NEW LANGUAGE

Finding anything

There is a poem I like to repeat form time to time, it's called Forerunners by Charles Brasch, a NZ poet and publisher. I never remember it in it's entirety, all I remember is 'fore runners, they came before us'.

The other thing about that empty table, is it is still. It is also empty. An empty still table. Strangely attractive. I wanted to look at it again as I spoke to a lingust yesterday about sign language- the form (shape) is equivilant with consonants, and the movement is equivelant with vowels. The movement is the vowel, the stillness is the consonant. One requires both for tranmission.

Empty table, rattle my head

meeting point

Hi Lee,
I'm a little bit tight with my schedule, but I'd like to give you some clue of what I could do in the context of the show at the shop. Concerning ideas about silence, I have some texts lying around that are specifically dealing with this topic and of which I know had some influence in the work I'm making now, but I need some piece and quiet to gather my thoughts. I make the proposals sound quite concrete, but they are nevertheless still very open for change. In my experience this concrete way of putting things can help speed up the process. Let's see...


Sign: Meeting point


stool without seat


wavy line

Proposal I
Group of sculptures at the spam-shop:
- wavy line as graffiti on the wall parallel to the stairs that lead to the second floor
- suspended triangular sign, "trefpunt", painted wood, blue/yellow
- stool
- divider wall with halogen industrial lamp, wood, hemp, glossy mint-green paint
- playing on plastic spacy 50's video monitor downstairs; video 'scrap'






Proposal II

- 3 wasco drawings or ink-jet print
- divider wall, mint green, halogen lamp
- light, sort of floating, wooden sculpture of table game
- 'scrap' video, same monitor as in proposal I


table game


drawings (they are supposed to be horizontal)

Waiting

One could deprive everything and also completely give over to a kind of imagined power through a waiting. but by now an idea of waiting is probably a bit fashionable and not really what we mean.. "Oh! I'm so exhuasted all the time etc."

Several short systems:

Take dust jacket off

Collect all images

Relaxation

Deny everything

Hyper ventilation

Lying on the ground under a table

Table falls on top of you and you can't move

Smoke starts

Whole place catches on fire

Black Box

further-further to deprivation

I keep on thinking how freezing to a pose and disrupting the archive could be related. Perhaps what really happens in the situation that Pavel describes (maybe there are more thinkable scenarios) is that through freezing the pose, the camera becomes part of the or interferes with the script. Applying that same language, thus speaking of role-change in approach to the archive or scripted material (history), perhaps its possible to say that to freeze is a an expression of the desire to interfere with this script.

I am still not able to answer your question who or what changes role in the performance situation or imagine how 'it' could perform. I can only attempt to imagine 'it' performing, when I draw back on moments in preparation to work with a certain material, hence this crazy talk about transcendence.

I was scanning through an article by Flusser, printed in F.R. David (with the fish), I think you own a copy as well. In it a nice alternative is given to how Pavel speaks about the power of imagination. Flusser says an inversion has taken place of the historical roles of reason and imagination. That history /writing /reason instead of explaining and critcising the imagination, has become subservient to image making. That (in the worst case) writers write scripts for new images, so called techno-images and this cycle becomes a kind of 'eternal return of life in apparatus that progresses by its own inertia'. This is a very black-and-black summary, but I feel more for this vision of imagination then Pavel's. My own interpretation of this short text on an intuitive level goes hand in hand with my experience with the government archive and social service. The role that objects play in the images that document the Social Service around it's instigation in the '60s, perform a rational, divisional, hierarchical, standardized function or sometimes frustrating relation between user and provider. In the present situation, co-existant to some of these still present 'older' objects, is a much more irrational image cycle at hand, one that seems to make physical this notion of techno-imagination: 'a tecnnical progresss that has become autonomous of human decision'. They are images of people performing, personalised models. I didn't know how to call this phenomenon, still don't, it becomes too easily a judgement; but some kind of temporal cyclical time, with no sense of history. (obviously)

Back to freezing, Flusser also talks about a black box which feeds on history, text or script (lineair time) and freezes it into techno-images (cyclical time). He then asks himself how and if this can/should be resisted. Before reading any further, I let my imagination flow unobstructedly and imagined us in front of this black box, before the histories and texts are devoured, posing before it, maybe becoming script ourselves and then many possible ends:
- devoured by the black box
- unmasking the script (that it is in fact scripted), then devoured by the black box

Perhaps I can wear my dust-jacket on the opening and hang yours on the wall in the Transmission gallery, as evidence of our collaboration and your absent presence?

