fig-2


41/50


FOS



12 – 18 Oct 2015
At ICA Studio
in association with Outset
Opening Monday
6 – 8pm

FOS, 2015




FOS, WEEK 41/50

For his week at fig-2, FOS brings together his two prolific practices within art and design. His solo show ‘Maggie Margaret lives’ is a juxtaposition of artworks and design objects, produced for his recent solo exhibition in Copenhagen and for fashion brand Céline. ‘Maggie Margaret lives’ emerges as a constructed interior that initiates dialogue between art and design, displaying their malleable yet distinctive natures. The premises is inhabited by a character performed by actress Joanna Bergin, who appears and disappears at random. Her script, written by the artist in collaboration with Deborah Birch, oscillates between the pragmatic and the abstract, which attempts to disseminate the public memories left against objects, in this specific case within art and design. The installation becomes a site where objects are activated through the relationship between them and their owner, the character, as well as through their relationship with the audience who act as witnesses.


FOS CV

FOS or Thomas Poulsen (b. 1971, Copenhagen, DK) lives and works in Copenhagen. Recent solo projects include: Porthole, Charlottenborg Copenhagen (2015); Always happy new year, The Royal Theatre, Copenhagen (2015); Small White Man - Echo (LP) (2015); Still Waters Run Deep, Odense Kunsten, Brandt’s Odense (2014); Agora, Athens Biennale, Athens (2014); Declaration of Unsolid Memories, Camden Arts Centre, London (2012); Osloo ⋅ Danish Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Venice (2011); One Language Traveler, National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2011); Another Place Yet A Place ⋅ Andersen’s Contemporary, Berlin (2010).

JAILBIRD JERKY






One day, he says, I will hold all -nesses in my hands
Bright white whiteness 
All wildernesses
They form, in spectacle-circus-ring cant, coils

we can no longer decipher each other

The lion faces in his mouth the possibility 
of a head, likely hatted
in all likeliness

and go

Clusters of neurones pass each other monoamines 
in order to say, this time it’s different

One day, he says, I will hold you in my hands
Through seventy pushups with Dougie on his back
he wheezes I will hold you
A crosslegged yogi is the closest thing in this cell to a redeemer
Dougie says, will you bend your body in prayer?

They’ve taken his pictures off the wall
Bodies bend and build
Dougie calls and Pavlovian methods answer — can’t you hear it? 
The chiming of bells

Dougie yogi on his back,
crosslegged chewing — i am a savoir bind my eyes — a tattooed finger

jailbird jerky 

First-homeowner’s rebate in seven instalments
Dougie says, the body is a temple in another temple 
and that temple in another
A myriads myriad of palaces in which to store your mind, upon whose walls are inked 
the names of those who own you 

bind my eyes i do not need to see the name Dougie glisten with sweat

Seventy more
Seventy more

He has drawn in the place of the photos what the photos depict
One day, he says, I will crumble before you
Such a fine temple does not lie 
about its own destruction

Dougie allows him one cigarette a week on her back 
while Dougie does two hundred pushups
He must learn to cross his legs like maharishi mahesh yogi and not slip off on sweat

Agility is the prima ballerina assoluta, Dougie says
A voice that sounds like bells rings out in his dreams, the circus-ring draws closer,
a kindness to his skin
thank him thank him

In this cell hide suggestions to be inked for those who cannot read without glasses

He will know enough is enough when his cell 
calls to be crumbled
upon whose flag will I lay down my life?
The lion’s head answers for Saint George, his teeth are ciphers 
shaped by the bones of dragons

don’t you see will you never see?
We can only be read through our great sadnesses
They are the marks on all the walls of all our temples, the only marks

One day, he leans against her forehead,
I will hold all -nesses in my hands

It is for blindness that Milton wrote and Homer sang out to be sung to
What is limp and wretched in my wake will give you 
the answer
See, you will not find signs of weakness looking at my strengths

Dougie never slips but is the first to admit slipperiness as possibility 
and therefore as friend

In the second before death with Dougie on his back 
He understands the possibility of sightedness in blindness
The muse feeding Milton drops of milk from her coffee-coloured breast 
and him reciting milk-pearls to his scribe

Will you promise to see truth in the many-coloured glass?

