THRASHING_SEEMS_CRAZY_BY_JULIANA_SPAHR_

this is true

a man in an alley grabbed my arm

this is true

someone called me an left the phone dangling at the post office

this is true

a man stalked me

someone tells a story

someone tells a story to another person

another person says I don't believe this

someone tells the story again in an attempt to convince

someone tells

as disbelief is easy

belief is difficult, supported by constraint

but a woman knows a man stalked her

knows this is true

a woman knows her own address

her own body

her lost domain, her desires, her confusions

someone tells a story

there are things people can do to themselves

they are:

leave molotov cocktail on own yard

set fire to own house

leave a glass of urine on own porch

leave envelope of feces outside own door

send a butcher knife to self at work

send letter to health department that self is spreading VD

stab own back

someone tells this story

says this is true

self turns on self

the knife enters at a point that the self could not have reached

but did

someone tells and then repeats and she stalks herself several

times to convince

someone tries to enter into the information

to pass words back and forth that have meaning

fails, resorts to this is true

this is true

a woman calls her stalker The Poet

this is true

a woman describes a stalker in terms that describe herself

this is true

a woman stalked herself to kill herself

this is true

a woman is at times a man

when a fish is hooked

other fish don't see the hook

thrashing seems crazy

the hook could be the branding of a woman at a young age

by a man

or an older male neighbor spending too much time with a

child

or the boring nature of life

in the story the hook is the artist's rendering of the stalker as

described by the woman

it is the woman in a man's face

she does not know this man

thrashing seems crazy

later she realizes it is herself

her knife

her hook

her own face she was always drawing male

this is true

as thrashing is not crazy when one is on the hook

NOTES: This poem draws from an Oprah episode on the case of Ruth Finley, a woman who, because of "disassociative personality disorder," was stalked by a male persona of herself.
Juliana Spahr, "Thrashing Seems Crazy" from Response. Copyright © 1996 by Juliana Spahr. Reprinted by permission of Green Integer.

Source: Response (Sun & Moon Press, 1996)

i find microscopic analogy in stagnant water (cybernetics poem after norbert wiener)

an almost buddhist
banality
to the fact
and it is a fact
that sooner or later we shall die.
it is, in fact, wholly probable that the universe will die the heat death.
the world will find itself reduced
to a vast
temperature
equilibrium
and nothing new will ever happen.

nothing will be left
or what will be left –
a drab uniformity from which you can expect only minor and insignificant local fluctuations
– will not be worth your time
or mine

regardless, these last stages –
what we call the world's death
or the heat death
– can have no spectators.

our lives are insignificant fractions
of eternity
stages so small
they would be dwarfed by even the
smallest minor local fluctuation in the heat death

these pockets of
organisation
form the negative
of the mould
entropy

which is never insignificant

so rejoice while you can
if you can
i find comfort and microcosmic
analogy in stagnant water
and soggy
bits of old bread
which appear to me
very much like the end

I envy you the ordered flesh from which they unfold

"Gaudi began the park in 1900," Virek said "Paco wears the period costume. Come here, child. Show us your marvel." "Señor," Paco lisped, bowing, and stepped forward to exhibit the thing he held.
Marly stared. Box of plain wood, glass-fronted. Objects. "Cornell," she said, her tears forgotten. "Cornell?" She turned to Virek.
"Of course not. The object set into that length of bone is a Braun biomonitor. This is the work of a living artist."
"There are more? More boxes?"
"I have found seven. Over a period of three years. The Virek Collection, you see, is a sort of black hole. The unnatural density of my wealth drags irresistibly at the rarest works of the human spirit. An autonomous process, and one I ordinarily take little interest in."
But Marly was lost in the box, in its evocation of impossible distances, of loss and yearning. It was somber, gentle, and somehow childlike. It contained seven objects.

The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuit boards, faced with mazes of gold A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A finger-length segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin but the thing's face was seared and blackened.

The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.
"Gracias, Paco." Box and boy were gone.
She gaped.
"Ah. Forgive me, I have forgotten that these transitions are too abrupt for you. Now, however, we must discuss your assignment."
"Herr Virek," she said, "what is Paco?"
"A subprogram."
"I see.''
"I have hired you to find the maker of the box."

Joseph Cornell, Boxes, various dates.

She took a deep breath. "Herr Virek, what if I fail? How long do I have to locate this artist?"
"The rest of your life," he said.
Forgive me," she found herself saying, to her horror, "but I understood you to say that you live in a vat?"

"Yes, Marly. And from that rather terminal perspective, I should advise you to strive to live hourly in your own flesh. Not in the past, if you understand me. I speak as one who can no longer tolerate that simple state, the cells of my body having opted for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers. I imagine that a more fortunate man, or a poorer one, would have been allowed to die at last, or be coded at the core of some bit of hardware. But I seem constrained, by a byzantine net of circumstance that requires, I understand, something like a tenth of my annual income. Making me, I suppose, the world's most expensive invalid. I was touched, Marly, at your affairs of the heart. I envy you the ordered flesh from which they unfold."

William Gibson, Count Zero, 1986

Paul Thek, from the series Technological Reliquaries, 1964-67

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

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.

Course,

I’ll have Janine go through

Everything.

She’ll explain our different

Staggered payment

Systems and will

Introduce you to your

Personal

Rep

songs as time; introducing a fissure into the dead order

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)