A Practice of Relinquishment

There is something equally compelling and unnerving about Sophie Calle’s insistence on maintaining what seems to a partially interrupted practice. Her work has often been heavily indebted to input from others, whether this is in specific instructions given to her, such as those written by Paul Auster in his Gotham Handbook, or an address book found in the street that allows Calle to construct a cumulative portrait of a stranger (and more specifically an artwork out of, or as, that process. Wandering around her current exhibition in the Whitechapel gallery, I was trying to think about this kind of relinquishment at the heart of her work – I wondered if it could be said to belong to an admirable selflessness, a generosity of spirit, or something else. Rather than seeing her practice as being partially interrupted, might we call it simply partial? There is often a reliance on people (including the artist of course) being put in-the-service-of – as if contributing a small component of a larger machine – in order to generate unforeseen circumstances, or to force the project into a certain position, of varying degrees of fixity.

One of the pieces I spent most time with concerned a the documentation of a 15-year struggle to find a way out of a project that had already been committed to – one that had started from a series of beautiful black and white images taken by the security camera in a cash machine. A wall was covered with clusters of these images, and an accompanying film was projected in a nearby corner. Moving through various possible ‘escape routes’ – trying to make the focus of the ongoing work the idea of money, making it about faces, about solitude, creative investment, etc. – the project seemed to speak most loudly about both partiality (in the sense of not being in control of everything, or rather of this not being possible or even permitted as an option. Of course, it could be argued that this is a condition for creative work in general, but here it became something else, something more pronounced and excited – as if there were no possibility of Calle being able to impress herself on the material at hand, as if she could gain no ‘purchase’… so to speak) and exhaustion. One wonders how much of a danger, or perhaps how much a feature of Calle’s work this sense of unwieldiness is – if one is always giving up ownership in some way, this is always to promote the risk of not being allowed back into the work. This could very well be Calle’s intention of course – to not be able to find a way into the work except on others’ terms, or in a way that is not pre-determined, could be precisely the generative input she hopes for from her collaborators. By permitting the interventions of others (in another piece Calle follows directives from her astrologer, a trip organised according to the cards…) and colluding with chance in this way, Calle’s practice is a forced engagement with the conditions of fiction, even when the ’source material’ is from the so-called real world.

The main piece on show was based on the dissection of a email received by Calle from a lover – a break up letter that is subjected to various processes by a series of women, for the most part according to their professional field. The letter is criticized, measured, refuted, translated, and so on, by fellow artists, dancers, actresses, singers, translators, criminologists, lawyers, sharpshooters, teenagers, designers, historians, etc. which amounts to an obsessive dissection that was absolutely fascinating. The installation (if that is what it could be called…) presents these ‘interpretations’ on the walls and on videos playing in random sequence. For me, the most interesting response to the task Calle had clearly given to her associates was from another writer. Her text announced that, while her first response had been to pick apart the man’s message (identifying its arrogance, its manipulativeness, etc.), she had, on reflection, chosen to warn Calle of the dangers presented by the group of women she had gathered around her – a coven of witnesses that she described as a “choir of death”. This warning seemed fascinating, both in the context of the rest of the exhibition and in relation to the nature of Calle’s working method in general. Aside from the particulars of this piece, such as the failed relationship, the complexities of gender politics, etc., I wondered if this warning about the risks of allowing others into your practice would hold for other instances – for surely what occurs here is not any straightforward collaboration. What would ‘death’ mean here though – the removal of the ‘artwork’ from Calle’s jurisdiction in some sense? The removal of the letter from her proximity, so that it no longer belongs [to anyone]? There is a form of dispersal at the heart of a practice that relinquishes something of itself – it is an approach to a dismissal of subjectivity that is, at the same time, something of a artificial heightening of that subject. Calle gives up something of her influence, her input, by asking for assistance, guidance, specific instructions from others – yet, somehow, especially in this recent piece, this serves to extract another, rarefied experience of Calle’s activity, Calle’s exercise of choice, and Calle’s claims on what emerges from the entire process.

The video that documented the 15-year search for a project’s conclusion, as well as constituting part of the resolution in itself, featured Calle’s eloquent and sonorous voiceover. The voice traced her various frustrations and false starts as the project went on. This retrospective summation, however, seemed to be too precise, too neatly reflective, to really tackle what was mentioned in the last few moments of the film: making the project be about failure, or the success of failure, or the failure of success. If the video served as Calle’s only available opportunity to reestablish the control needed to finish the work (and indeed to find the right way to present it), I wondered why it seemed that the uncertain status she that had run through the whole story – the hesitations, uncertainties, attempts to project the work onto others, to get them to assume some kind of responsibility for it – seemed absent from the final piece. I suppose that in the process of relinquishing responsibility and then reclaiming it can just as often result in staid, unconvincing work as delicately fashioned confabulations of fact and fiction.

Scaffolding on the Dunes

Gannets in Oxford

For me it’s not often that a musical performance instills a compulsion to write, even less that such a desire might be so clearly tied up with the performance as it is happening, but something about last night’s gig by Gannets got my fingers itching. This is not to say that this would simply be an opportunity to write about  the music, or anything as ostensibly straightforward as that, but rather that the alterations made to the room by that almost over-fertile music seemed to provide a place in which to write, a irresistible site of writing… there was an excess of material to be tapped. Given that it has had to wait until the next morning, I inevitably feel I’ve missed a trick, but still I find myself wondering how the activities of listening (a resolutely physical task in this case) and the act of writing came into such an imploring proximity… what made this music a potential writing machine…?

The cumulative presence conjured by this quintet was of extraordinary power – the intensity with which they filled the room was of a physicality beyond the effects of high volume and extreme dynamics. The group commenced sharply with a barrage of artillery from Noble, as Ward and Cundy began to maneuver their clarinets between shared coordinates of fractured phrases and tongue stops. A low bed of tonal snow came from Dangerfield’s distorted keyboard, punctured by mortar arcs of glissandi and half-loops from Lash’s amplified double bass. From a near-chaotic beginning that threatened not to fuse, the music set about determining itself on a level slightly askew from its opening statements – which is to say that there was a sense that it was only after pummeling the surrounding air with an initial assault – curtain fire, carpet bombing – that it would be possible for textures and frequencies to find angles, troughs and planes into which they could bleed and settle, and from where they could make inroads into new terrain, at different altitudes and on different vectors. As these degrees of overall cohesion took shape there was a sense of an always available ‘recognition’ of different scales and intensities: a bass shot illuminating a squeal from Ward, a flat-hand slap on the keyboard marking out a moments silence (… as if entire weather systems could be intimated from zones of rainfall, delicate thunderclaps instantly sounding out a surround… ). The option to engage in a variety of concurrent modes, always in mixture, set these burgeoning forms in a position to be disassembled, as if the trajectory of the music were always looking for (or demanding) new forms to assume. This was restless music in the sense that there was never any wavering whenever the ‘decision’ emerged to abandon all that had gone before, no matter how arduous and meticulous its set up had been.

Although it was a coincidence that I had seen Turner’s Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth earlier in the day, it was certainly apt to associate the performance with a vortex of sound – clenching planes swelling and swirling in the narrow room, dragging the audience in. It seems trite to say it, but there was an unnerving realisation that what was being produced there and then was interfering with the space in a particularly brutal manner – like Turner’s canvas, the music feigned to rotate the room as you sat before it. If the gravity of the airscrew was undeniable, yet the free arms of the spiral were audible here too: combinations of instruments peeling off, cohering elsewhere, their differences of timbre shielded by the context of their simultaneous production. For every layer there were possible splits, with each player finding space in which to fray and feather the group’s momentum – intense metallic hisses from the hi-hat, frames of white noise, full blooded screeches – all making themselves available for collapse and redistribution.

If anything, it was the lighter moments that were the least successful, perhaps suggesting why they were apparently fewer than usual. Following a charged gap – an improvised apnea – Dangerfield tested out a barbed rhythm, immediately enforced by the ruthless Noble, whose control allowed him to both fix and lever the pattern before allowing his playing to disperse, as if observing its own residue from above. In fact, the figure of combat is not too far off – the tone of a battlefield, including moments of calm aftermath, which Ward and Cundy would punctuate with their own defiant Reveille, in the space left after armies have either departed or fallen. If the room was filled with smoke at the end of it all, it would simply confirm that it had been filled with matter, a smoke of such consistency that it might have assumed the solidity of a base – a phantasmagorical, floating head with expressions passing across it, a face constantly shifting. In any case, it was a reminder as to how powerful and affecting this music can be.

Gannets are: Chris Cundy, Fyfe Dangerfield, Dominic Lash, Steve Noble & Alex Ward

For Later Use

“At the centre, what?”

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance

Michael Haneke 1993

The third film in Haneke’s trilogy – it seems best to respond in fragments also.

❚    Several instances of games/puzzles (from pick-up sticks, a fragmented cross) used as obvious metaphors, not only in relation to the film’s construction, but as a general comment on the accumulation and interpretation of information in contemporary culture. The top surface of presented configurations of what is seen, what is said –distributions of image and text, we might say – are bolstered and sponsored by innumerable underlying complexities. What is being acted out here is the articulation of surface elements – combinations of fragments simultaneously scattered and intercalated into the perimeter of a story – an uncertain centre. If the way the film is cut together, black screens interrupting each sections [same becoming-icon function that Rancière sees in Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma…?], we can recognize a method of juxtaposition and arrangement, but we can also see, in the repetitions and even the departures of framing/POV, a trace of overlapping elements, a strange allusion to shallow depth, etc. There are productive correlations to writing here – the accumulation of fragments, and echoing motifs being transmitted between elements that are in some ways isolated and self-sufficient. The fragmentary structure is used to echo the interruptions seen even in the most intimate of relations, let alone the inexplicable disconnects (systems of asyndeton, anacoluthon, parataxis in image…) between cause and effect, between violence and reason.