We come through the door in seven ways if it is open 
and three if it is locked, Dougie says
He is given the art of facelessness and the gift of monoamines 
when inside the lion’s maw

I will reimburse no-one
nothing

One hundred days of potters potting will not suffice for what is to come
The jury has reached its decision
Unanimously, we will amend the law of the dead

and so it is done

Fires lay waste to impeached bodies
Ashes scatter through olive trees while the living drink wine from funeral urns
He is still inside the circus-ring cat as his own exequies turn traitor
obsequious to the authority of those who own him

It is not the lion’s body — tauthaunched plinth-bottomed overriding sand —
that knows Dasein but its teeth, sharpened on the myths of dragons 
and the grinding-bones of sacked mutton

his being-toward-death is not his own but another’s
says Dougie as the first and last cigarette of the week is smoked on his back

In the wild he would attack hessian sacks lumpy with victuals and brawn
— or with sand, slumped over 
aluminum frames, signalling construction —
never having known, caged-creature, the slow-eyed wet-roiling peace 
that occurs after a kill

Dougie does not partake in tobacco
Je ne mange pas de ce pain là, he says

The lion does not know the myths under whose sole aegis he acts
says Dougie and his cross-legged almost-but-not-yet maharishi mahesh yogi, 
who slips not in the condition of sweat, 
acts under the star of Dougie

He covers vast and holy ground each millisecond spent 
interfacing feline teeth, 
dialoguing in a household à trois
Only vastness and holiness can achieve a two-way conversation between three

Who is carrying who? Am I carrying you, god?

His priest does not dare recognise the humanity of his femme de ménage 
Her dermis welted red-black-blue signals a reimbursement 
by needles and condomless congress for hundreds of bad daddy cheques
He ministers her sacraments from afar 
touch-shy 
shy of everything

he who has known no love since childhood, smile

Our muse will come from among the downtrodden 
There is no other way to inside out the vision of the world 
whose veil is café au lait and stock prices soothsaying 
I am all that hath been, and is, and shall be; no mortal can lift what is not there 

See in your orange juice sein und zeit, says Dougie
A vast interest network — electron-filigree in permanent 
lowest-price exchange — in exchange for an ordinary glass of OJ 

You must break your breakfast apart in contempt of comfort 
And fait attention that sympathy with the degraded 
does not become love for what degrades them
Dougie chews jailbird jerky 
to remind him of frailness

It is Dougie now holds all -nesses 
— as sweat to the warrior, as sight to the seer — 
it is love without need that leads us there, 
fury that returns us snapping awake 
as the lion unlocks his jaw

_______________________________________________________

The Eight of Swords and the Nameless Arcanum (Tarot de Marseilles) from Derek Jarman's In the Shadow of the Sun (1981); music by Throbbing Gristle.

Eight of Swords: Critical position, censure, crisis, chagrin, examination, research, control, condemnation, judgment, sickness, calumny. Reversed: Difficulty, obstacle, accident, treachery, fatality, adventure.

Nameless Arcanum: Death certainly is only relative and the death of the form may mean the commencement of life on another plane. Birth down here may be seen as a sort of death of a higher existence. "The veil and mask of life is perpetuated in change, transformation and passage from lower to higher . . ." (Waite) Higher to lower as well.


song of dolores (2008, 1937, 1640)


   


It’s tru c vrai 

Each night she casts her runes
In standard three tense formation;
All that is, that calls, that will be.



If he calls her baby, he might feed 
Her goat and tattoo his name on 
Her thigh. If he does, if he calls.


She rocks slowly as the 10 pisastre
Lido spins slowly to a gentle halt;
Le Dix de Deniers, her first sign.

Someone is singing far away





Hall-i-day's lay-dy, 
he-heey Johhhnny's girl, 
itsa no goo-od business t’kill a man, 
but little girl, ‘ow could you have known?





Danny is at the door telling her
To zip her boots, hitch her shorts,
And pack those things away before

She walks

Or hears clapping in her head 
From 1937, sees an English general,
The Kit Kat club, a girl called Amra







93% humidity








His body shudders as he sinks
Down through wet Cairo in June.
Wipe me down, baby, with a towel.

Amra wipes



The Suez canal, l'Eve future, his
Face an antenna in a storm,
Coming into and out of reception.











She just goes through his eyes.
You alone makes you alone;
Lune à l'envers, your second sign.












Halliday's lady lifts her skirt for
Our Johnny of the Bare Thigh,
Patrons, punters, future's Eve.

A man who says Y'can't read Dee,
Agrees that he don’t quite care to,
Says, they’ll only break yer heart.







She walks the corridor to blue,
The pole to pink, sings Johnny
softly singing Juh-Johnny's girl. 





While



Dolores walks on blanket ground
Mottled purple by the flower that
Several countries claim their own,

Huana, the new girl, spins around,
an ouroboros tattooed on her hip bone.
Le Jugement, Dolores, your third sign.








I am fourwalled with myself
thinking of Egypt : Athanasius,
give it up, I hear the voices say.


Brothers, I cannot.







At school, Dolores wrote names,
Circled them with hearts drawn
In metallic mint rollerball pen

First 

Steph, then Paul, Gil, Jackson;
and even her brother once, Yul,
When he spent the night in jail


But strong-like,

Huana sips gin to herself,
Snarls Fuck Off to all the johns,
Asks Dolores your rising sign,



hon?

