Below: Untitled, 2000, 2 poems by Jorge Eduardo Eielson, trans. LH from the Spanish on the back of two postcards left on chairs at the Peruvian Embassy, London, 24–25 July 2024.
Will Rowe spoke of knotting (in the form of quipu in Eielson’s work and in Indigenous cultures more broadly (see Cecilia Vicuña’s work for ex.), as well as an alphabet of sorts constituted of knots – nudos) and how knots may be undone but it takes a long time to undo them (think of undoing tangled/knotted necklace chains, separating them out…).
Do knots need to be undone? / Should they be? When? By who? (Codification, symbolism, secrecy, private and public language, Latin American mestizaje… Eielson was involved in the production of a new kind of mestizaje from Lima, from the coast, and then from a place of exile – Eielson made work in Europe with materials exported by friends from Peru, including black sand applied to the surface of paintings.)
Eielson’s series of nudos constituted a kind of alphabet; a new language. How to understand his practice as an artist in relation to his practice as a poet?
—
Learning how to tie knots in the navy in the film Cerrar los ojos by Víctor Erice (2023) – film director protagonist showing photos to the disappeared friend he learned to tie knots with and the latter’s lack of recognition / denial / forgetting in response… ‘La idea de cambiar la identidad y de rehacer la vida en otro sitio’ (The idea of changing one’s identity and of remaking one’s life in another place).
1
EVERY MACHINE IS USELESS
It’s no use multiplying
The gaze or delaying
The speed of pain
For millions of years
No accelerant star has existed
Not its splendour nor the tortoise who desires
The falcon’s speed
Slowness, too
Is a celestial machine
That moves between us
And nothing beats
The speed
Of love
2
IMMEDIATELY AFTER HAVING READ
These words
Close doors and windows
Don’t peep too much
Don’t make the trembling one jump
Yellow butterfly
Resting on a chair
Pulls the chain
And lets life go
As if nothing would have happened
She responds to the phone so quickly
Speaks of things stupid and wise
Hangs up yet again
But now considering
That the whole wide world is just
This mysterious yellow butterfly
Resting on a chair
—
Notes from Taylor Le Melle in conversation with Derica Shields
Is it about the book, specifically?
The idea of not legally being able to engage with a book – there are banned books
—
From $$ ABOMUNUS CRAXIOMS $$ by Bob Kaufman:
[...]
People who read are not happy.
People who do not read are not happy.
People are not very happy.
These days people get sicker quicker.
[...]
See Danny Hayward, in particular p. 29 of Training Exercises on doing and looking and reading. Also on politics as something we do and on poetry as a way to transform the self and also as a means of survival… on the ‘we’ as being worth defending. On the square within the circle. On the forest and the nymphs and what they represent / who they could be.
—
Taylor Le Melle:
‘The mobilisation… of forms, that spring up in order to support a goal’
‘The motivation behind developing the technology of film and photography had colonial stakes’
‘The people who are writing the novels at the time of the ship’s expansion… had a number of other people working on their behalf’
Someone facilitates the need to not have to labour
Derica Shields:
Lord Byron and Shelley were on vacay together… this form is coming out of a specific relationship to leisure and free time, certain ideas about the monster and the other… a sentimental education
Taylor:
‘That’s why I’m saying violent assimilation’
‘Liberatory politics centred around reading every word ever printed’
^ that ideology
‘What are you supposed to do?’
Curiosity and playing around
Opacity and specificity
‘This is not instruction’
‘Decisive or unrelenting about doing it this way’
‘A nothing to lose thing’
[Show a clip, c.42:27]
Discussion of intimacy by Hortense Spillers
‘If intimacy is not reliable…’
‘Sentimentality and feelings of love can be shown to be unstable [...] across the social order’
LISTEN
‘A cultural history of touch…’
‘Bodiedness associated with juridical… due process’
‘Flesh describes… a more or less expendable figure’
‘The alien does not have access… to ward[ing] off another’s touch’
Loss of freedom – ‘bodies lose their integrity and may be invaded by coercive power’
Immediacy in relationship to the slave, robs the touch of its… becomes the power to wound and violate
See Audre Lorde on the erotic
Man who focused on the visual world, the ‘eye’ man was positioned at the top
The skin man, was positioned at the bottom
‘Touch… has nothing to do with the erotic… or does it?’ – Spillers realises this is a question
—
What does self-defence look like/what forms can it take when we are seeing stickers left by fascists in the streets concealing Stanley knife blades? Other than removing them safely, what shall we do? How will we organise?
