Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Authors on Artists: Shane Anderson on Tino Sehgal


THIS IS AN OVERVIEW OF TINO SEHGAL’S SITUATIONS

by Shane Anderson

A child asks you about progress. A ticket taker states the newspaper’s headlines. A security guard hops on one leg, announces the title. Another sings about knowledge and propaganda. And another is getting naked. They are waiting for you. People are singing. People are jogging. Dancing. They are confessing their feelings about their grandmother. Someone is rotating on the floor then standing, in a circle. A high school student continues the conversation about progress. Children in uniforms run between your legs and play games without objects with you. Someone will pay you half of the entry fee if you can say something about market economy. A retiree wants to know when you felt like you belonged. Five people fall to the floor if you don’t respond. Others walk backwards, play games in slow motion, discuss radical politics. Two people kiss on the floor, grope for wages. People brush up against you. They whisper in your ear. What are they saying? The beatboxing is too loud to understand them. They are humming like a Theremin. The snare roll from lips is getting ready to drop. The lights flash on, I feels like I’m on ecstasy. The elderly finish off the conversation. I walk back alone. Everything is nearly invisible. And then gone.

In white rooms. Dark rooms. Surrounded by old paintings, neons, cracked mirrors and dusty chandeliers, in ball houses used by Nazis. In a house that belonged to Huguenots, the stench of bodies. On an empty spiral, inside the temple of the spirit. These constructed situations are filling the spaces with experiences we share with the performers and each other. With different names, they are all the same, a radical alteration of the environment, implicating the visitors into situations, using game structures, united, usually, by the demonstrative, an occasional verb of existence and a naïve description: This is Good, This is Propaganda, This Objective of that Object, This Situation, This Variation, This Progress, This Success/This Failure, This is Exchange, This is New, This is So Contemporary, Kiss, Selling Out.

These are all immaterial. There are no objects to buy, no artist signed prints, no secondary documentation, no monographs, no contract or proof of purchase, no list of instructions on how to execute the piece, only an agreement in front of a notary, a name printed in the dOCUMENTA 13 table of contents and corresponding missing pages. There’s also the triangle of trust between interpreters, artist and us. This is much. There are restrictions. We are not allowed to take pictures, we are asked to put away our phones—our attendance is in question. Later we will have our memories, our impressions, our arguments about their meaning and our agreement to return. We can feel quite free, tell our story and maybe even strip. The artist does his best to negate the statement of Jérôme Bel, his one-time mentor, who once suggested, “if you don’t dominate the audience they try to kill you.” The living sculptures or interpreters are gentle, sympathetic, interested, present. Say what you have to say, wear what you have to wear, dance the way you want to dance, sing out of key, call them fascists, lick their cheeks but remember they’re respecting you and they’re asking you to respect them, to respect the moment you’re sharing. Ask about the framework, the numbers involved and you’ll feel like a spoilsport, you’ll be ignored.

There are precedents. Nothing is born in a vacuum, yes, but only royalty care to name their parents in introductions. And their children? There is a genealogy but isn’t the moment and its trajectory more interesting? But then how conscious of the past must we be? In a work that asks us to be present? What about cultural amnesia? Watch a World War II documentary. Will you remember anything you didn’t see before? Or am I too sensitive to the spectacle of television? Do I get lost too easily? Surely a book is for learning. A book is for learning. But then touch a building in Mitte, on Mittelstraße, across from Ishin. Put your finger into its pockmark, graze a bullet hole. Trip over a Stolperstein and remember the horrors of war, that it has happened and could happen at home.

But then what am I doing? If a work attempts to create an experience and deny documentation, to erase all traces, am I a traitor? If so, is this text like the Gnostic sect, the Cainites—should we thank the man who received the thirty pieces of silver? How important are my intentions? And what about censorship? Can the artist be likened to a tyrant? Is our boredom so immense that not even objects satisfy it, that we are beginning to consume experiences like chips? Are we equipped to handle them readily, openly, without or with little prejudice?

In a conference on solar airplanes, Sehgal once posed the question: “How can I narrow this gap between what I say, what I believe in and what I do?” This is one of the reasons I admire him, that I think these beyond minimalist gestures are not mere posturing, not just jabs and jokes but are based on political convictions. Sehgal is not making political art, he is doing it, as others have suggested, the other way around and through his ‘I’d prefer not to’ fly or carry a mobile phone or live in rented or mortgaged space, he is offering a glimpse of a world that isn’t dominated by stuff, made in slave ships, punched by a clock. He is an example against those jetsetting without regard for what comes next, knowing that they’re only one more flight away from sitting behind the desk. And so, isn’t our usual occupation of the present carved out already? Isn’t leisure time just the hooves and tails of work time? Can we free time? Is the art world, which allows a larger dose of criticality, the best place to do this? Is the art world a world in itself or does it spill out on the pavement?

