Here are some words I wrote for school today:
Walter Benjamin’s 1936 “The Author as Producer” contains the following epigraph: “Il s’agit de gagner les intellectuels à la classe ouvrière, en leur faisant prendre conscience de l’identité de leurs démarches spirituelles et de leur condition de producteurs.”
The quote is from a 1936 open letter from Ramon Fernandez to André Gide that is in itself pretty interesting—you can find the letter in the original French at http://www.gidiana.net/articles/GideDetail1917.49.htm (it seems an English translation has been published but a cursory search isn’t showing it online). This bit, the line just after the one Benjamin quotes, is the most of interest to me:
“Tel est pour moi le point essentiel : l’intellectuel a besoin de la classe ouvrière pour se connaître lui-même complètement. Et comme l’ouvrier a besoin de l’intellectuel pour se penser lui-même, il existe entre l’un et l’autre un rigoureux rapport de réciprocité.”
“This for me is the essential point: the intellectual needs the working class to understand himself completely. And so too the worker needs the intellectual to think about himself; there exists an intensely reciprocal relationship between one and the other.”
While Benjamin’s reference to Fernandez (and indeed, the rest of the above letter) is very much caught up in global politics of the 1930s, this ties in nicely with the article’s later discussion of Brecht, and the idea of creative spaces as spaces for thoughtfulness, and as a two-way dialogue between “culture” and the world-as-lived.
Benjamin says of Brecht’s “epic theatre”: “It aims less at filling the public with emotion, even if it is that of revolt, than at making it consider thoughtfully, from a distance and over a period of time, the situations in which it lives.”
This latter is, perhaps obviously, an accurate if abstract description of how science operates. Thus the theatrical “laboratory.” (See Jerzy Grotowski for another iteration of the “theatre laboratory,” the Teatr Laboratorium.)
If the role of artistic and intellectual production is to encourage thoughtful examination of lived situations via a series of experiments, then as culture becomes a lived situation, so too must it be thoughtfully examined. The shifting of the apparatus, of the creative form, that Benjamin claims is essential in any truly revolutionary cultural output, then becomes necessary in order for creative forms to fulfill that role. The laboratory approach to art-making encourages experimentation with form, genre, and even the hierarchies of artistic production—see Billy Klüver’s description of the horizontal collaborative structure of the Pavilion project, and the manifesto of its press release. This kind of work makes an experimental proposal to its audience, rather than presenting them with a self-contained world of entertainment. From the Pavilion statement: “Eliminate the separation of the individual from technological change and expand and enrich technology to give the individual variety, pleasure and avenues for exploration and involvement in contemporary life.” Or to quote Benjamin, work that “is capable of making co-workers out of readers or spectators.”
This made me think (admittedly kind of tangentially) about the work of playwright Chuck Mee. Mee is the author of, among many other things, bobrauschenbergamerica, a play inspired by the work of Robert Rauschenberg, one of the artists involved in the Pavilion. His plays are textual collages, often working from a baseline of one extant text (a myth, a classic play, an artist’s work and biography), and remixing it with a variety of other sources. bobrauschenbergamerica, for example, was “developed in a workshop with Tali Gai, Jane Comfort, Kathleen Turco-Lyon, Rebecca Brown, Reba Herman, Alec Duffy, Jacki Goldhammer, and Carolyn Clark Smith and incorporates texts from them as well as from Robert Rauschenberg, Fred Becker, Philip Morrison, Walt Whitman, William S. Burroughs, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Allen Ginsberg, and Laurie Williams.”
One of the things that fascinates me about Mee’s work is his restructuring of the format of “the play”—all of his works are available for download on his website, http://charlesmee.org, with the following caveat:
“Please feel free to take the plays from this website and use them freely as a resource for your own work […] pillage the plays as I have pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the internet, and build your own, entirely new, piece—and then, please, put your own name to the work that results. But, if you would like to perform the plays essentially or substantially as I have composed them, they are protected by copyright in the versions you read here, and you need to clear performance rights.”
