of
power, knowledge, political agency, identity, representation, and so on. It has
seeded and substantively informed the development of cultural studies,
feminisms, post-colonialisms, and the proliferative deployment of critical
theory in areas from anthropology to film studies, from geography to art
history, theatre and performance studies. I confess to being one of the products
and perpetrators of such an intellectual training, and I remain profoundly
thankful for many of its enabling critical optics, concepts, strategies, and above
all for its dissident spirit of inquiry: its reflexive invitation to look again
at the naturalized, the received, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">doxa</i>,
with a view to exposing what or who is overlooked or concealed or silenced. In
the words of the novelist David Malouf:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">‘the very habit
and faculty that makes apprehensible to us what is known and expected dulls our
sensitivity to other forms, even with the most obvious. We must rub our eyes
and look again, clear our minds of what we are looking for to see what is
there’ (Malouf 1994: 130). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">When I was starting out as a young part-time academic
in the 1980s, any mention in such contexts of ‘spirituality’ or the ‘numinous’ was
almost invariably met with skepticism and suspicion, and a swift dismissal into
the benighted conceptual bin marked ‘new age’. Thinking and practices claiming
a relation to the spiritual or to perceptions of the ineffable, the unnameable,
the metaphysical, the mystical were more often than not collapsed into the
religious or the delusional, and discredited accordingly. Any ‘serious’
academic study of such practices and perceptions seemed unthinkable. More
recently, however, despite the lingering resilience of this dis-enchanted <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">partie prise</i> towards the numinous, many
such blindspot zones of ‘unthinkability’ have been revisited and reconceived from
a diversity of critical domains, most notably deconstruction, new materialisms,
feminisms, radical ecologies, and their intersections with post-quantum science
and neurology. A number of widely influential philosophers and thinkers have
articulated the conceptual means through which to open up to fresh critical
attention areas of experience and consciousness with direct implications and
possibilities for a nuanced exploration of the numinous: for example, Derrida’s
negative epistemologies (the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">apophatic</i>),
Donna Haraway’s cyborgian ‘affinities’, Karen Barad’s posthuman ‘agential
realism’, Jane Bennett’s ‘vibrant materialism’, Timothy Morton’s accounts of ‘humankind’
and of an ecology ‘without nature’, and, in the area of performance studies,
analyses of performance epistemologies and ontologies by theorists including
David George:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">‘As an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">epistemology</i>, performance offers: a
rediscovery of the now, relocation in the here; return to the primacy of
experience, of the event; rediscovery that facts are relations, that all
knowledge exists on the threshold and in the interaction between subject and
object (which are themselves only hypostatisations); a rediscover of ambiguity,
of contradiction, of difference; a reassertion that things – and people – are
what they do …’ (George 1999: 34).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">Silvia Battista’s timely and invaluable book,
which draws productively on a number of these scholars, forms part of a recent
and growing reappraisal in contemporary academia’s critical relations with the
numinous in art and performance. Battista shapes her book around detailed
discussions of work by five international artists – Marina Abramovic, James
Turrell, Ansuman Biswas, Marcus Coates, Wolfgang Laib – in order to clarify the
perceptual propositions and effects/affects each of these practices trigger,
the associational hermeneutic fields active in the particular works, and the
shifts in consciousness and epistemologies they produce that might be deemed to
be of a numinous order. The choice of artists and works necessarily represents
a sample, outlining an initial mapping of certain typologies of contemporary
performances of the numinous, rather than endeavouring to offer any exhaustive
listing of such practices (1).<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?rinli=1&pli=1&blogID=567846911414225929#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">It is important to note that, in this
context, Battista conceives of spirituality and numinous experience as outside
the parameters of organized religion. The works of the contemporary artists she
includes here offer instances of a (post-)secular sacred activated by embodied
events of perception, each of them generating manifestations beyond the
cognitive emprise of the ego. Battista suggests that these extra-ordinary and
ex-centric events, in some ways akin to Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘profane
illumination’, can be provoked by particular disciplines and performative structural
configurations (Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’) to produce a palpable flaring
into presentness and consciousness of dynamic processes, entanglements,
interconnections, pulsing materialities and plural agencies. So, for example,
Battista analyses the labour intensive and painstaking gathering, placement and
framing of pollen by means of which the German artist Wolfgang Laib creates the
conditions for the pollen itself to take (a) place, to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">happen</i> in its specificity as auratic event entangled in myriad
other processes of emergence, collection and dispersal; and in this way, the
pollen itself mysteriously ‘comes to matter’. In themselves, these events of
inter-/intra-action implicitly challenge mechanistic models of science - and
conventional conceptions of knowledge - characterized by binary cleftings, immutable
boundaries, the narrowly causal and instrumental, the ‘ego-logical’. Moreover,
as Battista goes on to propose, apprehension of this motile, relational mesh of
intersecting forces furnishes the potential for a posthuman, ecological
critique of received ideas about hierarchies of agency, authorship, and species.
</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">The performative tools employed by the five
artists under consideration here, mobilised to decentre and displace habitual
modes of perception, invite other less familiar qualities of receptive
attention that can give rise to unsettling, mysterious ‘landscapes of the passage’
as described by H</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">élè</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">ne Cixous at the very
beginning of this text. As Cixous goes on to insist, an openness and
susceptibility to ‘the phenomena of overflowing, beginning with natural
phenomena’ (i.e. an openness to the numinous):</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">‘does not mean
that everything will be adrift, our thinking, our choices, etc. But it means
that the factor of instability, the factor of uncertainty, or what Derrida
calls the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">undecidable</i>, is
indissociable from human life. This ought to oblige us to have an attitude that
is at once rigorous and tolerant and doubly so on each side: all the more
rigorous than open, all the more demanding since it must lead to openness,
leave passage: all the more mobile and rapid as the ground will always give
way, always’ (Cixous 1997: 52).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">Instability, rigour, tolerance, openness,
mobility, speed (and slowness, its shadow, out of and into which it unfolds), and
dissolution into renewed uncertainty: the cyclical trajectory of an engagement
with the unmasterable spaces of ‘the passage’ as traced by Cixous – and
Battista in her book - proposes an ongoing ethical disposition towards the in-excess,
the not-known, the not-yet-known, the unthinkable, the radically other, the
fleetingly glimpsed, the profoundly paradoxical. And at the heart of what
follows in this book is an invitation to an active porosity and receptivity to
non-mastery in the face of the encounter event with the other-than-oneself, which
one might usefully conceive of in terms of an opening to the ‘eco-logical’. For
we are always already implicated – literally, ‘en-folded’ – in other
subjectivities, agencies, forces, phenomena, realities.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">In order to give a future to the virtual
space of the future (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">l’avenir</i>) and to
the others that are us, we need practices and philosophies of inter-located <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">passage</i> rather than of fixed ground or
territory, in the present unfolding of a democracy that is, as Jacques Derrida,
Chantal Mouffe and others have suggested, always provisional, insufficient, in
process, always ‘to come’ (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">l’à-venir</i>).
It is apparent that identity and location, for example, are produced as much
through narration as through what already exists: they are more a matter of
doing than knowing. As Battista demonstrates, certain kinds of art and
performance provide opportunities to unsettle and refashion those heterogeneous
personal mappings that we are continuously making up and over, and out of which
we constitute our-‘selves’ and/in the world. The art practices that form the
focus of her book elaborate structures for perceptual and existential realignments,
amplificatory re-attunements that can enable a kind of fluid, performative
‘auto-topography’; this in turn encourages and activates shifting senses of
self, space, place and reality - rather than the ‘self’ or the ‘world’
occurring preformed, as if they were pre-existent entities rubbing up against
each other. When space, time, self are conceived as ‘a multiple foldable
diversity’ (Serres and Latour 1995: 59), a field of flows and intensities - <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">spacing</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">timing</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">selfing</i> – then
perhaps a dynamically porous self-in-process and in-relation can fray just a
little the dualist territorial imaginaries of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, of
self-identity in binary opposition to radical alterity. If one can accept the
paradox that the continuity of identity is secured through movement and the
capacity to change rather than the ability to cling on to what is already
established, as Zygmunt Bauman has suggested (1999: xiv), then one’s
responsibility is to abandon the logics of mastery, to ‘look again’ and listen
otherwise, and let untimely, numinous elements of all sorts of ‘outsides’
in-here. In this way identity can become ‘a point of departure for a voyage
without guarantees, and not a port of arrival’ (Chambers 2001: 25); and ‘home’ (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">oikos</i>, the eco-, and the self itself) can
be considered no longer as a ‘fixed structure’, but as ‘a contingent passage, a
way that literally carries [one] elsewhere’ (ibid: 26). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Note</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">(1) Other artists whose work would seem to be of potential relevance in this context </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">might include, for example, Joseph Beuys, Tehching Hsieh, Yoko Ono, Hermann Nitsch, Bill Viola, Francis Alys, Susan Hiller, Olafur Eliasson, John Newling and Lindsay Sears, as well as the recent performance work of British artists Abigail Conway (<i>An Evening with Primrose,</i> 2017) and Florence Peake.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">References</span></b></span></span>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">Bauman, Zygmunt. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Culture as Praxis</i>, London: Sage, 1999</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">Chambers, Iain. ‘A Question of History’, in
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Culture after Humanism: History,</i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Culture, Subjectivity</span></i><span lang="EN-US">, London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 7-46</span></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">Cixous, Hélène with Mireille Calle-Gruber. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>(trans.
Eric Prenowitz), London: Routledge, 1997</span></span>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">George, David ER. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Buddhism as/in Performance</i>, New Delhi: DK Printworld, 1999</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">Malouf, David. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Remembering Babylon</i>. London: Vintage, 1994</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">Serres, Michel and Latour, Bruno. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Conversations on Science, Culture and Time</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>(trans.
