Announcements

Three things, the preparation for which has been eating up every spare minute of my time:

September 1-6
RADICAL NEIGHBORLY CONVIVIALITY:
A week of performance and community building in response to the other RNC
Curated by Bedlam Theatre and the Nonsense Company
featuring The Nonsense Company, the Prince Myshkins, Roy Zimmerman, Bedlam Theatre, Bryan Bevell (performing Wallace Shawn's "The Fever"), David Rovics and more.
Bedlam Theatre, 1501 S. 6th St., Minneapolis (West Bank)
http://www.bedlamtheatre.org
http://www.nonsensecompany.com

(The Nonsense Company will also do two additonal performances on Friday and Saturday)


September 25-28, 8 p.m.
KING LEAR
Puppet Uprising's 2nd Annual Secret Shakespearean Dessert Theater

Five groups from around the country each take an act of Shakespeare's play, each in a different space and with a different dessert item served. The Nonsense Company's treatment of Act III is going to be pretty strange, and I imagine that we're not the only group of whom that can be said.

http://puppetuprising.org/upcoming.html


(Next Week)
CANNOT EXIST no.3
edited by Andy Gricevich
featuring Alex Burford, Mark Cunningham, Carrie Etter, Lawrence Giffin, William Gillespie, Kevin Killian, Mark Lamoureux, Bonnie Jean Michalski, Sheila E. Murphy, Andy Nicholson and Dirk Stratton.
http://cannotexist.blogspot.com

While on tour in California a couple of months back, I read Juliana Spahr's The Transformation, certainly one of the best novels (if it's a novel) published in my lifetime, and the best investigation I've seen of the questions and contradictions that thoughtful North Americans (and, in particular, politically concerned artists) tend to run into in the 21st century.

Spahr's novel is intelligent, moving, crucial, tentative in all the best ways while remaining emphatic in its ethical commitment. It's the story of the change in her writing that led to her wartime poetry collection, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. Told almost entirely in the third person plural, it's the story of a three-person relationship that moves to Hawaii in the late '90s. There "they" meet with a series of contradictions and absent places: their roles as low-grade pawns in the post-grad employment machine, which is at the same time a vast system reproducing cultural imperialism in a colonized place; the ecology, alien to them but also invasive as regards the island; the lack of social support for the kind of sexual relationship they've undertaken; the foregrounding of the impossibility of ranking issues of class, race, gender, and aesthetic commitments. It's the story of their subsequent move to another colonized set of islands (New York), and the effects of 9/11 and the beginning of the "War on Terror" on every aspect of their lives. Most of all, it's a story about discovering vulnerabilities, at first imposed upon the "they" of the book, and finally sought after in the consciousness that only the opening of themselves to all these contradictions, difficulties and dangers can make possible a life and a writing that could, in the midst of social, cultural, economic and political crisis, point toward more desirable forms of human existence.

I'm thankful for this courageous cultivation of vulnerability, this openness to one's possible and even inevitable wrongness that nonetheless refuses resignation, choosing instead to see ethical contradiction and error as the mask shown by possible alternatives in a historical period that blocks their real appearance.

"The possible contradictions of the war photograph now become apparent... the most extreme examples... show moments of agony in order to extort the maximum concern. Such moments... are discontinuous with all other moments. They exist by themselves. But the reader who has been arrested by the photograph may tend to feel this discontinuity as his own personal moral inadequacy... the issue of the war which has caused that moment is effectively depoliticised. The picture becomes evidence of the general human condition. It accuses nobody and everybody."

--John Berger*

"In [Goya's The Third of May, 1808], the soldiers faces are hidden from view[...] Godard chooses to take the camera inside the painting here, shooting the soldiers "face on" in a slow tracking shot along the barrels of their guns, while a voice-over states 'You do nothing to change yourselves'. This intrusion into the painting's "life" is not just a simple aesthetic trick[...] "Take concentration camps, for instance. The only real film to be made about them -- which has never been made because it would be intolerable -- would be if a camp were filmed from the point of view of the torturers and their daily routine . . . The really horrible thing about such scenes would not be their horror but their very ordinary everydayness." (Godard on Godard, 198) [...] instead of letting the viewer empathise with the holocaust victims in the face of anonymous oppression, he would give faces to these oppressors, which is exactly what he does with the Goya sequence in Passion. Godard gives an analysis of a similar "painting" to that of Goya's in Six Fois deux, this time of a photograph depicting Nazis in the foreground (shot from behind) torturing someone in the background (shot so the viewer can see his face). A voice-over says: "They always photograph the ones who are doing the torturing from the back and their victims face on." Again, this seems to be the preferred relationship of "objective" photographs between oppressor and oppressed, so the viewer can empathise with the victim. By breaking the plane of Goya's work, Godard challenges this commodified, archetypal aspect of mise-en-scene."