❚    In the interview accompanying the film, Haneke says that for him the editing process is joyful, and, perhaps more surprisingly, holds no surprises for him. In a film in which the accumulation of fragments seems to move toward a coherence of disjunction, or a certain kind of timbre to our inefficient and distorting communicative channels, a film that aims to tap a composition that extends beyond its constituent parts, this seemed incredible. Could it be that the editing process was one in which the director was simply instituting his carefully prepared plans, or that he was that convinced as to what would sequences of images would work in relation to their neighbours? Perhaps this is to misread what is meant by ‘surprise’ here – surely there were instances where elements, perhaps those separated from each other by long stretches of the film and the emerging narrative, were shifted from a non-productive presence to a resonance, by way of unforeseen combinations of image, sound, etc.

❚    It is only after the violent climax of the film that a shot appears that in some way departs from the matter of fact presentation of situations – much of the film being made up of a clinical eye watching situations unfold, without ‘comment’.  Yet, after the bank shooting, a man’s torso and arm sweep across the frame, nearly covering its surface except for a wedge of floor at the centre. In this space under the arm a slick of near black blood begins to well and spread, its slow progress relentlessly observed by the unmoving camera. The difference is that, unlike previous fragments, which often involved similarly static shots, there is no ambient sound (of panic, bustle of emergency, even the hum of immediate aftermath…) but complete silence. When, previously, this shot would have been partnered by the uproar of the accompanying ‘surround’ of the image of life ebbing away, it is now left exposed, stripped of distractions, presented purely as image. This could be seen, as a friend commented, too much of a departure, or even too theatrical (mawkish?) a disruption to the tone of the film in general.

❚    There are a number of other compelling scenes made up of lengthy, static camera shots (a recent example in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, was rightly lauded), for example, the sequence where the teenager plays endless repetitive shots against a ping-pong machine, its duration judged by Haneke so that the actions of ‘practice’ begin to move toward something more sinister and obsessive. The scenes with the elderly man, living alone and struggling to maintain relations with his daughter’s family, were particular affecting. Again there are visual examples of the occluded and superficial relations with have with objects, people and information – television screens peek in from the edges of the frame, from behind doorjambs, running their endless, barely audible commentary and partial images under clipped and frustrated conversations. A bisected telephone conversation lasts for several slow, agonizing minutes – routines and emotional games are played out and pressed against the silences of the lonely room on this side of the line, the fragmented discourse taking on a desperate mix of attempted contact and repeated indifference.

❚    After his recent passing, it was slightly odd to see the sequences that had news reports of Michael Jackson protesting his innocence on Austrian TV in the early 90s. As with all of these appropriated sequences of news footage there is always an uncertainty as to their origins – what is reconstructed, what is a straight lift? And what about their specific limits? Sequences can cut off sharply or linger for longer than expected. The delicacy involved in editing and sequencing these fragments, as with the film in general, takes on particularly musical connotations – the composition constantly playing with expectations, durations, tones and rhythms, etc. Strangely, the use of the film footage in Haneke’s film reminded me of another film I saw recently – Harun Farocki’s Videograms of a Revolution (1992), which edited together amateur and professional archive footage of the Romanian Revolution. The grainy images again seemed a world away and unnervingly familiar. No doubt there are connections between Haneke’s insistence that our information age is one that paradoxically does not communicate, and the unrelenting complexity of chaos captured in all these fragments of footage in the wake of Ceausescu flight from the rooftops. Farocki’s assemblage of material, which was absolutely exhausting to watch, was one of the most astonishingly immersive portrayals of real-time confusion I’ve seen. I should point out that I had to watch the film only with German subtitles – it certainly was an odd experience, yet somehow appropriate – to be in a room of people, not knowing what was happening, watching a film that showed a room full of people watching a revolution not knowing what was happening. It constructed an amazing intimacy and distance to those events – a sense that the people in the ‘scenes’ must have shared, being at once party to historic events that are, at the same time, far too large to comprehend. In any case, I think Haneke’s carefully constructed film touches upon a similar sense of dislocation as Farocki’s does.

Pierre & Benny

Benny’s Video

Michael Haneke 1992

I happened to watch this after the Allois film, and it seemed weirdly relevant to the same ideas about the relation of discourse and imagery to crime and violence, etc. Haneke’s disturbing film opens with a sequence of handheld video footage that shows (and repeats) a pig being slaughtered with a pellet gun – footage that is shot, it turns out, by the main character Benny. It becomes clear that the isolated teenager’s existence is surrounded by or mediated through imagery – his darkened room is constantly awash with signals, movies and TV, just as the rest of his parents apartment is covered art prints to the extent that no wall shows through. When Benny is in his room, screens flicker ceaselessly in the background, his phone conversations overlay and overlap news reports of foreign wars; there is a constant mash up of speech and image, feeding into a morass where it is difficult to discern any edges to experience. There is even a live video feed of the view from the window being piped into the dark room, running on a single monitor – the life of the street digested onto a small panel, linked to a board that can switch, edit and manipulate it.

Benny ends up taking a girl he has met outside the video store (herself staring into a hidden screen no less) back to his apartment when his parents are away. They watch the footage of the pig being killed together. Remarks are made about the fakery of violence in movies – within minutes, Benny has taken out the pellet gun used to kill the pig. It is deliberately ambiguous as to how deliberate the act is, but Benny shoots the girl in the midriff. It is only after this shot that the girl falls out of the main shot and the unfolding incident is mirrored / substituted by the recording camera/monitor set up in the room. A horrific aural aftermath then dominates, as two further shots, which eventually generate silence, always take place outside the relaying frame. Benny continues to film the clean up operation he undertakes, which he revisits, begins to edit. After the incident, Benny remains disturbingly impassive – he calmly eats, goes for walks and out with his friends, everything remaining latent, or struggling to make any impression. He shaves his head, yet this too is a gesture that remains neutral, or at least unclear as to its aggressive or recalcitrant charge. Although he comes close, he tells no one about what he has done.

When his parents return, Benny finds a way to make his confession – and this was what I was thinking about in relation to the discourse of Pierre Rivière and its relation to the ‘visibility’ of the crime. Benny, sitting with his parents, switches the feed on his monitor set up to play back the entire murder. His parents both watch the sequence of film, fascinated – Haneke stays with their expressions, as if they mirrored our own, watching these people having to react to what they are being shown. Benny’s discourse and his confession, at least initially, is made through images – but how eloquent is it? Could its strangeness, even its ‘style’ (as if we can correlate Benny’s recording to a kind of written statement), somehow make the crime disappear like Foucault claims in relation to Rivière? What kind of eloquence could be delivered by this fuzzy imagery, the static camera, monochrome peephole confessional? How could it contribute to the distancing of the crime, or fame it in such a way to prepare its effacement? In a strange way, this is exactly what happens – with the revelation that they bear responsibility for what has happened when a minor was left alone, for what they’ve been shown (like their own nightmare TV show, an episode of Family Collapse), the parents begin to devise ways out, clinically going over the options open to them with an odd mix of giggling shock and cold efficiency. Throughout the film few words are spoken, especially in relation to the details of the crime – when his father asks him why he did it, Benny responds, “I wanted to know what it was like…” He has no answer to the follow up question. After the decision is made, Benny and his mother immediately go to Egypt and the father takes on the grim responsibility for clearing the apartment of any evidence. When they return home, it is as if nothing has happened – there is still nothing in the press, there are no witnesses. Benny’s room has been opened to the light, the view from the window now hovering above the dead monitor screen (Benny had found it difficult to sleep during the trip because it was “so light”). Yet an ambiguous guilt persists – perhaps the inability to have continued possession of those images, which won’t not be supplemented by further confessions, further contributions of discourse. Unable to reconcile any exchange between raw and mediated worlds, Benny again lets his videotape to speak for him – he goes to the police and shows them the murder, together with the recording he had surreptitiously made of his parents planning to cover it up.

Pierre & Balthazar

Uhh…. another throwaway bit of writing while I should be busy doing something else… I wanted to draw comparisons between what Deleuze writes concerning disjunctions of image and text (or rather between what is visible and what is articulated), in Allois’ film on Pierre Rivière (particularly the opening scene of the tree image/courtroom sound which is mentioned in an endnote in his book on Foucault. Deleuze also mentions Straubs, Syberberg and Duras – filmmakers I’m going to seek out – as being exemplary in their treatment of this disjunction), and similar concerns raised by Jacques Rancière in the opening essay in The Future of the Image. Like Deleuze, Rancière focuses on the opening sequence of a film – in this case the first sequences of Robert Bresson’s Au hazard Balthazar (1966). Rancière describes how this sequence exposes the play of image operations – what he sees as “relations between a whole and parts, between a visibility and a power of signification and affect associated with it; between expectations and what happens to meet them” (The Future of the Image, 3) – firstly through the juxtaposition of a Schubert sonata with a run of black leader before the titles, then its replacement with the braying of a donkey playing against a n image of a plain exterior wall; or mouths not being visible against words spoken from them – all image functions that subvert and contradict what has been uttered or written through them.

All these elements, for Rancière, are where Bresson stages oppositions and between the various elements and functions of the image, setting up tensions and interruptions, contrasts and separations. The materials in play are not images of a donkey and a groups of characters, nor any deployments of technical modalities, fading and cutting in, dissolve and exchanging between POVs, etc, but the operations that couple and uncouple what is seen and what is spoken, constantly working with and against expectation. This is not a specifically cinematic technique for Rancière – in fact he traces it to developments in the 19th Century novel (especially Flaubert) and a retrained focus on heretofore ‘insignificant’ details or on material that would previously have been considered unsuitable for artistic attention. They both forge and undo meaning in action – the ability to anticipate and frustrate expectation, engaging the components of a composite like a series of differential gears. It is artistic images that produce discrepancy and dissemblance as well as analogy, that “produce forms of alteration in relation to the normal – or consensual – forms of sensible presentation, modes of linkages of events, modes of relations between a sensory given and a meaning.”