I like this object (in combination with a mirror), maybe it's something to keep in mind as a form for the booklet or a photo-album (ruth at work/ touching objects)

I had interpreted your photograph of the light obscuring your face as an intentional light flash from a lamp pointed towards the camera. Could this dual reading, between determination and failure be similar to the relation between performance and pose? Performance, carrying the progressive connotation of presence instead of representation, while posing as an attempt to resemble oneself is always doomed to fail?

"Posing is like waiting for a moment, the shot, of which one knows nothing except that it must be the 'right' moment. It's like a simple yet obscure emergency, the emergency of having to resemble oneself at a specific moment, that will occur, which always occurs almost-now, always quite soon, always at the risk of coming to early or too late"

So, in response to this quote, maybe in approaching the material that we want to work with, we create a state of emergency/ a moment; pose to let the material 'perform'. (I'm actually always a bit scared to use performing in connection to objects or material although I am very interested in their hieroglyphic representation of social relations, if that's what happens in the drawings...)

I like when illumination fails (or as in this case is in excess and consequently fails).

Marina sent this image of the face down woman, and above a nice comment my friend Ruben made about the photo of me with my flash covering my face....

Further to deprivation

From The Freeze in Ghost Stories- Stray thoughts on photography and film by Pavel Büchler (s0me less interesting than others)

"(of course there is also another way of looking at this: the freeze is a simple role change. For an instant, we are privileged to look through the camera– as though we hand't been looking through it all the time– and see the film creww making a pause for a pose)"

In our situation who changes roles? What kind of – if any– heirachy is there? I would say that we as performers need to operate/co-exist or deprive ourselves in order for the (any) meaning to become activated- that IT poses rather than us. Like the photo of the light/reflection/camera (all simoultaneously working) obscuring my face. This could be how to approach the appointment, a flash of light that obscures?

I'm not quite able to articulate it yet, but I think this freezing to a pose in film is similar to how we are disrupting the archive- we interrupt its normativised mode of performance, deprive it, and thus create a possible contingency.

In this book, by Pavel, which is sometimes less interesting he says earlier...

"it tells us how imagination, the power to make something out of nothing, can be manipulated to unite us collectively in a vision of reality which otherwise conflicts with individual perceptions and consciousness"

But as mentioned in passing before, perhaps we ought to rather make this as an imagined scenario, in a poster or discussion than actual performance?

a pause for a pose

I'm glad you introduced a metaphor of the film set, this makes it easier to abandon the mind-numbing dichotomy of performer and audience. The photograph of the heads are indeed working. To extend the metaphor of the film, the head or obscured face becomes part of the 'set'; it absorbs, reflects and mirrors other elements in the set. It is at work also because as Buechler mentions, a role-change takes place. This role-change ideally, is a moment of tension or alternation between immanence and transcendence. Immanent, because the head is part of the set (poured into the space) and transcendent, because of a transferred consciousness, the camera consciousness or perhaps becoming a looking glass oneself.

Freezing, then, isn't about converting an experience into an image, rather a sensibility that transcends into the image. (like a ghost) It is true that, maybe it sound freeky, I (we) use this as method to approach a space or material, to let go of a focus or normative mode of attention in order to act with the material or let the material perform, or yes, maybe less floaty: to create a possible contigency.

I like to stretch the idea of physical presence in performance situation, perhaps we could make a dialogue-script for Transmission and leave it relatively open for Ada (e.g. poster project).

pfff...
wish I had an idea now how this could be actualised.