Discharged

CANADA DRY | LOS ANGELES JULY 4
[The Deduction of Objects from their Shadows is Flawed.]
charcoal, acrylics, dry color pigments, glue, hairspray on canvas

30x40cm

2011

A NURSERY RHYME FOR PLATO'S CHILDREN,

[and so the list of things I owe to you continues].

Hark to my eyes he said

I got them chased all across the land

Hark to my eyes he said

I got them buried below in the sand

and when you come home late with no army coat on

and the night is in the eyes of everybody's pride

like cherry apple pie

Hark to my eyes he said

for they have seen many a covert hand

Hark to my eyes he said

for they have laid low on many a desert strand

and did not go blind ‖

Re: Liam Gillick: Contemporary art does not account for that which is taking place // Re: post-contemporary

#manifestomonday

Liam Gillick: "Contemporary art does not account for that which is taking place"

(e-flux journal # 21 – 12/2010)

NOTICES OF DISCHARGE, A MANIFESTO.

Preface (I): The State of the Contemporary

“The term 'contemporary art' is marked by an excessive usefulness. The contemporary has exceeded the specificity of the present to become inextricably linked to the growth of doubt consolidation. […] It does not describe a practice but a general 'being in the context'.” (Gillick)

This being is marked by, so Gillick,

1. a “complicit alongsideness”, i.e. the evasion of “fundamental ideas” and “key political questions” by “irony and coy relations to notions of quality”
2. an all-encompassing “inclusiveness” that “has helped suppress a critique of what art is and more importantly what comes next” (“authoritarian tolerance”)
3. a mode of production, of “[m]aking things with an awareness of all other things”, which is specifically linked to notions of a networking urban-ness, a chattiness which manifests itself in simultaneously answering “questions about [the artwork] itself and all other contemporary art” (all the time in every artwork)
4. WIP, i.e. a mode of production in which the “attempt to work is the work itself”, [u]nresolved is the better way, leaving a series of props that appear to work together”
5. the dominance of self-referentiality through the merging of “politics and biography”, subjectivity and work, i.e. a “coming-into-being through work”

Preface (II): The Post-Contemporary

“Not working at all is very hard to do. So the answer is to keep working ...” (Gillick), and look into

• “a boycott of the subjective”
• “the aggressive option of neo-objectivity”
• the separation of “life and action from contemporary art”.

NOTICES OF DISCHARGE

1. I'm discharging myself from the contemporary. I will account for what is taking place.
   
   
2. I'm discharging myself from therapy. I'm giving up on the past. I won't retract the probing needle from my head. I will stop pulling at it.
   self-medication Nowheretown/Germany
   
   
3. I'm discharging myself from the biographical. I will refrain from further exorcisms.
   biographical exorcism
   
   
4. I'm discharging myself from Germany. I have no talent for it. I will stop trying to look through Schlingensief's eyes.
   Schlingensief Nowheretown/Germany remnants
   
   
5. I'm discharging myself from the idiosyncratic. I will stop trying to convince you of its good intentions. I will not boycott the subjective. The next time you see me, I will wear a wig.
   
   
6. I'm discharging myself from the asylum. I have no talent for functioning madness. I will give sanity another try. I'll be the sanest person waiting for the bus in LA.
   (in)sanity
   
   
7. I'm discharging myself from rephrasing the fundamental questions. They have been answered in non-fundamental terms. I will not answer them in fundamental terms. I will stop talking about not answering them. 
   
   
8. I'm discharging myself from clarity. It is a shell and a knife. I have no talent for it. I will try to forget where the self-destruct buttons are. I will let them be pushed by accident again. I'm putting down the knife. The next time you see me, we'll shake hands.
   bubble wrap concrete

9. I'm discharging myself from daring you with the unresolved. I will not stop producing props. I will finish the plays I stage. I will account for what is taking place.
   Banksy told you not to.

Re: CQN #4. Totally Idiosyncratic, Totally Transparent. The word is manifesto, have I convinced you yet?