Roxanne Lapidus), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995</span></span>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">Image: Wolfgang Laib, <i>Pollen mountain</i> (2015) - pollen from hazelnut</span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">First published as 'Look again: landscapes of the passage', the foreword to Silvia Battista's <i>Posthuman Spiritualities in Contemporary Performance: Politics, Ecologies and Perceptions</i>, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>‘What is the relation of the dead to what has not yet happened, to the future? All the future is the construction in which their “imagination” is engaged’ (Berger 1996: n.p.)</i><br /><br />In the afternoon of Sunday 14 January 1968, shortly after the end of mass in the local churches, a series of major earthquakes (terremoti) shook through the Belice Valley in Western Sicily, a quasi-feudal and economically deprived agricultural area dotted with small towns, at the juncture of the provinces of Palermo, Trapani and Agrigento. The epicenter of these seismic events was the fourteenth-century town of Gibellina, and most of its 6,400 inhabitants fled their homes en masse in the early evening to seek refuge in the freezing open fields overnight: hundreds of blanketed groups huddling around fires under a clear sky, waiting for the light of dawn. In the early hours of Monday 15 January two further devastating shocks, the second of them measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale, ripped through the town, finally flattening and reducing it to a field of rubble on the hillside: stone, masonry, plaster, the debris of shattered lives. Only the town’s cemetery, a short distance away on a neighbouring hillside, remained intact. Three other communities in the valley were also entirely destroyed - Poggioreale, Salaparuta and Montevago; others were significantly damaged, including Santa Ninfa, Santa Margherita, Partanna and Salemi. In this one catastrophic night more than 400 people were killed – over 100 in Gibellina – while thousands more were injured, and almost 100,000 people were left homeless. On the front page of the Tuesday morning edition of the Communist newspaper L’Unità (16 January 1968), above a photograph of the deserted, pulverised ruins of Gibellina, the headline read: ‘Earthquake in Sicily: 500 dead? Entire region no longer exists. It was carnage’ (C’era una strage’). <br /><br />In the weeks and months that followed, as the dead were buried and survivors retrieved what possessions they could from the remains of their homes, gradually the emergency services and military personnel – struggling to cope with the aftermath of a disaster of such scale - constructed provisional shelters throughout the Belice Valley for the traumatised terremotati: gridded temporary communities of tents and then concrete fibre Nissan huts, without electricity, running water, heating, basic amenities. Ultimately these cramped, leaking, insanitary, barrack-like camps – barracopoli – would house the people of Gibellina for more than 11 years as they awaited a promised new town. Political in-fighting, bureaucratic indecision and inertia at local and State levels, disagreements about the location and nature of the new town, corruption, extortion and the embezzlement of State funds - all contributed to delays in planning and construction; and inevitably many contadini chose to abandon their paese forever, accepting local government’s offers of free passports and one-way tickets, and emigrating to Northern Italy, Germany, South America and elsewhere, in search of a new beginning.<br /><br />In what follows, and in the wake of this disastrous foundational event in the formation of a contemporary identity for the Belice Valley, my focus will be on Gibellina’s relocation and reconstruction in the 1970s and 1980s as a utopian art-and-garden community, Nuova Gibellina, designed by renowned architects, urban planners and artists, and its present unfinished, partially inhabited status; and secondly, at the site of the old town, the refashioning of its remains and its memorialisation in Alberto Burri’s vast sculptural land art installation, Il Grande Cretto (‘The Large Crack’), conceived as a ‘labyrinth of memory’, but never fully finished and currently in a state of increasing disrepair. These twinned sites shadow and ghost each other in their entangled doubling, and we will travel freely between them here. Each of them is rooted in and references a catastrophic past, while endeavouring to realise a vision of possible future identities and histories informed by a humanist ideology of art and culture’s restorative centrality in the constitution of civic life: the dream of a ‘concrete utopia’, staging and enabling a community’s ‘memories for the future’. Furthermore, contemporary Gibellina is haunted by a range of other doublings none of which settle into neat, mutually exclusive binaries. In addition to the axis between the past and its unrealised dreams of futurity, underlying this account are the ambiguous relations between idealised conception and its material concretisation, between map-plan and the embodied realities of everyday lived experience, between urbs (the material fabric of a city, its physical manifestation) and civis (the social practices and networks of its citizen inhabitants), and between construction-rebirth-renewal and ruin.<br /><br /><b>Nuova Gibellina: a ‘concrete utopia’</b><br /><br /><i>‘What meaning does your construction have?’ he asks. ‘What is the aim of a city under construction unless it is a city? Where is the plan you are following, the blueprint?’ ‘We will show it to you as soon as the working day is over; we cannot interrupt our work now’, they answer.<br /> Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. ‘There is the blueprint’, they say (Calvino 1974: 127)</i><br /><br />Initial plans for the reconstruction of Gibellina and the Belice Valley were drawn up by ISES (Istituto per lo Sviluppo dell’Edilizia Sociale) under the aegis of the Italian Ministry of Public Works. The State proposed a zoned rationalist plan for regional development, within which Gibellina, relocated to a new site and aggregated with some of the other damaged communities in a much larger town, would become a hub for local industry. In opposition to the State’s functionalist plans, Gibellina’s mayor Ludovico Corrao, a charismatic, pugnacious and controversial Communist lawyer with numerous connections in the arts (and arguably the core protagonist in the history of post-earthquake Gibellina) began to lobby with unflagging conviction for a radically different vision of a new town, solely for the Gibellinesi and in a different location - 18 kms to the west of the old town on the plains of Salinella below Salemi, close to agricultural land worked by the people of the town, and to major transport infrastructure: the train station at Salemi, with direct links to Palermo, and a new motorway linking Palermo and Mazara del Vallo on the south-western coast. Drawing on disparate elements of the utopian visions of François Marie Charles Fourier, William Morris, Frederick Law Olmsted and in particular Ebenezer Howard, Corrao conceived of the new Gibellina as a garden-city, open to the fields in the surrounding countryside, with art and culture as the generative foundation and ‘redemptive’ catalyst for elaborating new histories and civic identities from the (purported) tabula rasa enforced by disaster and displacement. Leading artists and architects would work closely with local people to produce a modernist ‘concrete utopia’ within which contemporary art and design would be embedded into the very fabric of the urban environment. Agriculture, craft and building work during the period of reconstruction would provide employment and seed new enterprises, and over time the town would take its place as a significant destination on the cultural tourism itinerary for Southern Europe: ‘Where history has been destroyed, only art could rebuild the layers of a dispersed memory; only a strong death-defying cultural project could make the earth capable of bearing fruit and producing new flowers’ (Ludovico Corrao, quoted in Pes and Bonifacio 2003: 4).<br /><br />From the time of his appointment as mayor in 1969, Corrao began to marshal high-profile artists, intellectuals and activists, including Leonardo Sciascia, Carlo Levi, Cesare Zavattini, and the celebrated Sicilian painter Renato Guttuso. He organised a series of gatherings, demonstrations and a public appeal on the second anniversary of the earthquake in January 1970, in the form of a collectively authored text corrosively critical of the State and explicitly designed to embarrass the government into action. In such ways Corrao and his growing group of powerful cultural allies insistently lobbied to draw attention to the predicament of the people of Gibellina, languishing in increasing frustration in the camps with construction still not underway, protesting as best they could through representations to politicians and church leaders (including the Pope), tax strikes, marches, and graffiti campaigns. Ultimately the initial ISES plans were abandoned, a compromise was agreed, and in the early 1970s building work finally commenced close to Corrao’s chosen site.<br /><br />The new plan, drawn up by the architect Marcello Fabbri through the ISES, entailed the construction of a modernist town in the broad shape of a butterfly, with the two curved ‘wings’ containing housing, schools, sports facilities and gardens, assembled around a central East/West spine for municipal buildings and public art works. Ultimately this zone, as initially conceived by the German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers in 1981, with Corrao and others, was also to include an ornamental lake, artisan workshops, green spaces, shops, pedestrian piazze and walkways, and a major new church on a small hill at the ‘head’. (Formally this urban design configuration, graphically representing chrysalis-like metaphors of transformative emergence, renewal and liberation, closely resembles Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer’s modernist plans for Brasilia, as detailed in Costa’s drawings in the late 1950s of a city in the form of an aeroplane or bird-man, with two unfolded wings set either side of a central monumental axis). Every Gibellinese family was guaranteed a new house: low-rise, double-fronted domestic dwellings divided into equal-sized plots with private gardens, offering vehicular access to a road on one side and a tree-lined pedestrian street on the other. By the late 1970s, most of the housing in Nuova Gibellina was completed, and the first people were able to move from the camps into their new homes. However by 1979 work on the components of the town’s central axis was barely underway, and it remained in large part an undeveloped void at the heart of the town. <br /><br />Although of course welcomed, the transition to an unfamiliar environment seems to have been profoundly unsettling, socially and psychologically, for many people. Despite the self-evident difficulties of the camps, years of having to navigate the shared and pressing problems of everyday life in close proximity had produced deep community bonds and relations of support. In this new context, with its radically dispersed lay-out and shift in scale, it seems many felt alienated and atomised by the wide boulevards, separated houses, and vast empty spaces. In the old town, population density had been at 3,200 people per hectare; in the spread of the new town, with a shrinking population of a little more than 4,000, there were now just 350 people per hectare (La Ferla 2004: 35). No provision seems to have been made for links with their former cultural mores and structures. Little possibility of conversations across the street or between neighbours. No meeting points on a human scale. No town centre, no shops. And the water supply was still unreliable, often interrupted without warning.<br /><br /><b>Rewriting ‘dis-aster’ </b><br /><br /><i>‘Our culture thinks through disasters. Implicitly or explicitly, disasters mediate philosophical enquiry and shape our creative imagination’ (Huet 2012: 2)</i><br /><br />From around 1980, Corrao turned his attention to the realisation of a number of ambitious architect-commissioned buildings and environments, and a wide range of public art works for the new town. This process continued in piecemeal fashion into the mid-1990s, and in fits and starts to the present time, both developing some of the core commissions for the central axis and dispersing art objects throughout the town. From the outset, Corrao was insistent that art was not ‘superfluous’, but the essential cornerstone for the gradual emergence of a new post-earthquake civic identity and genius loci. Today Nuova Gibellina contains about 20 major buildings deemed to be of particular architectural note, over 100 public art works in the open air, and hundreds of other paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations and textiles in its two major gallery collections on the edge of town (almost 2,000 works in total). Tourist brochures and catalogues produced by Nuova Gibellina’s Museum of Contemporary Art proclaim it as ‘the largest open-air gallery in the world’, a living museum of the late twentieth-century avant-garde. At the same time, as the focus of fiercely polemical critical debates in Italy, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, about the functions and forms of contemporary urban design and renewal, as well as art and architecture’s relations to context, scale, and social responsibility, the town’s projects have been condemned roundly by others as representing ‘the cemetery of the avant-garde’: a failed experiment in the spectacular, monumental and fragmented, and an unwitting and uncanny staging of Robert Smithson’s notion of entropic ‘ruins in reverse’, further compromised by the scant concern apparently shown for the lived experience of local inhabitants.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">One of the first major commissions, and the first art work one encounters at the entrance to the town today, is a startling 26-metre high burnished steel star straddling the main road: the Sicilian sculptor Pietro Consagra’s Stella: L’ingresso del Belice (‘Star: Entrance to the Belice’, 1981). Both monumental and delicate, resonantly defiant metaphor and simple graphic outline, its colour shifting constantly between industrial greys and honeyed apricots in response to the movements of sun and cloud, it remains one of Nuova Gibellina’s most iconic and poetically associative images (and one of few seemingly viewed with pride by many local people). Consagra seems to have been inspired in part by a relatively obscure passage in Goethe’s Italian Journey, written just a few miles away in Castelvetrano in April 1787, after a night spent in an inn that was ‘anything but elegant’:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><i>At midnight I woke up and saw over my head a star so beautiful that I thought I had never seen one like it. Its enchanting light seemed a prophecy of good things to come, and my spirit felt utterly refreshed … It was not till daybreak that I discovered what had caused this miracle. There was a crack in the roof and I had woken up just at the very moment when one of the most beautiful stars in the firmament was crossing my private meridian (Goethe 1970: 265).