Rancière goes on to specify that the image is not exclusive to the visible – “there is visibility that doesn’t amount to an image; there are images which consist wholly in words.” (The Future of the Image, 7) Deleuze and Foucault talk about the webs of relations that stream between what is visible and what is articulated – and the perpetual cracks/hinges between them. Between the visible and the articulable there is no common form, yet at the same time the two spill over into each other, each being insinuated in whatever gaps occur in the battle between them. This is possibly where I can refer to the discourse that features so heavily in Rene Allois’ film I, Pierre Rivière, having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother – that written by Pierre following his capture. Although I’m not so sure about any comparisons to be drawn between the two films – nor between the ‘lead’ figures of Pierre and Balthazar – it’s interesting to have come across these two examples of opening sequences that, for their respective authors, constitute such prime examples of a parade of disjunction between what is seen and what is articulated. Nonetheless, it is worth considering how the production of writing by Pierre – assigned such power by Foucault, might be considered as functioning, through its proximity to image (and what is this? The vivid nature of the young man’s writing, his style, his desperation, the strangeness of the imagery, its clouded relation to the recorded events or the testimony of others?), to reconfigure the frameworks of the visible and the thinkable. Is it possible to think of a writing that can so scramble the formations of thought that it can begin to dismiss even the admissions of guilt and wrongdoing it specifically addresses and admits to. This is a writing that can get you out of anything – not the gift of gab, but something far more potent. As always, I am reminded of Burroughs suggesting that there existed a writing that kill, but what about a writing that redraws the coordinates of meaning, responsibility and societal practice – a writing that is in some way contaminated by image, rendered diagrammatic as a demonic combination of saying and showing.

I just found this – which ties in to something about reenactment I was already thinking about in relation to Allois’ film and Lanzmann’s Shoah (but don’t have time to concentrate on) – one of the directorial assistants on the original film is going back.

Caliben Apparatus

I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister And My Brother

René Allois 1975

I was struck by a series of images when watching this last night, especially considering the way the filmmaker had split them up and repeated them, utilising the same actions and objects through different cinematic techniques. In fact, this is mentioned in passing in Gilles Deleuze’s book on Michel Foucault (Foucault having written at length on the Rivière case), as an example of productive disjunctions between image and text. Deleuze makes reference to the opening shots of a tree embedded in a boundary fence, which is combined with shuffling noises from an adjourning or commencing court session. Deleuze highlights the problems in dealing with the discrepancies between Rivière’s lucid and precise written (and spoken) account of the story and his actions as dramatised by the actors on screen – or, as both Deleuze and Foucault put it, between what is seen and what is articulated. Allois deals with this disjunction in interesting ways – not just in using voice-over, but repetitions of action – for example when Pierre is seen writing in his prison cell, his voice-over recounting that he was disturbed in his previous attempts to write out his experiences, he jumps up from his chair, sure that someone is behind him. The film immediately cuts to the ‘original’ version of that gesture, Pierre writing at a desk in the attic as his sister sneaks up behind him,  his renewed (and recounted) startled jump and turn – an action efficiently doubled, even emanating from the same area of the frame. Allois also inserts still images, both from his own film and historical drawings, engravings and images from painting. Beyond these techniques, there is also an intereting correlation to reenactment, as the farmers are played by farmers, peasants are played by peasants, the only professional actors playing ‘outsider’ characters, in order to preserve the genuine discrepancies between two broad sensibilities and assumptions, which may or may not be upheld. In fact the whole film rests on this multi-faceted positioning, always showing a few slants on the same incidents, feeding in the context of an individual voice, a different physical or imagined perspective.

In nay case, I was struck by the references in Pierre’s extraordinary written confession/explanation/description – a discourse that Foucault views as so extraordinary as to make the crime disappear – to a machine he had constructed for killing birds. I wondered whether it would be productive to think about this structure as an apparatus – if, the apparatus would be, as Giorgio Agamben describes it, “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings,” Pierre’s invention of new implements signals a desire to manufacture situations and to capture them – a device for controlling something he cannot control. Yet, this makes one wonder about the gesture of burying the apparatus – to preserve it, to keep it safe, as if this might imply a kind of deferral or abandonment of control. An exhumed apparatus, perhaps aged,

I also wondered about such an implement’s relation to writing – the isolation of objects through a process of naming; its killing capacity and its torturous look… it made  me think of Kafka’s apparatus, the Calipen (oh… pen? calipers?) including components named ‘Bed’, ‘Designer’ and ‘Harrow’.

The Thomas Telford Quartet – 14/07/09

Unruly Choir

Cobra Verde

Werner Herzog 1987

I watched this quite a while ago now, but didn’t manage to follow up on my desire to write something about this particular sequence. Another go, this time from memory. Towards the end of the film a ‘nun’s choir’ come into the walled section of the fort from which Francisco Manoel da Silva (Kinski) is running his slave trade outpost. The dozen or so young girls, framed at the back by a few male singers and percussionists, form a mass just ahead of the archway, pressing into the image in a lateral way, spreading out like a surface, as if reluctant to step into the full light of the courtyard. Da Silva has just walked through a group of male slaves, clinically grabbing heads and checking teeth (a horrible stocktake) and the emergence of this group of musicians and dancers is absolutely transformative – especially to Kinski. For one thing, the way the group comes up to the camera, and in particular the affecting, somehow invulnerable manner of the young woman who seems to lead the performance, seems to grow in the scene like an unstoppable contagion.

The main singer – who is undoubtedly the focal pull of the group, and who, every now and then, winds up the formation of figures with a muscular twirl, as if resetting the torsion that they are working on the film/image – and the surrounding women, address the camera straight on, smiling and winking wryly – looking through everything, all equipment and apparatus. There is no clear indication that we have assumed a character perspective, that we have cut to inhabit Kinski’s viewpoint, but this remains poised and uncertain. For then, Kinski breaks out from the frame edge and infiltrates the choir. There is something additional in this gesture I think – it’s like both Kinski and da Silva splits from themselves, drifting like a pale, and now benevolent apparition in the midst of the intense mass of the choir. Something that steps outside of the film here – not simply a breaking of the fourth wall or the consistency of characterisation – or at least there is nothing so upfront about its lack of containment, so to speak. Yet that’s what it seems to be at work here – this sequence, however instigated by Herzog, whether it became found its way into the film by design, accident, etc. it ends up blossoming unchecked in the material of the story, and the matter of the image. It overloads the narrative and historical setting, breeding over the ‘location’ like a fungus. It refuses to be assimilated on anything but its own terms – those of a singular performance, tied to an index of event that cannot be utilised in the generation of sustainable fictions. I’m tempted to say that it becomes extraneous, but this is not to be thought in the sense of any superficiality or as anything reductively ornamental. It is rather that it becomes a figure of brutal authenticity and, more importantly, materiality. This reference to materiality is echoed in what Gilles Deleuze says about what he considers Herzog’s emphasis on the materiality of images, producing a physical presence of the image that in this case could be linked both to a people’s nobility and vulnerability – a performance of disjunction that seems to protrude from the surface of the film, to come out and dismiss its construction through an integrated (paradoxical) display of porosity and imperviousness.

Fairchild One

Instances of Raymond Cathode Fields

The fir frosted with new growth. Trees crowded around a single spot, framed in the window. There for the seeing, for the bedridden, for the unmoveable and slaked of throat, each moving and taking possession of faltered rhythm, close-eyed dreaming, colours pawing in sun draft. Wood pigeons whoop, for everything hidden in their hearts. So often not my view. A mornings of others – after the slam of curtain edges, are held open with cross-nailed arms, helpless in the first announcement of light in the room. The feet stacked, slightly slanted on each other, as caught fish, married slugs, the funny clown-like Christ that flitters and jerks in the dreaming mind. How welcome he would be. Such a nervous alignment of the feet. The head is swung out to the side, the jaw-line slipping down perpendicular to the joists of the underarm. They sit without announcement, pressing slightly into a rafter of sunlight. A few branches have thicken in the midst of the canopy – an inverted bottle, a green of a lichen brewery. Sky utterly blurred, decapitated conifers. And, smothered in vine, a panicked linden – then a sudden allowance of motes as the silver picks up, sound creeps in there, before shadows then scowl from each of their depths. The shadows flee, hidden in countless indentations. Nothing moving but for one tendril, a lock of blond, curling desperately. Notice the dust on the flattened surfaces. Mark that hang of the roof…

Must isolate men in suits. Shoot in the back. Buzz words, not enough of a ream of consciousness. Not enough prudence, the financial year. Mean meat cuts, continuing after you have left. Supermarket fission. Continuity of pain. Blood sample. They put a sponge in her nostril, this is the oxygen. She said she hadn’t lain that way for close on two years. Colour arrangements of boredom. Small print. The blood cold immediately on the extant, it’s an effective sweat. The changing of sample cartridges, magazines – the port open like a wound. Acronym confluence. Acrono-pier, what is this code but a simple extension of exits, thought providing an entrance to itself. On to the touch, the spring cleaning. Aggravated assault and a soundless way with him. My marked-up method, come on, crack back into my head. Wake up. Those lost ways. Cybernetic, hapless. Down to a gap of an inch.

The disparity hits occasionally, light being dragged forcibly out of its position amid these chemicals. No references. Sky dirty on the way down here, but the hilltop emerged as if dipped in clean ivory coating. Feeling the standing weight on hidden granite beds, untimely grains perspiring to the surface – the imperfect approach of words.

Overlooking the incline, mists follow the threads of the waterways. Rivers or perhaps canals. An uncertain hour sees the slope rising up towards a side of sky, just beginning the fade into silhouette. That river wound out and away, over hillocks, glass impressions. Fault lines etch light in bands. Soft ground underfoot. The preview of words comes slowly – a team roped together, moving constantly from slack to taut. What do you call the dead water on the port side of the sea wall? Equipment set up at base – boxes, wooden and lacquered black. Some ornamented by the Japanese. Dug into the slope, out of the wind, a flattened wedge cut into the promontory. The machine gun post forms a crick in the grass. Across the valley is the other station, ready to transmit. Line up the coherer and decoherer, moisten the sensitive state. A dream returns all of a sudden – glass-encased metal coils. Lodged in 1894 amid slow diagrams and figures. Dusting for air prints.

