november-february: where have i been?

I didn't realize that I hadn't posted in so long, this is such a helpful place to put things, and so much has happened in a month, and this hasn't been updated in four months, and well, well, well, I am sorry I have been out of touch here.  Not for lack of things to talk about, perhaps it was because there was too much happening, too much to talk about; there were performances going on all over and some of them relating to my thesis, and then there was the getting ready for the residency, and then there was the after, and it's too much to talk about all of it, so this will just be the most recent important things with hopes that the blanks will be easy enough to fill in.

First off, I couldn't be in better company, advisors and colleagues and inspirational teachers and collaborators, and I feel tremendously supported in this.  It's the beginning of the final stretch, and the final stretch is really not a short stretch at all but rather a marathon, or even series of marathons.  In a year's time I plan to defend at the Viva, and that means writing two and a half chapters, and the revisions, and creating the artworks that will come from the research (and demonstrate the research, or perform the research, or some combination of verbs and prepositions that have the nouns 'art' and 'research'), etc.  So.  At this moment, post-residency, I am focused on these two things, writing the thesis and beginning the art works, and the residency helped me to focus on these two things in rather splendid ways.

I want to mention here that in the past month, there have also been some rather intense ceremonies, that that is certainly informing my current frame of mind; there is a kind of dreaminess which is pleasant, along with some exhaustion, which is not very pleasant, but necessarily a part of the working in the spirit world.  In New York City, I spent a few days with my musician friend, god brother, soul brother, interviewing him for my thesis, and gathering things for a certain Kongo spell, and this meant going all over the city, from the site belonging to the indigenous peoples who sold Manhattan to the pilgrims (up past 200th street) down to New York Harbour, a very intense and sometimes spooky couple of days.  And last week my godfather was here, to do the thesis interviews, and also to do the Eleke ceremony for my new goddaughter, and that was another three days of intensive ceremonial work, and at the end of all of that, my fingers hurt from making beaded necklaces, and I am very glad I am vegetarian and so sorry about what happens to chickens.

Now.  Onto more specific thesis-related things.  Yesterday I had a Skype session with Laura and Debbie, and it was heartening, and made me feel very relieved (not quite the right word, but the feeling of meeting old friends and having a great meal, it was like that).

I understand that there will come a point where I am bored to death with myself and the subject of this work, but at the moment I am as excited as ever.  Here's what we discussed in random notes that you will not understand until you have been initiated into these mysteries (but right now reading this will speak to your secret soul and bring you seven years of remarkably varied luck):

Shamanic work, like psychoanalytic, has the same issues of Transference.
NY residency, two competing voices, the Director and the Rehearsal Director.  I need to theoretically position my position, and, it seems, with Jake directing the 5th Monsters of the Sea (called Kiki, a gay farce, at Arizona State), I am giving over directorship, almost entirely, really, and this suggests that for the Viva, the performance/presentation, I would focus on my role as Rehearsal Director.

The presentations are provocative (that word comes up a lot), and would be more provocative, and fulfilling (as presentations, as research, as art works) if I answer questions.
There's a skill to answering questions, and I need the training, so, consider summer residency in Berlin a rehearsal public Viva.
15-20" presentation - make it tight.
           To give me more control, learn to answer within the parameters of my research.
           also, set the groundwork (for summer and in final) so that all the chaos is intentional.
Marcus Coates - look at his chaos, and also questions of authenticity, along with that thing, that thing he does where the completely lunatic merges with a kind of aesthetic finesse, and something very elemental and true starts to emerge....