I have been writing manifestos for a belletristic journal then. CINE QUA NON, as it has been characterized by Margarida Vale de Gato in the magazine's latest edition, is a space for ponderings, wonderings beyond the limitations of the norms of academic writing in the Humanities. I wrote a fictional play for paper dolls; it was published in the essay section after all. CQN is providing a playing field for the personal, the ambivalent, the self-reflective; I wandered off into it, forcefully, drunken on its possibilities, the artistic freedom to self-indulge, daring the editors to fence me in, until I could dare them no further. Looking for a cliff to fall off of, I asked “Have I convinced you yet?”, until finally I heard it uttered, “No”; a process of negotiating that is nothing else but what Tiago Patrício describes as the “attempt to understand if [you] are concealing under a mantle of virtue something that does not have a fit of creativity” (CQN #4, 132). I have been writing for CQN from inside out of my head to a forever invisible audience, arguing with them, trying to convince, convert them; when they did not answer, the only way to go was to sharpen my tools, that is to sharpen my words, often times shorten them, organizing them according to the rhythm of a song whose title I did not reveal to them or a visual pattern that only followed the shadows on my desk, tightening the rhetoric. It is the road to the totally idiosyncratic, which strives for the totally transparent; my indulgence was only meant to be enticing, my pretentiousness only meant to be infuriating. To borrow from Julian Hanna's piece on “Avant-garde Manifestos and Guerilla Advertising”, the articles wanted to be “machines to generate discourse” (66), or I should say, less cryptically and more straightforwardly, I wanted them to be just that; or the fuel at least; or the oil. No trace of the distrust in the word here that has left so much of contemporary theatre breathlessly stranded in performance/video art-land, looking around for an audience that is already gone from the balconies, has headed to the gallery or the movie theatre (see Krystian Lada on “Image Dramaturgy”, 32ff.). The word is manifesto, a manifesto for the word.

Even if it's a paper doll, in and out of CQN.

P.S.: I need to apologize to João Botelho in advance who equipped me with the ultimate definition of cinema or life and what's the difference again, it's all “lights and shadows and suffering human beings in between them trying to get out of the darkness and into the light” (116). I gonna use it and abuse it and finally forget it was you who said it in the first place. I am sorry.

Not quite dead. No quite.

Some kind of status update is in order.

While I'm still here in good old Berlin, consuming the first bubbles of summer, the other, more mobile gingerbread is travelling throughout the US of A. I hope to hear from her and her adventures into the realm of art, peanut butter and twinkies regularly.

Meanwhile, maybe even I will make myself heard a little more often. Just a little.
For I am not dead yet.

Not quite.

A post of good intentions

this is.

For the next days I'll try to leek out some Berlinale gossip, maybe even thoughts on the moving pictures.

But not for today.

Today I need to talk about wood and architecture.

My colleague and I moved from our office to the general Berlinale press office. We are residing in the Hyatt hotel now.

In here, everything is made of precious wood and dimmed light.

middle brown parquet zigzagging across the floor

doors and walls made of heavy wood varnished in black

big organically shaped tables in the reception area formed entirely out of convex tree slices

and on top of it all, a cocktail table consisting of a huge put-up branch of some strangely frayed looking tree

Yet, I do not feel out of place here. All of this creates as soozing atmosphere.

Also soozing: Behind my desk, in my back, there is a window. I know that if I turned round and had a look outside, I could see the Philharmony and its Kammermusiksaal by Hans Scharoun. Both of them I like a lot.

A friendly place.

With friendly architecture.

Re: Open Call - 7th Berlin Biennale / THAT'S HOW WEIRD IT'S GONNA BE (IV)

My first reaction was to hum the George Harrison tune, trying to figure out just how the rime goes: inverted, diverted, perverted, controlled, no – wait – they labelled and sold you. Here we go.

My second thought on Biennale curator Artur Żmijewski's call to please send in art and a statement of „... your political inclination (e.g. rightist, leftist, liberal, nationalist, anarchist, feminist, masculinist ...) ...“ was a sudden reminiscence of earlier Facebook days, when you could still state your political views by ticking the box, labelling yourself on a scale of very liberal to very conservative. The middle-ground being moderate, which to me always sounded very much like the apathetic option, or Żmijewski's alternative to giving that statement, namely being „... not interested in politics at all“. At least Facebook had the other option, too. Today, you can scribble in whatever you please, and explain – as far as the word limit may allow you – just what kind of an apathetic liberal you are, of the American or German breed - - -

To sum up, the Open Call left me thinking something along the lines of Is that a trick question? And, Let's hope it's a trick question!