It’s pisces, isn’t it? you’re swimming

Inside the ouroboros' ring where
Space stutters and does but remains
Time to be herded in circles.











Huana in metallic ball point pen.
Huana too is water, she could order
Oh-nly pickles, Jay y’hear?! for tea.









Huana says, I do not like Other 
Girls, I am jealous of all women,
Even my granma, and she knew it.




I look at their hair and think of 
Touching their lips, of their faces
On pillows, and compare my own.






Dolores is number 4 on her speed
Dial, Huana calls to ask about His 
Past and where they all are now?











Dee, did y’hear 

A two-headed snake was born here, 
And its got both *looks down nods*
It’s a no good sign, Dolores, uh-uh.





It is not quite as you might think:
Hieroglyphics, your honour, in 1650.
We didn’t even have the cartouche.




Inside the ouroboros' ring 
Space stutters but remains 
Time to be herded in circles.

If it does, if it falls.

If it is, if laid thus.





















Strain is present in all exquisite forms


To be exquisitely careful
Is a luxury.
To be exquisitely careful
Is a precious jewel
Possessed by few people.
Where
Outsourcing may be
Required
I can be exquisitely
Careful
In your place.
You have a prosthetic of
Exquisite care in 
All things.
I will be at your feet
More than once.
Have you ever thought of
Care as an
Abstract form of life
Chess
With no opponent? Or
A multi-player game.
Computers and 
People may as well be
People and computers.
If it sounds easy,
Know that
Strain is present in all
Exquisite
Forms.
All of them exert a
Straining on the body and
The spirit
Like a muscle on the
Wheel the
Rack
Exacting upon the fibres
Detail and
Precision.
You can monitor
Striated slow twitch
Precision from your
iPhone or
Watch.
Care exacted through 
Our app comes with
24hr support and
Customer
Care.
Of
Course,
I’ll have Janine go through
Everything.
She’ll explain our different
Staggered payment
Systems and will
Introduce you to your
Personal
Rep








a calendar (not a bible)... cybernetics, time refusal, "a floating image in mid air is no longer just a dream."


Jan Provoost, Sacred Allegory, XVIe siècle



The radical mystic Suso of Cologne, v. 1330: “Whence have you come?” The image answers, “I came from nowhere.” “Tell me, what are you?’ ‘I am not.’ ‘What do you wish?’ ‘I do not wish.’ ‘This is a miracle! Tell me, what is your name?’ ‘I am called Nameless Wilderness.’ ‘Where does your insight lead to?’ ‘To untrammelled freedom.’ ‘Tell me, what do you call untrammelled freedom?’ ‘When a man lives according to all his caprices without distinguishing between God and himself, and without looking before or after…’

Suso’s explicitly anti-time utterance = an element of time refusal.

A new level of spatialisation was involved in the defeat of the 14th century resistance to time; the emergence of the modern map in the 15th c. and the ensuing age of great voyages / Braudel’s phrase regarding modern civilisation’s “war against empty space” is best understood in this light.

The first document known to have been printed on Gutenberg’s press in the mid 15th century was a calendar (not a bible).

Notes from John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal



Harry Sanderson, Human Resolution @ Arcadia Missa

HB: We should talk about Haptics, where artist Yuri Pattison invited you to make a touchable 3D hologram within his Faraday Cage project (a Faraday cage is a 19th century invention that blocks out external electric currents, which Pattison recreated as a residency space in SPACE Studios). What's the difference between this work and Human Resolution

HS: [...] Haptics was just a straight desire to reproduce this technology that I'd heard about, which was this touchable hologram, which I thought was potentially quite beautiful: that you could touch something [...] that wasn't actually there. I found that more poetic and emotive and moving, in a more personal sense [...] The promotional video for that technology contained one line that was "a floating image in mid air is no longer just a dream." There's this desire to give technology a physical form so there's at least there's something that will push back at you. I think I found that profound, in a way, because it means that people still desire each other, even if it's so mediated that they just desire to create some kind of holographic representation of something. [...]

Human Resolution's a bit more negative, saying "look at you here as nothing but data". There's that Ashbery poem we were reading the other day where he says "much that is beautiful must be discarded so that we may resemble a taller impression of ourselves." There's a constant aspiration toward this image we've created of ourselves that we can't ever quite get to which is this, I suppose, want or desire: the "big other." You can't ever get it, you can't touch it. And data and Cloud computing perfectly fits into that as an ideological form because it's completely inaddressible. 

[...] The desire to make machines instantly responsive to the body plays on a strange sort of humanism, which is so close to digital property protection. We have these swipe screens and fingerprint scans under the remit of protecting oneself against identity theft, but it's also the protection of private property, which is inseparable from force in some sense.

