Re: <documenta X><blast> visual commodity
cwduff@alcor.concordia.ca
Wed, 9 Jul 1997 15:20:37 -0400 (EDT)
Olessia Tourkina, - and not Viktor.
Ah! this was an interesting error on my part. Of course I thought
you were one and it turns out you are many, or at least two - thus the
bilateral. The double signature of a clandestine self... That is to
say, there are two persons behind one signature. My apologies and also my
laughter at my own naive assumptions. There (in this very instance), one
has the escape line, the little fault line which allowed the creation of a
false (but no less real even momentarily) person named Victor Mazin (who
it turns out is real anyhow). A fine example of an event, a "persona" as
one says, let loose against the rigid molarities of everyday life. A
multipersonality already has crossed the borderline into an outer space
which "commodity" cannot capture. Even our personalities are in flight
from the state capture, that horrifying State that Nietzsche speaks of in
the following quote: "churches, armies, States - which of all these dogs
wants to die?" So my mistake became even momentarily the occassion of
invention. A personality against which I addressed a point of view, and
that point of view is now gone as well. And yes, emotional, poetic, a
manner of ebbing against desire, the infiltrated interiorized false
structures of desire bent and shaped in our persons - the poetic, a way of
becoming against the flows of capital commodification against even my own
body, my body parts, the prememory of body parts. Before limbs are even
formed, the embryo in its sack an infiltrated zone of commodity. How sad
to think the embryo is already (all read already and seen by the big
capital eyes) to be captured. And the body then spends a life fighting off
its unknown desires, its embryo self twin cut-off preceding all trauma
making later. Later we find desire capitalized and commodified. No, you
are right I suppose on one niveau, that there is no road away from the
commodity show. We as individuals can be "taken" "bought" and "sold." But
no, it is also more than that. We are bodies that make choices even in our
unknown desires, the movement of the hand across the page. The painter's
hand as it wipes and strokes a canvas, words which, words like these which
cannot address that act, that supreme act of delicate hovering between
space and time - the gesture of the painter as she is in flight from
history attempting to both slay and alleviate the ghosts of history. No,
this is not commodification. Our own alienation is the captured prisoner
at that instant, when the painter shatters the glass of commodity. And
later as Rimbaud says, other horrible labourers will come. It is
not the art works which are captured and pilloried. But we are, unless we
live on the edge, each moment an ebb-flow of escape and resistance. It is
not all passive, we wrestle, struggle and disarm the capital machine at
each step of the way, each perception we make overturns the idols of
perversity. Art does that, poetry does as it escapes in its rush flows
into the mind, the body, the loneliness of each reader-viewer. Thus we
are actors, we are makers, workers "horrible labourers" as Rimbaud has
said. Tristan Tzara speaks of the act of poetry as the invention before
the fact of the spaces we will inhabit, and the act of painting/writing
etc. is that space already there as we speak and attend to it.
This is how we are released from the commodity relations. But make
no mistake, it is a momentary reprieve and the battle lines are drawn
again, perhaps even moments afterward. But sometimes there are years
before the commodity event occurs. Even now on the Planet of Speed and no
more space, we invent new spaces. The words and painting become the spaces
of a subjectivizing consciousness which enters its own domain of play,
dance and even love. So poetry and art are captured by love, and its
machinery, which as Dante says, moves the Stars and Other planets. This
is how, and it is always a how, a practical formulation which the artist
works with, it is how we avoid the reification. After all there will be
those new generations who will come and make fire with new art works,
works they have never seen or heard, and they will be illuminated and
take us the alienated and dead ones to new times and new lands. It is the
sight of those new lands which inspires the mother of art, across and over
the borderspaces where the figure characters speak and rage against the
deaths and debts of capital. It is there that the lyric pulling of the
body in rhythm finds its heightened selfhood. It selves against the
ossification of everyday boredom and predictablity. "People are co-opted,
not works, which will always come to awake a sleeping youth, and which
never cease extending their flame." (Guattari &Deleuze p. 133 Antioedipus.