</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i> </i><br />Etymologically the word ‘disaster’ suggests the loss of a protective star (dis-astro), and the calamitous repercussions of abandonment by distant agencies in a state of cosmic emergency. Consagra’s sculpture, however, rewrites the apocalyptic narrative, reclaims the errant star, and brings it to earth in palpable, material, enduring form. In this way, a public art work, its component parts welded and erected by the artist in collaboration with a team of local craftsmen, perhaps serves to humanise and politicise disaster, and, to paraphrase Marie-Hélène Huet in The Culture of Disaster, emancipate it from a discredited supernatural and root it in the socius (Huet 2012: 8). For Corrao, ever the advocate of a restorative mnemonics with one eye on the future, Consagra’s Christian and socialist symbol of rebirth at the entrance to the valley represented ‘the capacity of the people of Belice to sustain the memory of culture, despite all attempts to erase it’ (quoted in La Ferla 2004: 39).<br /><br /><b>Il Grande Cretto: memory and oblivion</b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>‘The dead inhabit a timeless moment of construction continually rebegun. The construction is the state of the universe at any instant. According to their memory of life, the dead know the moment of construction as, also, a moment of collapse’ (Berger 1996: n.p.)<br /><br />‘Where there is no past, there cannot be a future’ (Sicilian novelist Vincenzo Consolo, quoted in Bouchard and Ferme 2013: 168)</i> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In 1979, Ludovico Corrao invited the celebrated Tuscan artist Alberto Burri (1915-95) to visit Gibellina, with a view to commissioning a major art work for the town. At that time Burri was perhaps best known for his monochromatic cretti (‘crack’) paintings of the 1970s, in which he explored analogies to mark-making and drawing in the filigree of chance cracks (craquelure) deliberately produced in the drying processes of various materials combined with pigments, including plastic cements, resins, kaolin and tar. These works seem to reference landscapes, clay river beds, evaporated lakes and deserts, and to relate to those same entropic processes that so fascinated Robert Smithson. Trained as a medical doctor, Burri was also interested in creating the conditions for the appearance of unforeseen and barely controlled ripples, ruptures and ‘wounds’ in the surface plane of visual images, and harnessing the energy implicated in their processes of scarring and ‘healing’. During his 1979 visit, Corrao took the artist to the devastated remains of the old Gibellina, to the work-in-progress of Nuova Gibellina, and to the nearby ruins of the Greek temples at Segesta; the latter seems to have triggered the seed of a creative response for Burri. Subsequently he proposed a large-scale memorial to the victims of the earthquake on the site of the old town, using the residual debris and rubble (i ruderi) to construct a dramatic map-like installation in situ on the hillside. Il Grande Cretto (now usually known as Il Cretto) would be the largest work of contemporary land art in the world. <br /><br />Over a period of several years from 1985, under the direction of the architect Alberto Zanmatti and with the assistance of army demolitions personnel and a team of engineers and builders, approximately 60% of Burri’s proposal was realised before resources for the project from private donations dried up in 1989. The remains of the old town were bulldozed into compacted blocks over an area of about 12 hectares (29 acres: 300 x 400 metres), in an approximate, somewhat abstracted restoration of the former locations of streets and buildings. These roughly eye-level, irregularly shaped cuboid structures and the 2-3 metre wide walkways between them were then covered with a shroud or sudarium-like layer of white cement to produce an imposing minimalist environment, which looks from a distance somewhat like an exposed quarry zone undulating down the slopes at the top of the valley. The play of light and shadow on the stone steps of the ancient amphitheatre at Segesta seems to have been central to Burri’s conception of Il Cretto as a dynamic environment-object imbricated in time. The cyclical daily mechanism of the sun’s passage would bring life and movement to his sculptural forms, and animate what he conceived of as an enduring poetic and thanatological testimony to a forgotten community in this manifestation of an ‘archaeology of the future’. And at the time of a full moon, local people say, the Cretto’s reflective spectral luminosity was visible at night from many miles away along the valley. The vein-like tissue of fissures in its surface resembled one of Burri’s paintings anomalously amplified and writ large into/onto the landscape: an epic projection of genius loci valued anew, and, for Burri, in implicit dialogue (and alliance) with those of the culturally revered ruins at Segesta and Selinunte.<br /><br />From within the Cretto’s apparent muteness and pervasive silence, the network of 122 sarcophagi and corridors produces something phenomenally and affectively related to Peter Eisenman’s penumbral Holocaust Memorial (2004) in Berlin. Burri’s installation, texturally rougher than Eisenmann’s, proposes a steeply angled, brightly lit and labyrinthine series of immersive passageways inviting exploration on foot, decelerating locomotion, and activating contemplation, associational memory and disorientation. Some degree of slumping in the concrete pouring and drying process has served to produce a vivid impression of the morphology of the surface walls as ‘epidermal’, their folds and creases evocative of ageing, somnolent or unfolding bodies. This tactile, organic quality within the material itself gives rise to a certain dynamism and liquidity in its apparently petrified, inorganic fixity, a corporeal lightness in its gravitied, monolithic, sublime mass. Wandering in proximity to the weathered distress of the surfaces along these crevasses, emergent shapes seem to drift to the surface of consciousness – ephemeral constellations, landscapes - while all the while one remains hyper-aware of this area of sculpted earth’s openness and connectedness to the overarching sky and to the vineyards and orchards of the valley ribboning away to the horizon.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Concrete’s imperfections inevitably and unpredictably entail transformation over time. The effects of weathering sit uneasily with modernist architectural conceptions of uniform, planar ‘beauty’ (usually white), and its aesthetic ideals have more often than not resisted or repressed a work’s imbrication in time and context. Such transformation has been located as a ‘ruinous’ deterioration of original authorial intent for a ‘finished’ work, rather than as the traces of a contingent openness to the assimilation of the particular, fugitive qualities of place in nature’s ongoing process of finishing what is always ‘unfinished’ in time. Today, long-term exposure to the extreme weather conditions of Western Sicily and lack of funding for restoration work have meant that Il Cretto is indeed, from a modernist perspective, deteriorating and gradually becoming a ‘new ruin’ in its own right. After almost 30 years, the original glaring white of the concrete finish, with its visibly artisanal shuttering and formwork, has been mottled and stained towards a somber blue-grey-tan lichen colour range. Some of the cement has been eroded to expose patchworks of different aggregates used in the original concrete blend for the render; and a number of the steel reinforcement rods are now exposed or have sprung free from the netting around the rubble core. In many places moss, small flowering shrubs, trees and other opportunist vegetation have colonised and burst through ever-widening cracks in the spalling mineral surface. <br /><br />In his remarkable historical study of concrete as modernity’s emblematic medium, Concrete and Culture, Adrian Forty returns repeatedly to concrete’s ambiguous status, and its resistance to stable classification as one of the recurrent features of its use and historical meanings: ‘many of the usual category distinctions through which we make sense of our lives – liquid/solid, smooth/rough, natural/artificial, ancient/modern, base/spirit – concrete manages to escape, slipping back and forth between categories’ (Forty 2012: 10-11). Its ‘tendency to double’ (11) proliferates in Burri’s use of the material in Il Cretto, a work which in its materiality and form activates the spaces between such binaries. In particular, the ambiguous blur between a progressive modernity and a residual craft archaism with elemental earthbound origins (concrete as a kind of mud), and between concrete’s base inertia as devalued industrial material and its paradoxical possibilities for a metaphysical numinosity. As an object-event-territory with complex and plural associations, and an uncertain overall status as art work, Il Cretto slips elusively between categories:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><i>Painting, sculpture, architecture, installation, land art, scenography, design plan, document, wasteland, edgeland, centre, performance, scar, sanctuary, votive, tomb, memorial, monument, memento mori … Il Grande Cretto avoids all artistic categories, academic or otherwise, or perhaps unites them; its status remains wholly ambiguous (Casanova 2009: 121).</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i> </i><br />Later in Forty’s book, in a discussion of the use of concrete in the construction of memorials, he reflects on the use of a substance ‘so often regarded as the material of oblivion, erasing and obliterating memory, cutting people off from their past, from themselves, from each other … How can a material so generally regarded as amnesiac become the medium of choice in the preservation of memories?’ (Forty 2012: 197). With reference to the twentieth century’s obsession with memory, and minimalist sculpture’s resistance to all forms of representation, Forty endeavours to unravel what he perceives to be a ‘circular puzzle – concrete the material of oblivion, avoided by artists hostile to mnemonic representation, but chosen by those seeking to represent memory’ (198). He goes on to suggest that, for him, the most successful of concrete memorials qua memorial is Georges-Henri Pingusson’s Memorial to the Martyrs of Deportation (1962) on the Ile de la Cité in Paris; and his description perhaps provides another perspective for understanding something of the paradoxical affective and memorial work that Burri’s Cretto both does and doesn’t enable: <br /><br /><i>not an object, but a void – and when you are in the void, there is nothing there to look at apart from yourself, the sky … and the unbroken surface of the concrete wall … there is no sign in this memorial; it is pure experience, there is nothing to be read, only the concrete itself … [it] creates a kind of sensory deprivation, which forces the visitor to concentrate upon the sky and the present … memory, if there can be such a thing, is of the moment, it cannot be captured or preserved … (214).</i><br /><br />Unfortunately, however, local people felt they were not fully consulted about the demolition of surviving structures within the remains of their town, nor about the nature of Burri’s radical proposal for the memorial - like their new town, so utterly different from other responses in neighbouring communities devastated by the earthquake. Some former residents of the old town, understandably less familiar with the discourses and practices of contemporary art, and with quite other conceptions of memory and memorialisation, felt that the ground of their patrimony (and identity) had been appropriated, and, in an act of paternalist, even colonialist imposition, forcibly reconfigured into forms that they could no longer recognise. In response to what they perceived to be Il Cretto’s obliteration and blanketing of historical remains, some suggested that the work had effected a kind of silencing. The enforced deracination from and veiled erasure of the recognisable traces of lived memory – a second violent ‘disappearing’, by art - had ultimately produced the ruins of memory in what had become, for them, quite literally a ‘concrete u-topia’, an alienating and impenetrable ‘no-where’; and it is evident that today the work’s function as sited civic memorial has been significantly eroded for many people in Nuova Gibellina. Even for visitors without direct connection to the old town, within the insistent baroque in-folding of Burri’s structure one senses a potent and unresolved tension between the revelation afforded by public memorialisation (for the future) and memory’s concealment, the withholding of proliferative narratives, experiences and orientations (from the past) buried beneath the centripetal opacity of these surfaces, never to be recovered.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />*****<br /> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Since the early 1980s, old Gibellina has been the site of an annual summer festival of performance and music, the Orestiadi, named in homage to Aeschylus’s foundational theatrical narratives of emergence from abject catastrophe into the beginnings of a civic democracy. Initially the ruins of the old town, then Burri’s structure, were integrated as backdrop and scenographic frame for events staged on a flat piece of bare ground at the base. Already in 1979, Dario Fo and Franca Rame had performed Mistero Buffo for the people of Gibellina. And for over a decade into the 1990s, the Orestiadi became firmly embedded in the European festival circuit as one of the most adventurous events on the cultural calendar. Curated and managed by the Fondazione Orestiadi from its offices in the renovated former manor house Il Baglio di Stefano on the edge of Nuova Gibellina, the festival attracted some of the world’s best known contemporary artists; and many of the performances were produced within the community and involved local people, in particular in the construction of scenographic objects and other design materials for theatre and opera. Over the last 20 years or so, however, the Orestiadi has diminished drastically in scope and artistic ambition, and there has been little direct involvement from local people in the programme of imported productions and exhibitions.