As Żmijewski goes on to elaborate in his curator's statement, he deems such a process of self-labelling necessary however, because there seems to the an „invisible rule“ within contemporary art by which artists are kindly asked to produce „'political'“ art, however, from an „unindentified political position“, which – as he states, justly – simply doesn't exist. I have never heard of such a rule, nor did I ever expect an artist to live by it (neither from an art critic's, nor a spectator's standpoint) – on the contrary. But then again I am not an artist in any professional, bread-and-butter sense; I never had to answer to a gallery owner or a curator, I don't even have to answer to my editor, yet – only to the voices in my head - -
Me: „What's with all the pretentious self-indulgence?“
Me: „Hm?“

Żmijewski's goal, as he points out, is to get the artists to break that very rule and lay bare „the invisible/ hidden structure“, the „obscene background of [their] art“, their politics. And, he wants them to remember that, after all, „[p]olitics are not, as politicians would like to convince us, fights for power or dirty games. They are the language of our collective needs which people share.“ The cynic in me (or is it the realist?) wants to shriek: Aren't we beyond irony?
Żmijewski: „...the curatorial choice will [not] be based on preferred political identity [as stated by the artist] [...] [but] on intuition and ambiguity. But this time intuition and ambiguity will be a little deformed by this over-obvious political element. So, we will see what happens.“
The Cynic again: Don't we know what will happen? I read it in the newspaper on Thursday: Post-Tucson: Sarah Palin refrains from calling Obama Hitler until Monday morning. Aren't we already living in the aftermath of the deformation of „intuition and ambiguity“, read reality, by the „over-obvious political element“, read ideology, in which the vocabulary of the „language of our collective needs“ has shrunken to nothing but statements of political inclinations, even been replaced by them? It is a game of politicians calling each other names, and as Żmijewski suggests, the artist should join in, starting with himself. To make that work, i.e. to give that „little deformation“ an outcome that cuts through it all and is mind-mangling (and I want nothing less), Żmijewski will have to sign up for a serious case of short-leash / tight-rope / whiplash curating – nothing else but strangling the artists/labels/artworks until they suffocate or snap. Oh, the possibilities!

But step aside, you Cynic, and come in, Idealist, for Żmijewski is pointing to Hannah Arendt as the reference point for his call to „describe what we do as artists also in pure (sic!) political terms“. To quote Arendt: The event illuminates its own past, but cannot be deduced from it. There is no such thing as causality, only contingency. Hence, the event, the Biennale itself, the performance of all that art hanging on all those walls in 2012 will render all good intentions and inclinations, as stated, labelled or mumbled („Hm? Other?“), futile anyway. Oh, the possibilities!

- - -

THAT'S HOW WEIRD IT'S GONNA BE (IV/last installment), 2011
exhibition flyer















THAT'S HOW WEIRD IT WAS (III), 2011
still from THROUGH THE BENT BACKED TULIPS / tiananmen square 2010 06 22 (2010)













THAT'S HOW WEIRD IT WAS (II), 2010
still from THE AGE OF THE UNDERSTATEMENT (song by The Last Shadow Puppets, video by Romain Gavras, 2008)

















THAT'S HOW WEIRD IT WAS (I), 2010

Re: Scenes from a play [no title, WIP], including ramblings + Re: Joana Craveiro, CQN # 3.

I got myself a book for Christmas full of AWKWARD FAMILY PHOTOS. I skimmed through it over the Holidays like a sociologist on the prowl – or a screenplay writer eagerly looking for characters and fictionalisations, in both cases equally fascinated by what others make of the term 'family'; how they choose to project themselves as a family, both inwards to its core members and outwards towards an audience beyond the front door. Although a lot of the pictures were taken by professional photographers within the space of a studio, these projections are filled with slip-ups – misplaced gestures and looks; they seem to come apart, open up space for speculation, theory, therapy where there should be the calm unit of the nuclear family after all. The AWKWARD lies in the fact that no, this is not the SIMPSONS' annual Christmas family portrait in which Bart makes it abundantly clear, year after year, what is just going on behind that front door. No, on the contrary: everybody was told to behave and they did, and still, that's what they got.
There are very few pictures of my core family, my parents, my brother and myself – come to think of it, there might be not one family portrait. We never went to let it be taken by a photographer and – as my father used to take all our pictures– he is missing in all of them. There are however pictures of my broader family, a potpourri of myself with different pairings of relatives. Page after page of them going yellow in photo albums, twenty years weighing down on them. A handful from the past ten years, scattered around somewhere, in drawers, on harddrives.