A sudden image of the children’s graveyard near to the outskirts of the hospital grounds – positioned at the very corner of farmland, a tiny segment isolated in a wheat field. We have high input levels, and we can feed back around. Another image of the burned man, tea-coloured, who was bound to his chair on the corner in the Old Town, his skin approaching madness. A lack of defining moments; impaled meat cuts. A card stamped as anonymous, here we go, smell the flowers bricked in. Working in the fields in lonely moistures, wanting to sit still and ask. No emblem of sweat, but of liquid ebbing languidly between him and the world. Nothing is admitted to the air. Screened off. Living in dark times, a slight swing of the light bulb there, some kind of disturbance, who knows what, some kind of seismic activity. The sunlight yellowing the saggy net curtains, then an itchy movement in the trees, psoriatic snatches. Life flakes off at this speed. Darkened time, and it’s all a question of what? Of what you might intend. Where your loyalties lie. A prepared shirt pocket always sopping, like a dumb kid’s bottom lip. This clothing has thinned into a type of skin – I want to know about you, just have far have you come with this aimlessness? There is a purity at which you don’t know how to point. Are you agreeing with me? I’m following the conversation with string, why not more? At the tip of its end. Ending tips. A weave of pathways scratches the the mountainous roof. Lines set hard into the ice flats, rolled by diamond wheels as tracery notation, pass between peaks, passes. Hugging the ground all of a sudden. Rain is always upset when it is interrupted. When it hangs off you, when it cries from branches, those are such tears.

Rivers slowly talking to mud, the mixture forming glass sheets, then, having lifted out of light, beginning to rise over cities (I claim fear in filling the mouth with water, then air), the sky cracking, the stampede just one disjointed beat away, a useless mess of people, bunched up and snapping, rolling ribs. What have you done? Have you spoken out? Did you take to the streets when they remained dry, did you join? A wooden spoon rattled on the base of a cook pot. This is how anti- you are. But we see that nothing, that nothing works. Get the loaded vantage, the high jacket. Take the shot, but that is not what is key here. It’s easy to misplace something so fugitive as faith.

“You got the wrong guy.”

So why are you called that? Such a question. No other names, just that single moniker – are you filled with the blood of the lamb? Are you just, innocent? Call out your name before your name. Both pure and clean, beautiful boys, that feeling came in the face of everything, that there was nothing wrong with the body. Encouraged by a childhood chant, a divine providence amidst a crushingly atheistic household… how come you think I can do that? – “because you’re Fairchild” – no need for further explanation, no statement of qualification…before, after a while I began to get sidetracked by that statement, horrified at the idea, absolute immovability of it, the sudden pointlessness. As I would look at my own body, very pale skinned and thin breasted, dotted with pale moles, the stringy flat stomach of adolescence, and it was clear that there was nothing wrong. As if it had been whispered to me in dreams, or given to me in confidence before I was formed. Something I had woken up with inside my head.

“The cages and car park cells bulge beneath the streets.”

Fairchild ties his hands together. His right thumbnail has grown long and has a lopsided curve than reminds him of his mouth – in photographs he sees it and sometimes can hardly credit it, his jaw offset a few degrees, the centre of the lip skewed slightly, and he feels like he is peeling, the skin loose , cooked, never able to fit against the skull as it might, and again, his small teeth that are like those of a child – always been frightened by that in the smiles of others, the large area of gum that frames the row of teeth that are small like sardine bones – those spinal tubes that such at the slightest touch, in patterns made with chalk powder sprinkling through rubbed thumb and forefinger. If the smile is broad and the top lip slips upwards, the hard flesh seems horribly exposed, the fierceness of the skull right there just a fraction of a millimetre from the surface, lubricated with thin spit, skin-covered china, the flesh smothering out any trace of enamel, and it feels wet and hot and claustrophobic, no escape at all.

All the rest he bites

Such a
Closest thing to policy
No separations
That nonetheless could be subsumed in the
Act of personality
Inclusivity of rigour
What does control give you here?
Clean agent
Works in pot A and pot B
If you have one to piss in
A set of responses
Driven from the outside also
Perhaps more so
The mechanism itself
Put off as a delay
We’ll grind them up
In the open field
Under the poetic text
The leper text
Applied to all operations
Ever so piecemeal
Failed in desire
And this building
Coded call
And this dream tick
More on the level
Buried in space mass
Filled land
trained economics
Connections
Absorptions
I do it too
Desperate over it
Barely function
On this range of allowances
What is given an IN
And supplied with no possible EXIT
Or do we show the filter?
Yes I take a history listing
And present the primary
I mean OF COURSE

Heightened batteries
Over the network
Echo this
Print the heart size, if it keeps still
Need to create a bedding field
A seed array
To be called up
Displayed to favour
This obsession with slicing things up
It is more a feeling for everything as
Enough dissatisfaction
to partake of all things
Partial
Callous
No stance
Moral forests
Burn the desert cities
Weapons grade
Reconstruct
Slump into ice blue scars
And start to bring the numbers up
Rushing as shoals
Pulled out from the streets
Laughing cavalier
Petrochemical
Mud-tongue
The ocean slipped inland
Mountain boats

This level of exclusion is no accident
Bring it all together
As writing murdered by its own movements
Skin split phimosis of spirit – cowardly notions in time of war
Open or underhand, but instead
Underhand AND paraded, over a core course of quicksilver
That describes a tumbling desperation
The space before the onset of panic
Which is defined as
Pre-
But it is the eternal shadow
Of the orgasm
An endless plane
Just missed
Over the slick edge

He tries his hand at writing. Begins to read out the previous days takings.

“What say Fairchild? Well, I say garump, then I flicks my fingernails against one another, chirping a beautiful sound, like picks in a quarry, those insect mouths, the mandibles that you wouldn’t credit. A stiff cuff and collar this morning – in preparation for the off – and what a fit of suit, for I always thinks this sort of arrangement doesn’t hang right, these fat baggy liquid palms hung like drying fish out at the links. Digits puffy, giving me away to these surrounding eyes as something mis-placed, something out of a certain element, yes, shrinking in the sun, stumped with maggots. Unfit. Though then who knows, they might view me as someone key – this pretty woman now sitting with her legs bound up in a skirt like a bandage, crossed too, tangled at the knee, over those faun-coloured cushions of the lobby seats, her cell phone disgraced at her ear, buzzing and popping that same fingernail sonar, she – well – she often might look me up and down or, as it may be, from side to side, I spot a line of ink at her palm’s beginning, her pen has broken, having given in to her lean, and she guffaws gently, pressing that hot plastic to her cheek, a little feedback from the leaking valve, past all consequence now. That’s how you came out, that’s right, she was talking from birth, asking for all things needed, at feeding and all other times. I might lay heres a while, or then follow her to her room, not to like her light… what am I saying, I wanted to name her then. I called her for a moment, made her mine. Now she rises up, the knees slipping out of their chain lock, still awkwardly knocking against each other like bent keys, and she disappears into the restaurant. So, but then, back to the moment, the aim, where we aim before we forced the sight – I am dressed correct, though I am stiff amongst it, the starch crowds the skin even from the distance of one size out, or some approximation thereof, for we are sure that this is not how it fits, I have seen the images, and the square-jaws, that sidle down the corridor to the carpeted gymnasium, all those glossy shows, and surely this is not that same configuration, this is not that perfect concern. The tie runs up to the throat like a murderous rat, up a drain, yes, where the game is to time its whack on the skull as it makes a break, feel its give, one dollar a shot, the half-remembered Windsor clump an addendum organ knotted there, swinging like a dirty words outside the larynx, clasped and ready, though not quite enough to be out and spoken. A tied tongue, needing to be scissored; these thoughts flush quickly, a bubble of ultraviolet, paused for the moment when I let him know that, indeed I am on to him, I recognise his schemes, his systems are not hidden but in their true purpose and I am here to tell, in no uncertainty, that I know precisely where he is, from where he starts, each day and so on – all this to happen in the marble bathroom where I will approach him perfectly timed. But the knot certainly grafts against the throat. No minute of peace is given. A late bloom, stunted and having to emerge forceful, the messy stress of the lower jaw amongst it all. The lobby is quiet, some strange sort of hour in which codes are exchanged amongst the workers, yes, the calm before the storm as it might be, that fat-faced concierge, the one who has bought my glance more than a few times, I wonder how he regards these pleasantly quiet moments, when the last remaining drinkers are in the bar, soon to wander back into the lift boxes to disappear into the rooms. He watches me for another moment, his eyes pressed up into his low brow, giving me an uncertain eye to be sure, maybe to carry me out… his lips are coloured strangely, like he was drunk on wine, but perhaps it is explained away by the amount of time he spends licking them with that circular sweep of an otherwise colourless tongue, all his blood having slunk away somewhere into the far circuits of his face, sure enough to get away from his words, his no doubt reedy voice, his tangle of nothingness only… when some prior insistence, ah… some such. But the whiteness of these cuffs disturbs me, the stability of their ringed contours too, and I do not like its hold. Though it is the suit that hides me, I must keep that fresh. It is so distant from me that I am sufficiently buried – Giacometti, I said at the mirror, but the room was silent almost too soon after I closed my mouth, so I decided not to speak out loud to myself again. Soon it will be smoke and fire… what I mean is, the slur of slow sound is like smoke at the moment, but soon it will be fire. Soon it will explode into meaning, from wet heat into dry purpose. It is the parade of following a route, a spring sprung, the logic of my actions, and damn it I am tired and perhaps not as efficiently as I had in my run through, the cleanliness of which was indisputable, the silence of door fittings, the perfect approach, the perfect attack, every response and gut reaction predicted and seen before it occurred, never lost for one moment, always ahead of the game, every sound known and planned, every incident(al) thing catered for. Yes don’t doubt it. Nothing is going to reproach me. Though I am tired without the perfect – but I want to pass the moments thinking about my clothes, my first suit of this kind, and it presses on sections of my limbs that I had not predicted and I suppose it is throwing me a little, the need for a dress rehearsal was not quite in my mind, but the thing is the correct get up for the event, I must be in no further confusion. A coil of thread like a cobra on my sleeve, how it raises its diamond head like that I shall not understand, but picking it off and tumbling it between thumb and finger I drop it to the carpet – an asteroid into lava, such is the confused spit of it. The material stiffens under the fingertips too, it seems, nothing to comfort me, it presses a horseshoe of cotton onto the back of my hand. The pleat confers to confuse my shins, my knees perhaps have forgotten how exactly to configure the walking stance, the upshot, my take off will be compromised, my timing will be astray… but the neck hole is not a problem and how is this, how it is, don’t know how my neck has provided for itself, as it seems to be in the most comfort here, I swill slightly from each side, and nothing doing, the wired disturbance only running down from there… no matter. What you might call a chalk stripe, outlining my lined or depth, contoured stretched out equidistant down the sleeves and across the back. Dull map of seabeds… they have a plant here in this lobby, a bonsai, yet enormous, stunted an yet oversized – coiled nightmare mania about to explode out destroying relative scale and emitting confusion (I feel the strain on my face) between one range and another, and in reach of neither. A strange thing, no mistake. Where is the commotion that was expected? The look from the concierge seems to have altered some, he gazes now with an expert lean, perhaps his professionalism rears it ugly head. Watch me in this armour suit, my cardboard cut-out, like billiard baize that zips up my intent, but I have a fucking appointment concierge, don‘t doubt that. He writes at that desk as if trying to keep his inner wrist as close to his waist as physically possible, all the while craning his neck in little juts, light glinting in grass blades of stiffened hair. What kind of thing is happening here? I am waiting here, simply being in the appropriate place, appropriately dressed, no awkwardness should be apparent, though there are suspicions being aroused, something is moving, there is trouble afoot, I sense it, something about me is suspicious, something does not fit and will scupper all. I turn around, rather too flamboyantly, capsize one of these leather loafers (fit for apes and case-carrying lackeys, mill slaves) under itself and nearly snap my leg tendons out from behind the shin bone – Jesus’ pain! – I retake the armchair, run the finger pads over that strangely curving bone, feel its coarse rub and wonder what is happening to my skeleton here and now in the lobby, its pustules or marrow and scrapings of future old age pain feeling like a dreadful texture beneath the trousers. Now gazing out into the street, these chairs set up in tandem so they were, back to back, one fairly set against the elevator doors (the one all my bargaining has been for, the perfect view, from which to begin the task, from where to strike, in full view, my position) the other left stupidly gazing into the bleached street like an old fellow at the widow, gazing and thinking. Of course I am out of position now, I am at fault all of a sudden, lost at sea and cut off, no reference from which to begin my thinking. I lack the bell the arrival to set all things in pattern. I must resume my disguise with more fluidity, I must trust its appearance, that from inside seems so stiff and unnatural – this is the apparel that these people require, I am perfectly correct, I am in place, thinking along the same lines, I belong. There must be something that I can try, some diversionary tactic that I might use to explain my movements, if there need be an explanation, the concierge eyes me still, I feel his eyes in the back panel of this suit. He might have watched me throw the muscle out of my lower leg in that injury out of nothing, watched me scream blue blood murder and grasping my calf in horror, rolling around the foyer like some usual demonic tycoon. I wonder if indeed that could be what he considers me, a super rich, for its difficult to tell just how I am appraised, there is nothing against which to judge, no reference points. Perhaps he views me as some wastrel worker, waiting down here for the arrival of a lunch date, a business patter gone wrong and needing to be repaired, something to do with conferences and tables, neatly stacked, plastic glasses and the rumour of drink. But I forget the plainest thing in my favour, obsessing as I am about the suit and the invisibility it affords me, in this laminated plastic label that hangs from the chest pocket, attached though with a metal clip, expertly articulated as some miniature crane, with the letters and codes that allow me to be welcomed here no matter what. This is my passport to this world, this is my cover, not the suit, this, as well as my unshakable calm under this certain pressure. This is the identity spoken here. It states my business, even implies my chosen pleasures, it defines me in a glance, for all, not just the concierge, during these particular weeks here and now, this is all the security that I could possibly want. There is nothing to worry about. Nothing to fear. I am on track, on schedule. Now if I can just as naturally as I am massaging the ID card, move around back onto the original chair, facing the appropriate way then all will be back perfectly to its prearranged order. We can begin again. How to manufacture such a delicate operation, moving from one vantage to another, with what possible reason could one give if asked for the inexplicable motion from the one chair to another. I will have it by the time the operation is complete, for really why would one have to give his explanation for all the slightest movements he made across space and time, from chair to chair, even the position of his limbs and thoughts, there are no private motions there these days it would seem. The fabric of the trousers seems to have an ability to attach itself to my knees as I rise up and begin to move across the carpet, which is a sensation that I neither like or dislike, it might be caught on some other rough bone that I had not known I had grown, some other nodule of future pain that lies in wait. But in mid-flight, checking my progress was not being viewed and recorded and checked against possible reasoning held in the hotel stores for men moving and fidgeting for no apparent reason, the desk is empty and the concierge has up and gone, perhaps to ask the management to come and discuss my movements, perhaps even the one that I am in the midst of right now, perhaps that are onto my larger plan, my grander scheme that involves some tens of thousands of such movements, perhaps he is on the telephone in the back room, I imagine there is such a back room, full of safe deposits, keys, I do not know, toilet rolls and towels, where he is reporting my motions to the press, even to the police news. Police news? What is this? And here I am still climbing towards a reasonable statement to give if I am apprehended about my curious movements, bouncing from one chair to the next, that I have not been totally on top of the current situation, I am not quite ‘up to speed’, you see. But the absence of the concierge is a greater concern than my reasons for moving around so haphazardly, I must maintain this trajectory and regain my starting position and then begin to figure out –