1 page aide-mémoire - like a recipe, for Jake

Look at theoretical fiction, as a frame for methodology chapter - Borges and Jodorowsky, yes, but also, Chris Kraus - Aliens and Anorexia, I love dick (on order from my library), Kathy Acker, Masha Tupitsyn (I just looked at her tumblr, http://mashatupitsyn.tumblr.com, and this is oh this, this is something, I was just thinking of doing something very much like this, really something very like this yes this yes yes yes)
   Marquis de Sade - Philosophy of the Boudoir, there is a tradition for treatises buried in fiction

Debbie, talked of this Puncturing of Otherness
Trance and every day life
where I don't valorize notion of trance
a strategy that seeks to allow the 'other' to emerge and transmit, but not framed in 'otherness'
   lacan & lukumí - emerge as coexisting
'How do we find the language for these practices?'
(visual and written)
a central question

--side note, already this is emerging here, since the residency, conversations with debbie and then with monika, i am not sure why exactly but i am becoming really rather obsessed with text, taking tutorials and buying books on typography, also bought motion software for final cut pro and am taking tutorials on how to make text move, and all of this seems very important for what i want the final work to be.  i know the final work will be much like the videos i've shown, but bringing back the multiple personas, and also making the text that is there much more essential to the experience of watching these videos.  like, if i am going to be live, speaking my narrative dog stories over an actor on video, where their face is covered with moving text, everything needs to connect--my words need to interrupt at the right exact time, and their words need to play with the text that scrolls or moves, etc....so i am looking at artists who work with text, like jenny holzer and alejandro cesarco, and start to see what it is i am trying to do here...i know this is somehow connected to an idea i have, where i want to make art about making performances, and that is either intimately connected to all of this or entirely a tangent....but, before i close the side note, a question: why does it seem to me like hit steyerl and pipilotti rist are playing with image the way the text based artists are playing with text, and why does it feel like it comes from the same artistic mud bog?

next: in 2 weeks, send next draft of methodologies chapter, but give yourself a few extra days to also send a revised structure of the work (i think this will also have to include a structure for the work on the video pieces i am wanting to construct, so i can have the map laid out very very clearly for my self) - so that deadline will be march 1st
--and after submitting that, immediately start to draft the next chapter

start to draft a rationale for why the viva performance needs to be in a basement (if that is indeed what is finally decided)
and don't forget to start to unpack some of the metaphorical juice of the basement (underground, subterranean, hidden, ignored, etc.) - from psychoanalysis, especially....

There is more to say, of course, but not enough hours in the day to say it all.
It is nice to be writing here again, and nice to see you here again.
C

And some photos (this update is coming together in pieces, instead of the reverse)

First, this is a Lumia, made by Thomas Wilfred in, I think the 1940s.

There aren't many of these around, but the guy who is directing my show in 

Seattle collects them.  He and his uncle have the biggest collection in the world.  

It's better than tv.  It's slightly psychotropic.

But you can't tell that here, this is a still photo.  It moves, the light reacts with these spinning metal 

plates inside, they spin and make very groovy images, really like a lava lamp except

it feels somehow more, uh, what's the word, more complex.

This is a production photo of 'I Never Betrayed the Revolution,' my play in Seattle 

that is going to preview tonight (in a couple of hours).

I wrote the play 24 years ago, half my life nearly, so it is bizarre to see it come

to life like this.

This is a still from the media for 'Hotel Athena,'

part IV of Monsters of the Sea.

We closed this last weekend, the house was always full, we never had enough room,

but everyone who came got cake.  There were some interesting things that came up in regards to the

trance (mentioned in the previous blog).  I'm doing interviews with the performers soon,

in a week or two, and I suspect I'll find out more.

Some of the performers didn't feel like they went into an altered state at all,

others had very intense experiences.  

I like it that the method does not work for everyone.

I am thinking about possession and trance in terms of embodiment and representation.

Not just because those terms all look good in art proposals (I'm not sure if they still

do, I hope there are other words that are hot by now).

But because I am thinking of trance as a metaphor for performance in general, 

inhabiting a role, being inhabited by something else.

The idea of ghosting, doubles, and absence.

Herbert Blau and Peggy Phelan are my favorite theorists this month.

XO

Oh, also, romeo&juliet/VOID will go up in two weeks.  No photo yet, but those are coming, I'm told.

I saw a run-through last night, and it is stunning.

Although I kept ritual out of it (I took out the stage directions),

it didn't stay like that.

A very astute dramaturg, who spent part of her childhood in Central Africa, and has a Bantu middle name, was onto me from the start, and started researching Yoruba culture and cosmology when 

rehearsals started.