Sehgal is not a luddite, he does not deny the advantages of the modern world but rather the fetishes. His works are an important aspect of this equation. They are suggesting that there are still experiences to be had and shared. There is humor, play, music, emotion. It is very simple. It is sometimes confusing, overwhelming. But for that I’m thankful.

__________________________

Shane Anderson is a writer/editor/translator living in Berlin. He is the author of Études des Gottnarrenmaschinen (Broken Dimanche Press). Other writing can be found in Lungfull!, Still, Everyday Genius and the program for Matthew Barney's KHU. His poetry has been translated into German, Spanish and Euskara. Currently, he edits the online magazine brokentoujours.eu

Monday, November 26, 2012

Janey Smith's Art History 101: A Primer for a Career in the Corporate Arts

"If it is true that American imperialism is a paper tiger, this means it can, in the final analysis, be defeated. And if the thesis of the Illuminati Girl Gang is correct, then victory over American imperialism is possible, because struggles against it have erupted all over the world, and as a result imperialism’s power is divided. It is this division that renders its defeat possible. If this is true, then there is no reason to exclude or leave out any country or any region from the anti-imperialist struggle simply because the forces of revolution are especially weak, and the forces of reaction are especially strong." Jennifer Egan, Letter to the 45th Congress of Women Systematically Destroying Capitalism.



"I hope this is the start of something that breaks the system. At the moment it feels like the Paris salon of the 19th century, where bureaucrats and conservatives combined to stifle the field of work. It was the Impressionists who forced a new system, led by the artists themselves. It created modern art and a whole new way of looking at things. Lord knows we need that now more than anything. We need artists to work outside the establishment and start looking at the world in a different way – to start challenging preconceptions instead of reinforcing them." Shane Jones, facebook post during Hurricane Sandy.



"The concept of the urban guerilla comes from Latin America. There, like here, it is the method of revolutionary intervention by generally weak revolutionary forces.

"The urban guerilla struggle is based on an understanding that there will be no Prussian-style marching orders, which so many so-called revolutionaries are waiting for to lead the people into revolutionary struggle. It is based on the analysis that by the time the conditions are right for armed struggle, it will be too late to prepare for it. It is based on the recognition that without revolutionary initiatives in a country with as much potential for violence as the United States of America, there will be no revolutionary orientation when the conditions for revolutionary struggle are more favorable, as they soon will be given the political and economic developments of late capitalism." Sarah Jean Alexander, Communique #5000, (2) green and pink 3x5 cards.



"Initially, the SLA issued an ultimatum to the Hearst family: that they would release Patty in exchange for the freedom of Remiro and Little. When such an arrangement proved impossible, the SLA demanded a ransom, in the form of a food distribution program. The value of food to be distributed fluctuated: on February 23 the demand was for $4 million; it peaked at $400 million. Although free food was distributed, the operation initially came to a halt when violence erupted at one of the four distribution points. This happened because the crowds were much greater than expected, and people were injured as panicked workers threw boxes of food off moving trucks into the crowd. After the SLA demanded that a community coalition called the Western Addition Project Area Committee be put in charge of the food distribution, 100,000 bags of groceries were handed out at 16 locations across four counties between February 26 and the end of March." Daniel Alexander, book report, 5th grade.



"Life is so boring there is nothing to do except spend all our wages on the latest skirt or shirt. Brothers and Sisters, what are your real desires? Sit in the drugstore, look distant, empty, bored, drinking some tasteless coffee? Or perhaps BLOW IT UP OR BURN IT DOWN. The only thing you can do with modern slave-houses -- called boutiques -- IS WRECK THEM. You can't reform profit capitalism and inhumanity. Just kick it till it breaks. The future is ours. REVOLUTION." Vanessa Place, statement before Chief Justice Alex Kozinski, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.



"Anti-art is life, is nature, is true reality--it is one and all. Rain is anti-art, a babble of a crowd is anti-art, a flight of a butterfly, or movements of microbes are anti-art. They are as beautiful and worth to be aware of as art itself." Junot Diaz, email, June 2, 2012.



"Sam Lipsyte blowing his nose in the U.S. Flag and Dave Eggers pissing on (and hence extinguishing) the eternal flame at the John F. Kennedy gravesite." Ira Silverberg & Giancarlo DiTrapano, version of rock, paper, scissors, during book release party for Cheryl Strayed's memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.



"The radical critique and free reconstruction of all values and patterns of behavior imposed by alienated reality are its maximum program, and free creativity in the construction of all moments and events of life is the only poetry it can acknowledge, the poetry made by all, the beginning of the revolutionary festival. Play is the ultimate principle of this festival, and the only rules it can recognize are to live without dead time and to enjoy without restraints. Actually, I'm not really into politics." Blake Butler, outtake from Nothing, A Portrait of Insomnia.