—
Ways of distinguishing human life from bare or animal life…
[Clip ends c.49:56]
1:00:52
Say whatever your categorization is means that you are, means that you are, whatever your categorization or your situation is means that you got to live on 300 calories a day or you have like a chronic kind of like lack of access to vitamin C or like, so, you know, these are like real things that these policies create,
right? Like we have, and this is happening right now. It's not just, you know, right? Right. So it's like, and then whoever survives that does not escape the reproductive labour of reproducing the world, right? Creates more flesh and tells that flesh it's very important to read books. You know what I'm saying?
1:08:40
that's what massage therapy is it's like making a relationship for like four hours a day with four different people it's like okay this is the relationship we're gonna have for this hour this 90 minutes um And figuring that out together, right? Like it's never going to be the same every time.
TRUST
And loss of trust, politically, and erotically/libidinally, in others, in oneself…
2 screengrabs from Hal Hartley’s film Trust (1990) posted 2015 ^
Domestic space in Hal Hartley’s films
Knotting and unknotting (in Eielson’s work)
Binding and unbinding (Derica and Taylor)
Threads of thought in Marina’s talk with Andreas Petrossiants (‘tangling and untangling’): https://www.e-flux.com/podcasts/407867/marina-vishmidt-speculation-as-a-mode-of-production
Contemporary capital and contemporary art… parallelism… the image of work.
Speculative negation…
‘Art is [...] an emancipatory activity… that can be commodified’
Open and closed forms of speculation: speculative fiction may be proximate to utopian approach
Speculative gambling, casino understanding of the nature of capitalism today (creates more of itself… a present of returns predicated on enclosing the future)
Open speculation (of art) is imbricated in… closed speculation
‘Situated movements in time and space’
Conventional understanding of autonomy is a kind of scripted non-performance
Mix of methodologies also reflects the process of putting it together over a long period of time
Robert Morris, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, 1961
Trying to practise a negative dialectical, homemade approach that practises its politics in the field of theory… traces mediations between
13:00
‘Tangling and untangling’
14:30 – the turn to conceptualism and performance
—
The turn of visual artists to poetry and vice-versa / the combination of these practices, often with music (see e.g. Egg Meat quoting Bob Kaufman at SET Peckham last week).
→
7 August
(After reading more Training Exercises)
Binding and unbinding in Will Rowe’s response to Danny’s report ‘On Denial’:
https://communityofgoods.blogspot.com/2023/05/letter-to-danny-14523-wr.html
Freud’s notion of ‘binding’ came into the conversation at the recent Mayday Rooms meeting. Freud’s use of the term, where binding works in terms of ‘an energy which flows along chains of ideas and implies associative “links”’, suggests a possible cross-over between inner life and the political outside. When you write ‘there is no outside to an injury’ are you posing this as an outside where resolution might have been possible? I want to say that a wound with no outside is the pair of a situation with no solution—a situation where words are stuck in chains of association that perpetuate an impasse. Not that individual wound and social wound are homologous, but that they exist in a certain relation to each other. What kind of relation? The insistent trauma-talk of narcissistic selves falsifies the relation. Once you accept that life is suffering, you can accept the challenge of living. That’s Jordan Peterson speaking, and inside his voice the long history of voices that have said that suffering is an entirely internal matter, a belief highly acceptable to capitalism. Individual wound and social wound are not homologous but what they have in common is isolation.
Rimbaud’s poem ‘The Drunken Boat’ sums up a basic element of Leftist tradition: to break all moorings, the call to rebellion as radical subjective unbinding, the legacy of the Paris Commune gathered into that call, that cell of meaning. That Rimbaud got labelled a poète maudit was a manoeuvre of bourgeois literature, we know that. The boat lands in Africa and finds itself facing white men with firearms: subjective emancipation includes colonial violence. That’s the corrective to individualism. But the binding, undone, without new binding consisting of a changed social order—does it go where we need to go? Does it merely end up bending to a new master?
—-
I feel less worried about Stanley Knife blades hidden under stickers this morning — we can safely remove them and put them to other uses or dispose of them. I’m keeping an eye on the news and figuring out what self-defence and community defence can be, along with many others… The EDL have announced a ‘protest’ outside the Old Fire Station in Stoke Newington this evening. What do they think they’re going to find there? A closed office in proximity to Stoke Newington police station.
Louise Bourgeois, Cumul I, 1969
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