<br /><br /><b>‘Town as gallery’: notes on the architecture of the butterfly</b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Alongside the site of the bustling weekly market stretches a curved, cracked concrete bowl of almost 100 metres in length: an ‘ornamental lake’ with no water, just pockets of wind-blown litter and desiccated vegetation. Beyond the dry lake bed, a sprawling area of overgrown grassland with a small church at its edge, and then the town ‘centre’, the Piazza XV Gennaio 1968, another expansive and exposed void without shade. On one side, Samonà and Gregotti’s tufo and reinforced concrete town hall (Municipio), with its memorials to the earthquake; on the other, Alessandro Mendini’s cement and iron Torre Civica (1987), a 28-metre, winged, lighthouse-like structure and sonic art work intended as the town clock. At four predetermined times of the day, registering the rhythms of the working day, it is supposed to relay a 30-second burst of computer-generated amplified sound that never repeats – recorded fragments of traditional Sicilian songs, voices from the fields and from the past – but it has been out of operation for some time.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">An elegant stone staircase that seems to lead nowhere slices through Ungers’s Carabinieri building, framing a patch of sky like a James Turrell ‘sky space’. Nearby, a number of free-standing floating walls pierced by empty windows, whose deconstructive function seems to be to frame ephemeral perspectives on the town for the passerby. An apparently unattached stone beam intersects with the roof of a building (Casa Pirrello) at an almost vertical angle, piercing it, as if suspended in mid-flight between falling and ascending; the beam casts a shadow across the façade below, like a sun dial. A series of immense, linear, de Chirico-like piazze, constructed formally and explicitly around a perspectival vanishing point (Purini and Thermes’s unfinished Sistema delle Piazze, 1990); at night, lighting in the facades either side of the chequer-board stone paving suggests abandoned runways awaiting air traffic. Uncanny scale and monumentality, in conjunction with a radical heterogeneity of form and style, seem to privilege visuality and scenographic frontality, the simulacral, the interstitial, the fragmentary and discontinuous.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">At the base of a small hill towards the top of the town, Pietro Consagra’s Meeting (1983), an undulating steel and glass structure of great organic sensuousness and fluidity, like the back of whale or a camel breaching the surface; with only a small café at one end, it remains largely empty, a seductive sculptural shell. On the other side of the archway in its midriff, the Piazza Joseph Beuys (2001): the most desolate and deserted of the town’s stone and concrete voids, like an immense abandoned carpark. As well as the odd fragment of graffiti (‘Du bis mein’), its stained framing walls contain some ceramic texts that signal its intended and wholly unrealised revolutionary function as lo spazio della parola (‘the space of language’), an agora for collective gatherings, passeggiate and civic conversation. At one end of the square, and at right angles to the Meeting, broods Consagra’s towering and sublime Teatro, a major performing arts and cultural centre first conceived in the 1970s and still unfinished today. Architecture as permanent building-site, seemingly abandoned and suspended forever at some indeterminate mid-point between construction and abandonment. In the summer months the weathered concrete exoskeleton of this magnificent curvilinear monolith is colonized by darting flocks of sparrows, martins and migrant swifts. <br /><br />Further up the hillside, Francesco Venezia’s Palazzo di Lorenzo (1981), an enclosed, roofless cube whose walls incorporate the stone remains of the façade of a major feudal building retrieved from the centre of the old town after the earthquake. This contemplative, mnemonic space of refuge and connectivity with a recognisable past activates the displaced former palazzo’s windows and balconies as optic frames for glimpses of the town and the neighbouring fields; its open configuration also dynamically registers the passage of the sun and of time in the movement across its textured surfaces of carved, material blocks of light and shadow. Finally, nearby on the top of the hill, Ludovico Quaroni’s astonishing Chiesa Madre, with its dramatic staging of a metaphysical intersection/collision between a rationalist cube and a huge white cosmic sphere – as if a luminous planetary body had tumbled from the skies and embedded itself in the wall behind the church’s altar. First conceived in 1972, the church was nearing completion when the concrete roof of the nave collapsed in 1994, leaving it in a state of abandoned disrepair until its restoration and final consecration, almost 50 years after its genesis, in 2010.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Postscript: the unfinished</b><br /><br />For all of its continuing problems (unemployment, diminishing financial resources and prospects for young people, etc.), its unfinished structures and art works urgently in need of restoration, and for all of its haunting melancholy at times, in reality Nuova Gibellina today is far from the state of ‘ruinous abandonment’ that initial impressions and fleeting contact might suggest. The more time one spends there, the more apparent it becomes that over the years local people have gradually found ways to inhabit pockets of their extra-ordinary urban situation tactically and to affirm its uniqueness. Social life goes on in homes, the few cafes and social clubs (circoli), in the weekly market alongside the empty lake, and on summer evenings in the milling conversational traffic and street vendors in and around the municipal square and the open-air cinema. On most days, sections of the deserted spaces of the vast piazze are noisily reclaimed as perfect all-weather environments for kids playing football. A scattering of small shops now operate from the ground floors of some dwellings; and the slow drift from house to house entailed in this dispersed, attenuated mode of gathering things for an evening meal inevitably generates surprise encounters and pleasurable conversations. After several visits in recent years, I have become increasingly attached to this town. For the courageous ambition and compromising blindspots of its original imagining, and for its present imperfections, fragilities and uncertainties. For the warmth of human exchanges it affords, and for its moments of startling, layered beauty in the everyday. Perhaps above all, for the enduring possibilities it still seems to contain, somehow and despite everything, as an ambiguous, provisional, slowly unfolding work-in-progress … <br /><br /><br /><b>References</b><br />Berger, John (1996). ‘Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead’, in <i>Pages of the Wound</i>, London: Bloomsbury/Circle Press (unpaginated)</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Bignardi, Massimo, Lacagnina, Davide and Mantovani, Paola (eds) (2008).<i> Cantiere Gibellina: una ricerca sul campo</i>, Roma: Artemide</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Bouchard, Norma and Ferme, Valerio (2013). ‘Writing the Mediterraneity of the Italian Souths’, <i>Italy and The Mediterranean</i>, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 155-90<br /> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Calvino, Italo (1974). <i>Invisible Cities</i>, trans. William Weaver, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Camarrone, Davide (2011). <i>I maestri di Gibellina</i>, Palermo: Sallerio.<br /> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Cantavella, Anna Juan (2009). <i>Espace urbain, art et utopie: une approche critique de la dimension utopique dans l’artiation des espaces urbains de la ville</i>, PhD, Université Pierre-Mendès France – Grenoble II/ Université de Barcelone</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Casanova, Françoise-Julien (2009). ‘Le Cretto de Gibellina’, in E. Chiron, R. Triki and N. Kossentini (eds), <i>Paysages croisés: la part du corps</i>, Paris: La Sorbonne, 109-124</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Flam, Jack (ed.) (1996). <i>Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings</i>, Berkeley: University of California Press</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Forty, Adrian (2012). <i>Concrete and Culture: A Material History</i>, London: Reaktion Books</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Hall, Peter (2014). <i>Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design since 1880</i>, Chichester: Wiley/Blackwell</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1970). <i>Italian Journey</i>, trans. W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, London: Penguin</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Huet, Marie-Hélène (2012). <i>The Culture of Disaster</i>, Chicago: University of Chicago Press</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />La Ferla, Mario (2004). <i>Te la do io Brasilia: la ricostruzione incompiuta di Gibellina</i>, Viterbo: Eretica/Stampalternativa</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Mostafavi, Mohsen and Leatherbarrow, David (1993). <i>On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time</i>, Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Pes, Aurelio and Bonifacio, Tanino (eds) (2003). <i>Gibellina, dalla A alla Z</i>, Gibellina: Comune di Gibellina/Museo d’Arte Contemporanea</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Sciosia, Vittoria (2014). ‘Belice from a drone’: http://vimeo.com/111352987 - online video: accessed 10 January 2015.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Essay originally published as 'Terremoto: memory, utopia, and the unfinished in Sicily', in </i>Performance Research<i>, 20:3, June 2015 ('On Ruins and Ruination'), eds. Carl Lavery & Richard Gough</i></span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i> </i></span></span><br />
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david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-56755917403761874342019-02-23T18:40:00.000+00:002019-05-02T08:37:21.672+01:00botched taxidermy (FE365)<style>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8Mu3VpceKbgBA5Nz1RwT15e0ugf-9a1eXhWzFvTQ5GRVtsVDrq1m1u-E7uQZ5_U9Nwh5zFSyw69oQYbLqzLuBEMJlbgzVMHy4NlwiV0_ZF_BB0gnno52Jl1a8xmZgVWHYcs4Dvy9LI5s_/s1600/panto+horse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8Mu3VpceKbgBA5Nz1RwT15e0ugf-9a1eXhWzFvTQ5GRVtsVDrq1m1u-E7uQZ5_U9Nwh5zFSyw69oQYbLqzLuBEMJlbgzVMHy4NlwiV0_ZF_BB0gnno52Jl1a8xmZgVWHYcs4Dvy9LI5s_/s1600/panto+horse.jpg" width="200" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Throughout 2014, the 30th year of Forced Entertainment's existence, the company made an open call for people to submit texts "describing, thinking around, considering, marking or in any way remembering the company’s work in the three decades from its beginning in 1984". The only rule, that they be "exactly 365 words long, the final objective being to make a selection of texts totaling 10,950 words, one word for each day of the group’s collective work in the field of contemporary performance". In March 2015, 30 of the texts originally submitted - one for each year - were selected and published online as a pdf, with an introduction by Deborah Chadbourn and an afterword by Tim Etchells. </i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><i><i>This and the following post, texts I submitted, were included. </i></i></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">*****</span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In his book <i>The Postmodern Animal</i> (2000), Steve Baker explores a variety of contemporary
art practices involving animal representations, where ‘things appear to have <i>gone wrong</i> with the animal, as it were,
but where it still <i>holds together’</i>.
He describes strategies of imitation where disguises are tawdry, compromised,
incongruous conjunctions coming apart at the seams, active reminders of
difference and perhaps of a certain shame. With reference to Deleuze and
Guattari’s word <i>rater</i> (to spoil,
ruin), he coins the term ‘botched taxidermy’ for such makeshift, imperfect
practices. Related to assemblage and <i>bricolage</i>,
and the knowingly open display of ‘faulty’ or ‘inexpert’ technique, Baker
suggests that such creative procedures in the generation of the provisional,
the informal and the recycled are ‘questioning entities’(Derrida).</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">‘Botched taxidermy’ seems useful in
relation to Forced Entertainment’s work, not only for thinking into all those
dodgy animal disguises and uncertain animal/human hybrids in the performances:
the panto horse in <i>Pleasure</i>, gulping
whisky through an eye socket and cans of lager through the join between the two
halves of the costume, before dancing in its own beery piss; the recurrent
gorilla suit with or without head; or Cathy’s tatty, amateurish ‘dog’ costume
in <i>Showtime</i>, on all fours with only
the dog’s head and an old overcoat - a hilarious irritant messing with the
show’s already troubled coherence, as well as a bittersweet failure of
cynocephalic transformation. ‘Botched taxidermy’ also informs the structures and
tonalities that characterise so many of these shows. Irreverently playing with
received, overly-familiar or overlooked representational forms, displacing and
defamiliarising them, turning them inside out and on their heads. Messing with
their anatomies, abusing them, taking them apart, ‘stitching them up’ and
reanimating them as comic, pathetic, psychotic, narcoleptic, drunk,
incompetent, conspiratorial or inventive revenants in a different context
here-now.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In Forced Entertainment’s shows, things
often stagger on the lip of falling apart, yet somehow it still holds together.
This core ambiguity and complexity in the work might be called a ‘fucked-up-and-yetness’.
The ‘and-yetness’, which is political in its invitation to possibility and
connectivity, takes many forms aesthetically and affectively, from the
melancholic, the poignant and the corrosively comic, to the most astonishing
micro-events of a flaring into appearance.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><i>For all of the </i></i>FE365<i><i> submissions in 2014, as well as the</i></i><i><i> pdf download, see <a href="http://www.forcedentertainment.com/project/fe365/">here</a>. </i></i></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Contributors
to the pdf selection include Mike Harrison, Alan Read, Gerry Harris, John
McGrath, Matt Fenton, David Tushingham, Tim Crouch, Andy Smith, Richard
Gregory, Kate Valk, Claire Macdonald, Dan Rebellato and Mark Etchells. </i></span></span></i></i></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">
</span></span>david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-82818813715624711242019-02-23T18:35:00.000+00:002019-05-02T08:37:47.041+01:00liars and thieves (FE365)<style>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Years
ago, someone once sent me a rather poor photocopy of a photo of my friend
Claire Marshall - in <i>Hidden J</i>, I think, it was a show I never actually saw.