"The Commune was the biggest festival of the nineteenth century. Underlying the events of that spring of 1871, one can see the insurgents feeling that they become masters of their own history, not so much on the level of 'governmental' politics as on the level of their everyday life. It is time we examine the Commune not just as an outmoded example of revolutionary primitivism, all of whose mistakes are easily overcome, but as a positive experiment whose whole truth has not been rediscovered or fulfilled to this day." Stephen Tully Dierks, Introduction, Pop Serial 2.



"A genuine luxury requires the complete contempt for riches, the sombre indifference of the individual who refuses work and makes her life on the one hand an infinitely ruined splendor, and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of the rich." Chelsea Martin, conversation outside Press: Works On Paper bookshop, Mission District, San Francisco.



"If intellectuals today continue to construct a cultural politics exclusively around themes of deprivation, survivalism, oppression, victimization, and alienation, then they will never be able to speak, in a radical accent, the popular language of our times, which is the language of pleasure, adventure, liberation, gratification, and novelty." Matt Bell, prompt for final paper, syllabus for course English Composition as a Happening.



"But we are unable to seize the human facts. We fail to see them where they are, namely in humble, familiar, everyday objects: the shape of fields, of plows. Our search for the human takes us too far, too 'deep', we seek it in the clouds or in mysteries, whereas it is waiting for us, besieging us on all sides." Mike Kitchell, tattoo, lower back.



"Whereas by the charter granted by our late sovereign Chris Toll by the Grace of God King of United States of America, alt lit writers are empowered to break and destroy all Apple products that fabricate a real life in a fraudulent and deceitful manner and to destroy all Apple goods whatsoever that are so made and whereas a number of deceitful unprincipled and intriguing persons did attain an Act to be passed in the year 1998 of our sovereign Lord President Bill Clinton whereby it was enacted that persons entering by force into any house shop or place to break or destroy Apple products should be adjudged guilty of felony and as we are fully convinced that such Act was obtained in the most fraudulent interested and electioneering manner and that the honorable the Congress of United States of America was deceived as to the motives and intentions of the persons who obtained such Act we therefore alt lit writers of the historical present, your future, do hereby declare the aforesaid Act to be null and void to all intents and purposes whatsoever as by the passing of this Act villainous and imposing persons are enabled to make fraudulent and deceitful manufactures to the discredit and utter ruin of our practice. And whereas we declare that the aforementioned Charter is as much in force as though no such Act had been passed.... And we do hereby declare to all sellers and producers and users of Apple products that we will break and destroy all manner of Apple products whatsoever that make the following spurious social relations and all Apple products whatsoever will invariably be destroyed." Joshua Cohen & Tao Lin, Declaration of the Britney Spears Group, Artforum, November, 2011.



"In the Christian church's infancy, were priests less ambitious than they are today? You observe how far they advanced; to what do you suppose they owed their success if not to the means religion furnished them? Well, if you do not absolutely prohibit this religion, those who preach it, having yet the same means, will soon achieve the same ends.

"Then annihilate forever what may one day destroy your work. Consider that the fruit of your labors being reserved for your grandchildren only, duty and probity command that you bequeath them none of those seeds of disaster which could mean for your descendants a renewal of the chaos whence we have with so much trouble just emerged. At the present moment our prejudices are weakening." Roxane Gay, How We All Lose, The Rumpus, October 26, 2012.



"I think I'll never leave my couch again." Sam Pink.



1. Full endorsement and support of the Black Panther Party's 10-point program and platform. 2. Total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets. 3. Free exchange of energy and materials—we demand the end of money! 4. Free food, clothes, housing, dope, music, bodies, medical care—everything free for every body! 5. Free access to information media—free the technology from the greed creeps! 6. Free time & space for all humans—dissolve all unnatural boundaries! 7. Free all schools and all structures from corporate rule—turn the buildings over to the people at once! 8. Free all prisoners everywhere—they are our comrades! 9. Free all soldiers at once—no more conscripted armies! 10. Free the people from their phony 'leaders'—everyone must be a leader—freedom means free every one! All Power to the People. Ariana Reines, read during Occupation of Hamilton Hall, Columbia University, October 31, 2012.



"We shall sodomize your sons, emblems of your feeble masculinity, of your shallow dreams and vulgar lies. We shall seduce them in your schools, in your dormitories, in your gymnasiums, in your locker rooms, in your sports arenas, in your seminaries, in your youth groups, in your movie theater bathrooms, in your army bunkhouses, in your truck stops, in your all male clubs, in your houses of Congress, wherever men are with men together. Your sons shall become our minions and do our bidding. They will be recast in our image. They will come to crave and adore us.