“Excuse me, sir…”
The concierge, cowering in between scales like a polite freak, his hands bent in curious ways.
“Excuse me, sir, but you flies are undone…”
Speak, FAIRCHILD:
“Gah yerrss, was a little cold around there…”
“I’m sorry?”
“Salittle, little too near the door. I found it colder.”
“Right. You are, ahem, err, flying low sir…”
“Whattz at? Low lying? Nothing of that sort…”
“Sir, I mean that your trousers are unfastened.”
“…Gah, chalk line… gah, yessir, yes, I see that you mean well. Y’appreciate that.”
“You are most welcome, sir.
“Gah…”
“Are you not going to refast-… right you are sir.”

But for all the world. Nothing approaches this in the annals of old. He slinks back to his wooden veneered den, his pen station, his command booth, and I complete the movement down and across, slinking into the open cup of the chair facing inward. Back in position. Rise up gently on my buttocks, pursing them slightly, pushing out the pelvis in order to safely grab the small metal clasp and pull my trousers closed. Of all the sensations I was feeling about this attire, the itchiness and the ill fitting shapes and hangs, I did not notice the yawning hole at the front, most visible to all passers by and casual glancers, no indication of wind being allowed in, no turbine cooler. Somewhat wider than a chalk line. In any case I believe his suspicions have shifted, perhaps now he considers me something of a strange fruit, at worst some sort of lowly sex perversion that might pull out his extremities and do some dance with them in tow, but that is an acceptable risk at the present time, he can be allowed that misconception. I have a job to do here and now, which on review, could look bad, could look extremely as if I were some twisted person seeking kicks, but the seriousness of my engagement is something that keeps my mind centred. I must keep the task in hand, the play in mind. Offence and defence, pulling that move through all known calls and commands, the combinations of motions. I glance at the wall clock, it is about the right time, it is surely near that the required substance will seep into these seconds and minutes, will charge them with an electricity of purpose and meaning, will power up my spine and spirit in a conflagration of energies. I await his person and run over his demeanour in the mind – his plaited pattern suit, sharply cut but somehow still not quite fitting his person, so strangely shaped is he nowadays, in these years he has fattened and become an odd mock up of what the young executive might turn into if it was left to police artists to predict in their identikit worlds, but a life spent in this profession, as it was and has been reaching to the top, much like to the penthouse of these very city structures, in the belly of which I find myself now, awaiting like Jonah for a sliver of light, keeping in my mind the blowhole, to blow! Escape routes, tearing out of the entrails of this city, nothing will keep me still, I will force through tissues and fleshes, districts and brick, run run… to the top, as owner of conglomerates, the maker of hidden invisible deals with the very patterns and habits of life, extreme power ruled by numbers, numbers commanded by other numbers, ways of life, countries raided, the bands of black beneath the seas, oceans, under great rock flats, seams of wealth affords him these rooms in this city, the strange hold even of his suit, its crumpled clasp around his waist as if he slept in a small tight chair for a few moments, perhaps entreating some demon of his that keeps him moving keeps him acquiring, earning, to let him sleep a little, let him curl against the back of the chair with slightly wet hands clasped together, under his body, like prayer sticks, signal fans, looking for warmth and the trapped security beneath his body weight, let him sleep for a few minutes before he goes out of the door, flanked by whomever run along for the ride, his business case now swinging like an extension of his will, his attaché, his middle man, clasped at the wrist with a pair of Los Angeles handcuff that he was given as some silent and deal clinching gift some years ago. Magnate magnet. I am stalking Mr Magnet. And he will fall under my plan. Difficult to track down in normal circles, difficult to know where exactly these things will come together, but come together they must for it all is essential to the ongoing. He is above now, early morning, readying to exit just like I have said, readying to press DOWN buttons and to fall into my arms on the bell. Such is my hunger to see him here never be warm. How will everything move out from here and this point forward? Here he comes then, out of his frame, his movements don’t come close to the magazine shots, the video shakes that I have seen so far. But he is fuller here in person, at this distance, his head clipped by the light from the elevator, a cold light, out from that capsule down onto this planet and its thankfully breathable atmosphere, lest he gets loose his ventilator and stalks and takes specimens, finds the minerals to source, to drain planets and moons yessir, he is certainly different here, a grey tinge, perhaps blue, in the fabric of his finery, an incomplete feeling, as if I had only seen the image of him in flat, now I turn him over. He spins free out there, moving and unsafe, I can still do this. A tie that looks like a wound down his sternum.”

Distributed Dictate(s)

A free download of the performance of Representations 9 at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival can be found here.