In the photo, she’s wearing a black dress and a cardboard sign tied with string
around her neck, with the word LIAR written in big capital letters. Claire
looks vulnerable and isolated adorned by this material textual object,
'othered' as if the sign has been coercively imposed. In some photos of her in
this show, a slightly blurred Richard Lowdon is lurking in the background, his
eyes directed towards Claire’s back, and his presence seems to confirm this
coercion. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Yet the nomination LIAR remains ambiguous, and any stable reading
skids and unravels. Claire seems to be located as A liar, if not THE singular
liar. At the same time the word and her gaze also point outwards to any readers
of the sign, and the term can attach itself to anyone who witnesses, perhaps to
be freely accepted and shared in complicity: aren’t we all liars anyway? Or it
can be received as accusation. Who? Me? Oh…</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The photograph came to me at a time when I lived in Australia, and petty
criminals were being publicly shamed in some states there. A boy who had been
caught shoplifting in a glossy new mall in Canberra was punished in the
children’s court by being obliged to stand every Saturday outside the
‘scene-of-the-crime’ in the shopping centre wearing a T-shirt with the word
THIEF printed on it. Within days of his sentencing, this civic stigmatisation
had been co-opted and dispersed as thousands of identical T-shirts were
printed, distributed and worn around the shopping malls of Canberra.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Whenever I’ve seen this image of Claire, and it has often been reproduced since
then, I have wanted to undo her isolation, and have tried to imagine (it’s not
so hard) a proliferation of liars on street corners and in courts of law, in
shopping centres and front gardens, in railway stations and pubs and theatres
and universities and online. A community of liars, with no clear way of ever
knowing if any of us were telling the truth.</span></span><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Photo: Hugo Glendinning </span></span></i></div>
david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-48408877267627527782019-02-20T21:21:00.000+00:002019-05-02T13:55:33.015+01:00stony ground, but not entirely<style>@font-face {
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">As an
undergraduate student of French and Drama at an English university in the late 1970s,
with a furrowed brow and a cigarette-fueled enthusiasm for Camus, Genet,
Ionesco and above all Beckett, I possessed a much thumbed and annotated copy of
Martin Esslin’s <i>The Theatre of the Absurd</i>. Esslin’s book became a point
of reference and orientation for me at that time, mapping and distilling
certain thematic and formal patterns of which I felt I had intuited something
without being able to organise those feelings into anything resembling coherent
thought. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">At an impressionable, receptive period it was foundational for me, offering
a window into affective landscapes of theatre, as well as leading me towards a wide
range of other texts and readings. Initially it also spawned a bunch of
adjectives that provided a kind of shorthand for complex ‘worlds’ and
structures of feeling, words to be tossed around in undergraduate seminars and
conversations as if there was a knowing, nodding consensus as to what they
actually meant: ‘Beckettian’, ‘Kafkaesque’, ‘Pinteresque’ etc., as well as
‘absurdist’. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Ultimately, and more productively, it helped seed a life-long
interest in the ‘unlessenable least best worse' and ‘nohow on' of Beckett’s writings. The late Herbert Blau once located Beckett’s work as
‘the <i>locus classicus</i> of the problematic of the future' - and, on this hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War 1, as
conflict continues unabated in various war zones around the world, Beckett will
be a shadow companion in what follows:</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">
</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">‘Let us do something, while we have the chance! It
is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed …
But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like
it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!' (Vladimir in <i>Waiting for Godot</i>).<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=567846911414225929#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""></a></span></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I still
have that original copy of Esslin’s book, although until recently I had not opened
its battered covers for many years. Almost forty years later, it is frankly
disarming to revisit this text via the filter of my underlinings and scribbled
notes, encountering these barely decipherable invitations to read and think as ‘someone
else’ once read and thought. For these sub-Krapp marginalia offer the
perspectives of a dimly remembered and prematurely world-weary nineteen
year-old, his (my) unconvincing performance of hip Left Bank-ish anomie
concretised in an omnipresent, decaying donkey jacket stuffed with papers and
books (no carrots or pebbles), and an impenetrable micro-climatic pall of (‘Camusian’)
smoke. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I was clearly seduced and somehow affirmed by what I took - in my
limited understanding of existentialism as a philosophical <i>style</i>, a grey
cloak of ideas to be tossed over young shoulders and worn - to be revelatory representations
of impossibility and inertia, of the inadequacies of reason, language and received
regimes of the self, of disenchantment and meaninglessness in the face of
mortality. In retrospect, I had little sense of the gravity and matter of such thoughts
in and as lived experience.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Over the
next few years, increasingly and joyously immersed in the chaotic, dissident
explosion of new popular music at that time, and associated leftist politics, I
came to read some of these plays as proto-‘punk’ manifestations, affectively rhythmed
and charged mechanisms to prise the lid off the blind assumptions, repressed
power-plays and dead-ends of naturalised middle-class ‘normality’ and
conformity, education, culture, science-as-progress, entrepreneurship, meaningful
action, the future. (One of my notes in the margins of Esslin’s book comically
reads ‘Cf. Pistols?!’). In their defamiliarising shocks to thought and conventional
aesthetic values, as much as in their pitch-black humour, these plays seemed to
have a critical status politically and socially, both presenting lived
situations as uncomfortable, uncanny image-worlds – <i>how it is</i> - and implicitly
positing the possibility of and need to conceive of <i>how it might be</i>,
otherwise, in a ‘world to come’. </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I began to realise that these were not exclusively
essentialist metaphysical myths of nihilism and despair, scorched ahistorical
outlines of the inevitability of the house burning down and total collapse
through proliferation or entropic diminution, but also and at the same time
abrasive, startling, excavatory calls to question and think and reimagine what
Beckett in his short text ‘Enough’ characterised as ‘stony ground <i>but not
entirely’</i>. Calls to <i>make</i> meaning where it
apparently recedes and dissolves – in paradox, contradiction, oxymoron, double-bind,
the uncanny, the im/possible, the Unnamable - or to learn how to <i>live with</i>
not-meaning (1). Esslin suggested as much, perhaps, but
somehow the insistent privileged framing of these plays, via a very particular
conception of absurdity as anguished existential ontology, has served to insulate
and defuse their potential critical, political charge.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">So. Now. What/how
one might live in relation to others. What/how one might be. What/how one might
do. At this place, at this moment in time, all mankind is us. Whether we like
it or not.<i> </i></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Extract from an essay on Beckett and ecology, 'The ruins of time (I've forgotten this before)', </i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>published in the autumn of 2015 </i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>as part of a collection reappraising Esslin's </i>Theatre of the Absurd<i> in the light of contemporary environmental concerns and perspectives</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i> </i></span></span>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=567846911414225929#_ednref4" name="_edn4" title=""></a></span></span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgolxRgqVwgtDVtn31JdrvP_uK8MbzNu89Mlo8cXQsB1WpCYuRjWsEUapl2hm2eyHLdgbC9I54tabRYHC8UKI1p_RnrS-ympZsE9wyU-1XMHV3H5f014VnJ9UfgPR1Dtc6iQ19PKDSXTqaT/s1600/laughing+beckett.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgolxRgqVwgtDVtn31JdrvP_uK8MbzNu89Mlo8cXQsB1WpCYuRjWsEUapl2hm2eyHLdgbC9I54tabRYHC8UKI1p_RnrS-ympZsE9wyU-1XMHV3H5f014VnJ9UfgPR1Dtc6iQ19PKDSXTqaT/s1600/laughing+beckett.jpg" width="148" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">(1) It was only much later that I came across
Adorno’s negative dialectics and other critical perspectives contesting an ‘absence’
of meaning in Beckett: “Beckett’s plays are absurd not because of the absence
of any meaning, for they would be simply irrelevant, but because they put
meaning on trial; they unfold its history’ (Adorno, <i>Aesthetic Theory</i>, 1970). See also Stanley Cavell on <i>Endgame</i>
as: ‘not the failure of meaning (if that means the lack of meaning) but its
total, even totalitarian success – our inability <i>not</i> to mean what we are given to mean’ (in <i>Must We Mean What We Say?</i>, 1996).</span></span></div>
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david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-30927163148507030882019-02-15T12:09:00.000+00:002019-05-05T00:22:36.322+01:00two shillings<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
'A tea time drunk weaving his way down Old Compton Street in the
blinding sun stops me, and with a smile says, "Son, I want to give you
two shillings".<br />
<br />
I was quite taken aback as my hand was already in my
pocket fumbling for change.<br />
<br />
He gave me the two shillings. I thanked him
and he said, "Good day".<br />
<br />
"It is", I said. "All sunlight".<br />
<br />
From
Derek Jarman's <i>Modern Nature</i>, entry for 29 April 1990david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-30582549797799781152019-02-08T12:01:00.000+00:002019-05-02T13:59:11.410+01:00space time angles<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRnXND1SwJA06w___b6lQ9loI7oCBrxymyenz2ALpEFH4259NGMDMg0Zi2uYwgH0Js_gvWYVWnL332mcFwSqzlkXtbjRGXZhfQGMVLzojrT83IpOo9d3R7gEWKi9hjIR02evLkhyphenhypheneIf9dj/s1600/throwing+figs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="140" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRnXND1SwJA06w___b6lQ9loI7oCBrxymyenz2ALpEFH4259NGMDMg0Zi2uYwgH0Js_gvWYVWnL332mcFwSqzlkXtbjRGXZhfQGMVLzojrT83IpOo9d3R7gEWKi9hjIR02evLkhyphenhypheneIf9dj/s1600/throwing+figs.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
As an artist and teacher of performance practices, I spend quite a lot of time in studios with people in general trying to make things. I am a party to their processes from the word ‘go’ to the moment at which it is shown live, if that’s the goal. In the bulk of my teaching that’s what it has been, in Australia, at Dartington and at Royal Holloway. Hopefully I am present and attentive to those people finding a way, finding forms, shapes and structures that they can work with, and trying to see where that flounders, where it's buoyant, where something moves freely amongst them and therefore in relation to me watching. I try to give them a little bit of guidance, where possible, but also to give them a bit of courage when something happens. Usually, often, ‘when something happens’ means that at some level I am engaged more than just as a pair of eyes with a brain attached to them; it feels much more embodied and implicated than that.<br />
<br />
As well as performing, I also work as a dramaturg with dance people, with people somewhere in between dance and theatre, and then with Lone Twin. This job can take many different forms but essentially it involves a lot of watching and responding, always in the light of what it seems might be possible for that person or group, always trying to pitch any responses at a level that would encourage something that seems to be going on to develop fruitfully. So there’s a whole array of different kinds of watching that go on in teaching and in working as a dramaturg (and of course in performing). In addition, I am also a fairly seasoned spectator. I have watched a lot of performance over the years, and I have been involved in making a lot of performances. And of course there are different orders of watching and listening involved in actually making and performing ... When people talk about ‘kinaesthetic empathy’, the empathy is both kinaesthetic and affective and it is very hard to separate those things off; indeed they seem to be absolutely entangled. The cliche that one is ‘moved’ by something feels quite palpably real and lived in all sorts of ways: motion, e-motion.<br />
<br />
Another spectating and 'doing' activity that informs my relationship to all these things is sport. From being able to walk and run to around the age of 24, I guess I did that more than anything else. At whatever level one arrives, there are all kinds of empathies as a spectator that come out of simply doing that activity every afternoon or evening for 20 odd years, in one’s spare time. I spent years of my life kicking, throwing, catching, running, falling over, usually in relation to an object that moves predictably, a round ball, or unpredictably, like a rugby ball. I fundamentally believe that that set of experiences and deep oafish pleasures for me inform a huge amount of my understanding of and my feeling for related things to this day.<br />
<br />
When I go and watch a football match at Arsenal, I am often surprised by the kind of things people in the stands say and what that reveals or suggests as to what they read in what's going on. For example, quite often people are extremely critical if somebody tries something and it doesn’t work, rather than being sympathetic to the endeavour. Yet one can still see a thought which has not been realised because of a whole variety of conditions, often extremely minimal. Its 'failure' might be the result of some kind of blurring of the concentration because someone was moving very fast: the lack of peripheral vision at that particular angle, or the ball moving in a particular way that made it slightly unpredictable, and unplayable. Empathy informs a capacity to 'see' all of those things: the architecture of a body, its movement through space, its relationship to those variables, the speed at which things are unfolding, the moment when something goes awry, what has been attempted if not realised – and somehow those things seem very legible to me at times.<br />
<br />