So.  The production team has been working with African concepts, particularly West & Central African-derived ritual, and are playing with mirrors quite a bit.

The design team for this is amazing, live degrading video and sound, and many other things

too complicated for here, at least right now.

I have to go see a preview.

This has been a fun month and I am exhausted but no longer tired.

C

Not yet an update

This is too soon for an update, it hasn't been a month yet, the last show (#4 of 5) closed last night. And there are some things that are churning around that I have been thinking but not writing so this is just that little first bit of writing.  Some new things happened.

First. After one of the shows last weekend (the first weekend), YYYYY had just come back from doing some work in Sedona, a workshop on fire medicine, archaic Egyptian techniques that I won't get into (I don't know and can't know most of it, and don't want to talk for her), after the show she wanted to hide in the back room while we were meeting and chatting with the audience, and she found that, in her post show meditation (after performing a part that has a very sensual and earthy fire dance, channeling Oshun dancing for Shango), she couldn't move, there were spirits all around her and she could not move for about half an hour.  I saw have been seeing am still seeing spirits all over the house, it's been cleaned with copal and sage and murphys oil soap haha, but it's still a very busy place.  These actors have been channeling a lot of things.YYYYY says that this experience could be partly from the work in the show and partly from Sedona and I'm not sure if it makes much of a difference? I need to explain. 

Second, XXXXXX, one of the actors more susceptible to altered states, came over early. In a panic. On Thursday night.  Things were opening and she was seeing ghosts and her spirit wolf following her everywhere, could not control it and needed help. I cleaned her and gave her some things to do (to be mentioned in the sorcerers notebook (this is methodology)' and YYYYY worked with her on some energy balance things, all went well, and her performance was remarkable, powerful and tearful and magic.

There are influxes of these spiritual things intertwining with the work I'm writing about, and it's not pure Lukumi or Bantu and this is a methodological problem because, even though those traditions are based in callaloo, mixing cultural forms and appropriating whatever works, these are not reliable nor repeatable results.  The data is getting confused.  But only if.  Only if I'm still making this as a method that other actors can use, to be repeated in other situations.

A few weeks ago I met with my ex-wife, who runs a phd program here in performance of the Americas, and I was telling her about my work, and how it might apply in the fields she knows of, and in talking I realized that there is a problem, in that it's not useful for others because they would have to have a resident santero in the acting company, otherwise my methods of spell and trance are not transferable, or rather, if the methods are transferable, then the cultural specificity of the methods are irrelevant, and any new age or earth religion would suffice. This puts it into that sphere where sloppy and generic ideas of a spirit world can be the basis for anyone wanting to repeat this, and there are plenty of performance works out there that use a watered-down and easily accessible set of spiritual principles in order to make work that is universal and ultimately banal. 

However. I trust my instincts as well as the advice of my supervisors and see that the pieces really and truly are all there, so it's a question of putting the puzzle pieces in a certain order to see what the pattern says, what I'm trying to tell myself.  And I see that this is, in effect, a shift in focus toward the ones this work is for.

I suspect that it is related to building a useful metaphor for performance, where actors channel characters in the way that mediums channel the dead, and framing the methodology to suggest that in my experiments I am finding that this metaphor is not only true, but that there is really very little difference. 

And that what I am constructing, then, is not a method for reproducing my work, but instead, constructing a theory of performance.  One that confirms what Herbert Blau, Lorca, and Phelan have been considering and theorizing, that art making is made by ghosts, and we are shells for ghosts to inhabit in order to make things in the material world, and these things talk to both worlds, the living and the dead, when they are enacted and embodied.

september-october: please turn down the heat (15 oct 14)

This time, when the fall drags her feet and doesn't want to show up, not fully, just waves her hand here and there, and we catch a glimpse of her hair before the summer sun fully occupies the hot tub of our frustrated hopes, there are a hundred reasons we can find for fighting with each other and with total strangers.  Cool mornings dull the edges of these frustrations, sometimes just enough to keep us calm when 92 degrees knocks on the window at 2 in the afternoon. Like those religious families in suits that walk the neighborhoods, you think they're gone, but not quite gone, and then they come back and want to talk to you about why you are going to hell.