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28th April 2008

Il Conformista

Bernardo Bertolucci 1970

Though it seems to be incidental, one of the images that sticks in the mind in this film was Raoul, a relatively minor character, having walnuts covering every surface in his home. He walked and talked, nutcracker in hand, as space was gradually freed up with every snack. It seemed a kind of loosening, of surfaces, of architecture – the thickest of dusts – or some way of measuring behaviour, tracing where one has been. This remained (suitably) unexplained in the film – contributing nothing, it just was, which was something that the set design and art direction was arguably guilty of generally, with many over-the-top (though beautiful) sequences, such as the shots of patients scattered over the grand steps of the insane asylum, like white oracles spread over the tiers of a shallow amphitheatre overlooking the bay. Marcello Clerici, the central character of the film (played by Trintignant), in his desire to conform – which would seem to be consonant with a desire to disappear – takes his assimilation of the prevalent ‘norms’ of society to the extreme of joining a covert government organisation, working to seek out dissidents. Clerici’s desire to become anonymous is interesting for many reasons, not least in the way it is portrayed on film – not only as a critique of the origins and nature of Italian Fascism, but also in the way that the character is seen to become an agent of passivity and inaction. Clerici’s mania for his absorption into the mass, whether it be into the prevailing political system, or the anonymities of domestic life, seems a complex mixture of a violent desire to belong and a terrible blankness. This is obviously connected to the formative trauma in his childhood (where he appears to kill a chauffeur who tries to seduce him) and contributes to his intended withdrawal. One of the interesting sequences was the confession he takes with the priest in preparation for his marriage to a middle-class girl. After questioning him about past sins, which include the volunteered murder of the pederast, the priest asks him about his new bride. Marcello’s reaction, his articulation of blankness and his approach to it, is oddly compelling. Condemning with faint praise, Clerici’s description of his future wife as desperately ordinary, of average intellect and lacking any emotional maturity, he somehow relishes an implied description and delineation of the space she provides for him to dissolve into. He admits that the ‘average’ or ‘normal’ life is what he seeks – “painfully” – as if slipping from an ill-fitting garment in order to dissolve his body entirely – to change the nature of the shadow he casts. This desire to blankness is rooted in uncertainty. Tormented by suppressed memories, and uncertainties about his own desire, Clerici seems eager to disappear into whatever vacancy can be created, and the most readily available, the easiest (no matter what the consequence) is the anonymity of a superficial, sedentary life. Clerici’s movement into blankness and vacancy – an empty space slowly being filled by the prevailing prejudices of the society of the time – is a kind of recession that resonates with other forms of withdrawal, such as Melville’s Bartleby. Yet the vacuum at the heart of Clerici is a passivity borne out of a converse desire – rather than any non preferred act of passive resistance or contamination, Clerici’s disappearance stems from an excess acquiescence, that of going along with anything in order to become inconspicuous, to belong so effectively as to be unnoticed. Clerici’s movement toward dissolution is based in desire and will (based in excess – excess of the average), even if it is the willing denunciation of will. As a result of his own isolation, Clerici’s obsessive pursuit of the mediocre naturally leads him into the heart Fascist regime, yet still he cannot really accomplish anything, lacking the commitment to any cause. The task he has been given (to assassinate his former professor) is eventually taken away from him – the gang of men kill them as he sits impassively in the back of the car, simply remaining in his seat watching it unfold. It is as if Clerici had finally shrunk back beyond himself, as if in a dream, or lost to an out of body experience. His incapacity has overtaken him, and his conforming makes him a passive voyeur, forced to stand by as the figure of difference, the possibility of another life (Sandra) wordless screams at the window. Clerici’s withdrawal into passivity, as he is wrapped up in his overcoat, huddled in the back seat, seems particularly horrific – the anti-Bartleby.

It also seems that his attempts to dismiss or misdirect focus, to avoid attention, only brings it upon him – even the desperate horror pressed against a car window (a screen that is a blockade) – and that he can’t fail but be engaged, to have demands put upon on him, which leads to his ultimate inaction – the scribe who has stopped writing yet watches his task get completed nonetheless. In another two sequences there are other images of Clerici’s contraction. In the first, set in the dance hall, Clerici is caught by the Polonaise that had briefly exited the room – the spiraling dance snares him like an insect in the centre of its vortex, as if he were the blank singularity at the centre of a black hole.

Another beautifully shot sequence alludes more directly to Clerici’s dissipation. He is talking to his former professor in the Paris office. With the blinds closed and sunlight concentrated in deep chiaroscuro, the characters (discussing Plato’s allegory of the cave) cast strong shadows onto the walls. When the blinds are suddenly opened again, Clerici’s silhouette, clearly marked on the plain surface, is suddenly erased – the disappearance of an ideal form, or an illusion, or of all preferences and presence and the opening up of potentiality.

Gen. Neu. Dis. N.

s. k. u. r. r. i. l. s. t. e. e. r.

Terriers Sulk
Terrier Sulks
Resister Lurk
Terries Lurks
Retires Lurks
Retries Lurks
Kilters Surer
Strikers Lure
Strikers Rule
Striker Rules
Striker Lures
Skier Rustler
Strikes Ruler
Strike Rulers
Trikes Rulers
Slurries Trek
Surlier Treks
Reek Stir Slur
Leer Irk Truss
Leer Irk Rusts
Leer Risk Rust
Leer Risk Ruts
Leer Irks Rust
Leer Irks Ruts
Leer Risks Rut
Leer Stir Rusk
Reel Irk Truss
Reel Irk Rusts
Reel Risk Rust
Reel Risk Ruts
Reel Irks Rust
Reel Irks Ruts
Reel Risks Rut
Reel Stir Rusk
Reels Irk Rust
Reels Irk Ruts
Reels Risk Rut
Reels Irks Rut
Leers Irk Rust
Leers Irk Ruts
Leers Risk Rut
Leers Irks Rut
Lesser Irk Rut
Ere Skirt Slur
Ere Stirs Lurk
Ere Stir Lurks
Serer Ilk Rust
Serer Ilk Ruts
Serer Silk Rut
Serer Ilks Rut
Serer Irk Lust
Serer Irk Slut
Serer Kit Slur
Serer Lit Rusk
Serer Its Lurk
Serer Tis Lurk
Serer Sit Lurk
Serer Ti Lurks
Serer It Lurks
Terser I Lurks
Terser Is Lurk
Seer Stir Lurk
Sere Stir Lurk
Ester Irk Slur
Ester Sir Lurk
Terse Irk Slur
Terse Sir Lurk
Trees Irk Slur
Trees Sir Lurk
Steer Irk Slur
Steer Sir Lurk
Reset Irk Slur
Reset Sir Lurk
Tree Irk Slurs
Tree Risk Slur
Tree Irks Slur
Tree Sir Lurks
Tree Sirs Lurk
Like Err Truss
Like Err Rusts
Like Errs Rust
Like Errs Ruts
Liker Re Truss
Liker Re Rusts
Liker Res Rust
Liker Res Ruts
Kilters Err Us
Kilter Errs Us
Likes Err Rust
Likes Err Ruts
Likes Errs Rut
Skier Err Lust
Skier Err Slut
Strike Re Slur
Trikes Re Slur
Trike Re Slurs
Trike Res Slur
Kites Err Slur
Tikes Err Slur
Kite Err Slurs
Kite Errs Slur
Tike Err Slurs
Tike Errs Slur
Lire Err Tusks
Lire Errs Tusk
Lire Rest Rusk
Lire Erst Rusk
Rile Err Tusks
Rile Errs Tusk
Rile Rest Rusk
Rile Erst Rusk
Riles Err Tusk
Slier Err Tusk
Tilers Re Rusk
Litres Re Rusk
Liters Re Rusk
Relit Re Rusks
Relit Res Rusk
Litre Re Rusks
Litre Res Rusk
Liter Re Rusks
Liter Res Rusk
Tiler Re Rusks
Tiler Res Rusk
Stile Err Rusk
Islet Err Rusk
Tiles Err Rusk
Tile Err Rusks
Tile Errs Rusk
Lite Err Rusks
Lite Errs Rusk
Ire Treks Slur
Ire Trek Slurs
Ire Rests Lurk
Ire Tress Lurk
Ire Rest Lurks
Ire Erst Lurks
Stirrer Elk Us
Riser Elk Rust
Riser Elk Ruts
Riser Elks Rut
Riser Let Rusk
Riser Set Lurk
Risers Elk Rut
Triers Re Sulk
Trier Re Sulks
Trier Res Sulk
Ires Trek Slur
Ires Rest Lurk
Ires Erst Lurk
Rise Trek Slur
Rise Rest Lurk
Rise Erst Lurk
Sire Trek Slur
Sire Rest Lurk
Sire Erst Lurk
Resist Re Lurk
Sister Re Lurk
Tries Re Lurks
Tries Err Sulk
Tries Res Lurk
Rites Re Lurks
Rites Err Sulk
Rites Res Lurk
Tires Re Lurks
Tires Err Sulk
Tires Res Lurk
Tiers Re Lurks
Tiers Err Sulk
Tiers Res Lurk
Tire Err Sulks
Tire Errs Sulk
Tire Res Lurks
Rite Err Sulks
Rite Errs Sulk
Rite Res Lurks
Tier Err Sulks
Tier Errs Sulk
Tier Res Lurks
Sties Err Lurk
Sites Err Lurk
Site Err Lurks
Site Errs Lurk
Ties Err Lurks
Ties Errs Lurk
Tie Errs Lurks
Elk Surer Stir
Elk Truer Sirs
Elks Truer Sir
Treks Rulers I
Treks Ruler Is
Treks Lure Sir
Treks Rule Sir
Trek Rulers Is
Trek Ruler Sis
Trek Rules Sir
Trek Lures Sir
Trek Lure Sirs
Trek Rule Sirs
Rustler Re Ski
Rulers Re Skit
Rulers Re Kits
Rulers Res Kit
Rulers Set Irk
Ruler Re Skits
Ruler Res Skit
Ruler Res Kits
Ruler Rest Ski
Ruler Erst Ski
Ruler Sets Irk
Ruler Set Risk
Ruler Set Irks
Sutlers Re Irk
Lustres Re Irk
Lusters Re Irk
Ulsters Re Irk
Results Re Irk
Rustles Re Irk
Rustle Re Risk
Rustle Re Irks
Rustle Err Ski
Rustle Res Irk
Lustre Re Risk
Lustre Re Irks
Lustre Err Ski
Lustre Res Irk
Sutler Re Risk
Sutler Re Irks
Sutler Err Ski
Sutler Res Irk
Luster Re Risk
Luster Re Irks
Luster Err Ski
Luster Res Irk
Ulster Re Risk
Ulster Re Irks
Ulster Err Ski
Ulster Res Irk
Result Re Risk
Result Re Irks
Result Err Ski
Result Res Irk
Rules Re Skirt
Rules Err Skit
Rules Err Kits
Rules Errs Kit
Rules Rest Irk
Rules Erst Irk
Lures Re Skirt
Lures Err Skit
Lures Err Kits
Lures Errs Kit
Lures Rest Irk
Lures Erst Irk
Lure Re Skirts
Lure Err Skits
Lure Errs Skit
Lure Errs Kits
Lure Res Skirt
Lure Rests Irk
Lure Tress Irk
Lure Rest Risk
Lure Rest Irks
Lure Erst Risk
Lure Erst Irks
Rule Re Skirts
Rule Err Skits
Rule Errs Skit
Rule Errs Kits
Rule Res Skirt
Rule Rests Irk
Rule Tress Irk
Rule Rest Risk
Rule Rest Irks
Rule Erst Risk
Rule Erst Irks
Less Truer Irk
Tussle Err Irk
Lets Surer Irk
Lest Surer Irk
Lutes Err Risk
Lutes Err Irks
Lutes Errs Irk
Slue Err Skirt
Let Surer Risk
Let Surer Irks
Lute Err Risks
Lute Errs Risk
Lute Errs Irks
Re Surer Kilts
Re Truer Silks
Err Estrus Ilk
Err Russet Ilk
Err Surest Ilk
Err Users Kilt
Err Ruses Kilt
Err Trues Silk
Err Trues Ilks
Err Ruse Kilts
Err Sure Kilts
Err Rues Kilts
Err User Kilts
Err True Silks
Errs Trues Ilk
Errs Ruse Kilt
Errs Sure Kilt
Errs Rues Kilt
Errs User Kilt
Errs True Silk
Errs True Ilks
Errs Rue Kilts
Surer Res Kilt
Surer Rest Ilk
Surer Erst Ilk
Truer Res Silk
Truer Res Ilks
Elk Re Sir Rust
Elk Re Sir Ruts
Elk Re Sirs Rut
Elk Err I Truss
Elk Err I Rusts
Elk Err Stir Us
Elk Err Is Rust
Elk Err Is Ruts
Elk Err Sis Rut
Elk Errs I Rust
Elk Errs I Ruts
Elk Errs Is Rut
Elk Res Sir Rut
Elks Re Sir Rut
Elks Err I Rust
Elks Err I Ruts
Elks Err Is Rut
Elks Errs I Rut
Treks Re I Slur
Trek Re I Slurs
Trek Re Is Slur
Trek Res I Slur
Less Re Irk Rut
Lets Err I Rusk
Lets Err Irk Us
Lest Err I Rusk
Lest Err Irk Us
Let Re Sir Rusk
Let Err I Rusks
Let Err Risk Us
Let Err Irks Us
Let Err Is Rusk
Let Errs I Rusk
Let Errs Irk Us
Re Err Kilts Us
Re Err Ski Lust
Re Err Ski Slut
Re Err Its Sulk
Re Err Tis Sulk
Re Err Sit Sulk
Re Err Ti Sulks
Re Err It Sulks
Re Errs Kilt Us
Re Errs Ti Sulk
Re Errs It Sulk
Re Res Ilk Rust
Re Res Ilk Ruts
Re Res Silk Rut
Re Res Ilks Rut
Re Res Irk Lust
Re Res Irk Slut
Re Res Kit Slur
Re Res Lit Rusk
Re Res Its Lurk
Re Res Tis Lurk
Re Res Sit Lurk
Re Res Ti Lurks
Re Res It Lurks
Re Rests I Lurk
Re Tress I Lurk
Re Rest I Lurks
Re Rest Is Lurk
Re Erst I Lurks
Re Erst Is Lurk
Re Set Irk Slur
Re Set Sir Lurk
Err Res Kilt Us
Err Res Ti Sulk
Err Res It Sulk
Err Rest I Sulk
Err Rest Ilk Us
Err Erst I Sulk
Err Erst Ilk Us
Err Sets I Lurk
Err Set I Lurks
Err Set Is Lurk
Errs Set I Lurk
Res Rest I Lurk
Res Erst I Lurk