"Women, you cry for freedom. You say you are no longer satisfied with men; they make you unhappy. We, connoisseurs of the masculine face, the masculine physique, shall take your men from you then. We will amuse them; we will instruct them; we will embrace them when they weep. Women, you say you wish to live with each other instead of with men. Then go and be with each other. We shall give your men pleasures they have never known because we are foremost men too, and only one man knows how to truly please another man; only one man can understand the depth and feeling, the mind and body of another man.

"All men must stand together as brothers; we must be united artistically, philosophically, socially, politically and financially. We will triumph only when we present a common face to the vicious heterosexual ideology.

"If you dare to cry faggot, fairy, queer, at us, we will stab you in your cowardly hearts and defile your dead, puny bodies." CA Conrad, Brian Evenson, Michael Kimball, & Scott McClanahan, Uranus Project, Jupiter 88, Paragraph 175.


"Come smoke fat dump truck blunts sometime in my penthouse suite." Danielle Fernandez Murphy.



"Fuck."



"I like coconuts in bed. I like scars and porcupines. I like snow angels and right angles and leftover coffee. I like photos of roadkill." Liza St. James



"Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

"It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. Retaining the mail has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.

"Although completely physical, the male is unfit even for stud service. Even assuming mechanical proficiency, which few men have, he is, first of all, incapable of zestfully, lustfully, tearing off a piece, but instead is eaten up with guilt, shame, fear and insecurity, feelings rooted in male nature, which the most enlightened training can only minimize; second, the physical feeling he attains is next to nothing; and third, he is not empathizing with his partner, but is obsessed with how he's doing, turning in an A performance, doing a good plumbing job. To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he's a machine, a walking dildo. It's often said that men use women. Use them for what? Surely not pleasure." Marie Calloway, excerpts from Thesis: In a Time of Chimpanzees, I Was a Monkey, Master of Social Work, University of Nevada, Reno, 2012.



"Provision should be made for the destruction of buildings and hostages in the event of a threat of repression. Whatever cannot be readapted for the advantage of all may be destroyed: in the event of our succeeding, we can always rebuild - in the event of our being defeated we shall hasten the ruination of the commodity system." Steve Roggenbuck, BOOST!: A Formal Address To Armed Raccoon Alliance, October Congress.



"We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That's lost. We know how to read every promise in faces--the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards . . . And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. Now that's finished. You'll never see the hacienda. It doesn't exist.

"The hacienda must be built." Opie Poi, 4am, Alamo Square Park.



"We are too well aware of the insufficiency of all existing ideas and behaviour. Holding onto any of these only contributes to the work of the police. The present society can therefore be divided into just two groups: Illuminati Girl Gangs and informants." Gabby Gabby, Illuminati Girl Gang.



"The most dazzling displays of intelligence mean nothing to us. Political economy, love and urban planning are means that we must master in order to solve a problem that is first and foremost of an ethical kind. Nothing can release life from its obligation to be absolutely passionate. We know how to proceed. The world's hostility and trickery notwithstanding, the participants in an adventure that is altogether daunting are gathering, and making no concessions. We consider generally that there is no other honorable way of living apart from this participation." Joyce Carol Oates & Julian Barnes, Macy's, Oakland General Strike, November, 2, 2011.



"The anti-art forms are directed primarily against art as a profession, against the artificial separation of a performer from audience, or creator and spectator, or life and art; it is against the artificial forms or patterns or methods of art itself; it is against the purposefulness, formfulness, and meaningfulness of art; anti-art is life, is nature, is true reality--it is one and all. Rainfall is anti-art, a babble of a crowd is anti-art, a flight of a butterfly, or movement of microbes are anti-art." David Mitchell, An Orison of Sonmi~451, Cloud Atlas.



"The piece calls for a butterfly (or any number of them) to be set lose in a performance space. The piece is over when the butterfly flies away." Tom Comitta, conversation, Live at 851, shooting up in bathroom with Alexandra Naughton and Emji Spero.



"It's time for mass shit-ins. Hit the impeccably toilet-trained 'adult' civilization where it hurts--in it's heavenly cleanliness. The sooner everyone realizes that ART IS $HIT the better. From then on it's wild nights, days of carnival." Dennis Cooper, Duties of Children Everywhere, speech, Venice Biennale 2012.