This is the setting, the surround, for the past month, not that weather is everything, but at this time of the year, in the desert, it's not a small thing.  And I would have imagined that having three plays going on at once would be just like living in a candy store, where the candy being sold is validation and attention, and you would think that I would like those.

Of course, I do.  However.  We are rehearsing for MOTS IV (HOTEL ATHENA) in my house, performing it in the living room, den, front patio and back yard, with 7 actors and the director, and me, and often my daughter, and usually a very excited and not small dog.  You can see where this is going.  It's not unusual, but it is more intense than usual; more people, and more people complaining to me about how this is difficult.  Art is difficult, I say, while I'm also feeling like I've eaten glass, and can't find a place to complain, and the inside of my mouth is full of bite marks.

So I get flown to Seattle, to haunt an old stomping ground, and get to remember the difference between the optic and the haptic.  Those streets and the smell of the sound, they are still in my blood, in the center of my marrow, I nearly drowned in liquor here, but instead I was drowned in the writing of famous authors who haunted the bookstores where I worked. Instead of looking up my old theatre friends, I find that all of the people I miss the most were bookstore people. Writing and reading is how we all survived being twenty-somethings in the 90s at the center of grunge. This is where we learned that words constitute reality, that art was not just a reflection of it.

I am buying a pack of cigarettes at a convenience store in Bell Town, and the clerk looks at the red star on my shirt, and says, "You're a communist! How refreshing! You don't hear much about them these days!"  I tell him that I got this shirt in Prague, which somehow disappoints him.  He was hoping that the revolutionaries and activists were still making things, and I have the same hopes.

I came to Seattle nervous about the work, this is a play I wrote 24 years ago, a linear, episodic plot, about a revolution gone wrong in an Eastern European country, which I was hoping would be apparent as a metaphor for this country.  I don't know if that will read, but I'm terribly excited about the actors working on this, and looking forward to how a 4-week run might play out (not in terms of my career, I'm not entirely hopeful about that, at least not in economic terms--I get paid for this, but even elementary math will reveal my wage is very, very low, which is not surprising to anyone who works in theatre in the U.S. or maybe anywhere).  I leave with a backpack full of books (What We See When We Read is my favorite), the smell of food shared with old friends and new friends, visceral memories of a marriage that saw its best years in this city, and something in my heart that is turning green from all the rain. I can't wait to get home to my daughter, my dog, my love, and the work in Phoenix.

I get back in the morning, and that night I'm sitting in a room in the Fine Arts Complex at ASU, listening to designers talk about my play (romeo&Juliet/VOID, which was the 3rd MOTS).  The director has some thoughts about the ending that I'm not entirely sure of (a suggestion that the whole thing was a coma-induced hallucination).  This is where it starts to feel sticky and hot.  I'm trying to keep in mind that when I gave him the script, I took out all the stage directions, and most of the notes, because it's always more interesting to me to see what someone will do with the work.  The work here is tough, and the director points out that there is no traditional conflict, the scenes are disjointed, and surrounded on all sides by monologues that are poetic swaths of inner life.  The script is all internal, it's all subtext and bounces back and forth between the imaginary and the real, so I am not going to complain about his ideas for the symbolic, I think it will be interesting, is what I keep telling myself.  And surely this is the most accomplished director I've worked with.

It's exhilarating and nerve-wracking to hear the words read out loud with an entirely new group of actors, and it's clear that some of this is too dense to sink in for the most part, but the video designer, he is swooning, tearing up, and his face is changing colors, because he understands it.  Usually I end up focusing on the one person who really gets it.  Or who shows that they get it.

The next night I'm having dinner with my daughter, watching comedy sitcoms on an iPad, and all the actors for Hotel Athena start showing up early.  Jake the director has been guiding them in trance when I've been away, and it's exciting to be back in this space, even though it's obvious that art is literally invading my home.  The only one to blame for this is me.

There are some nights where the actors are working, and I'm half-watching rehearsals and half prepping for my class when, in the space of an hour, I'll get questions from the director, an email from the dramaturg for r&j, and an email from the stage manager in Seattle.

