Taxi! intervention (not hailed cabs) @ Not Sent Letters
On Friday evening I, alongside my generous and esteemed collaborator Lori Weidenhammer, undertook my first experiment in what will be a series of experiments and ongoing interventions (“Transactions”) around Helen Potrebenko’s 1975 novel Taxi!
Thank you to everyone who engaged with both Lori and I. Lori was deployed as Security Guard (Insecurity) and as you’ll see from the photo documentation (again thanks to a varied bunch of snappers) I was installed in the Taxi! rank. It was an embodiment piece that sought to recontextualize the experience of reading and being read to. It also was an inquiry into the conditions by which we read and how might we read a forgotten text over an available and advertised text.
I have more to write about this intervention. I was grateful to Helen Potrebenko and her husband Earl for turning out and supporting the piece. Also a huge thank you to Charlene Vickers for hosting the event at her studio space and Jeremy Todd for creating space for it. It was a fascinating experience to have such an engagement with readers. And as usual within performance art offered surprise, learning and took me in directions I could not have conceived of. For now I offer some photos of what took place.
(Also thank you to Jeremy Isao Speier for his precise, diligent work on the sign)
Circa Issue 131 on art criticism
I was curious to see that Circa Issue 131 is entirely devoted to the question of art criticism.
I was even more curious to recognize something in the first paragraph of Declan Delong’s piece that I’d never contemplated before. (To be honest I’d have employed a red pen and scrubbed parts of this sentence, but it’s the latter bit that interested me)
December 1987, and for perhaps the twentieth or thirtieth time in one long, languorous, teenage afternoon, I am again eagerly poring over the latest issue of what is, without question, the most important journal of cultural criticism in the world: the weekly music magazine Melody Maker.
Delong continues on to describe the editorial policy and reflect on the work of individual writers, but what arrested me was the consideration of Melody Maker as a journal of cultural criticism. I’d never thought of the influence of that devoted weekly or was two weekly read. I remember it came out on a Wednesday. I remember wondering how we’d live waiting for the next copy (as you do at age 15/17 galvanized by what comes out of the radio dial and so on, as if the rest of the world can just go shatter itself). And most importantly, I am struck by why we bought Melody Maker over the NME because I remember it was Melody Maker that was the first choice always. NME followed if you had a bit of extra money. Was there 10p difference in the price?
Further into this Circa issue Matt Packer’s piece Critical Fantasies contains the following parallel in a bracketed paragraph:
(Similar in apprehension is CIRCA’s approach of asking writers to respond to the issue of criticism in the present issue, after its well known financial difficulties. An approach that is simultaneously a dance of death, and a way of shoring-up CIRCA’s performative functions for its own survival)
You can read both essays entirely here The whole magazine is downloadable as a pdf.
Plants vs…
It is the time of year when people start to think about and plan their gardens, or garden plots. I love to read about them thumbing through the seed catalogues and visualizing how and where the plants may sit in relation to the weather, light and so on.
In contrast I don’t feel the same buzz when I read the endless articles and interviews with writers on “why or how they write…” What they write concerns me, the ideas around what they write perhaps, the research, in someways what they fail to write or don’t write concerns me more than why they write.
Last night I was nursing two injuries at gymnastics. Injuries sustained from going to the dentist and sleeping! I was considering skipping the training session because there was a screening of some archived readings I was curious about, but, after the day that was in it, physical action was the more necessary choice.
Not entirely sure how I thought not being able to lift my arm was going to facilitate flinging my body about the place. I snagged something in the shoulder, all the way up the neck to the ear region. It’s a 72-hour type strain acquired from sitting in the dentist’s chair with my head on an angle, in a state of terror, that caused it.
I find working with the body when it’s injured rewarding. I am interested in the seperation of how muscles work and interact and inter relate with each other: Not unlike the ingredients in a sentence. One’s awareness shifts when you’re denied access to a particular muscle group heavily relied on in a particular sport. I had not bargained how much the upper body is engaged previously. The transfer of weight to and from the shoulder region especially. Bit like losing the wheel on your car.
I figured I could easily spend the session on the trampoline or stretching, but it proved overly-painful. I was chatting, between tramp turns, with a contortionist. Her body arrived in the world equipped for the task it appeared. She’d always been very flexible. So I was asking her whether she discovered this from doing tricks at school or with her friends. She didn’t like that kind of attention, she explained. She’s a shy person. Now she’s an apprentice circus performer. Her connection being with her body over the spectacle of it displayed for an audience. Or perhaps she’s concealed by that spectacle and therefore comfortable. There was something of the ornament about this particular physical activity because a contortionist places the body in a manner and to an extremity nearly all of us cannot and leaves it there for a period of time and then moves to place it into another ‘sculpture’ (?).
I was thinking about the way truth is contorted lately and it’s curious that contorting truth is not an arrival point. It merely continues to ping, and ping, often with unsettling results and listening. What are the conditions neuro-scientifically that allow for truth to be contorted? Does the brain mimic the body in this way? Does it allow sculpture (ideas) to form and remain static, rather than be released to the next move, until their outline becomes so clear they take over ?
Not hailing cabs
I have been searching for my copy of The Trial to look up something in it. It has vamoosed. What about that?
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A big adventure on Kingsway today and some confusion around the 2×2’s and an introduction to a light, ultra thin wood. The sign she cometh to life slowly.
Next Post
A very engaging few hours conversation on research and ideas yesterday with one of my favourite thinker, artist and conversationalist’s. Saturday, ditto, a great collaborative exchange and brainstorm with Lori. Back to the good stuff! The weather changes when the elements are brighter.
Abandon
I was interested to read in an old NY Times article (2008) that Isabel Fonseca abandoned a non-fiction book about Uruguay and her family history there.
The piece explained Fonseca began to feel intimidated “because of how some of her family had reacted to a memoir included in the collection “Bruno Fonseca: the Secret Life of Painting,” published after her brother’s death from AIDS in 1994. “Some people didn’t like it,” she said. “There was a lot of ‘It wasn’t like this, it wasn’t like that.’ I thought I had been very straight, so it startled me and inhibited me tremendously.”
It piqued my interest because of Fonseca’s first book “Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey” and the research that book entailed. The abandoned family history book was beset then by a pre-emptative assumption of how it would fail to be authentic to what took place. Failure whether it’s confirmed by the writer or created by the general atmosphere around the writer can often be a new departure point for the writer in my experience.
But it also reminds me of another assumption where it’s quite the opposite: that of what is contained in a book and what that book must surely be and amount to, without having read the book. Read the book before you zip up the sleeping bag on it. Even a chunk of it.
Yesterday I returned to a novel for a sixth reading and was delighted to discover a particular strand that had floated over my head during the previous 5 readings.