I’m surprised by the limited way in which some people who I imagine haven’t played much sport seem to watch sport, including some of the commentators on TV. You know, cries of 'Rubbish!' to Santi Cazorla, that sort of thing. Relatedly, I'm always intrigued by the relationship between those managers and coaches who have been quite accomplished sports players – footballers, let’s say – and those who weren’t, and therefore the differences in their possible understandings of the predicament of that individual or that group of people. The embodied knowledges and intutitions they may or may not be able to access. For me it is centrally about reading predicaments in a particular set of conditions. Maybe my abilities to understand and empathise with somebody’s predicament come out of sitting in studios, making work, being inside performances, watching performances, and playing and watching sport for much of my life.<br />
<br />
At university, one of my core teachers David Bradby taught me a slightly old-fashioned mode of critical engagement called ‘close reading’ in relation to language, and this has been very useful to me in all sorts of ways. I learned from him an attention to the particularities of language, its rhythms, refrains, patterns, structures across time and space in writing. What writing <i>does</i>. I guess what a dramaturg practises at one level is a kind of close reading: of what movements are and what they do, how they relate to other elements, the weave and its effects. By 'reading' I don’t mean decoding towards some singular meaning, but a whole set of often ambiguous and contradictory effects or intensities, structures of energy that produce different things in me as a spectator. The work in the studio is like a proto-spectating, acting as a kind of barometer that reads the heat or feel of the texture. I think of those qualities, and of movement, very much as material, in both senses of that word. <br />
<br />
I think that through sport, and through watching loads of stuff, lots of students and other practitioners, there are moments when I am able to be there and now with it. There is something like an amplified and sensitised empathy to many different things at play, and at the centre of that is what bodies are doing and what that produces in relation to other bodies, the space, the framing of the visible world, the audible world, the relationship with us, etc. And it's not necessarily a question of needing to know what the internal life of that is, its invisible logic, the intuitive or quite conscious scoring that goes on for a dancer: what Jonathan Burrows calls the 'internal song'. I’m always interested in those things, but not with a view to that thing being conveyed ... what's going on internally could be anything, because as we know there’s a mismatch between one’s internal life and what happens for somebody watching on the outside, what 'appears'. It’s all to do with what their actions do, and how to help someone recognise what that 'do' to me as a kind of foldback to them. So if I am ever interested in accessing their internal life, it’s only as a mechanism to help them have a fuller sense of what that seems to do for a third party.<br />
<br />
At one time I was a gifted cricketer and at a certain point in my life people had me lined up to do this professionally as an adult. I played some representative cricket and then I had an injury and lost interest, particularly when I went to university. At other times I also played squash, fives and royal tennis, which is an extraordinarily complex game spatially and architecturally. It's played in an internal court with many different surfaces and textures. There are inert zones that you can hit the ball at and it will fall 'dead' off the wall, surfaces that you can hit which will rebound at a predictable rate, roofs that you can roll the ball along, etc. It’s very much about creatively reading architectures and surfaces and beginning to orient yourself and what you do with the ball in relation to these material effects. In a way it’s not unlike parcours but with a ball; you read and use the logic of architectural structures to play the game.<br />
<br />
When I was very young, I played quite a bit of golf – and once every 10 years or so I still play with my brother; and that information from childhood is deeply encoded in my body. There is something remarkable in golf; it's the closest I have come to meditation outside of things that identify themselves as meditation. Similarly there is also something in football, and indeed in cricket, where everything external to what is going on right here, right now, falls away, and that's an extraordinary liberation at one level. A kind of immersion in present process. In golf that’s a singular activity, it’s just you and a club and a ball. But at the moment of settling down to strike a ball and to find a kind of flow that isn’t forced, they’re all the same thing (or not): you try too hard and you’ve stuffed it. You get in the way of ‘it’ doing it. It’s very <i>Zen and the Art of Archery</i>. That’s where I understood those things, in golf and in kicking, and in all of those activities associated with these sports: catching, kicking, throwing etc. To strike something with one’s foot, one’s head, or with a bat, or to bowl, or to hit a ball with a golf club – at times there’s a moment of profound stillness in and around the doing of that, and an absolute clarity which is very pleasurable for me (I'm someone who struggles with the privileging of the intellectual world at one level, and finds it hugely dispersed and distracting and off-balance). At such moments, I have felt absolute clarity in my ability to engage with the doing of that precise thing and not to be distracted by something else – those dumb bits of static: whether it will be good, whether people will like me if I do that, or who I am when I’m doing that. All that self-reflexive distraction – things that relate to a notion of self, to a notion of the quality of oneself, one’s abilities or non-abilities – they just fall away. And over time there are enough of such moments to make it significantly realigning in terms of one's sense of self; there is absolute calmness and clarity, and at its best or clearest, a joyous reunion with the thing that is being done. You are the thing that is being done; you are not doing it any more, it kind of ‘does you’. You can be a shit golfer and hit the ball very, very sweetly without effort five times in a round of golf and that will be enough for you to be full of joy.<br />
<br />
I never took any of these things very seriously. Even though I was competitive I always thought they were joyously ridiculous as activities. I always understood and accepted the nonsense of sport, its fatuousness. Fundamentally it’s absurd and a bit pointless, both comic and serious, a 'folly' as Lone Twin suggest; and I very much like that about it. Of course it produces a great deal, with its intensities and emotions, its vectors and balls of energy, its alignments of perception, its very real and ephemeral pleasures; but it does not actually make a 'thing', it’s not productive in an instrumental way; it's a pure potlatch activity. It has no function other than in its doing and sharing. Sport is play, with all of play’s productive and non-productive attributes.<br />
<br />
I have some odd abilities. For instance, I can for throw balls, or stones, very hard and a very long way. I don't know why. I guess it comes out of hours of chucking things as a kid, somehow endlessly fascinated by the arc of a trajectory, the curved flight through the air, the triangulation hand-eye-there. From the age of 7 to 18, I endlessly won silly competitions about throwing cricket balls. Like golf, or kicking a ball, it’s something to do with not getting in my own way and understanding the notion of not trying. There’s a kind of effort and aligned connectedness in playful visualisation that doesn’t impede your capacity to just get on and do that thing. Alain Platel of Les Ballets C de la B once talked of a fascination with something he called ‘suppressed virtuosities’. Those things we are extremely good at, but that no longer have a value, no current purchase as an activity. Throwing is one of them for me and I rather like the fact that I have this completely functionless capacity. I value its lack of value and its anomalous redundancy.<br />
<br />
As a result when I see people who are very good at whatever their thing is, whether it's David Beckham taking a free kick, or a friend at school who could manipulate his face in a hyper-gurning way, or my friend the performer/choreographer Jane Mason moving, I recognise they have a particular set of capacities that I don’t have. I can see that Jane has a range of possibilities, and my not being able to do them somehow amplifies radically my sense of what a body can do. The horizon expands ever so slightly, and I find that very exciting. In Jane’s case, her particular quality might be the capacity to ride very close to some kind of intuitive hunch – without having to decode or understand intellectually, to explain it away. She’s very adept at that, and it takes various shapes. And so the nature of the conversation that seems possible with her is rooted in a kind of empathy for the proposition that she can run close to felt impulses she really doesn't need to know in a way she can verbalise. And I love and respect that, and try to encourage her to do that.<br />
<br />
Of course if you play team sports you get to know your own capacities at some level: what you’re not so 'good' at, what you are 'good' at. Not necessarily intellectually ‘know’ those things, but you have a felt sense of them. And you also start to read what other people can do and where their capacities are; and so you create the conditions where that capacity can be activated usefully. It’s absolutely similar to working with a group of performers, whether they are dancers or theatre people. It’s somehow creating the conditions for the individuals within the collective to recognise, value, extend and develop their own capacities, and to find a complementarity in relation, so that collectively they can produce something that is more than the sum of its parts and that’s live here and now. Years ago I remember seeing early Theatre de Complicite shows, and talking with Simon McBurney about sport – and he made a similar set of connections between sport activities, team, playing field, structures in space that have restrictions and therefore encourage play, tactical possibility and game structures inside the restrictions. That’s what enables play, the parameters, the friction. It’s like the give in a bicycle chain; it has a structure, but it also has ‘play’ in it in that other sense of ‘give’. For me there was always a strong connection between sport, play and performance making.<br />
<br />
I remember reading a beautiful article about footballers by Richard Williams in <i>The Guardian</i>, in which he writes in particular about the Portuguese player Luis Figo and Zinedine Zidane. It was in part about why one might conceive of them as ‘artists’. Richard Williams had been a music writer before becoming a sports journalist; he’s written a book about Miles Davis, for example. He’s one of the few journalists who has a real feel for rhythm, space, tears and shifts in space, relations of connection and counterpoint, etc. – those elements that are central to my relation to watching sport. Anyway, Williams wrote a memorable phrase in this article: ‘He [Zidane] sees space and time and angles where we see only confusion.’ The ‘we’ that he refers to is perhaps the untutored eye, the kind of a person who perhaps isn’t sensitised to those kinds of elements and processes going on. He suggests somebody like Zidane makes such things palpably apparent. A change of direction that opens up that part of the space where it was blocked. That shift in angle, that cut-back pass that opens up a gap in relation to that vector of that body moving at that speed, through what looks like a chaotic scrimmage, into a new configuration of space. So it’s a kind of choreographic practice at one level, an enabling managing of space for people to flair into the thing that they do very well. Which is thrilling and illuminating, of course. There are very few people who make such dynamic elements and possibilities as visible as Zidane sometimes did: a kind of pedagogy for spectators.<br />
<br />
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<i>For what it's worth, an edited transcript of an interview with David Williams by Dick McCaw, a version of which was first published as 'Space and time and angles: learning how to watch' in the journal </i>Theatre, Dance and Performance Training<i> 5:3, 2014, 350-3</i>.<i> Image just above: Anthony Gormley, 'Trajectory Field', 2001</i>david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-80578274777596917412019-02-06T12:19:00.000+00:002019-05-04T13:24:19.725+01:00the zoo at night: beautiful mutants<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9TLTQgsrFApMfvnT9FuA7hbfaCnpgqkD3iV4oZomXLN658n97HL-iZYY4h0rLFcPqJE_93Fp-VfXHJXs604i_7Pp6Q4fJQ7fapugXqNQMKpMDgjhR13jZPGvthQCENuVys_RXQTjcgC4X/s1600/Small+BM_Andrea+cage+hang_clean+5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1134" data-original-width="915" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9TLTQgsrFApMfvnT9FuA7hbfaCnpgqkD3iV4oZomXLN658n97HL-iZYY4h0rLFcPqJE_93Fp-VfXHJXs604i_7Pp6Q4fJQ7fapugXqNQMKpMDgjhR13jZPGvthQCENuVys_RXQTjcgC4X/s400/Small+BM_Andrea+cage+hang_clean+5.jpg" width="322" /></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> ‘… like all
people who feel uncomfortable in an uncomfortable world, you </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">want to make a
map. Well let me tell you it is difficult to make a map in</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><i> splintered times
when whole worlds and histories collide’</i> (1).<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?rinli=1&pli=1&blogID=567846911414225929#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></a></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">It is
a little puzzling to revisit the archival traces that linger from a performance
that occurred almost a quarter of a century ago, in search of ‘what happened’:
working note books, drafts, photographs, some video fragments, drawings, the
programme, reviews, photocopied extracts from associated readings<b> </b>(2), <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?rinli=1&pli=1&blogID=567846911414225929#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></a>and
the odd object, including a blue paint handprint on a square of thick,
water-stained canvas, a leather Arlecchino half-mask, and a finger-length
luminescent peacock feather. It’s puzzling because the work itself and its
processes are of course largely irrecuperable from these things, and the stories
my cortex hums to me are of uncertain status at such distance in time, closer
to fiction, or perhaps dream. The live event slips in and out of focus, some
sequences and details still vivid, brightly lit and ‘hot’ in my memory, others
largely defused or eroded over time. </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">However
my memory of the </span><span lang="EN-US">place of the event - the New Fortune Theatre - feels remarkably immediate,
embodied, animate; and as I write on this winter’s evening in my home in
Somerset, England, in an instant I can cross the world and be there again. It’s
a place I still feel I know well. Perhaps its clarity and intensity in my
memory in part result from having spent a number of years working from an
office in the English Department at UWA that looked out directly on to this space;
perhaps in part this is the mnemonic residue of all those hours spent exploring
its sculptural geometries and volumes, its live zones, sight lines, the
movement of light and shadow over its surfaces. In what follows – a reworking
and expansion of some earlier reflections on the production co-written with my