And I sneak away from Hotel Athena rehearsals to go to campus and sit in on r&j rehearsals, and t feels good, but so very strange that there are multiple places in the world where people are speaking my words, all written at very different times in my life.  They really do become like children, children who are on the verge of growing up and making their own decisions, and somehow this is making me want to pay more attention to the time I have with my daughter.

For short bursts of time, before the attention gets pulled elsewhere, I can focus on the trance work in my living room, taking the ones who want to go in further, and making the time meditating more meaningful for the ones who are not prone to entering other worlds (there are a couple of these this time, and I like it that not everyone participating in this feels like they're entering an altered state, it makes the research more problematic, and more fruitful, ultimately, I mean, I hope).

Tomorrow we open, and my house is different.  Screens hanging up, everything is very clean, and spare, and it feels like I am living in a hotel.  I like it more than living in a house, because I can pretend that someone else will be responsible for making the beds.  Somewhere in the past couple of days, my irritation at the invasion in my house turned me from being the writer who watches things into someone who is making this thing, and that's a good role for me.  And I am reminded by all of this that the phenomenological questions I have about this work are as much about my own subjectivity as the others, and that, despite the relentless heat, this, this, this temporary space, is home.

august-september (and a little july): aha here we go (17 sep 14)

I didn't do one of these for 15 aug because I was in Berlin, and we all were, and that's how it was in August.  Talking about what we've all been working on for a year, and working on some new things, and then talking about those things, too.  So this post might cover anything not covered in all of that, and then there's more.

Between this post and the last post, the written portion of the RDC2 was returned for resubmission with rewrites.  In order to meet the timing of the studio work (which was looming, now it is not 'was looming' but rather 'is looming' or better, it 'looms'),  I took a week in the residency to do the rewrite, which is not necessarily typical, and I don't know if I would recommend it (on principle, because missing any of the sessions in the residency isn't what I would recommend at all), but I'm very glad I had the time to focus, because I came out of the fire of writing in the middle of things like that very much energized.  And in the process, had some wonderful conversations with my advisors, as well as the third reader, and left Berlin feeling much more grounded, grounded in a PhD program, and particularly in this one.

And two days ago, when this post was due, I got word from my DoS that the revision of the RDC2 was accepted, and, that symbol that applied to me before, 'MPhil/PhD' is now just 'PhD' and that feels very good, but more than that, it feels earned, earned with an awful lot of help and support from TI and Plymouth.  This was such good news, in fact, that I entirely forgot to write this blog post, which was due on that same day.

So I'm in the beginning of studio project #4 now, Monsters of the Sea/ Hotel Athena, with a script written and in rehearsal, and also have about 3,000 words on the next chapter on Methodology.  And for the first time, perhaps (though there is a philosophical problem with origins of course), I am experiencing the writing as not simply a hoop, an exercise, something to show the work, but as the work itself, that the writing is the work.  And the documentation is the work.  As much as the studio practice is the work.  That is to say, I have a better grasp on what artistic research is, and what it is for.  I'm finding the whole process very useful, and in itself energizing.

Part of the challenge could be to hold to an attitude that it is energizing; I think I can do that, because right now any bumps or blocks in the writing aren't coming from laziness or boredom with the tasks at hand, but result from things that have not been thought through fully.

This is important, I think.

Two things happened at the residency that lead to this.  First, the workshop on he Exhibition with Geoff, and the thought of Michel Schwabb, along with the presence of other PhD researchers opened up a fundamental discussion, one I'd been having unconsciously with the process, but had not brought into the light of consciousness (if it can be described as light).  This came about from seeing an art practice PhD in terms of what it is not, rather than what it is, to begin with.  What it is came later.

What it is not: through reading and listening to Schwabb, I understand that this kind of PhD is at odds with standard academic formulations, because it needs to live in two worlds at once, one that adheres to the modernist demands to 'make it new' while also conforming to the standards of, usually, social science practices.  And the challenge (ironic sense of the word) is to maintain the integrity of the PhD as artistic research that also performs artistically.  This while also being clear that, although it cannot live comfortably in the social sciences, it can and should use the tools of traditional humanities methods and methodologies.  So this became a question of re-framing, but particularly in terms of that sticky problem of method and methodology.