The plays themselves are often extremely open-ended, containing very few stage directions, or impossible stage directions, or are composed of several sections that can be rearranged in different sequences to different effect. There are ambiguous references to the use of media, to be interpreted differently by every production. They are built to be malleable, to turn readers into authors, into experimenters. This doesn’t always yield the best aesthetic results in every production (of which there are many, since you don’t have to pay for rights if you alter the play enough), but this work occupies a place in between authorship/copyright and collaboration/open source that I think is really, really exciting. Theater as laboratory is where it’s at, seriously.
as soon as you have completed the assigned physical activity, write without stopping until told to find an ending place. avoid using the words “I” and “me”.
——
You think that you body is a stranger, that we are grappling for each other in a desert, that your mother gave you the gift of a body only to let the world take it from you— with the laughter of young women, the fear of small boys, the cradling passage of time in a small room with smaller windows. you wake up not knowing anything and your body protests against the day, and memory floods in like some great weight of brackish water. we come bearing debris, there are many kinds of weight and we have forgotten lightness.
——
There is a place that has been forgotten, is lying fallow, fallowing, wallowing, watering itself apart without company. The nest before a single bird is born. The echo of time perpetuating itself. The blood, singing sharp and loud and unheard. The veins of everyone here have not forgotten, but we are losing the code. Sleep with boughs above your door to keep the wicked out, do not learn the names of places inside your mouth, the secret workings of each tooth and its grinding like a saw mill. Let the hair fall where it may. Bury the bodies in simple earth while singing. Learn all the old songs, realize they were already familiar. Time continues to drip, on, on on.
——
“Don’t stop,” she said.
“But this is where we get off,” he said. “The stop. For the museum.”
“I know,” she said. “But I like the view from the train, when it’s high up and is just the right time of day. The glass on all the buildings does something lovely.”
“Alright,” he said. “We can just keep going until it loops back around, it’ll be dark by then and then we can go.”
“Thanks,” she said. “You’re sweet.”
“You’re funny,” he said, but he was smiling.
——
“Don’t stop,” she said, “please, I have so much more to say, and I just want you to keep rubbing my back and listening.”
some words I wrote after doing a lot of crawling across a floor the other day.
Sid Branca, video stills from girls room, a media performance work in progress
from the group show Hysteria! Visualizing Female Anxiety, curated by Carmilla Dirt at Templehead Gallery, Chicago, 2013
If you’re interested, over at my other less-journaly more-tumblry tumblr, I will be using a couple of specific tags to track things I find that in some way relate to my coursework in this semester of my MFA program. This is more notes-to-my-self than anything, but you are welcome to check them out:
What was a time when you felt some aspect of your body was outside of your control?
(this is for a performance piece I’m doing later)
This Jezebel article does a pretty solid job of pointing out some of what bugs me about many of the trend pieces about online dating:
Sounds shitty, indeed. But one clueless musician’s interaction with a social media manager hardly means that “Women in their 20s these days are lucky to get a last-minute text to tag along.” And why is it always up to men to set the dating tone? All of the anecdotes in these articles are from straight women, because straight women are apparently the only people who would be devastated about the demise of traditional courtship. But if you want to go to dinner and a movie, why not…suggest going to dinner and a movie?
Because hey, everyone: if you are interested in a specific kind of date, or a specific kind of relationship, you should communicate that to the people you are getting involved with.
Because hey, then you either
a) get the thing you want, hooray for you!
or b) learn that the person(s) in question want something different from what you want, and you can make decisions about whether you would like to modify your attitudes about dates/relationships or end your romantic/sexual involvement with that person(s) and move on.
It is actually that easy (sometimes).
Of course, often people don’t know what they want, want conflicting things, are unable to accept or access what they want due to societal or other pressures, have trouble clearly communicating what they want, etc. etc. etc. Relationships are messy business and always will be.
But real talk these things need to go:
- the idea that anyone should be tricking anyone else into a relationship (bonus points for the fucked up attitudes about gender that are usually involved)
- the expectation that you can always assume what kind of dates or relationship someone wants
- the expectation that someone else will know what kind of dates or relationship you want if you do not tell them.