Laboratory

I Take It Back (I Attack Bike)

Tie Lost Glean Short

1. Why start here? Any beginning is a consideration of invulnerability.

2. There is something mulish about this dog.

3. Being terribly moved. Moving terribly.

4. Coated in oil. Digital fits.

5. Death involves processions of dying.

6. Dying inhabites every possible space of death.

7. Disaffected parts.

8. Everyone’s a groaner.

9. Territories claimed then usurped.

10. At the heart of the swerve…

11. Skidding takes place elsewhere.

12. “You write like you drive.”

13. Why was it difficult to answer the question about “writing with a forked tongue”?

14. I feel it’s preferable to be “unconnected” rather than “disconnected”.

15. Textual Healing.

16. Don’t confuse proximity with connection.

17. Linguistic buffeting.

18. Language Buffet.

Affordance

A desire to find a piece of writing somehow; to find something to work on. To allow it to become those moments just ahead of him, now that the eyes had begun to feel pinched at the edges of the covering lids, now that the darkness of the room had burnished itself back into shapes, his pupils naively slackening. Sight beginning to foam. Not the middle of the night – he doesn’t belong to tiredness just yet, in fact he knows that he is trying to sleep at a moment not quite fit for it, as if always lying in an alien position. He knows there is the little notebook, so searches this out, slips off its elasticated band, hooked over the opening side of the cover, flipping it over the edges of the pages like the first steps of seduction. Old handwriting, a pencil that seemed to have an imperfection in its diamond stylus. Dragging a stone in the words. He begins to read, rewrite. These are the same thing perhaps, held each side of the mirror.

On a slight downward incline, a couple are pulling the car up, small hiccups of the engine as it disengages. The handbrake jolts, becoming only a length of rope bridging the length of the vehicle – a sinew between both bumpers. Previous to this, in the hotel room, his stomach had developed an odd string strain across it, like a cord of incongruous muscle, the twine of glue across egg albumen. His belly space dissected by a hairline wrench, something like a absent hernia; nothing but a twinge, except that the indiscernible line of discomfort sought its way through the abdomen with a kind of load, a sense of implied volume and potential (plans for expansion). Twined; the curious encampment of near-pain; its accommodation.

This seems incongruous, unremembered; some kind of business-speak from the newspaper: “pre-preparation.” What is this clinamen…? Another section then:

He reared, powered by an emerging thought, but collapsed in the orbit of the same movement – a tumbler, without the anchor of gravity, or the spurs of its insistence.

Anything seems permissible in this distended area. He wanted to write something about the opening shot of a film he had seen a few days ago, but there seemed no opening in his life where he might even consider the task. It was not something that made itself available. Yet the darkness had begun to lighten in the room – the electric lamp, the small notebook. Stupidly, he noticed his room had half an arch in one corner, the curve of the alcove disappearing into the wall. The writing is going to come out wrong.

It was the opening sequence, after the opening credits had appeared, white texts on black screens – suddenly a shot of the sky. At first it seemed overly complicated, as if there were too much going on for this to be a sky not beset by disasters, not recording some kind of catastrophe in its airborne surfaces. A mixture of smokes, vapours, clouds running close to the ground (near to, like objects held close to the eye) and distant at the very edges of the atmosphere – different textures each, dream quilts, the dirt of rain making some drifts seem like the excuses of forest fires, the declarations of exhaust fumes. The camera fidgeted strangely, a movement that seemed inhuman – though still absolutely performed by a human. This is what he was thinking as the sky panned awkwardly. This is not a mechanism seeing this, this is the movement of a stiff neck – the jostling movements of the head, neck (the body trunk off below too) together with the eyes themselves, all stacked up in a tower of looking – vertically looking up into the sky, wavering and taking it in. The vapour trail line of the plane linking one cloudbank and another, gilded by sunlight – some shift of backdrop. But it wasn’t being caught by a camera, this is what he was convinced of when he was watching it – the camera had disappeared for him – it was a special case of looking, as if he recognised somehow the stacking of the body in the upward gaze, looking up toward the light, the sun, and the terrible confluence of clouds drifting into and over one another.

RPM

1. The light stands in the lorry park.

2. A bubble of plastic extrudes from the base of the building.

3. Writing as hernia.

4. To address its conditions – some kind of imperative.

5. Hands cannot be washed.

6. It is not clear how best to expose the apparatus.

7. He began thinking about sap and how he was always fascinated by the idea of trees bleeding.

8. ‘Sap’ as a noun and as a verb.

9. A trail of flames amongst the black. Suddenly a vision of an assumed totality.

10. A point of turnaround; seriousness coughs up farce, then sobers on a swallow.

11. A barrel of apples, each one a grenade of coherence.

12. Submit an extract.

13. Any empty claims as to what this is doing.

14. There can be no comeback.

15. Combination engine.

16. Spill it.

17. Writing as tar baby.

18. Get set. Lay up.

19. This is entirely serious.

20. Having cut across the chambers.

21. Forestalls its own progress.

22. A stewball.

23. Stumbling block.

24. PUSH OUT REMNANTS

25. A theory peel-off.

26. Writing as hypochondriac.

27. A folded piece of paper, having been unfolded.

28. Permit construction.

29. Difficult persuasive positions.

30. Writing as revolving door.

31. Writing as jigsaw puzzle.

32. Failure becomes sustainable.

33. A sponsoring thought.

To _____ And / Or ________

Collected Works of Müleskind: 005

When you’re this far into describing, another background gives justice to one other type of ‘fire canal’. In the reading, which is more to the cause where the individual (that kicks) feels pity and wants to grieve for the developer who is seen to be remarkable, your talk sighs from you, with more kicks, being generally concerned with who and what is possible – you are this impression which stays.

It is the confinement and the dialogue which are to interrupt you. That (thing) density, as soon as it hits, gives this depiction of the field’s revealed lines. A possibility of doing. In order for there to be a gain and loss, you get a use. Will go out when writing, will be able to understand. I am bitter from the difference of hands. The chest cavity is narrow, and sits, sits, quietly, timidly tired of trying. The lumber is soft. All critique disrupts the soil and rolls up from the field, a phosphorus sound shouting in compliance with estrangement. My work of literature is in submersion from the surface which bites, and quickly passes over the shallow territory – all according to the ocean as the major matter of concern. A method of condition demands the fact that this will work, in order to compose from the progress which one sees. The contributor must remember the intermediate contraction amid its false starts, in compliance with the very end, wearing out, your vast quantity, to oppose only that which you emphasize. This is how one writes.