Here's a story: (this really happened) I stopped into the office of one of my old friends, a colleague who is tenured at the university I sometimes teach at.  He asked about my time in Europe, and I told him about RDC2 struggles and other things, and said that my problem was that I didn't really understand the difference between method and methodology.

He got excited.  "Tell me the difference!" he said (I use double quotes here because it happened in the U.S.).  Before I could tell him, though, he interrupted (this happens a lot to me, I don't talk loud enough, because I like to listen, I suppose).  He said, "Because it's obvious to me that no one really knows!  We teach it here, and if you look at the dozens of texts we teach from, they all say something very different."

End of that story.  All to say, this is nothing unique to an arts PhD, but to all of them that deal with constructions outside of the established disciplines.  So are we establishing the constructions, then?  Maybe a little, I like to think so, because it helps me to make a thesis knowing that this is something rather new, and we all have an unusual degree of freedom in determining the inner logic of what we are making.  But oh, there has to be an inner logic.

So the breakthrough here, in these stories, for me, was that I had written my RDC2 to try to satisfy two separate models, a social sciences model that I am not trained in, and an arts research model that I had not fully constructed.  So I had to construct it again.  And fortunately I had help.

Short version: I threw out the (unstable) dependence on ethnographic, psychoanalytic, and phenomenological methods altogether, using them, with my advisors' and third reader's recommendations, as contexts instead of methods.  And the bricoleur methodology I barely articulated was thrown out in order to give a place for the first instinct, the methodology of the Kanga, a new methodology.  Using practice-lead methods, interview methods, and subjective methods, to build a frame for what I was already doing.  Thank you all for all of the help.

The second thing that happened at the residency: Wolfgang's seminar on Conflict.  Based on the theme of conflict, I watched him tell us a story (with too many interruptions, he does not talk loudly either, I like that in a thinker) about a history of the continent I was on, one that reflects some essential conditions (historical, political, and philosophical) of the continent on which I live most of the months of the year.  This experience in thought, ideas that added up to a story, with an underlying imperative to make work that speaks to that story, was groundbreaking, because I have not been able to follow lines of thought all the way through, for the better part of a year, and maybe even two years.  (Mostly because of personal losses that made it difficult to think, but also because the work on my thesis was still a batch of unconnected things, waiting for me to find the connecting threads).

So I left that continent, thinking about the bullet holes in the walls, the dirt from another visit to Sachenhausen (am I going to visit this place every year??), and the things that artists do after a war, to come back to a place where everybody seems so terrified of losing all of their material things they don't think much of anything beyond it, and also a place in the middle of terrible violence from the police against young black men (among others), annnnnnd work at a university where they are going to start arming the campus police with assault weapons (there has never been a riot on campus, it's too hot to organize).

Putting the growing desire to move to Europe aside, I'm back to where I have been working with many others to build an artistic community based on mutual support, and back to work.

The new project, Hotel Athena, is a theatre piece for multiple rooms, set in a hotel in another country, where someone is looking for someone he lost.  The theme is a little bit Robert Graves (of all things), loss of the feminine, death of the father (the master texts), and the resurgence of the maternal/feminine in the material and immaterial world.  Lots of room for ghosts.  The performers have been through the spell, and we've begun trance work; it's much more individual this time (and the spell is much more communal this time), so the methodology is already serving as a potent guide. For documentation, we're recording more, images and words, using better video and sound capture tools, and I'm also starting to look more at how projected text can work (I understand how it can work to generate meaning in the documentation, but am working on the aesthetic, so that it is pleasing to the eye even if it is sometimes confrontational).  I'm still looking, though, and always open to suggestions on that part of things.

Deborah sent some wonderful resources for ethnography and video, taken from the field of cultural geography, that will be useful in guiding this next phase of documentation.

And a central concern, one that Laura brought up when we talked this morning, has to do with, interestingly enough, voice.  Finding the voice (or vocalities) for the one who is making the Kanga, the voice I will use as the central narrative author for the text of the thesis.  Be ruthless, go for the jugular, don't edit yourself, and consider what the placement of words can do to a page; all of these things.