core collaborator and friend Barry Laing, with extracts from the performance
text – my memories of this place, its architectural and affective particularities,
its agencies in the making of a performance, are at the very centre. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-US"><span> </span>David
Williams</span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> ________________________________</span></span></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">The trigger source for the Ex-Stasis
Theatre Company’s production of <i>Beautiful
Mutants</i>, commissioned by the Festival of Perth in 1993, was Deborah Levy’s
novel of the same name. Initially the novel was adapted by David Williams and
Barry Laing into a performance text/script, which passed through seven written
drafts before being submitted to the company. The sequence of 24 episodes in this
seventh draft then became the starting point for the material outcomes of the
performance itself, which were collectively devised with the full ExTC company (3).<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?rinli=1&pli=1&blogID=567846911414225929#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></a></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-US">Beautiful
Mutants</span></i><span lang="EN-US">, Levy’s first novel, marks the beginning of
her transition as a writer from theatre to fiction, and its textures
(linguistic and imagistic), tonal shifts of register and fluid narrative
structure mine and extend many of the attributes of her earlier texts for
performance. It is a work of vast imaginative range and depth set in the
crumbling world of late 1980s capitalism and commercialism, characterized by
one of Levy’s protagonists as ‘the age of the migrant and the missile’. (4) <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?rinli=1&pli=1&blogID=567846911414225929#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></a>With the scope and dexterity of a cinematic vision, Levy hunts in unexpected
places and moves easily among the shadows in the lives and fractured minds of
people exiled from themselves, displaced geographically and psychologically:
their culture too near for comfort, the land of their dreams sometimes too far
to realize. In a world of rampant materialism, competition and consumption, the
city – Thatcher’s London - becomes a ‘zoo’, peopled and echoing with squeals of
desire, dances of obsession and dreams of flight.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFLByWhytqs3WVC9JCXCKpzvhnc_QDX1ye49A3VvQCuqOJHpBG_RKzgE-UF1XbwUMdTaZxVqNHrQlwPEj1w9Fh7Om_Gpqz6wUetGWWjoS9U_lumcZpBDWko0f8NhXPiJtsAEDYbQOAQYrt/s1600/Small+BM_Anne+on+lilo+in+pool+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="706" data-original-width="992" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFLByWhytqs3WVC9JCXCKpzvhnc_QDX1ye49A3VvQCuqOJHpBG_RKzgE-UF1XbwUMdTaZxVqNHrQlwPEj1w9Fh7Om_Gpqz6wUetGWWjoS9U_lumcZpBDWko0f8NhXPiJtsAEDYbQOAQYrt/s400/Small+BM_Anne+on+lilo+in+pool+3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">ExTC’s production was gathered around and
written into the specificities of the performance site, the New Fortune Theatre
at UWA: a schematic ‘reconstruction’ of an Elizabethan theatre, with triple
balconies on all sides of a large thrust stage, an audience ‘pit’, and a second
open space behind the regular stage – and all open to the sky. The architecture
of the New Fortune, familiar to both directors, was instrumental in the
conception and development of the work from the very outset. We felt that its
multiple zones, framings, layerings, its possibility for something akin to the
mobility of cinematic close-up, long shot and depth of field, for montage and fluid
dissolves of location (5) <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?rinli=1&pli=1&blogID=567846911414225929#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></a>could inform and focus the emergent dramaturgy of the performance as a whole. Although
we would have limited access to the theatre during the devising process, we
tried to conceive of the space as protagonist, material and medium, rather than
as passive ‘receptacle’ or container for our imaginings. And secretly we played
the game of asking ourselves what <i>it</i>
wanted, how it could flare into a different visibility by a shifting of the
geometry of attention. Ideally the event could both ‘fit’ with the logics and
possibilities of the site and at the same time be in a relation of tension or critical
friction with it, the performance’s forms and materials somewhat ‘ill-fitting’
in terms of the site’s received conventions and languages (as we perceived them,
at least). So the theatre itself as a particular space-time to refer to, align
with, push against, hold present. Ultimately, with a view to being playful in a
purposeful way, we sought to defamiliarise the space and make its latent dynamics
and potentials active and apparent. To this end, the usual orientation of the
space was turned through 45 degrees clockwise, with an L-shaped block of
seating placed on two sides and two levels, thereby configuring a ‘new’
performance space privileging proximity, encounter and sensory imbrication, as
well as a looking anew/askew on a known space at an unfamiliar angle of incidence,
its centre line now running from downstage right to upstage left. In addition,
the space usually designated as audience ‘pit’ in the Elizabethan configuration
was sealed and flooded with water to a level of over a meter in depth. This
pool area, the thrust stage and all three levels of the balconies were used by
the performers throughout.</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="background: yellow; mso-highlight: yellow;"></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">In terms of design, the core components
were located in the pool: a metal ‘island’ with hinged struts, allowing
transformation from a cage in the shape of cupped hands, a claw or a closed
bud, into, say, an unfolding sunflower (see episode 3, ‘The Age of the Great
Howl’, below); a bridge – a spine, a trestle of bones – with articulated metal
supports, which could also be manipulated; a silk and bamboo structure known as
‘the pupa’, a tubular tunnel that snaked around the lip of the thrust and into
the water like some massive grey intestinal tract or larval invertebrate; a
network of rope and chain rigging, onto which spectators were invited to tie
small handwritten notes of desired release, like prayer flags; and the water
itself, able to suggest a tropical blue lagoon, a black lake of indeterminate
depth, or a sulphurous burning reservoir. The water offered reflective and scriptable
surfaces, mirrorings, doublings, and endless possible dis/appearances,
dissolvings and re-makings. In its saturated metaphoricity and material
fluidity it was conceived as the unstable space of memories and desires, of
buoyancies, rips and drownings – in the words of the South African writer
Breyten Breytenbach, water as ‘the soul of the mirror’ (6).</span></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1BNdLNhH9dbyYwe7PAg9qGRNhjdWHqY5DKo4mdXzHyr9qNkSty9i8Usw8VTn58KtwfgfrWyVcIV0-DSJIjpnjKNMzvVw0E31NbWC9lQsrWcXlDdF4hIbwGt8AfRpu0-1go2EG7h9j-IX_/s1600/Small+BM_Barry+afloat_clean+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1134" data-original-width="896" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1BNdLNhH9dbyYwe7PAg9qGRNhjdWHqY5DKo4mdXzHyr9qNkSty9i8Usw8VTn58KtwfgfrWyVcIV0-DSJIjpnjKNMzvVw0E31NbWC9lQsrWcXlDdF4hIbwGt8AfRpu0-1go2EG7h9j-IX_/s400/Small+BM_Barry+afloat_clean+3.jpg" width="315" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">In this complex and dynamic space were
elaborated the major roles upon which the performance turned. Lapinski, a
Russian immigrant conceived on the marble slab of a war memorial, who leaves
her home for a foreign land: an ‘island’, another place, an elsewhere. She
smokes, conjures the martyrs and ‘love demons’ who haunt her, befriends a Poet,
loves a Painter called Freddie, and tells stories. She is a kind of narrator,
her voice pervading and animating the space of all the others, their stories
enacting her story in turn:</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><span></span><i>Life
is a perpetual to and fro, a dis/continuous releasing and absorbing of</i></span></span></span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><span> </span>the
self. Let her weave her story within their stories, her life amidst their</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><span> </span>lives.
And while she weaves, let her whip, spur and set them on fire. Thus</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><i><span> </span>making
them sing again. Very softly a-new a-gain </i>(7).<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?rinli=1&pli=1&blogID=567846911414225929#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></a></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">In the flat above Lapinski, whose
‘otherness’ particularly confounds him, lives the Revenger. He exists crawling
between earth and sky, swimming sometimes, mostly treading water, but burning
with the struggle to turn his drownings into dreams. He is frightened and he
doesn’t know why, he wakes in the mornings afraid and there’s no one there to
tell; but incredulously and comically he is determined to be ‘master of his own
fuck-ups’, and most of all amused by his own bitter jokes.</span></span></span></div>
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</div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">The Poet works on a hamburger production
line in a factory on the edge of an urban wasteland – the ‘Meatbelt’, the brown
underbelly of the city – with Lapinski and other women, sleepwalkers, blood
under their finger nails. Among them is Seashells, a woman who can hear the
sea, has visions, and loses her hands to the beast of the machine. In the
Poet’s eyes, whole continents flicker as she transports herself, her workmates
and the audience across thousands of imagined miles, through borders of every
kind, no passports required. She has learnt the art of metamorphosis:</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguCpbZed6r7HsHSHtaQB1IXZG9kDpT527-xr26i0fQSly1lgk65tFrh9nKW7jRjbDqHoppQWGLqTEpBtWVf953dWQIJwxMnheVS1FL_zwQI3gge_sBuZH7CQzFSrmyTKPoOOgbXwSOkQNW/s1600/Small+M_Andrea_Meatbelt+bridge_clean+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="701" data-original-width="992" height="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguCpbZed6r7HsHSHtaQB1IXZG9kDpT527-xr26i0fQSly1lgk65tFrh9nKW7jRjbDqHoppQWGLqTEpBtWVf953dWQIJwxMnheVS1FL_zwQI3gge_sBuZH7CQzFSrmyTKPoOOgbXwSOkQNW/s400/Small+M_Andrea_Meatbelt+bridge_clean+3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><span></span><i>The
night shift is nearly over. Soon we will return to each other after our</i></span></span></span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><span> </span>long
separation. We will be startled by the distance we have travelled,</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><i><span> </span>even
though we are standing shoulder to shoulder in the same room. </i>(8)<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?rinli=1&pli=1&blogID=567846911414225929#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></a></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Freddie is an artist who glories in his own
delusional ruminations on Lenin, Freud and Dali. He is a ‘lover’ fragmented by
impossible past loves, including Lapinski, who realizes himself in the very
moment of his immolation in the voracious lust and flaming mouth of Gemma the
Banker. The Banker finds liberation in hatred and destruction. She is ‘love’s
arsonist’, a Kali-like corporate raider who loots the city and every possible
sexual scenario; ultimately she torches the Zoo in a maniacal, necrophiliac
apocalypse of passion and pain.</span></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh70dZxGkp8LjuGd0yxx6DdKPuJrtH6OPiPtAUKwJvhuD1Vz2QVdDIMu0-09ObiLsqt2fxduPVQHQWqwnwKdaUnyiMlBIM72uMRWx1ShJOQeJpO9da1t8RKh0jZfgFTNPrpDfvHEnesyltx/s1600/Small+BM_Anne+and+James_pool+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="714" data-original-width="992" height="287" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh70dZxGkp8LjuGd0yxx6DdKPuJrtH6OPiPtAUKwJvhuD1Vz2QVdDIMu0-09ObiLsqt2fxduPVQHQWqwnwKdaUnyiMlBIM72uMRWx1ShJOQeJpO9da1t8RKh0jZfgFTNPrpDfvHEnesyltx/s400/Small+BM_Anne+and+James_pool+4.jpg" width="400" /></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Krupskaya, Lapinski’s shape-shifting cat,
prowls through these stories and spaces, transformed by them variously into a
grandmother, a corpse, a blow-up doll, and other shadows and reflections
between worlds.</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">The form of the work emerged from these
darkly comic and sometimes violent stories of exile and dislocation, and the
possibilities afforded by the performance space. Dramaturgically and
scenographically, the intention was to engender a cinematic fluidity that
enabled radical jumps in space-time, sudden migrations, interweavings and
collisions of discrete image-worlds: a kind of dissident, critical surrealism. The
performance posited a cartography of multiple or possible selves using an
episodic structure to speak of the pathologies of cultural ‘death’ and the possibilities
of imaginal ‘life’, and the transitional spaces between. Conceptually, these
transitional spaces were orchestrated as rips, tearings, overflowings, bleedings,
ecstasies – formally suture, montage, jump-cuts – in an attempt to articulate
an increase in the buoyancy of the imaginal pool we are always already swimming
in.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">In this context, we conceived of images as polyphonous
‘worlds’: collocatory syntaxes conjoining words, physical actions, music, sound
and the rhythmed articulation of space – images as dynamic sites of <i>possibility</i>. The ‘images’ were thought
of as the visible/audible/palpable intersections of these sites. In this way we
understood the pool as a <i>tabula rasa</i>
re-definable under different lighting conditions, revealing its depth or
solidifying into an impenetrable, black void. The performers swam beneath its
surface, emerging from darkness into the dreams or nightmares of their own
stories, disappearing, then re-emerging in the memories of others.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOwnont6qLsA9u_0wxkHNeYVnJYSnv7ne_XsKQuFxFq7Lovq1Ar_-eKtalrl30m1Mor5B2pGsRTvGrOSpB62jhbq9Fxo_KQgwwG8EED-kfaNk-osyy4VfPRuM4GvKKvzk3A6VKCiFxPYj5/s1600/Small+BM_Meatbelt_bridge_clean+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="787" data-original-width="992" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOwnont6qLsA9u_0wxkHNeYVnJYSnv7ne_XsKQuFxFq7Lovq1Ar_-eKtalrl30m1Mor5B2pGsRTvGrOSpB62jhbq9Fxo_KQgwwG8EED-kfaNk-osyy4VfPRuM4GvKKvzk3A6VKCiFxPYj5/s400/Small+BM_Meatbelt_bridge_clean+3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">The water, and the metal, wood, earth and
canvas of the set and its structures – such as the bridge linking the front of
the auditorium to the thrust stage – were ‘playable’. They served as musical
instruments and pliable forms. The water deflected, reflected and re-animated
sound, light and the performers’ actions. In ‘The Age of the Great Howl’, the
bridge, which served as one of the sites for the Meatbelt, was played with iron
bars for percussive and melodic effect, alongside pre-recorded sound and the
thrashing of water. In episode 21, ‘Zoo Apocalypse’, the water was set aflame –
fire over water – as were metal, wood and cloth dispersed throughout the space.