Univ. of Minnesota Press 1986) So whether you or I personally are released
is dependant on our relationship to that great "sweeping and cleaning"
(Tzara 1918) that we undergo. We undergo in our encounters with the art
work. It is what I call pragmantic. A working term that has no pretense to
being something other than a neolgism which makes do with the realities at
hand. A pragmanticism of art and literature which invites us to live and
create at all little levels too. After all, why do some artists commit
suicide, what aloneness did they feel (based on history, memory, bodily
suffering, heart-break etc.) or see in their solitude that led them to
die? Were they on the other side already of something so strong something
which pulls each death from our bodies? What gaze did they hold against
the void? And in that gaze what was reflected agains the subjects and
objects of their seeing? Was their a collective sigh of relief at their
death? No one can answer to these questions born of a vertigo that has
seen the void and the dark night of its heart. How did articulation fail
them at that moment. They had gone beyond the reified structures and heard
what cannot be heard. And the pragmantic artist must step carefully at the
height or depth of death and life. This is to transcend the almighty
dollar's machinery and to escape the banality of the market place.
**************************************************************************
Clifford Duffy wrote 6.07.97.18:34:
> "SInce both viewer and artist are then released from the commodification
> relationship - one cannot speak of the visual "commodity."
>
> I am very interesting how is it possible
> "to release from the commodification relationship"? Could you
> show me the way of escaping from the total reification of our culture?
******* Make New Eyes *******
What I was speaking of above, is what occurs in the specific
instance of an encounter between one person and one painting, and even a
series of paintings (i.e. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger's work). In the
moment of looking I am not seeing the reified object, in
fact on the contrary, if I am looking really looking with open eyes, and
my eyes as viewer are as naked as the paintings that I see before me
then there is no more reification. But I was never speaking about "total
escape. But I do see the unknown shapes which struggle in those works.
Their beauty and pain, their allegorization which is beyond mere
denotation.
The opposite is my own stance (against totality), I think we are
so far determined at almost all levels of our being (and this is not all
"bad" either), that this "little" zone of unpredictability and escape from
objectivity in the normal sense, is almost what one might call a miracle.
Now miracles (even marxist ones) are not subject to the purely
deterministic elements of our alienation. What is the creation of a poem? What does it mean to see paint
come alive and appear on a canvas, what words can depict this process,
where the forces and unnameable elements of nature, conscioussness and
even deity appear? I quoted Rimbaud above, he speaks in the letter from
which I quoted of the visions of the poet, the artist. He says there are
form that have no name, and that formlessness will have to be given new
names, that the poet/artist must have these visions to overcome the
banality of art. He warns us that Baudelaire was too much caught in the
milieu of art, and not enough on the outside. And we of the late 20th.
century we all know about how real the outside is. We know how many die
behind bars and wires, and how the sound chemical death and the hiss of
gas, the crackle of gunfire, the crash of Tomahawk missiles on the surf of
the water makes death instanteous. We know about Rwanda, Bosnia,
Iran-Iraq, Shatila-Sabra, Auschwitz, we have heard about perhaps millions
going hungry in North Korea. Artists no longer live in the milieu Rimbaud
referred to. The outside is a dangerous place where the artist walks with
her objects hoping to create a way out, another milieu of reprieve.
Words against missiles, no good. Sometimes one picks up a stone, or goes
underground. Action becomes the name of what we must do. We no longer
speak, and even Homer and Sappho will act, even the silent painters of the
a past will rise up against the death squads of the death machines.
Provisionally for now, Clifford Duffy.
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> a forum on spatial articulations, perspectives, and procedures
> texts are the property of individual authors
> for information, email majordomo@forum.documenta.de with
> the following line in the message body: info blast
> archive at http://www.documenta.de/english/blasta.htm
> or http://www.documenta.de/deutsch/blasta.htm
> documenta X Kassel and http://www.documenta.de 1997