Ok that's enough.  I hope you've been well.
xo
c

reading diary not late oh it is late this is my late reading diary

--there are, of course, two types of people in this world, those who think in dualisms, and those who do not....
this, then, this, then, is a journey between trains, a journey in thought between trains, all the tracks connect, and the stops are clearly marked, but there is no way to know how the tracks are going to curve as we go--between one thinker one thought and another, this is a train ride, history and culture are train rides where tracks converge and some of them go to the same stops, the tracks cross, and usually the trains do not crash into each other, but sometimes they certainly do...
but first.
i have seen socially embedded art, and maybe even made some (not much), and have some contexts for having seen this kind of work that i think works, but.  most of the time, when there is an event where the people performing talk about conscience and social change, i try to find reasons to be out of town for a week or so, because, because, i couldn't articulate it very well before, but because, there is that sense of us and them, where we in these scenarios are part of something disenfranchised, and them is part of something that disenfranchises, and then we get to see work about how bad those people are who are disenfranchising, and it seems so very easy, and so very uncomfortable, and incomplete.
instead, thinking with the texts (rather than through them), there are some patterns emerging about the nature of discourse generally, this is very post-structural of course, but the subject object relations through language, and the impossibility of stepping outside the father's narrative, that help illuminate why the us and them cannot hope to undermine anything, and at best, someone in the crowd might be able to think a little more deeply, but probably not really.  so.
it seems as though it's necessary to consider how we might make not only an art of social practice, but a good art of social practice, and this means bringing the aesthetics along, and looking at the very structures of how we travel on the tracks are working.
so we have to travel, because we cannot stand still, we simply cannot stand still.
and next, the tracks:
they are, out of order:
they are out of order.
they are:
HARRISON's notion of dissonance enters through music in terms of structures of harmony, weaving into nazi degenerate art, kandinsky and others playing with harmony in new and unusual ways, the idea of harmony now upset, now something else, now something made to upset, this one and that one, the opposites do not play off each other so easily, or rather, that philosophy of difference, of the other the one that resists the either this or that, in favor of playing against harmony that is rooted somewhere in heraclitus, no, SCHMITT, no, they didn't invent dualisms, of course, but those are the tracks we have to travel on to find out how we got to here, this us, this them, and that question from Billy Bragg, wondering whether the 'man in the mask or the indian is an enemy or a friend of mine'.
and harmony finds its counter or its spherical doubling in coupling and the idea of divine love, in that heavenly spherical way, the union of perfect opposites, that thing called by some masculine and that thing called by some feminine and when they collide, that conflict (is that a conflict? is love a conflict? zizek on lacan, oh he's always on lacan, but that, that violent force that selects this one out of all the other ones? is that conflict?) is not safe, is not so heavenly, is not being treated well by marxist materialisms, that one that one we always see walking with sartre, what is her name? the metro stop named for her was, and it's name was, and her name was BEAUVOIR is running on similar tracks to HARRISON, the other, the feminine, the eternal feminine, the jew, any other who is not the us in the us-them of dis ding, her track is one that traces tracks and ends somewhere at the tip of the nose, that is, on the body, that unsuspecting body, that other in the dualism that negates the self, the mind negates the body in order to justify genocide, does it seem to anyone else that the self-other thing has to come into play after the nation state has committed an atrocity?  and does it seem as though what is also remarkably original about this time (aside from the surveillance, etc.) is that there was a time when the self-other thing was the beginning of the state building toward atrocity, whereas now they/we (we are them, we have met the enemy and he is us) commit the atrocity and then find the discourse, find the self-other thing, to talk about why we did what we had to do?  and it also seems as though there was a time when the nation-state believed the self-other discourse it speaks, and now the state uses the discourse to tell the people why we are at war, and everybody knows that no one representing the nation-state really believes their own words, that it is something else, and something perhaps much much worse? (i read too much zizek and i did not have the proper training in philosophy to put the arguments together correctly)
and there are tracks, there are metro stops going to tracks that are there to lay down foundations, to build structures, or reveal structures, in order that they be revealed as something more concrete than, than, um, in order that they be revealed as concrete.  useful foundations, such as.  KANT's metro car is built with good intentions and even feels a little charming these days, a little naive, but worth the time to admire the scenery and enjoy the company of ghosts who would rather be resting than rolling over in their graves.  and then we have to get off and switch back to BEAVOIR, again, building toward a philosophy of immanence, building toward a becoming not based on the conflict being won by one who is not the other.  MARX&ENGELS, the next stop, is where we will pause and get off and wait for the next train, because for some reason, on this subway line, this stop has the best snacks, but they're expensive (it's what happens when history runs into itself), but here we really should stop and sit on one of the benches and talked about what worked and what didn't work, because truly, they laid down some of the most solid and reasonable foundations, you start with the problem (the spectre) and then begin to build the opposing forces and offer a solution, that should be an angry gesture made with a fist, haha, something like that, something like a manifesto. and it would be good to nap for a very long time, most of the afternoon even, until the rush hour traffic starts to come and we would necessarily be inclined to move, even though perhaps it wouldn't be the worst thing to stop, to just lay for a little bit longer and see what we can build from this, what to build next from this. and only then would anyone in their right mind get up again and perhaps we are wishing by now that the next metro is a merry go round with horses and unicorns but instead there is AGAMBEN and we have to take that, he picks up the notion of state as providing security from SCHMITT and instigates a foucaultian revisiting where terror becomes a necessary ingredient in what might be a dialectic, this certainly sometimes usually often appears to be a dialectic, and if we forget why we were traveling here to begin with, there is the last stop LEDERACH who leads this back to art, this peaceful form, based on harmony and discord, based in a balancing that is never quite one thing against another thing and the collapse of those things into each other, or the towering of one thing over the other, but the balance of things where they talk to each other, is it really just about having a conversation? is this just about learning how to have a proper conversation? (and not a fight or an argument, but a real, civilized conversation)?
(this was not a civilized conversation this was just a monologue)
(out of order, but then perhaps we are out of order, the restaurant is all out of order, and instead of ordering more order, we are ordering something else instead, not chaos, either, something else instead.  the choices on the menu are order and chaos, but we are ordering something else instead)
aha