„I will let go of the memory of Germany twenty years ago, all of Germany...“
(Joana Craveiro, 10PM: FINDING ANOTHER WAY OUT, CINE QUA NON # 3 [summer/fall '10])

Thumbing through these albums, I don't feel less like a sociologist or a story-teller, maybe even more so – scrutinizing myself. I don't recognise her, I don't remember her, I don't know why she's having that look upon her face. It is as if more than one life has come and went by in between her and me, all discarded and replaced at one point; I do remember odd ends, memory stroboscope, flashes of something or the other, celluloid snippets piling up underneath the editing table.

„All autobiographical work as I practice it is a fiction. Because I edit, [...] , omit, unsay. Autobiography doesn't hurt me. Rather it saves me, ...“
(Joana Craveiro, OPEN LETTER ABOUT ALL THIS, ibid)

Of course I know her and of course I know the story; I made it up. Of course I know why I am sitting at that table next to my grandmother. It is my grandfather's 70th birthday, 1989. He is sitting at the head of the table, flanked by an equal number of relatives on both sides. Closest to the camera, there is my grandmother next to myself on the left hand side, my mother next to my brother on the right. I am 4 years old, my brother is five. My father decided to document the moment. I smile, a bit cautiously; my brother is leaning forward towards the table, a flash of enthusiasm. Both my grandmother and my mother smile at him, albeit as well cautiously. It is a behaved smile that mirrors their hands, which rest shyly in their laps; they sit up straight as not screen myself and my brother from the camera. The scene is very symmetrical, dignified (as the occasion calls for), Last Supper-ish even (as there is food spread out on the table), calm, yet cheerful-ish - -
No, it is AWKWARD. In the foreground, on the center stage, at the other head of the table facing my grandfather, there it is on display, prominently on a plate, holding my father's place so-to-speak. A chicken leg. A chicken leg, the meat nibbled off. It is mocking us in its bony factuality. And we tried so hard and yet you might just put the picture in the book and call it: In commemoration of grandpa's 70th birthday and that chicken leg, what a yummy one - - - - -
And above my grandfather's head is all that space, all that wall paper and those hands in the sand, just barely touching, a reprint of Walter Womacka's AM STRAND ('On the beach', 1962). Two people, a man, a woman, fingertips, everything that goes on between them, is it careless not to look at one another- -, lovers, // thick as thieves //. It is not a photo op, it's not a couple, it is not honeymoon at the beach. It is not AWKWARD, its perspective is screwed, the ocean is behind them, and what are they looking at- -, it is an idea of that, of what - -.

„I would like to make a toast to the fact that we enact each other constantly...“
(Joana Craveiro, BEING PORTUGUESE, ibid)

The reprint has been hanging over my grandparents' brown nubbly couch me and my brother used to sleep on whenever we visited them as small children for years. I looked at it for the first time then and saw hands. I inherited it after my grandfather's death and looked at it for the first time. I took it from my parents when I moved out and looked at it for the first time. It had been standing on my wooden floor for years before I looked at it. And saw them. I found out that it was the most re-printed painting in former East Germany and so I finally looked at it and saw hands. I made that story up so many times, I cannot remember when it was true.

„I will definitely [...] give up the past, the songs I have been listening to for the past twenty years, the books I have been quoting from for the past twenty years [...], stop recording [...] the same [...] Velvet Underground song.“
(Joana Craveiro, 10PM: FINDING ANOTHER WAY OUT, ibid)