The pungent odour of fuel and black smoke mingled with human cries and animal
murmurings as the flickering shadows kept time with destruction:</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">The zoo at night
is the saddest place. Behind the bars, at rest from</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> vivisecting
eyes, the animals cry out, species separated from one another,</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> knowing
instinctively the map of belonging. They would choose predator</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> and prey against
this outlandish safety. Their ears, more powerful than</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> those of their
keepers, pick up sounds of cars and last-hour take-aways.</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> They hear all
the human noises of distress. What they don’t hear is the</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> hum of the
undergrowth or the crack of fire. The noises of kill. The river-</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">roar booming
against brief screams. They prick their ears till their ears</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> are sharp
points, but the noises they seek are too far away. I wish I could</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><i> hear your voice
again. </i>(9)<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?rinli=1&pli=1&blogID=567846911414225929#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></a></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">The spoken words of the script were one of
a number of ‘textual’ components embedded in these composite images. For
example in episode 17, ‘And All for Babies with Bone Disease’, the Revenger
tells stories that collapse time and space while the figure of his father,
enacted by the performer who plays the morphing Krupskaya, presides over his
demise from a second balcony. Drifting piano music, the hollow sound of drips
and a distant helicopter threaten the primacy of the spoken/written words.</span></span></span></div>
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</span></span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">In addition, we located a series of
speakers in and around the performance areas to allow the soundscapes to
‘travel’ through and around, spatialising the movement of sound within the
architecture of the theatre. One of the central audio images which recurred in
different guises throughout the performance was of a helicopter with
searchlight, circling ever closer, before hovering in the night sky above the
space, finally careering out of control and being ‘sucked’ into the water with
the performers (see below, episode 24, ‘This Does Not Exist’). The performers
enact roles of ‘see-ers’, and the ‘seen’; they are able to transport
themselves, but they are policed, living under the watchful eye and scorching
light of equally possible repressions.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicfv4oRjE2PKM97JFxV_HEf45zWs7Cl2s3JrEStoCzis-iBH9Wmqlv8D-43lqw246vmFIp2y4u0JhcwYaeo_GKfmd8mE-E0NvN15Da8U4It3N3qDHRYf58E5pU3ckYx5_bf_oiZ9Q-GhDn/s1600/Small+BM_Barry_Anne_zoo+apocalypse+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="992" data-original-width="647" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicfv4oRjE2PKM97JFxV_HEf45zWs7Cl2s3JrEStoCzis-iBH9Wmqlv8D-43lqw246vmFIp2y4u0JhcwYaeo_GKfmd8mE-E0NvN15Da8U4It3N3qDHRYf58E5pU3ckYx5_bf_oiZ9Q-GhDn/s400/Small+BM_Barry_Anne_zoo+apocalypse+2.jpg" width="260" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Finally, the particularity of the theatre
space itself introduced a wholly productive unpredictability in two ways.
Firstly, the weather became an active component of unfolding image worlds,
particularly wind – warm gusts and eddies animating flame, smoke, cloth, hair, sounds
- and the occasional summer shower, droplets disturbing the surface of the
water as if it were reaching boiling point. Secondly, in all of the
performances the theatre’s resident peacocks chose to remain present throughout,
exquisitely languorous and bejeweled onlookers, uncharacteristically silent, taking
up various positions on the balconies like baroque azure extras quietly performing
an-other audience. This porosity in the parameters of space and event, their
openness to the uncontrollable dynamics of the context (the allowing in of both
a meteorological and animal ‘outside’), seemed to amplify and thicken the
resonance of images, giving them further immediacy, body and carry.</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"></span><i><span lang="EN-US">David
Williams and Barry Laing thank Deborah Levy for her encouragement during the
production process. All photographs are by Marcelo
Palacios.</span></i></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">_______________________________________________ </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span lang="EN-US">EPISODE
1: EXILE IS A STATE OF MIND </span></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-US">The
first image of the performance. Soundscape: piano music, a lament, emerging
from a sound of sampled water droplets, as the performers who play Lapinski and
Krupskaya walk slowly into the space from opposite sides and meet on the
bridge. Krupskaya carries an old, battered and threadbare umbrella, inverted
above her, like a bowl; a black cloth over her shoulders, like a shawl. She
gives the umbrella to Lapinski, who slowly spins it above her head to create
her own ‘snow-storm’; from the umbrella white feathers swirl and settle on her
shoulders, the bridge and the water below. At the same time, Krupskaya wraps
her head in the black cloth, for a few moments becoming the ‘grandmother’,
bidding Lapinski farewell. </span></i></span></span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaWMCi-qaD1_IBPv0UT7IgQqKXChpzkC-sqnkz3PoxiAd7p3yQiPl6Ah2TvJlzoBzvRZvptwFUsd8bbPjM-VjAg8ANxeZvQe1oJhCQbE7iDZLjy3lHrbi0A-oq_dnl73GLY0SgKGwa59xF/s1600/Small+BM_Mandy+smoke_clean+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="992" data-original-width="696" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaWMCi-qaD1_IBPv0UT7IgQqKXChpzkC-sqnkz3PoxiAd7p3yQiPl6Ah2TvJlzoBzvRZvptwFUsd8bbPjM-VjAg8ANxeZvQe1oJhCQbE7iDZLjy3lHrbi0A-oq_dnl73GLY0SgKGwa59xF/s400/Small+BM_Mandy+smoke_clean+2.jpg" width="280" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-US">Both
figures then step quietly out of this space, down from the bridge and into the
water, as the journey to a foreign land begins. Lapinski moves through the
water with the umbrella, looking straight ahead. While she wades, she trails
Krupskaya in her wake. She is a ‘corpse’, floating concealed underneath what is
now a black shroud: her dead ‘mother’ – a memory, a weight. As Lapinski
approaches the metal cage, Krupskaya is released, floating abandoned for a few
moments, then re-emerging to dance serenely in the water with the cloth. The
umbrella floats nearby, like a monstrous damaged lotus.</span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-US">A
distant dog bark in the soundtrack greets Lapinski as she climbs into her ‘new
world’ – an island, a cage. As the music slips underneath, she slowly looks
around her at the audience, and begins to tell Lapinski’s story:</span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span lang="EN-US">LAPINSKI: </span></b><span lang="EN-US">My mother was
the ice-skating champion of Moscow. She danced, glided, whirled on blades of
steel, pregnant with me, warm in her womb even though I was on ice. She said I
was conceived on the marble slab of a war memorial, both she and my father in
their Sunday best: I came into being on a pile of corpses in the bitter snows
of mid-winter.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">On my fifth
birthday, my father stole a goose. He stuffed it into the pocket of his
overcoat and whizzed off on his motorbike, trying to stop it from flying away
with his knees. We ate it that evening. As I put my first forkful into my
mouth, he tickled me under the chin and said, “This does not exist.
Understand?” I did not understand at the time. Especially as my mother stuffed
a pillow full of the feathers for me, and soaked the few left in red vegetable
dye to sew onto the skirt of her skating costume. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">At the age of
twelve, when my parents died, I was sent to the West by my grandmother. She
said it was for the best. I was to stay with a distant uncle. When I asked my
grandmother why he had left, she said, “Because he is faithless”. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-US">The
‘mother’ has disappeared into the water, and now reappears in deep focus,
walking quietly along a side balcony and off into the distance, a blue light
painting the plastic shroud that rustles around her: the memory recedes. </span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Which is how I
came to be here. Where women were rumoured to swim in fountains of sparkling
wine dressed in leopardskin bikinis. I unpacked my few clothes, books,
photographs, parcels of spiced meat, and wept into the handkerchief my
grandmother had pressed into my hand. It was embroidered with one scarlet
thread with my name – L. A. P. I. N. S. K. I. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-US">The
music has dropped out altogether. </span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><span> </span>Exile
is a state of mind… </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> _______________________________________</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> <b>Notes</b></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span></span>(1) The
Poet in Deborah Levy, <i>Beautiful Mutants</i>,
Jonathan Cape: London, 1989, p. 16. Republished by Penguin in <i>Early Levy</i>, a volume with her novel <i>Swallowing Geography</i>, in 2014.</span></span></span></div>
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</span></span><div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span></span>(2) This pool of loosely related materials, reflecting our fascinations at
the time and informing our approaches to some degree, include an annotated copy
of Ted Hughes’s poem/film treatment <i>Gaudete</i>,
sections of Roland Barthes’s <i>A Lover’s
Discourse</i> and of Breyten Breytenbach’s <i>Confessions
of an Albino Terrorist</i>, two short stories by Gail Jones – ‘The House of
Breathing’ and ‘Modernity’ - and essays about the dance-theatre work of Pina
Bausch.</span></span></span></div>
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</span></span><div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span></span><span>(3) </span><i> Beautiful Mutants</i> was first performed at
the New Fortune Theatre in Perth on 9 February 1993. The project was conceived
and directed by David Williams and Barry Laing. The performers were Mandy
McElhinney (Lapinski), Felicity Bott (Krupskaya), Barry Laing (‘Duke’, the
Revenger), Andrea McVeigh (The Poet), James Berlyn (Freddie, the Painter), Anne
Browning (Gemma, the Banker), and Kate Beahan (Seashells). The devising process
also implicated the designer Ricardo Peach, lighting designer Margaret Burton,
sound artists John Patterson and Andrew Beck, costume designer Bruno
Santarelli, and the production manager Mark Homer.</span></span></span></div>
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</span></span><div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span></span>(4) The
Poet in Deborah Levy, <i>Beautiful Mutants</i>,
Jonathan Cape: London, 1989, p. 11.</span></span></span></div>
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</span></span><div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span></span>(5) Although
these are characteristics of Shakespearean dramaturgy, film was our central
metaphorical and aesthetic stimulus here for an approach to image making in the
theatre.</span></span></span></div>
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</span></span><div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span></span>(6) Breyten Breytenbach, <i>All One
Horse: Fictions and Images</i>, Faber & Faber: London, 1989, p. 14.</span></span></span></div>
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</span></span><div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span></span>(7) Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘Grandma’s Story’, in <i>Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism</i>, Indiana
University Press: Bloomington 1989, p. 128.</span></span></span></div>
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</span></span><div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span></span>(8) Episode
14, ‘One Body’, ExTC adaptation of Deborah Levy’s <i>Beautiful Mutants</i>. </span></span></span></div>
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</span></span><div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span></span>(9) Jeanette Winterson, <i>Written on the
Body</i>, Jonathan Cape: London, 1992, p. 135.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><i>Extract from </i></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><i>'Space as protagonist, material, medium: </i></span></span></span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Beautiful Mutants</span></span></span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><i>', </i></span></span></span></i></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"><i>by David Williams and Barry Laing, </i></span></span></span>a longer text with extracts from the performance text, </i><i>published in </i>The New Fortune Theatre: That Vast Open Stage<i>, Perth, Australia: UWA Press, 2018. Eds. Ciara Rawnsley & Robert White</i></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">A long bike trip with Sue to Kensal Green cemetery in North London, in search of something I first read about some year's ago in Iain Sinclair's <i>Lights Out For The Territory</i>. His account of a particular encounter in the 1990s, en route to a funeral with his friend the photographer Marc Atkins, has lingered with me. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Initially Sinclair is dismissive of the pretensions of some of the cemetery's inhabitants, their 'pyramids and stone mansions whose original pomposity had been weathered by long indifference into something more democratic: a sanctuary for wild nature, a trysting place for work-experience vampires. Irrelevant memory doses. Boasts and titles and meaningless dates'. Then -</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">"I spotted one particular stone angel that had to be photographed: a robed hermaphrodite tangled in the bare Medea branches of a tree. The image was entirely mythical. The tree devoured the stone like a recollection of dry fire. Like Actaeon, the voyeur, turned into a stag: trapped, as it were, by the wonder of a site unexpectedly encountered. Like Ezra Pound's obsession with the girl who becomes a tree:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> <i>The tree has entered my hands,</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i> The sap has ascended my arms,</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i> The tree has grown in my breast -</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i> Downward,</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i> The branches grow out of me, like arms.</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The angel's hands were gone, her face was hidden; the branches spread out above her like electrified hair. Her wings, tangled in the thicket, were a useless decoration ..." (350).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">There are countless angels in Kensal Green cemetery, immobile flocks of them in varying states of eroded, gravitied flight, but Thomas Raphael's winged companion was nowhere to be found. Eventually we met a passing 'friend' of the cemetery, who explained that the tree had died some time ago, and the masonry of the angel itself had been significantly damaged. He offered to show us what remained. I thanked him and declined, for it seemed most fitting to retain Sinclair's account of his Ovidian encounter and Atkins' photograph as the enduring mnemonic traces of a vision now disappeared - an active vanishing.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Text extract from Iain Sinclair, </i>Lights Out For The Territory<i>, London: Granta, 1997. Photo: Marc Atkins</i></span></span>david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-8403546614120933002019-01-25T11:03:00.000+00:002019-05-02T08:31:25.194+01:00seven hands<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />david williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17972996242468146343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-567846911414225929.post-76079264554665742692019-01-19T16:03:00.000+00:002019-05-02T08:29:42.851+01:00cigarettes & coffee (palermo)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Top: 'round the back' - designated smokers' area </div>
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behind the Teatro Massimo, Palermo</div>
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