I am, duh, guilty of having done all of these things at various points in my relationship/not-relationship history, so my apologies if all that comes off as didactic. This is all coming from the place of feeling like I’ve learned some things from that chaotic history, and having just had a surprisingly easy and communicative new relationship conversation that has me feeling optimistic about humans telling other humans about dem feeeeeelings.
“On the other hand, a lot of anti-makeup sentiment– particularly anything that starts talking about how “frivolous” and “shallow” makeup is– is also misogynistic and femmephobic. Makeup is a form of visual art. If making your face beautiful is shallow, so is making a canvas beautiful or a block of marble or a hunk of plastic. If you understand why someone would feel satisfied and happy when they make a gorgeous print, you understand why someone would feel satisfied and happy when their makeup looks perfect. I do not think it is accidental that the form of visual art almost entirely practiced by women is the one that gets accused of frivolity and where the talent exhibited by many of the artists is ignored or denigrated. - Ozy Frantz”
Other People’s Makeup Use: None Of Your Business – Ozy Frantz’s Blog (via brute-reason)
Draw on everything 2k13 has definitely extended to All Cat Eye All The Time.
(via bananafin)
sid’s brain fumes on this:
I also think that there’s something at play here about ephemerality, and how it relates to gendered attitudes about creative output.
A completely not-backed-up-by-anything claim that I have found to be true in my personal observations: The more physically imposing a medium, the more strenuous to work with, it is not only seen as more long-lasting, but often both a) of greater import and b) coming from a more masculine source. What up marble sculpture and steel skyscrapers? I see u there, with your gravitas and your hot, sweaty men wielding dangerous tools. If “women’s media” are textiles, paintings, drawings–things that do not last–pretty, delicate things that must be preserved by men with disposable income, then cosmetic art is an even more palpable example of this.
You paint your face and it lasts mere hours. It is assumed that you do not do this for yourself, to bring yourself pleasure through your personal aesthetics, but for male attention and/as material gain. It is considered shallow, pointless, not art but fashion–as if the distinction between those two things has ever been unproblematic. Just because it is not lasting, that does not mean it cannot be art. Look at theatre, some of which is inextricably caught up in the idea of the ephemeral performance, the moment that is unrepeatable. Only those lucky enough to be in the audience (/in your presence) at the right moment will catch this specific aesthetic experience.
Makeup, like literally every form of aesthetic choice-making, can be a tool. A tool for personal creative expression, for conformity, for rebellion, for political statement, for getting laid, for hiding something, for emphasizing something, for putting up barriers and for taking them down. (The choice of the absence of makeup is, of course, folded into all of this as well.) And sure, it can be shallow.That is totally also okay. But it doesn’t have to be, and categorically writing it off as a shallow and heteronormatively feminine (and it doesn’t have to be) form of aesthetic expression is symptomatic of some super wack nonsense about gender and ephemerality.
Apologies for the incoherence of that rambling, I haven’t finished my coffee yet and may change my mind about all of this by the end of the day.
Kickstarter backer art party
This speaks volumes, I think, about Amanda Palmer’s relationship with her fans. Yes, you can say that these images show us that she’s an exhibitionist, a narcissist, that she loves an excuse to get naked in public–all of those things are presumably true to some extent, and I see no problem with any of those things in the way she engages with the media – but the thing I think is important here is trust. She trusts her fans, not only with her music, not only with intimate information about her life via her blog, but with her body in all its vulnerability.
That is huge, especially in an era of bodyguards and guardrails and a Berlin Wall of personal assistants, and a general cultural attitude that treats celebrities as beings that are somehow physically manifest differently from all the rest of us, with our weird corporeal bodies. This kind of relationship to audience is more Marina Abramovic than American Idol, and I think that is what rock n roll is all about.
Dream: my father and I at a swimming pool at night, pushing a tiny boat across the water while sitting in our coats on the edge of the concrete. In the boat, which is tiny but completely technically accurate, just in miniature, is a hamster or a gerbil, curled up comfortably in some little nook. He is enjoying the waves. I have the feeling something very important is happening nearby, possibly something dangerous, but I keep pushing the little boat back and forth. There are voices in the distance.