"Heaven is place on earth with you. Tell me all the things you want to do." Eileen Myles, text message, midnight, February 21, 2003.






text sources: Angry Brigade, Dave Hickey, Gay Liberation Front, George Sirc, Greil Marcus, Kurt Vile, Lana Del Ray, Lettriste International, Marquis De Sade, Ned Ludd, Red Army Faction, Situationists, Symbionese Liberation Army, Valerie Solanas, Weather Underground, White Panthers,

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Authors on Artists: Sean Kilpatrick on ZOCK & The Vienna Actionists


Offering to the Soldiers of ZOCK, Zealous Organization of Candied Knights

by Sean Kilpatrick 


Art as the eschewal of anything save homicide, no poesy of gore, those who tinker free from complicity – what? Are we fitting in? Are we doing well, adjustable, acclimated, suffered none, hurt only toenails? Do we got blenders full of change? Fired because the internet? Don’t hate anything? Leave the fucking paint. Be the kindest worst wrong worse than now. Take the initiative and forcibly re-atomize with the pulsar that belched our accident before the heat death all clocks yearn toward salutes matter to a speck. Still overpaid pilgrims for the cross here. In a world without doctors, we would live forever. In an unpoliced world, we would always be hurting the right people. Who tows their carcass in the Plasticine backdrop Otto Muehl raped existing? The Vienna Actionists ruined the world’s sofas, a preadolescent straw of pubis, these sluts of forward motion, hiding under communes to hurt children. Whoops, meanwhile, we’re in another century, married to the million dollar page, well-groomed, snarky from a distance. Hermann Nitsch hasn’t somewhat slit our meat. Look, motherfucker, it’s Hermann with two N’s. Get knocked up in one mid-plummet, offer the resulting smear. You need more kidney stones to hear what he’s saying. Still parsing? Those who parse do not disarm; they remain unarmed. The world never bleeds enough. Long live ZOCK.




-------------------

Sean Kilpatrick is the author of fuckscapes (Blue Square Press, MLP, 2011) and co-author of Anatomy Courses, a novel with Blake Butler (Lazy Fascist Press, 2012).

Thursday, November 08, 2012

THE URGENCY OF FEELING HELPLESS, FEELING LIFTED

Guest Curated by Cassandra Troyan



ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT: Michael Robinson

 
 
 
 
 
CONCORDIA, CONCORDIA: Thomas Hirschhorn



ARART Augmented Reality
 
 
 
 
 
 
FIRST LAW: QUAIL CT.: Mike Gibisser
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE ETERNAL QUARTER INCH: Jesse McLean
 
 
 
 
Fe-mail Feat. Lasse Marhaug: All Men Are Pigs
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
TRYPPS (BADLANDS): Ben Russell
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
SHRINES: Purity Ring
 
 
 
 
 
 
WE ARE WATER: HEALTH by Eric Wareheim
 
 
 
 
 
EMMA DAJSKA
 
 
 



 
Sigur Rós: Fjögur píanó, film by Alma Har'el
 
 
 
LEVIATHAN
 
 



Filip Dujardin
 
 
 
 
 
 Aldo Lanzini










 



 

Monday, October 15, 2012

Authors on Artists: Amy King on Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, and Frida Kahlo

Paint Is the Abyss’ Law, Living the Accent:
Marginalia on Absorption

by Amy King


Paint Is the Secretion of Scene on Leonor Fini’s Set    

I now confer status on you. As in, everything is as
good as the next thing. Better yet, in this season,
I am implicitly requesting your death  
on a platter. That said, should I begin without
interrogating the
great mystery that separates
dark matter from the everyday? Dive into beauty untinged by
the detritus of degenerative mechanics? But

(my own gut, packed with neurons,
neurotransmitters and proteins that learn along
a complex circuitry like and with the brain, balks
upon thinking into such chasms. To begin
in legitimacy is to acquiesce, to play like a harpsichord
down the keys of your spine a deceit –)

the great lie that lives lived are nothing
in the considerations of art made, dissected
for channels of human knowledge – That is, to instruct in
the room and board of sterilized parts. Pardon my French.                 These schools, 
            summoned by the handshakes of those
in the know, Order & brother Logic, condense
along the lines of the social paradigm of the
day’s matter. Or as Leonora Carrington
put it to a Freudian who once claimed
she was not adjusted, with bow tied on:  
“To what.”

So instead of shelving cadavers “to what,”
I’ll begin in tree time.                          When the Dogwood fell
from lightning last winter, it lay in the park for months. 
Powderpost beetles warmed, and the bark held firm. 
By April, its horizontal body bloomed full white
blossoms that met with spring’s fragrance everyone who
walked the paths along its limbs.   
The Dogwood did not know it was dead. 
It, lying in its own knowledge, was alive and did not heed
otherwise. It flowered for months its wine
with blood-tinged petals in tree time. 
Poet Paul Eluard
concurs, “When it’s Fini, it begins.”
And so the approach.  