I re-enacted it in acrylics and filed it under biographical exorcism as if it had always been there, painted myself as her on a concrete rooftop in NY, Brian Kinney by her side and everything is flat and they are faceless and there is just her hand on the concrete. I looked at it yesterday and I didn't recognise them anymore - - And I wrote scenes for a play that I didn't give a title for I only toyed with the idea of it, of them, two paper dolls, one fictional/living, the other dead/dead, Andy Warhol, as dead as you can be, being a paper doll and all - - and in my head I still have a movie about two people, one sitting, one lying on the concrete, and it is so still, and there is all that static and crackling from a bad-quality CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION YouTube-rip played at a torturously slow speed in the background, and you'd only know that you're watching a movie after all by the sun's flickering reflection in the glitter around their eyes. It is Jack Smith in a James Benning movie - -

„It is me. But I wear a wig. Two wigs. And in the end I make an assay.“
(Joana Craveiro, OPEN LETTER ABOUT ALL THIS, ibid)

Or an essay or ramblings or a cut-up

ODD ENDS/ STROBOSCOPE/ HANDS

(the fictional/dead, the fictional/living and everybody in between)

2011.

//

//

THE AGE OF THE UNDERSTATEMENT (The Last Shadow Puppets, 2008)

THAT'S HOW WEIRD IT WAS. (II)
2010

Put down the glue gun. And the noodles. And Andy. Put. Andy. Down.

#manifestomonday









MY 2nd GRADE ART TEACHER WOULD GIVE ME AN A+*
*ONLY I AM NOT IN 2nd GRADE.
noodles, metallic spray paint, a poster and doodling on canvas
30x40cm
2010
(pixeled, blown up and edited, 2010)

Actually, this is the perfect Andy-quote as a comment on Mr. Brainwash. Isn't it?
And I wanna see this atwork of yours in the flesh before I say any more about it. (d.g.)

Watching EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP reminded me of the fact that I still had that poster somewhere and that it was in dire need of some proper framing. Yet, it's hard to contain. For what does the 'getting away with it' actually entail? The neatandtidy answer being soup as canon ///
Institutionalisation/commodification/commercialisation/etc.. R€nt mon€y. Uncle artcrust. A write-up in LA Weekly. A quote by Banksy on your art. Noel Gallagher at the opening of your show. ///
MindMangling – your own (self-medication) and that of others – preferably Carl Barât's, on the Arsenal's rooftop terrace, in green shiny pants /// /// (a.h.)

Put the shiny green pants back in binary babblin.

//















//


Alright then: I was told that Vaginal Davis is looking for a new flat. (Contact her via her blog if you know anything up to 250 Euro warm.) Why though, I do not know. Maybe a rent increase?

Two thoughts to this news: I am awfully sad about the prospect of losing Miss Davis as a neighbour and shopping companion. And: Has gentrification reached die Rote Insel already if such a famous queen of the glittering world like her has to leave it? (d.g.)

Scrapbook. part 2

I get paid to look at art.
Well, not exactly to look at it. Rather to watch it. To watch over it.
Because, you know, the art needs to be protected from its visitors. They threaten it.

#1
Mind your step, please!
Ooh, you stepped on the art. Haha.
-The art? Oh ... Sorry.

But mind you, in that same exhibition, there was also some art to step on!

Sometimes though, it rather feels as if I was some kind of caretaker for the visitors themselves.

#2
Excuse me, where is the exhibition?
Right here. You are already in the middle of it.
Oh. Aha? Thank you.

And sometimes I simply don't know what went wrong.

#3
Sagen Sie, sind das alles echte Filme hier?

The woman asking me this was at that moment visiting an exhibition devoted to art films.
Mhhmh.

In fact, I'm not really sure who or what I am protecting.
It's probably my own sanity. Or is it insanity?

In lieu of a cake: lying in the bathtub with Bill Hicks, increasingly pruny.