Dream: There’s a war going on, I think, but I’m in a treehouse library with a man who stops me just before I kiss him to tell me that he’s married. I’m running through a building full of wood paneling, or maybe it’s a barn, or a very large boat. It’s a barn, and for a moment the group of us believe we are safe in some back room, start planning our defenses, when I am lifted up into the air by my neck. I can only see the wisps of invisible threads, feel a cold hand. Someone holds up a mirror and everyone starts fighting. Creatures that can only be seen in their reflection, silver and hard, like ghosts made of ice.
Dream: The front door of my apartment is made of a single thick sheet of glass, and someone has kicked it in and robbed me. But not just the appliances, the valuables, but everything. They have taken my Christmas tree, the paint from the walls, the dust from the floor. My bedroom is completely intact, and I walk back and forth between the two over and over. It’s like someone has transplanted this one room into a different building. I wake up unsure if this has really happened, and lie there a long time, trying not to wake the stranger next to me, trying to remember what was real.
Inspired by this post, A Brief History of Kisses at Midnight, I thought for the sake of exercising my ever-deteriorating long-term memory I would give it a try. It takes me ages to remember, in pieces, almost anything at all, so this might be a little rough, and very inaccurate. There are many years missing.
–
I went to my ex-boyfriend’s party–not a source of trouble, just a dear friend plus the occasional joke, the occasional oops we had sex again didn’t we, the occasional reminder of why things worked and why they didn’t–but I spent the whole time avoiding another, more recent. When midnight hit I was sitting on the couch, watching everyone dance, everyone screaming out numbers. I thought about choreography, I thought about theft. I could see them both from where I sat, but am fairly sure I kissed no one.
–
We found ourselves without plans, so we threw a party last minute.We played 1,000 Blank White Cards. When midnight approached, we played Freebird at full volume and everyone started taking off their clothes. At midnight, I don’t think I kissed anyone, but I turned a corner in my apartment and walked into a room full of naked men dancing to Like A Prayer. Spinning their dicks like helicopters to Like A Prayer. It was beautiful.
–
Back when our friends still had that huge, nasty loft full of weird nights, they threw a party. I remember burlesque, and sticky floors, and making Shakespeare jokes to a dealer I didn’t know who didn’t give a damn. A mirror falling on us off the bathroom wall and not breaking. At midnight all our drunk white girl faces blended together and we gave each other kisses. At five in the morning the man who kept calling and sexually harassing my friend called her again, and I took the phone and told him in great detail how I imagined finding him, rendering him helpless, and cutting his dick off in a long, torturous operation. He never called her again.
–
In an apartment in Brooklyn where I knew no one, I watched a beautiful woman with long, dark hair play the piano. A young man told me about kicking heroin, showed me his tattoos. There were beautiful pieces of broken machines on the walls, a little fort made of birch branches. One of my idols played a ukulele, covered the Cure. I was given a scrap of paper, told to write something on it, that I’d need it later. I lost my paper, got a new one. At midnight, I dropped the scrap with the word FEAR scrawled on into a bucket full of fire. Later that night, I found my first paper. I ripped it into a hundred pieces and threw it in the trash on a New York City subway platform underground.
–
“This,” they said at midnight, “is a traditional Jewish song of celebration.” At midnight I was not kissing, I was screaming Beastie Boys lyrics with burlesque artists. We were mostly drunk and no one knew every single word, but MCA was still alive and we were pouring our hearts into this ridiculous cover, and it was probably already 12:05, but “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)” is a great song. On the sidewalk smoking cigarettes with a Swiss drummer, I was swept along with the gypsy orchestra, almost arrested in the subway for playing the kazoo, so near Times Square and we were making such beautiful music–not for money, there was no one there, but for ourselves. The night took many convoluted turns, and at dawn I found myself at Coney Island, drinking whiskey and tea from a mason jar and dipping my feet in the ocean on New Year’s Day.
–
We were both so in love with him, and he with himself, all three of our faces pressed together as the countdown crashed. We all knew what was coming, but for a moment, oh, we could pretend.
–
In the basement of our parents’ house, I told my baby brother that the world would never end. I kissed him on the cheek, and time continued to pass.