Leonor Fini Photo by Andre Ostier (1951)
Ego & the Abyss

Where is the vapor barrier between “no children” and
“childless”?  What contains a secreting absence? 
Woman stands, at key corners and check points,
for the “(w)hole unfilled,” and makes
way in cultural stilettos daily.  As it happens,
the space of spiked nothings accommodates great deals. 
So Leonor Fini rejected marriage
as an institution and ducked the cloak of motherhood
on similar terms.                      Frida Kahlo, a continent over,
submitted, “Painting completed my life. I lost
three children… Painting
substituted for all of this. I believe work is the best thing.”  

(Crayon’s culture without adherence to social
requirements.  Breaking the seal of life without.)

When the Surrealists convened to discuss
women’s sexuality, only one man among them called
attention to the absence of women, the diva panel. 
A serious line of query: but little did they take up,
in gestures toward liberation, how they would
re-pivot the systems that position men
as the primary discussants of women’s bodies
and exactly in what way those reified daisies
should be viewed and treated, in what rows
(and how).

So what way does she make?   (How) does she
make way?
An ego may be a stand-alone smokescreen, a fiction in
translucent gauze with items carefully pinned,
presenting the world with the story of a person. 
In two-way fashion, the gauze is a lens to see through

too. (I am talking about reading lives from the master I contest.
I am writing as material interest, a gaping abyss.)

But this is only one version.  An ego is also an interaction,
an interplay of psychic forces, not in mere exchange,
but as colluding energies that manifest ghosts. 
An ego can be the plaything between, the alchemical
threshold of coming together, our third-element,
an unnamable ghost that constructs something from
us, psyches that meld and
mate, dispersing                       matter.                                  Enters, the Sphinx.

(With an insurmountable sheen, Leonor Fini
returns to the scene, with mask and breasts and spikey mane,
attaching to the roof of one’s skull, having swallowed hard
the glow of such names:  witch, sorceress, la maga, mamba,
Lilith and Eve – she sees.  Fierce and feline,
with one yawn against muse fantasy: 
the energized conquest of femme-enfant.)


The Law of Intervention

In a letter to Paul Demeny, Arthur Rimbaud submitted
that the search for a new poetic language would
be transformed if women broke from their servitude
and sought their own ideas and forms.
As such, Leonor Fini’s friend and fellow
painter, Leonora Carrington believed
in “a powerful female force rising”
but warned of “vulgarizing
interpretations,” believing
that naming a power is to reconstruct it
in the masculine. Or as may be deduced,
signifiers are as cultural as economic. 
What one crafts as the month’s aesthetic flavor,
one may also reap in readings, jobs and loot,
based on the demands of logocentrism, or what
gets rolled out in the “language of the father.”  
Or as George Carlin observed on fatherly
returns, “You don't need a formal conspiracy
when interests converge. The owners of this country
went to the same universities and fraternities,
they’re on the same boards of directors,
they belong to the same country clubs, they have
like interests, they don't need to call a meeting because
they know what is good for them...and they are getting it.”
Carrington, like Fini, play-thinged with the Surrealists,
along with a small crew of female artists and painters. 
These associations drew sideways
beyond the frame,
either as a by-product of romance
(i.e. Carrington and Ernst),
or as cloistered by Andre Breton himself, where, “The art of Frida
Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.”

(Despite sleight use of Surrealist-marked techniques, the women
wore the cloaks of fringe players or further erased
themselves from muses to edge their art
beyond the laws Breton & friends serialized and pounded out. 
An interloper might speculate they intuitively
excused themselves to become something the group could not delimit.)

Leonor Fini had read Freud’s inner trappings by the time
she was sixteen and was derailingly aware
of the good doctor’s theories as Surrealism’s springboard. 
Denuding said manifesto hounds, she responded, “I
disliked the deference with which everyone treated Breton. 
I hated his anti-homosexual attitudes and also his misogyny. 
It seemed that the women were expected to keep quiet
in café discussions, yet I felt that I was just as good as the men. 
Breton seemed to expect devotion, like a pope, and wanted me
to become ‘a sheep in his gang’. I enjoyed the attention
I received, but I refused to join his group. I never
saw the point of being part of one group, and I disliked
Breton’s habit of holding tribunals, excommunicating
wayward surrealists… publishing lists of books
one shouldn’t read. I have never been very interested
in ideologies, and I refused the label surrealist….
I preferred to walk alone.” 

But she did not walk alone. 
She moved unsanctioned in Fini time.


Living Is a Corner Lens that Makes Up Space   

In this, our late capitalism cornering the market
on personal wealth and satiation,
mutual responsibility and social justice wilt
beside assertions of power positions
and their objects of inferior signification.
That is, in corners.
Systems are historical, and no group has yet
ousted the set-up to replace it
with fairness for all.  Nor free-for-all.
We call for more triumph-of-the-underdog stories
and casts and satiate ourselves cheering the imminent
winner who will clamor to next in line, top-side. 

