Thursday, April 29, 2010

duplicate.

There is something particularly uncanny
about the experience of duplicates.
The strangeness that occurs when one is similar to
but not quite the same.

Whether in the tried repetition of a performance
or the re-enactment of a lost battle
whether the return to a beloved city
or the embrace of a new lover
it is in this act of duplication
the very attempt at replication that
only exacerbates the differences that now exist.
it is in the differences between Factum 1 and
Factum 2
that remind Rauschenberg of his inability to recreate
a masterpiece
twice
it is in gravity's insistence on paint
where repetition seems unthinkable
and yet a tear tends to fall in the same place twice
even if it has long forgotten its trail
home

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Cage and Fin

- - - - - - -
- - - - - - -
- - - - - - -
- - Cage -
- - - - - - -
- - - - - - -
- - - - - - -


cage came to see soundandsilence as inextricably related.

Silent Prayer
abstractly negate sound to produce
silence
(negation of Muzak as pervasive commercially produced music)
. . . . . . . . . 4'33''. . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
reattributes a positivity
to silence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . in its own right
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
anechoic chamber and the inability to escape
the pulsing of one's blood and ringing of the nervous system

Zen
being and nothingness

simultaneously

Da
da







space
between art and



life

Jackson Pollock's movement toward----------------------------> the ends
art that extended into life------------ opposite of -----------trompe l'oeil

past the medium of paint to include the medium of life
combines and assemblages

white
on
white had a religious undertone

white as being representative of the ultimate
the omniscient
the ascetic

white as returning to the two dimensionality of art

finality
in the point
where a circle
begins and ends

_____________________________________line
between ____________________determinate negation (formalist) and abstract negation

white paintings are a
i
r
ports for lights and enviroment

Malevich white on white
as a project ion screen that
succeeds in capturing
light like the impressionists
wanted glass architecture
that allows for themelange of
light and atmosphere
in creating space
that is as much art as it is life



not ground zero of painting,


















"To write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbarous"



there are multiple ways of getting at a zero that doesn't exist
return to Nature and temporality
Rauschenberg grass and dirt paintings that deteriorate in their own time despite

human agency

Thursday, April 15, 2010

limb-in-hall

Dear Peggy,

Was it Picasso that said copying was the highest form of flattery?
Or was it flagellation?
Forgive me for I have sin...ce
forgotten.
You should know
there were two things that kept me up last night
as I was writing and writhing
pondering and pontificating
inching my way towards the hours of Psychosis
4.48.

ONE- the subtle sting of heartbreak
and the persistent haunting of emptiness in my bed, and
TWO- your writing
about your love affair with Marina.

In one, I found myself moving closer to life
and in the other I found myself running less
--at a de-accelerated pace towards
death.

Will you be my Ulay
my Krasner
my Cage?
I'll be your ugly duckling
if you'll engage (with) me
even if not reciprocally.
Be the sun in mine eyes so that I might not see
the horizon
to which, for which, I am bound.

liminality.

Dear Peggy,

I fear that the words I will write will not suffice, and yet I am left only with these words, and fear that if I do not acknowledge the profound effect you have had on my experience at Stanford in this exact moment in space, and time, that this sensate experience will be ingested and defecated into the annals of my history, wound tightly in the nostalgic reminiscence that occurs when one reflects upon college, because how else are the halcyon days supposed to be archived?

I will forget about the masochism of heartbreak, and the banal existence that consumed my academic body rendering me apathetic and seemingly disenchanted with the institution of learning. My plastic neurons reorganize themselves, but my body remembers even when my mind chooses not to. Particularly when my mind chooses not to.

This past quarter, I occupied The liminal space, more so out of necessity than out of desire. In chasing after time, and fearing the apocalyptic ending of what was supposed to be the best years of my life, where everything fell into space-- into love, into careers, into place--I brought upon another type of cataclysm that left me suspended, literally, if not from ropes tied to the porcelain god à la Sarah Kane, than perhaps industrial sized meat hooks. In my search for life, I, at times toured the border terror-tories of death. As a performer seeking reality on stage, I found myself staging my life as a drama. In my epic quest for love, I fell quickly from my lover's grasp, and unlike Eurydice, I confidently strode toward normalcy only to find that there was no one in my shadow. I became the spectator as my body performed sickness--psychosis, hysteria, depression. It was in this nowhere space, the green flash before the sunset that signified the sunrise in this betweenness.

It was here, that I was given back the gift of time. A fortuitous find in the life of a Stanford student. It is here, that I began to see that I was living life as if it was a scripted voyage toward death. Towards endings. Toward my ultimate fear of being a lone.

It was I, the I that declared that many times in my life I felt more alive when I was on stage, performing, than when I was in the world, performing. Because in some ways I realized that my audience when I was on stage was, first and foremost, my kinesthetic proprioceptive body. The one that knew when I nailed that line, or pelvic contraction. Unlike in "life," my genuine drama, where so often my audience was the other, the anyone-but-me that turned a blind eye to facetious deliveries and faked orgasms.

Peggy, I feel, and I use this verb intentionally, that is to say, empathetically, I feel that you are deeply disenchanted with the insistence of humanity to destruct, and yet equally plagued by its persistence to create. Where do the protectors in our real life dramas (yes! the universal our) exist when death counts account for more than con-science?

