OK. The East Bay chapter of the Public Crying Coalition seeks to share and document sites and stories of public crying. An act both intimate and isolating, public crying exists at the axis of public and private, hyper visible and unnoticed, vulnerable and galvanized. We seek to map the East Bay with the psychogeography of tears. Entirely of ivory, the suit had been carved to the delicacy of lace, and through the myriad networks of absences, in every tiny space, there was a young and tender flower growing, though most of the blooms were no larger than the head of a tree-agate spat button, or a pin. And the helmet all alone would set the tone, somehow it was a dolphin, and a dragon, and peacock made as a puppet-cage for mermaids, and they themselves like mirages of coral teeming with gems that were insects of exquisite delicacy, like thoughts externalized into automata. Some people like it that it’s 12/12/12. The cover is black and white, with a herringbone pattern behind an upside-down white heart (ass, balls, whatever), and inside the heart is another heart, one of those loteria hearts, red, skewered from the bottom up by a blade, and the word Love written across it in a punk-gothic tattoo script. Because it is included in this list, you know that this was one of the nine most important artworks I lived with this year; why now that I am looking inside it again do I feel like I’ve never even laid my eyes on it? The relation to the past has nothing to do with memory and everything to do with telepathy. The only freshness is the untimely. Then I look at it again, broken, reconstituted, reinvented and humor and spirituality light and black, all of these things inhabited (or tried on) in the most playful and political possible ways, from Fischli and Weiss’s rat and bear films, Sharon Hayes’s re-performances of the Patty Hearst tapes; Geoffrey Farmer’s exquisite magazine cut-out puppet collages; the aforementioned Charles Atlas; costume, mask, rehearsal, reenactment, reversal, repetition, mirroring, comedy, the media failed three times during Cliff’s attempt to perform this piece, and with consummate grace under pressure he finally gave it up after the third try — hex incompletely dissipated? Go on, another example couldn’t hurt: “I can describe sound as “stubborn” or ”like a fruit bat”, or designate its duration as equivalent to “to completely opening or closing a door”. The subsequent sounds are now adorned with life-qualities that are unavailable to notation. As are the performer and the audience. Pretty neat, huh? OK. Is this still an attack on Galloway? I ask because while I much liked a previous post that criticized university discourse, it’s difficult to think of just whom you might have in mind, if not Galloway … besides Althusser. Who, at least according to Rancière, defended university discourse against all comers when it was challenged in 68. I suppose the attack could also be on the UK’s SWP, as interpreted by, say, Ben Watson (in which case the “university” in “university discourse” has to be read in Lacan’s metaphorical sense). Otherwise, I am having trouble figuring out who your actual targets are here.
[Note: Sources: JBR; “About”, at Public Crying Coalition; phaneronoemikon, “Jogging With Roussel 16 part 3”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 12 Dec 012; JBR; Suzanne Stein, “Attention Span 2012 | Suzanne Stein”, at Third Factory/Notes to Poetry, 12 Dec 012 (re: Bob Flanagan, Slave Sonnets; Jalal Toufic, Distracted; Cliff Hengst, Maybe [Live performance (part of Stage Presence at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) | Thursday, August 9 – Sunday, August 12, 2012]); Seth Kim-Cohen, “How to Write a Text About How to Write a Text Score (And Why)”, in Word Events: Perspectives on Verbal Notation (eds. John Lely and John Saunders); JBR; JBR, comment appended to Levi R Bryant, “Circles”, at Larval Subjects, 12 Dec 012]
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