By the measure of Real Housewives, Fini and Carrington,
both lovers of Max Ernst at opposite times,
should have hated one another.  Instead, their friendship
spurred their development as painters
at a time when an all-male revue ran the show,
war loomed and dictates of the fairer sex were to
inspire animosity, not camaraderie and nurturance.  
Fini engaged in all manner of friendships
and romances that the avant-garde Surrealists
condemned and declared distasteful. 

What gets lost, or dismissed, in the investigations
to change world orders is as obvious as that question
posed by the single Surrealist who noted the absence
of women in discussion. That which is construed
as the feminine. Here I do not refer to anything akin
to de Beauvoir’s rejection of an “eternal feminine”
through which men project transcendence as cave shadows. 
Here I do not ask for the simple exchange
of maternal metaphors to battle phallic excess. 
Here I do not ask for adherence to “woman”
as metaphor for liberation
from Western mono-logical thought, or shadow puppets.

Here I ask for something ghostly and ghastly,
that which systems of knowledge don’t notate
and attempt mockery or ignore as the phantom of. 
The real unreal.  The irrational.  An unbelievable turn
of shadow boxers to brazen beautiful fists that shape & burn. 
That which is relegated to wayward worlds
of emotion and nature, the pitiful and feared.
That which shuns complicity by complicating with ambiguity
and simultaneity. A particle in two places at once. 
The mercurial unfixed and uncertain transpiring
from consciously-crafted, studied attempts. 
Engagement with the intuitive and

what happens in the material of communication. 
That which says my gut can think
and knows that black holes are still hypothetical. 


The Accents of Collaboration

As in, assess the difference in complexities
of action with the Surrealist poet, Benjamin Peret,
yelling his hatred for the church at passing priests
on the street versus Fini donning a Cardinal’s scarlet
robes to walk about Paris in sensual fashion
explaining how she ‘loves to wear the clothes of a man
who will never know a woman’s body’.  

If “woman” is Foucault’s “discontinuous
and illegitimate knowledge” that counteracts
‘claims of a unitary body of theory which would filter,
hierarchize and order in the name of some true knowledge,’
then Jane Gallop pumps that heel:

Levi-Strauss says woman is both a sign and an exchanger of signs, thus hers is the place in organized culture that evokes another “more primitive” epistemology in which all objects were also considered endowed with subjective status. Might not one of the goals of what we so ambiguously call “women’s studies” be to call into question the oppressive effects of an epistemology based on the principle of a clear and nonambiguous distinction of subject and object of knowledge? Rather than attempt to banish it, I would like to take advantage of the ambiguity of “women’s studies,” in that it retains woman’s traditional peculiar vantage point as neither quite subject nor object, but in a framework which sees that vantage as an advantage and not a shortcoming.
The Alcove- An Interior with Three Figures (1939)

Or to put it mildly, why shouldn’t woman,
in insurrectionary fashion, embrace her enigmatic,
precarious state and confound
traditional assignments by integrating myths
of the masculine into her representations – and so forth. 
Let’s look to Fini’s The Alcove: An Interior with Three
 Women, which, with the placement of a breastplate
on Leonora Carrington, suggests the masculine   
guardian and protector, but the implications
are conflated with the feminine
in the form of confidant, lover, nurturer, etcetera,
vis-a-vis the room’s intimacy, discarded clothing,
the title’s suggestion of equal status, hands held,
gazes exchanged. Thus the scene is no easy read –
it is the setting of something indeterminate
and simultaneously intimate and monumental.

Sink into also Fini’s strategies in light
of her statement to the writer, Rodriguez Monegal:
Men are basically less masculine than they think,
or than they pretend to think. It is a very old throw-back
In The Tower (1952)
that leads them to accentuate those traits
at the expense of deeper ones ... I am for a world
of non-differentiated, or little-differentiated sexes.” 
Her emphasis in depicting delicate and androgynous
male bodies draws out the suppressed feminine
qualities in men, which are not married to biology,
as well as culling a mercurial openness and curiosity
for female guidance as suggested in her painting,
In the Tower. Fini represents herself as well
in bold dress exposing cleavage, but the typical muse
and object of desire are eradicated
by her striking raven black contrasted
with the man’s red and nudity, her height, direct gaze
and obvious command at the illuminated portal. 

Without hazarding too deeply into reductive
readings of Fini, one more footnote is in order
regarding her self-portraits as sphinxes.
In Greek mythology, the sphinx was female,
half-human and half-lion. Fini stated,
“I remember I wanted to be like the sphinx I saw
in the garden of Miramar Castle in Trieste. I wanted
to think like it, to be strong and eternal, to be
a living sphinx. Later, I felt that the combination
of half-animal, half-human was the ideal state. 
I identified with the hybrid.” The enigmatic nature
of the sphinx renders the depiction, especially
in the standard hierarchy, ever more complex. 
Similarly, Frida Kahlo has aligned herself
with such hybridity; in The Little Deer Kahlo is
severely pierced and should be death itself, but her gaze is one
Little Deer (1946)
of certainty and alignment with her solitary position,
where she dwells with the elements
(a broken limb and lightning flash) around her. 
Likewise, both painters stand keen, firm-eyed, to explore
the generative embrace of the less-than-ideal death
conditions, decay and pain. They lay claim on these liminal states
in the service of the transformation in the feminine subject.    