Harry Burke / Harry Sanderson, hitherr >?>>>


"The card represents life of the imagination apart from life of the spirit." (Waite)

This card consequently means the life of the soul in particular, the feelings and sentiments, emotions (not only fear, etc.), changes wrought in existence by them, water and the female element in general. It is the sign of panta rei: everything passing, flowing or ebbing away in life, consequently uncertainty. It may relate to dreams, to exhibitions, popular plays, and games, theatres, and to the lower class of people. Physically it means the brain and the stomach.

"Servile spirits (the dog), savage souls (the wolf), and crawling creatures (the crayfish) are all present watching the fall of the soul, hoping to aid in its destruction." (Papus) That is true. And it may happen to us, that a lower current of the Moon brings our way people who have no higher aim than to 'aid in our destruction' even if we ourselves have no intention whatever of 'falling'.

Unfortunately, so firmly were the prevailing nineteenth century conceptions committed to the notion of man as primarily homo faber, the toolmaker, rather than homo sapiens, the mind maker, that […] the first discovery of the art of the Altamira caves was dismissed as a hoax, because the leading paleoethnologists would not admit that the Ice Age hunters, whose weapons and tools they had recently discovered, could have had either the leisure or the mental inclination to produce art – not crude forms, but images that showed powers of observation and abstraction of a high order.
Notes from Lewis Mumford, Tool Users vs. Homo Sapiens and the Megamachine











Theodore Kaczynski in Lutz Dammbeck's The Net (2003)




i seee te face




grundrisse

A health food worker's t-shirt says in cursive, travel around you. he packs up dozens of macrobiotic organic and dairy-free sandwiches, which by tomorrow will be stale and soggy as well as macrobiotic organic dairyfree. he is spanish and has a swollen ankle. he works in the madrid airport and is now takes the elevator up and down the three floors between his booth and the airport shuttle whereas normally he would take the stairs then
escalator. the type of clientele who chide and teach their children moral lessons from the earliest age smile at him, 
"your foot...", their faces sampling pity because it's free. his dark lover is waiting at home for him with a point of meth, which they will smoke, before showering, fucking, and running in the streets in freshly laundered shorts. His lover has long hair and a cock like a banana. Neither of them come. His feet in new nikes, white, plush, and the sweat, which looses itself from his body, are the same thing. He will play basketball. And twist his other ankle. The smell of the ball, taut, pushes against his nicotine fingers, like a wing of Renaissance paintings wherein the baby holds coral and the woman a flower, probably Mantegnas, imposed upon like a sigh. This is unworthy. There are no rooms full of ghosts. It is a pinhead-angel type equation. It is a room full of pinheads and in the gaps are thoughts thought by thugs and bank robbers. They number in their thousand-millions. They think of home. Of family. The next bank. A glass of orange juice. More knuckles. Of sex. Of the perfect ass. Of their small dicks. Of their big dicks. Boxing. One day having children. Of going to the local butcher to pick up some shanks. Of her excellent cooking, goddamn, almost as good as my mother's. Of the beach. Of the stripper. Of dirty bills and clean bills. Of their smell. The sawn-off shotgun and the sawn-off head. Of their friends, of their enemies. That they are sometimes the same thing. Of a song on the radio. Of home. Of family. Of ass. I will loosen a room full of ghosts. The shy fat girl will get down on her knees to suck his dick. He holds the back of her head and fucks her mouth. He finishes and she wipes her mouth and smiles. She has known him since childhood. 

ß




i see the face ofjesus
in my hand
it is palmyra
jejas died the arh=cheologiist’
the black face of dearth
skapping pythagorusa

i am twisting msekf aroud tony ocnrad 

a;; of these insight
was to get sam
to atake mxe while listening to tony cord
illl hilkd him down m
my finers have disappeared over the bar
ifity poooll 
it;s swayed away
 the berg that move s the body it weighs me down
i mjst plane and hone and scrape you out of orange for our to fore the weigh of it
thrst
just thrust
no one denies a tin waist 
marissa nichols you're my superhero 

jitter bue vie stared tony aain
no from all sides
yes
entere
the wallsar e dark
it speeches high and rust red its iron you cant separate me

then i cant find jump pump 
w=y=a;; b=;ue falls int do i write stupid’dwon red
conrad

twe sink slowly through the space i lost my watch when i was 12 theowing away 
streams and rams of me reams off 
folden sounds the ream of fold that you playing me 
i; play at screen shot no at f3
this is the same those through space
if you flop over a mountain for me it;ll never happen


ß



i eat a whole bag of salt and vinegar chips thinking of someone maybe you you call them crisps or the beer conjures another better form ripe for nostalgia everyone looks better in my imagination sounds funnier me too like feeling full i wouldn’t eat so many if there was someone here to impress i don’t share with my cat even though i’m full even though he’s asking but i refuse as if subtly to say i’m not sharing because you ask me so there

grundrissestraße