june-july: decomposing & decompositioning (15 july 14)

this month there is much less to tell.  after finishing the third studio project, i've been getting things ready for this, this trip to europe, traveling in ireland, italy, switzerland, austria (and soon the former czech republic, poland, then berlin).  collecting data from the people in the third project, planning the next one, and putting together the video for the mila kunst exhibition.  that, the video, is unlocking some things about documentation that i like very much.
i am considering the possibility (maybe i wrote about this last month?) of the presentation in plymouth to be an installation with stations, one station for each performer (just the ones who have been in all or nearly all), and collecting their performance selections, interviews, writing and ephemera.  so there would be multiple stations to represent multiple bodies.
oh, also, thinking through the comments from the third reader on the rdc2, and at times i get a glimpse into something useful, but more often it's hard to get through the condescending tone of the thing, along with the suggested further reading list with books i've read and absorbed 20 year ago already.  hm.  that tells me that there's something very elementary in the work that i'm not saying out loud, and i'm not sure what it is yet.
santeria is a system that contains elements of yoruba religion that are very old, but itself is fairly new, less than 200 years old, really, in terms of how it's practiced formally, though it had its birth during the slave trade--as the system that it now is, it's survived through absorbing other traditions, ideas, thoughts, and to me, adding lacan into the list of things it can absorb seems incidental, and not worth going into discussion about colonialism, etc.  it seems divisive, but i understand the implications of ignoring these things as well.  and honestly, i don't think anyone can be inside of it and not think about those things constantly, because it's born from the institution of slavery, inside history and not outside in some eliade-like eden that is above time.  hm.
similarly, feminism, post-feminism, and liberational discourses on otherness also seem embedded in the work, so there is something that i'm not saying, and i think there is a simple way to say it, but first i have to find out exactly what it is that i'm not saying.  i suspect i'll know in a month.
very much looking forward to everything that happens next, yes yes yes