How does the saying go about history and farce? History, history, beware of your farciness? I have been listening to Bill Hicks' ARIZONA BAY album, his tales about surviving Bush and the Fundamentalists in the White House. About dinosaurs as God's way to test their faith – God, the old prankster, burying bones all over to be dug up and sow doubt in the belief of the non-believers of evolution. About how the Democrats won, finally, after having aimed at the Republican elephant for so many years. The elephant that sold the weapons to Iraq and as soon as the cheque cleared went on to test the quality of its products. Only Hicks is talking about the early nineties. Clinton is president, pre-Bush II and pre-Iraq II. Now, another Democrat is sitting in the White House, and it looks as if the elephant might win over Congress in November – again. Meanwhile, the Fundamentalists are tea-partying and that freak parralel universe in which Sarah Palin might run for president is actually our own.
What would Bill Hicks say if he were alive today? Bloody murder? Or would he put his head under water – if we gonna get all pruny, then at least evenly?
In face of it all Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are going to RALLY TO RESTORE SANITY AND/OR FEAR next weekend in Washington. In face of Germany's own autumn of discontent – the Leitkultur-debate is making its reappearance (aka how to keep the 'German' in German angst) – Christine Lemke-Matwey called out to Germany's own Dichter/Denker to get their heads out of the bathwater sand, and say something. If Christoph Schlingensief were alive today, as she suggests already nostalgically, he surely would have to say something – and clear the air, hopefully.
Living abroad in 2008, I was pondering upon that German angst myself and wrote about Schlingensief's WIEN-AKTION (BITTE LIEBT ÖSTERREICH), his 2000 Austrian take on this season's debate:

// Is this real? Is it real theater? Real art? Or indeed real life? For those who witnessed Schlingensief's work BITTE LIEBT ÖSTERREICH commissioned for the Wiener Festwochen festival in Austria, it was in fact difficult to decide upon the nature of the spectacle: the work featured a large container installed on a square next to the opera house in Vienna. In line with the concept of the Big Brother TV program, twelve participants, who were announced by Schlingensief as seeking for asylum, moved into the container for one week, being under video surveillance on a 24 hours basis. The public could follow the life of the container inhabitants on television and the Internet and were asked to vote for the candidates, whereby those two receiving the most votes would not only definitely have to leave the container, but also putatively have to leave the country, having lost the competition of seeking for refugee. Whereas this account frames the work as a rather straightforward piece of performance art, the introduction of elements such as a banner stating 'Ausländer Raus' ('Foreigners Out'), a slogan used by neo-nationalist parties in Germany, and flags alluding to the right-wing populist Austrian party FPÖ rooted the work within the current political discussion, pointing to its potential as being an actual political campaign.
Hence, interpretations of Schlingensief's work indeed ranged from it being a critique of policies towards asylum seekers and the populist strategies used for their implementation to being a meta-critique on the increasing event character of all politics and the crucial role of the media apparatus. Criticism towards the WIEN-AKTION ran on the very same axis: Schlingensief's re-enactment of the spectacle of politics through yet another spectacle turns artistic practice into an act of populist event management, which dismisses art's potential to say something meaningful about reality by turning it into a piece of virtual reality itself.
Yet, within the framework of this exhibition [MARTYRS. CLOWNS. BIOGRAPHICAL EXORCISMS] the term virtual reality seems the least appropriate to describe the nature of Schlingensief's artistic project, which is marked by his ever-lasting possession by the demon called Germany. His works then appear as performances of political introspection which insist on a place for his own biography within, against, towards and in spite of the reality of German history – PLEASE LOVE AUSTRIA is after all a call for subjective engagement. The audience in Vienna reacted to the initial display of the 'Foreigners Out'-banner with applause – Art, life and true romance are never virtual. //

I don't know if Schlingensief would want to participate in the current debate, too. Or if he would feel that you can only state the obvious for so many times. I don't even know if I want to. The fact that to Seehofer and company the Leitkultur-debate is no farce at all (and that they are not asking to Please love Germany either) leaves me a bit breathless. I think I'm already holding my breath under water with Bill. 'Germany', neat and tidy within its lovely 'borders', home of the 'Germans' and their 'Christian-Jewish tradition', reading Grass or better yet, watching TATORT on Sundays. I have no clue.
I am German, yet nothing but a patchwork, my biography a succession of actual physical and/or cultural displacements, migration, refuge, adaptation, weirdness. My grandmother was born in a country that doesn't exist anymore, my parents were, I was. Germany just turned twenty. Or two-hundred, but then again, I have no idea either way. I'm living in Kreuzberg now, where nobody is from here, everybody came from somewhere, including patched baggage.
The only time I ever got a glimpse at what that concept 'Germany' might mean (that icing apart from the actual cake, the Grundgesetz) was when I lived abroad back then in 2008. And then I only realised it in the way other people looked at me and told me, that yes, I am German, even if in denial. And in the way the Germans at the Goethe-Institute in Amsterdam explained it to my fellow Dutchmen. I listened to Feridun Zaimoglu talking about GERMAN AMOK, I read Christian Kracht's FASERLAND, I found Schlingensief in a dark room at the De Appel gallery. I even enjoyed the familiarity of their geographies, Heimat. But then again, they looked a lot like Kreuzberg.
So I have an idea after all. Last week I asked for political and cultural asylum again nevertheless. Not that I'm headed for greener pastures (see above). Just pastures. If L.A. has fallen into the ocean by then, I'll be heading out to ARIZONA BAY.

