‘What happens’, as P puts it here, ‘when nothing happens’, is just the ‘infraordinary’, American. Black. Queer. “Until the lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.” These characters have names like The Onion, The Curatins, Big Foot, Silence, Fat Anxiety and Thin Anxiety. Five pairs of feet in front of hotel-room doors say “My chilblains, my chilblains, my chilblains,” one after the other. The transparent doors light up and the dancing shadows of five monkeys eating carrots appear. We declare the following: “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non- human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.” A guy walks into a bar and shouts, Screw Googling, and everybody jumps in the air. Hooray is heard all around. Free shots on the house. The house is made of little shreds of data. Whenever someone orders a beer, a tomato shoots out of the ceiling fan shouting, “Consciousness? Me too, me too!” I would venture to point out that if you’re using Instagram, namely the filters, whether or not you are a hipster, you probably don’t find them “regrettable.” Maybe we will all download this app when we are 50? But never mind. Thanks to the massacres exhibited by the Prom Queen I now have several penises. They are interchangeable! I trade you a lesbian penis for your disgusting penis. It reminds me of home. The penis I still love the most is the one that flapped out of a soldier’s pants as he was dragged through the street. I have a copy of it. It’s my true penis. I’m Miss World. An impossible prince. Pun. Instrument. I’m missing child. How deep its hatred must be if an arm comes out of the forehead between the eyes and wildly rolls up things like tree trunks and grinds with its millstone molars the scary laughs and swallows them and like a tank crushes everything it stomps on and rolls up anything that moves. As in Joyelle’s necropastoral, it seems the plague is a subtext: art running like Artaud’s subterrenean plague. In the most upsetting piece, the one in which the “sons” torture their purple mother, the sons are wearing plague masks, but it doesn’t protect them against art – and it certainly doesn’t protect their mother … This art plague animates the entire collection into a spasmy, jerky “parade” that ultimately leads to the grotesque, materially occult moment of the last video, where the white man seems both corpse and patient, ravished or saved by the bird of paradise.
[Note: Sources: Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (tr. Marc Lowenthal) and Marc Lowenthal, as quoted in Lars Iyer, “There are many things in place Saint-Sulpice …”, at Spurious, 20 Aug 012; EJ Hill, African Proverb (Ewé, Mina), as quoted in Hill’s “Selbstbildnis”, at Notes on Looking, 20 Aug 012; Jillian Steinhauer, and Pablo Picasso, Desire Caught by the Tail, as quoted in Steinhauer’s “Picasso the Playwright”, at Hyperallergic, 20 Aug 012; “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness*”, as quoted in Vaughan Bell, “Animals conscious say leading neuroscientists”, at Mindhacks, 20 Aug 012 (at foot of declaration: “* The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness was written by Philip Low and edited by Jaak Panksepp, Diana Reiss, David Edelman, Bruno Van Swinderen, Philip Low and Christof Koch. The Declaration was publicly proclaimed in Cambridge, UK, on July 7, 2012, at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and non-Human Animals, at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, by Low, Edelman and Koch. The Declaration was signed by the conference participants that very evening, in the presence of Stephen Hawking, in the Balfour Room at the Hotel du Vin in Cambridge, UK. The signing ceremony was memorialized by CBS 60 Minutes”); Jono Tosch, “tomato freak out”, at Oil Changes, 20 Aug 012; JBR; Jillian Steinhauer, “New App Lets You Un-Instagram (aka ‘Normalize’) Your Photos”, at Hyperallergic, 20 Aug 012; Johannes Göransson, Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate, as quoted in Lorian Long, “ENTRANCE TO A COLONIAL PAGEANT IN WHICH WE ALL BEGIN TO INTRICATE BY JOHANNES GÖRANSSON”, at Bookslut, Jan 012; Kim Hyesoon, “Mrs Elephant’s Reply” (tr. Don Mee Choi), at Paragraphiti; Johannes Göransson, quoting himself in his “Natalie Djurburg’s Parade”, at Montevidayo, 1 Aug 012 (which for some reason appeared in my RSS feed today, 20 Aug 012)]
Comments