( would i know ?? are you a woman or a man_? )
This question, purely a musical moment inscribed in the instant of
its difference, its delayed desire pushing the gender text to its maximum
possibility. What comes after Barthe's notion, and the vanishing of the
author. But space breaths down its neck and throat and invents a time
between texts, displaces sublimation and recalls desire.
Something like the interactive borders where the painting heals
the viewer, if healing is required. And what is requisite is the moment
of desire which creates the desire to live. Not caught by the terms, but
always creating and inventing. And then some. Gender becomes the moment
where we speak past ourselves in the inter-textuality of its (Sex)texting
- Sextexting, and it travels past the pronouns of gender. But that is not
what bodies are, at least not at the moment we first come upon them. Say
we are overwhelmed by the awesome beauty of a creature sitting on a bench
near us at the bus-stop or say, sitting drinking coffee in some neutral
public space of discursivenes. And in that moment miracles can happen.
Over thousands of spaces. Over thousands of miles of years. To quote
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (speaking in another context) what happens is
"As if an object becomes a partial subject and communicates with us." What
miracle of ontology and everyday epistemology overturned in the moment
when we surge against the dead objectness of la quotidienne.
A text, a painting becomes a partial subject (what might have been called
an idol or a god in another time), and communes with us. We enter its
boundaries and rush forward to its love, it hate, its endless
concatenations of depth. A real fallowness comes alive and is fertile to
the eye of the beholder. William Blake speaks of real paintings and real
visions coming to the aid of the viewer. Not in these terms, but in the
visionary language of his own mythologic making vocabularies. And in the
entry point[s] there are scattered veins of hope, rushes of senses that
teach us like cities. We enter the painting as into the body of a woman,
feeling its senuality surrounding us, our organs swollen with the warmth
it floods us with. It grips and pulls us in further, further to the
nasence of its various origins, and the origins (of the painting[s]) are
various and plenty and never merely one or two or three, but many,
multitudinous countries, beds, cities, streets, memories buried under
amnesias and partial desires broken in the machine of its
production-seduction. And the border of the painting is the
moment which swells larger to contain us. Yes, it is telepathic and
mysterious, the uncannyness of premonition, dream. Yes, this borderspace
of desires when feeling returns, which never left. But we had been looking
elsewhere lost in the gender's rigidities, in the stop sign at the street
corner, then suddenly we are thrust back into the gaze of the woman
sitting looking at us on the bus. The stranger woman wondering who we are,
out of all her heartaches, and the painting provides that reference
niveau, or rather the hand which holds us back from the chaos of the
everyday.
"all verbs spoke female sadness,
he wished for its femaleness to play on the bushes
of its origins. Realizing then its violin's
sweetness was hunger and memory awakening, she
stepped back and the returns
mounted in the rising song. She
whispered of arms and legs and bodies
... the nights rolled by like the country...."
The chaos subsides in the play of death and life. Simple moments
of contemplation in the mothering spaces of the opening borders of the
painting.
******
C.D.
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