A little death behind the eyes.

I admit I did not make it any further than 20 minutes into the pilot the first time around before I decided that yes, I am a bit bored, so why not leave it for another rainy day. I had been rather reluctant to watch the meticulous re-creation of N.Y.'s advertisement industry in the 60s in the first place. Why the past anyway? What I wanted to see was a meticulous depiction of the ad business in N.Y. in 2010. However, as a fellow pop culturaphil reminded me, it's not about the past and even when it is about the past it's actually about the present. And, you can only ignore such a big chunk of pop culture for so long. So, I sat myself down again and finally caught up on MAD MEN.
Yet, even after having watched it all and the series' fourth season finale this past Sunday, I am still not sure what's actually going on, what the series – and the fuss – is about (except for the obvious meticulous part). For it is not about mad men. The pun doesn't work, or rather it ends where it started: on MADison Avenue. These men are not mad, they are complacent. They aren't jumping from the roofs of downtown skyscrapers (as the title sequence suggests) and land in their office chairs. They had already been sitting there, and have continued to do so for the series' past 4 seasons, albeit in different offices - somewhere in between pantyhose campaigns, in between Lucky Strikes, in between drinks, in between marriages, in between secretaries. Yes, there is nothing wrong with that as a plot – or a philosophy (I have written a 'maximum of pleasure, minimum of bullshit' defense for another cable TV ad man, Brian Kinney – forthcoming in CQN # 3). Only why bother if you don't seem to be having any fun, if you couldn't care less?
And Don Draper, leading man, creative hotshot and womanizer (or so he's called), is not having any. Or maybe he is, but you can't really tell as the series' immersion in everything white straight upper middle class 1960ish also applies to its cinematography: it sticks to the kiss&pan-rule, and no taking off of tights during sex.
When Don Draper is not piling up secretaries, wifes, ex-wifes and children like ties (you just buy one after another, more of the same because you like the pattern and one can never have enough accessories for that matter), he is alternating between trying to stay sober enough (or get drunk enough) to come up with one of his hotshot ideas and indulging in introspective swimming. Not that it gets him any further than feeling a bit sorry for himself, a bit alienated from his womanized women, a bit empty. His favorite line in that case: You don't really know who I am! (Yes, he's not Don Draper, and no, he did not kill Don Draper to become him. It's not that bad.)
I have been watching MAD MEN together with the fifth season of DEXTER these past few Mondays: If you want to see a man with truly alienating secrets, try Dexter. Likewise Don, he has also diagnosed himself with being a bit dead behind the eyes. Unlike Don however, he's no longer too complacent about it - as it dawns on him that it doesn't go together well with having some things in your life that you can actually be bothered about.
Watching Don moping around, I find myself reaching that state of mindless cotton wool complacency, too, interrupted only from time to time by pointless rampages towards the screen: Don, come on! Aren't you living in New York in the Sixties? Isn't Andy Warhol sitting in his factory three blocks down the street, re-writing the history of something. Isn't there a revolution underway? Don, come on! Stop impregnating your secretaries and let's go get screen-tested!
But we know how the story ended, I'm only waiting for Don to catch up, too. Don won't have changed the face of anything, his children did. Those children I yelled at him not to have, my parents' generation - I stand corrected (for that part anyway).

// I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
[...]
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
[...]
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.//
(Sharon Olds: I GO BACK TO MAY 1937)

Men, desks, paper dolls.

A little death behind the eyes: Don Draper (MAD MEN), Brian Kinney (QUEER AS FOLK), Dexter Morgan (DEXTER).

Put the babblin back in binary babblin.

THAT'S HOW WEIRD IT WAS. (I)

2010

Put the binary back in babblin.