--Glen Norton**

* from About Looking. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Quoted in Tina Darragh's "Numb to Dumb," in Crayon no.4. Milwaukee, 2004

** from Godard's Passion

Paul Chan's video films might be an excellent example of vulnerablist political art.

Three of them were shown at the Madison MCA this evening, and I'll write about two:

RE: THE_OPERATION (2002), a half-hour series of invented letters and emails from the Bush cabinet as they fight the "war on terror" on the ground in the Middle East, seems like a setup that could only result in sarcastic caricature (which could be perfectly good satire--"what if they really did have to serve in the armed forces"). Instead, the text Chan gives these politicos includes a more or less ordinary letter from George to Laura, a musing by Condi on masculine equations of war and sex, an anonymously delivered, predatory sexual message by Ashcroft, a press release regularly disrupted by static, a text by Blanchot on friendship. Some of it's funny, most is variously strange--and even the moments of "character assassination" lack any "nyah-nyah." I find the tone (or various tones) admirable and moving, as well as profoundly disorienting.

It's Baghdad In No Particular Order (2003) that particularly inclines me to give Chan the Vulnerablist's Stamp of Approval. A fifty-minute sequence of pieces of footage from Chan's 2002 trip to Baghdad with Voices in the Wilderness, this is "artless" art in the best sense; Chan's technique with the hand-held camera is, by his own admission, "not that good," and the cinematography has the look of any video shot by a highly thoughtful, sensitive and observant tourist--because it more or less is that, rather than an imitation of that style by someone trying to make their work look "authentic."

The juxtaposition of scenes is paratactical, as the title implies, though the composition is clearly thought-out. The voice-over (spoken not by Chan himself, but by a woman whose name I didn't manage to write down) is infrequent, usually just telling us the name of a person or type of music we're seeing. When the voice does wax philosophical, it does so without any need to produce an intellectual "ah-ha!" At one point, the voice says something like, "They only trust me enough to stare when I am blind... blindness is the prerequisite for clairvoyance--" a direct reflection on the situation of filming (in this case, a pair of fascinated, silent children toward whom Chen has turned the viewer screen on which they're displayed) and a less direct one on the intention to show the film to others. Both in the film and on his website, Chen is refreshingly unapologetic in his love of philosophy, it's always both interesting and relevant (in one Godardian moment Chan puts a quote from Adorno's Aesthetic Theory into the mouth of a girl showing a drawing to the camera, and it works wonderfully). His program note frames BINPO as a Benjaminian project, which it manages to be, with less pretense than any other self-described Walterwerks I've encountered (Benjamin might be the philosopher who comes closest to Vulnerablism).

I don't think I've described the film very well. Perhaps a single moment will illustrate it better:

Throughout, the camera wobbles and swerves, and there are many close-ups that are too extreme for the lens to focus; subjects blur in and out. Toward the end of the film, the camera lingers, in a dim room, on a series of (I'm pretty sure) black-and-white snapshots of people who have died, the shot so close that, in general, they appear as face-shaped blobs with dark holes for eyes--almost skulls. This closeness, however, also means that any tiny movement of the camera has a huge effect, and so part of a face will become clear as the lens is tilted just a bit, or the entire photo becomes visible for a second. On occasion, this movement results in the haunting illusion of the eyes blinking--the shifting of focus in different directions on multiple areas of the picture is disorienting enough that the photo seems to have come to life.

Both of the latter two films, and this one in particular, meet the major Vulnerablist criteria (loose and tentative as they are): rough edges (not as a pose, but also treated as compositional material), room for humor and mournfulness as well as Brechtian alienation, directness and philosophical complexity, parataxis and naturalism, the inclusion of the composing subject without the protection either of accusing or excepting itself, careful reflexivity and a moment-by-moment openness to what happens.

No conclusion.

The "footnotes" (aka "Part II" of the film, an archive of texts, sound, paintings, and clips from the film) are online.