Eruption of Disuse

Binder Operates

Verbatim (A Drama for Tape Loops)

(Verbatim was produced in collaboration with Dominic Lash)

Pingback

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Charon

Collected Works of Müleskind: 004

—- Make Eyes – - – - Six equally sized sea anemones pinched and drawn by threads, sliced by razor blades to accentuate the claps of the sphincter. A powerful light source is to shined through the pinched area making it seem that there is a hole. These are then to be pelted with speckled pebbles until the light source is obscured.

Collected Works of Müleskind: 003

The outer part of the form is to be covered with flayed and trimmed chicken wire, which has been allowed to be completely covered by spiderwebs. Black stones are suspended in the centre of the enclosed cells of the wire, resting on the silk wherever possible. If they cannot be suspended they must be secured by the wire itself, but only as pairs. Within the main ring, a large circular folio of newsprint, treated with a corrosive so that the text is not decipherable, is centrally positioned. Several thousand grains of rice, then sugar, then salt (granulation becoming smaller toward the edges of the pile), which have been spilled on the paper, are meticulously drawn around with pencil, with the exception of another circular area, just off-centre. Crucially, a gap between the edge of the paper disc and the wire casing must be consistently maintained.

Collected Works of Müleskind: 002

[A series of eight transcriptions were made of the movements of the mouth and the eyes at given events. Blinks, winks, as well as general indications of the direction of gazes, are indicated by lines emanating from circled dots. Often, the circled dots appear in pairs, linked by arching lines. The distance between the circled dots would seem to indicate some kind of tension or expressive gesture, though it is unclear exactly how this works. The thicker black lines would seem to correspond to the mouth, or more abstractly, to the voice, or to language. In some sense, given the similar configurations, these could be considered as crude portraits, face drawings. ]

This installation consists of eight table arrangements, lined up in two rows of four. The edges of the tables, which are all to be covered with a simple white cloth, are given by dotted lines. In the first, a metal shell (similar to a bullet) marked on its base with two small marking, impressed into the metal, are rammed into the tabletop, pinching the tablecloth into the wood, and creating a emanation of creases surrounding it. Next to this, a circular form is drawn from thick black ink, made up of a matrix of lines and connected patches. The second has two projectiles hammered into the table surface, again pinching the cloth, but this time only marked on their bases by one dot each. Another smaller table is placed on top of the main one, upon which a lump of coal and a length of black wire is draped. The third arrangement is similar, but without the coal, and with lengths of white thread being drawn from one of the buried projectiles to the other, over the top of the second table. This is repeated in the fourth arrangement, but instead of the table, there are four lengths of oil-blackened chain, about two-foot long, which have been bent at the middle. Eight lengths of chain are to be found in the following arrangement, this time placed on their sides in two rows of four. In the next, they begin to be arranged around the buried projectiles, whilst the white threads have been drawn down flush with the table surface. the final two arrangement require two main tables, slotted over one another and covered with one white cloth. The buried shells, this time far apart on each side of the table, are accompanied by much smaller platforms (not quite tables now), again covered with white, and again linked (though this time not taut) by lengths of white thread. On top of the platforms in arrangement eight, we go back to lengths of black wire, coiled onto the flat surface. In the last arrangement, the table cloth is wedged down between the conjoined tables (requiring a straight edge), the lengths of thread have been cut and laid carefully over the border, while the buried projectiles are accompanied by the ink drawings similar to that in the first arrangement.

Collected Works of Müleskind: 001

Having marked out a circular section of riverbed, various objects are placed at specific locations, their exact positions marked out with string. Two porcelain discs, completely flat, without any flanging or discernible lips (they could not really be called plates), are set on the mud approximately three feet apart. They are of different sizes, though exact dimensions are not given in this instance. To the south of these 19 holes are drilled into the ground, all of varying depths and diameters. At the centre of the circular section is placed an enclosed dome made of plastic, filled with slightly-salted water, and filled with seaweed and various fishes. Again, the exact marine life required was not specified. The logistical problems of placing this dome of water onto a dry riverbed are not discussed. Two further discs are visible, one placed inside the plastic dome, set into the riverbed, made of black coal. This should be just visible through the strands of seaweed. The other disc is a patch of sandpaper attached to the curving surface on the north-east region of the dome. Just ahead of the ‘water feature’ (as it is labeled), there is a shallow indentation, similar in size to the smaller of the porcelain discs, which contains two fried eggs, their whites having cooked into one another. The effect, as when viewed from above (and from which vantage the surviving directions provide views) is a kind of figure-eight set in a shallow bowl. The elements of the work are thus brought together, according to the artist’s directions.

Mr. Loew

A short film made by the artists Mircea Cantor and Gabriela Vanga, The Snow and the Man (2005), records a man building a snowman in a secluded Paris street. The ten minute piece might be considered unremarkable, yet the activities of the man observed were quite particular and, for me, compelling. Initially the man (dressed in t-shirt and zipped top, perhaps in his mid-thirties) moves about a parking area, gently rolling handfuls of fresh snow into larger and larger pieces. His actions are careful, tender, and there’s appears to a specific technique to what he is doing. His careful, circular kneading of the powdery snow seems a curiously slow method for gathering masses of snow, but it is assumed that this is a specific way of compacting it for modelling. Being viewed from above like this – the entire film is one shot, taken from an apartment window above him – seems to confer on the man, at least at first, a certain authority. There is a logical pattern to what we are witnessing. Slowly his activities begin to produce forms – he puts two reasonably sized portions of snow on top of each other, then tries to pick them up. They tumble back onto the floor, so he must start to scramble around again, slowly rolling the fragments back into the correct proportioned sphere. The man’s tentative authority gradually begins to crumble – slapstick emerges, a certain irrationality in the man’s movements, as if such traits were hidden from this vantage no longer.

The assumption that the snow figure would be built on the flat, white plain of the car park tarmac is dismissed when the man lifts his small tower of snow and takes it into a small yard, just to the right of the shot. The camera follows him as he places his materials on to a row of rubbish bins lined up against the fence. He piles a third lump of snow onto his tower to form a crude articulation on the square lid of the bin. He then disappears into the building at the rear of the yard, which he will do more than once, often with no obvious purpose – before reemerging with a long tool, perhaps a screwdriver with a wooden handle. He begins to poke it into the smallest globe – the head – perhaps marking out features, or preparing the surface for the addition of other elements. He then inserts the long tool, in an odd gesture of abandonment, near-madness all of a sudden, into the left side of the figure, leaving it protruding upwards like a fascist salute. Other fragments of snow, already stored on the top of another bin, are handled, some rolled in his fingers like cigarettes, others thrown idly of screen – though its certain, just from the look on the man’s face, that there is no person there to be his target. He is in front of a production line and his work is ravaged with interruptions. He might be profoundly bored at his workbench, with that curious proximity of attention that comes from ritualised, mindless activities and a lack of presence of mind – the body working on its own, the attention dipping in and out of sequence with it, like an oar slipping into water.

The man’s behaviour is fascinating. It is as if our voyeurism is provoking his way of being, this way of occupying space, and more specifically time, revealing it as a kind of substrate to solitude. Though he says nothing, it is like the man is talking to himself. He has a strange relationship to time here – he operates after having fallen through its cracks. He keeps looking away from what he is doing, as if watching for something out of shot, wary of being spotted, but in a way that seems at the same time wholly consistent with his automatic actions. He seems to only be operating on half-attention; his actions are of the order of slow reflexes, automatic movements working at the boundary between conscious and involuntary gestures. He glances at his watch, yet with no sense that he is waiting for something, that there is anything ever to be awaited. Perhaps it is more a checking and re-checking that time has come to a halt. The man, barely present, becomes increasingly anonymous in his erratic idiosyncrasies – this is the paradox – somehow dispersing amid his own eccentric traits and the strange, pointless task he is absorbed in. We continue to watch him, as he stabs the figure, rubs snow on it like powder, like a casual surgeon – the unsurprised improviser. He leaves the scene again, like Krapp slinking off to rummage, then returns. He lifts the figure, turns this way and that, before placing it back on top of the bin. There is nowhere to go. There is nothing to do. I suddenly think of his activity as writing, occurring in a region of uncertainty and hesitation, amid a sudden loss of power. What does one do with snow, or with the blank page? He operates outside himself. I also think of the Golem, though, instead of being made from virgin soil and pure spring water, made simply of virgin snow, of whiteness, and think that, at some point, the connection with writing would be confirmed by the placing of a piece of paper, rolled like a cigarette scroll, inside the figure, with the life-giving code printed upon it.

Further Silt

Müleskind Radio Broadcast

Small Deposits

Green Screen

Man In Pit (Composition for MEL)

‘MAN IN PIT’ – Composition for MEL (Dominic Lash, David Stent & Chris Stubbs)

Each player has 5 pages, all of which should be visible at all times.

The players are free to interpret the symbols in any way they see fit, but must “bear in mind” the following guidelines:

- The symbols should be considered both as partial components making up a larger whole (across single pages and over the set of five), as well as self-contained units.

- All the symbols correspond to terms of measurement from Pitman’s Shorthand Dictionary, Seventh Edition. As such, the symbols should be imagined as being able to be unpacked, or made ‘longhand’ once more.

- White space, either within or surrounding any symbol, should not necessarily be considered as silence.

- A musician may refer to any of the 5 pages (or their combination) at any one time. They are free, if they so desire, to read across separate pages or to remain focused on one individual symbol.

- Players should try to identify both visible and interrupted vectors between symbols, either suggested by specific details of shape or in general layout on the page. These can be used as ’stations’ to link up phrases or ‘lines of attack’.

- Players should consider the diversity of symbol outline, aspects of brevity and proximity, as well as freely re-imagining relative scale

- The piece will be given a set duration in advance – say 10 minutes. This will not be tracked by a timer, but will rely on the musicians’ intuition to come to a suitable close.

Science Oxford – 6th June 2008