Afterthoughts, on what will be and the things that are

not waiting outside
on whom they are not waiting for
on bubble wrap
on the way out
on the effects of baseball bats on art
on the history of brainpicking
on Church Builders
on obituaries
on remnants
on resilience
on the effect of concrete drywalls
on the effect of concrete.

In CINE QUA NON #2, Ana Luisa Valdeira da Silva reviews the 2009 Young Creators Show, organized by the IPJ-Portuguese Institute of Youth and the CPAI-Portuguese Club of Arts and Ideas in Évora and Portel. She asks:


//- Can I get inside one? Yes - // In a giant object that was also intended to be alive, in the work The Way Out is Through by Manuela Pacheco, a selection in the visual arts area. An enormous plastic bag keeps itself inflated through the airflows that enter it. There’s a hole through which you can get in, dressing yourself as a bubble, and inside it a realtime projection of what’s happening outside. We’re inside, cocooned inside the bubble, watching what’s going on outside on a canvas of living plastic. // [...] //- Can I crush it? Yes - That was André Neto’s suggestion when he talked about his work Branco Esterilizado (Sterilized White). And so I did or at least I tried. I step into his structure made of drywall with an edge of about 8.2 feet, pick up a baseball bat that was resting on a corner and hit one of the walls pretty hard. There’s an audible blast which reverberated for quite a few seconds. Lots of sound but the structure, already full of holes, made to represent a sort of an art gallery space, didn’t even suffer a dent. It turns out I didn’t apply enough power to it. Right away, the lady that was supervising the exhibit looked at me with astonishment on her face and said: only the author can destroy it. The young creator wasn’t there neither to allow me to destroy it nor to destroy it himself, there was only me trying to punch a hole through the drywall in front of the Creator, right at the altar of St. Vicente's Church. //

cf. CQN # 2, p. 94ff.

Sunday, February 14, 2010.

// it's Valentine's Day and Christoph Schlingensief is performing, HAU, Berlin, the Berlinale program says he's showing L'INFERNO, commenting on it, he's commenting on it alright, I don't know if he's showing it, he says Ulrich and Erika Gregor wouldn't call that showing a movie, at least not properly or cinephily or, he's fast-forwarding through the opening credits, then rewinding the whole thing, I don't know, is he giving in, he's showing that one frame with the director's name in it, smugly perhaps, here you go, proper and all / he's fast-forwarding again, all the while reviewing what he's not going to show us, then a sudden halt, he's showing a scene now, he's mixing sounds to go with it, then, is he losing faith in the act, he's turning down the volume, he's commenting on it again, or rather, telling an anecdote about some gallery opening in Berlin, only it's not an anecdote, but a lecture, or a parable perhaps, on the state of Berlin's art scene, I'm thinking L'INFERNO alright, he's fast-forwarding again /
first balcony, knees up to my chin, I'm euphoric, he's getting away with it, he came to do what, infuriate, agitate, convince, self-indulge, ask for money for his opera house in Africa, and he does it and he's going to get it, why, because art history and the art market have long decided, yes, we let him get away with it, but well, the audience came in disbelief of it all, smugly too, so he is performing and he's mangling minds and he's getting away with it, the audience is going away with their minds mangled /
I'm sitting in the bleachers, I am sad, there is something so utterly sad about him on stage, he's so done with cancer, he says it, I'm done with you, cancer, I think he always was, even when he was still showing off his X-ray images / he's done with the name-calling, and maybe that's what is so utterly sad, that there is still that fierceness with which he stated, cancer, you are an asshole, I refuse you, but something else is creeping in, something desperate, desperation, he says it, straightforwardly, it's so plain it hurts, he says, I want to be well / I want to be alive
there's no point in being dead, there's no point in being a dead artist /
the next day, I'm talking to Delphine, I'm telling her about the sadness and the desperation, I ask her, what will happen to his art, what does it mean to be a dead artist, a dead performance artist, a dead biographical exorcist, what will be, she asks me, are you of little faith, I shrug, his art, it will be, it is now with him and in spite of him, it will without him
there is consolation in there, somewhere //

Christoph Schlingensief died on Saturday, August 21, 2010.

of the frozen things like fountains in public spaces in june

I am still not done with the color of concrete.

through the bent backed tulips