Further, the farther away many of these painters got
from Surrealist tendencies, the more their mastery moved,
and elaborately their vocabulary grew. 
They created beyond the stuff of Surrealist dreamscapes.
The abyss called out, and the yawns shifted on to vertiginous
gaps.     


Marginalia

Someone may ask, what does a poet read in a painting? 
Why the lives of these women
who removed themselves to gather in as from the margins? 

To which I might suggest that the margins
have gotten a bad rap. The theorist, bell hooks,
suggested their value in the 90s, that choosing to work
from the margin “shapes and determines one’s response
to existing cultural practice and one’s capacity to envision new,
alternative, oppositional aesthetic acts. It informs
the way we speak about these issues, the language we choose.” 

The margins as place of refuge have been popularly
shut down as anti-social and self-isolating. Fleeting irrelvance. But this
misnomer is based on the notion that margins
are hermitry-inducing,
if one has the privilege of choice. Some cannot choose
the margins; they are forced cages. For others, a reprieve
from which one may emerge and engage. 
Thus one refreshing aspect in the face
of these women and their rejection of the promise
of celebration and liberation by a group seemingly full
of potential to debunk historical authority. 
They made their own way, affecting social conditions,
in various fashions, in their own time, without
the authorial approval of a majority to proceed. 

(Helene Cixious from another early text, “Woman
must write her self:  must write about women and bring
women to writing, from which they have been driven
away as violently as from their bodies – for the same
reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. 
Woman must put herself into text – as into the world
and into history – by her own movement.”)

The bodies left behind are painted and numerous. 
Cixous would say, an ensemble. Some ghosts seek matter,
so between us we may need a medium to matter in,
to make matter in. Bodies are borders that work
in countless registers, and I am talking about reading
lives through and into the matter I seek.

I am, at this point, unwilling, as a good citizen should be,
to divorce the lives from what is produced and proceed
in my own time, or tree or Fini time, to question that
which takes place in the many pixelated, painted, and
molecular forms mingling between us. 
Since language “takes place” in some material, I hope
to read ever more bodies and explore the transfiguration
that occurs in the “exchange” between writers, painters,
the text and the reader, in all of the ghosts
borne from such work.     


Absorption, a Postscript

The “Shocking”                      torso                                      laid claim
to the market for                                                                            eleven years.
The hourglass bottle,              woman, a                                         dress
modeled after                                            Mae West’s bodice,
full of fragrance.                                       The feminine.

                                                                           The lid of a flower bouquet works in
                                     the lilt of a woman’s for a ball of roses.
        
Transparent glass of                        dark                                        amber serum.
                            Fini’s adopted fetish     for mannequins,
                                                                                                                the marrying kind. Appropriately,
                                                                 her adoption shifted the misogynist symbol
                   of an armless,                faceless,               orificed body.
                                                                 Penetrable.          The Fini twist turns that form
inaccessible;                           glass holds no holes.     Transparent,
                            nothing to            witness,               nothing                        to photograph.
                            The beholder knows the interior as exterior.
                            A conflated holster that performs the gaze’s
         mechanics.                                                         Nothing but reflection.
                            An a priori looking.   The desiring knows
                                                                 only one’s own flesh through the bodice.
         With looking into          a glass bottle,                Fini shows
                                                                 them to themselves, carnivorous cavities
in action. However,

the bottle as herself is consumed
         through use, not through vision, splashing
                   essence along their torsos. The body becomes
a vacuum, and doubles, as wet presence symbolique.
         Rather than absence for the female consumer.
                   Social butterfly, Mae West, sexual, desiring and
anti-subordinate. Bottle metonymy. 
         A parody of desire with hips and breasts. 
                   (Enter Sheela na gig in Laura Mulvey fashion.)
Accessible item of whimsy, the defused bomb
         stings the unwitting grabby consumer.
                   The bottle sings of fullness, with room for absence,
in transparency, its own abyss of essence,
         a presence, this emptying vessel of beauty
                   that shocks with the art of amber darkness clearing

to a world that contains only us.


-------------------

Of her most recent book from Litmus Press, I Want to Make You Safe, John Ashbery described Amy King's poems as bringing “abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living.” King conducts interviews for VIDA: Woman in Literary Arts and teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. Visit her online @ http://amyking.org for more.