The empathy we feel toward another, the inexplicable that exists between the inextricable.
So often love is accompanied by surrender, and in that surrender, the death of sight.
How one moves quicker from status as lover to stranger than lover to friend.
How beauty renders itself closer to tragedy than comedy.
How a kiss of carbon dioxide is both a betrayal of the heart--and yet, an impetus for the self to inhale again. In a cyclic fashion where love renders us both closer to death and closer to life simultaneously.

It is here that you, and I, have both given me, back and anew, time.

And in this uncertainty, the commitment only to commit.
But, perhaps it is the "doubt that makes love love."


Sunday, April 11, 2010

Bobby McFerrin

swallowed sounds the texture of un pot de chocolat
that coaxed even a scarred esophagus back to health
after a night of retching offerings up for the porcelain god


how to coererce a spectator while insisting on his freedom?
where does faith end and the void begin?

Saturday, April 10, 2010

glass slippers or wire hangers.

the body remembers even when the mind wishes not to.
a touch lingers longer than a word
a sigh of warm breath longer than the turning away.

I went to see Robert Moses' Cinderella Theory a few nights ago
at the Nitery at Stanford.
it was a project that I let fall by the way side
when RENT took over my life
but the entire cast of characters upon that stage were
one and the same with me.
A collection of what Daniel Graver calls the "personnage" body
for I could see little more than Katharine's expansive wing span
and Little Linda's staccato head movements.
Mostly I was disarmed by the type casting of bodies
the full figured pair that fought over the children's clothing
the frail ones offered up like a hybrid of an aborted fetus
and the deposition of Christ.
How utterly oxymoronic and unpoetic.
the bodies merely feigned frailty between virtuosic
batmas and pirouettes en attitude.

The dissonance between the dancer's body and the character's body
was rearticulated in the disjunct between the textual accompaniment
and the choreography.
After a while, I found myself purposely ignoring the text
in order to attend to the movement.
The text was literal
the movement contrived.
Conviction in movement parsed the performer bodies
from the familiar bodies of friends.
The written labels on flesh acted more like costumes
rather than insights into identity.
And though there was a ritualistic cleansing at the end
as if the baptismal commencement of a renaissance
there remained a cacophony that could not be cleansed.

The lack of relations between bodies on stage--
the lack of relationship--
revealed no history or memory.
There was a dearth of corporeal souvenirs
an absence of embodied affect
the result of time spent with
in, around,
another.

Hangers made up the bodies of lost children
like ghastly wind chimes echoing the absence
of life.
I wondered why the portrait of the modern family
was so desolate and bleak.
Why life seemed so anemic in these circumstances
even when the shoe seemed to fit at first.

but then we grew.



Thursday, April 8, 2010

surrogate.

In the negative space
between ideal schemas and performative gestures
there comes a time when surrogates become
the source of sustenance
and we forget that we are only
half full.

Eventually something has to give way
the heart or the hippocampus
and it is in times like these
that I am thankful that somewhere
neurons are regenerative
and memory fades faster than scars.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Re: Naissance


And after we have shown each other how we have set and kept
the clear, healthy boundaries that help us live side by side with
each other,
let us risk remembering that we never stop silently loving
those we once loved out loud

-Oriah

It is at the end of our lives that we reminisce
upon the past and evaluate
our successes and our failures.
I like to think that at the end
we dwell longer on the successes
than those spots in which we have fallen
short.
Some of us, are luckily enough to die while we are living.
Only then, when our survival is at stake
when we no longer see
when we no longer sense
when digestion is slow and belabored
do we remember that the body persists
even when the mind has been lost.
This Spring, the rain has given way
to buds nursed on injury.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Ourchive


Throughout the week in New York
the notion of remembering the past
as a way of moving forward
was a recurring idea that permeated our collective experiences.
Whether it was viewing the Panorama of the five boroughs
created for the 1964 World's Fair in Queens
or understanding the importance of sampling
in the process of Reenactment in the 2010 Whitney Biennial
it became very apparent that the idiosyncratic nature of our
voyage was greatly informed by the years
of art making that preceded it.
While it was reassuring to note that we have not
divorced ourselves completely from the art that makes
up our collective history, my experience of Art
(with a capital A)
during the trip made me question the role of archiving
documentation
and recollection.
While I don't believe that contemporary artists have
run out of novel things to say--
why do so many of them resort to recreating the
paramount projects of the past
as if nostalgic middle-aged housewives
reminiscing upon their halcyon years?

Has the art world out-shocked itself?

And yet, how is it that the Marina Abramovic retrospective
removed from its contextual space in time
is still effective at making one's passage through
a couple of naked bodies uncomfortable?
More specifically, while pictures add to the
source of our collective memory
there is a certain artifice that exists
in the pictorial tradition
that fails to capture the essence of a shared moment
and thus, creates a specific unilateral memory of the past.
All this to say, with such a rich landscape of past
art movements, happenings, moments of genius,
I wonder what has fallen by the way side
and what would have remained if the gatekeepers to this art
had themselves been different?
Thus, as we assemble Ourchive
I add merely a glimpse of an exceptional trip
that far exceeded my expectations of "immersion"
and only worked to solidify my love for New York.
The following is a video focusing on the gestural exchanges
that occurred throughout the trip
By obscuring most of the identifying features of the people we met
and juxtaposing subway strangers and NYC elite alongside
Stanford students
I hope to offer a portrait of a city that is at once diverse and common
stripped of language and context
a certain humanity persists in palms and fingertips.