At the Airport

6 September 2007

They make their livings out at the airport, scavenging recyclable material from the trash containers which are dedicated to aluminum cans and certain kinds of plastic bottles, for later resale. A small group of people seem to work the same terminal. You spot a young asian woman, an old man that looks like he’s hardcore homeless. Another rather non-descript guy. Like ghosts they drift thru silently and alone, treading routes that cross repeatedly, though they don’t seem to make or seek contact with each other. Each place in the terminal they stop at they examine the contents of the recycling bins, discretely but matter of fact… turning the bottles over or around to see what the symbols are… micro-experts in the rules, regulations and logos of this strange detail of the consumption economy.. each with large laundry bag on wheels, one with a large shopping bag from KaDeWe, in which to gather their spoils. It takes you a while to even notice them as distinct from all the other passengers, meeters and greeters – but once noticed these curious itinerant workers are shadows that its hard to ignore, you see them more and more. Like background noise/buzz or the fact that a movie is out of synch – once recognized you cannot stop from noticing and you wonder how many other people around you in the crowd are also players in some not-yet-noticed sub-economy. What gives them away in fact is the repetition – their grazing/paths which take them back around in a parasitic cycle from one place to another and back again. Everyone else here only comes around once – one trip to the toilet, one to duty-free, one to the café or electronics store. These scavenging ghosts are on rails however, always cycling back to the same places. Hoping to be the first to get there just after someone drops another useful/resaleable item.

 

Forthcoming

5 September 2007

I’m doing a show of my video work at Sketch in London from 15 September to 3 November 2007. For the show, titled One Hundred and Three People, I’m exhibiting three existing pieces (Kent Beeson is a Classic & an Absolutely New Thing, Erasure and So Small) alongside a new work called 100 People, which conjures the imaginary presence of one hundred people, each of whom exists only by virtue of brief descriptions on screen. This last one is currently under construction. Like my earlier video Starfucker, 100 People functions as a kind of minimalist anti- (or virtual) cinema in which simple presentation of unfolding text on a black background investigates the dynamic capacity of language itself to create images and to summon presence.

Sketch is at 9 Conduit Street, London W1S 2XG Tube: Oxford Circus/Piccadilly Circus. The opening reception is on Saturday 15 September, 12.30-2.30pm.The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am-5pm. Free admission.

Also, as mentioned here before Starfucker will be part of Ein zweites Leben (A Second Life), at the Stadtgalerie Pavilion / Loge in Bern, opening on the 8th of September and running until the 21st October. As part of the exhibition there will be a special screening event with a selection of my other video-pieces on 19th September at 20.00 with an introduction/Q&A by curator Barnaby Drabble.

Finally on art-related matters the Drama Queens project I made earlier this year with Elmgreen & Dragset has a very nice mention here in Kate Bush’s roundup of Munster for ArtForum. I’ve written about the project a few times here in the notebook and have flagged other press stuff and youTube clips from it here too – use the tags below to locate this info if you’re that way inclined.

Most Beautiful

2 September 2007

Then, out of the blue comes the most beautiful spam subject line I’ve had in ages.

> i very want to find my love

Must use it as a title for something. It’s from one of those ‘I am biologically female, saw your profile on the internets, will be in your town soon and would like to meet you’ invitations, which I have been collecting for no particular reason. I think I’m attracted to it as a project (like some of mine) about endless variations-on-a-theme. Also the performance of not-writing-very-well. Or the genuine not-writing-very-well. Or the combination of the two.

*

A few things on the Nettime list recently that I liked reading. This interview by Jelle Bouwhuis with Norman Klein on the New Canon. A link by Olia Lialina to her article about Web Vernacular which led me, indirectly to this piece of hers from back in 1996, which I liked, called (I think) ‘My boyfriend came back from the war. After dinner they left us alone’. Very much a Donald Barthelme kind of title.  (Google Ads makes a very weird intervention on the first page of this work though, by pulling up random text-ads for anything to do with War – War Medals, War of the Worlds Tickets, Modern War Studies, Records from World War Two etc – hard to take against the minimalist aesthetic of the piece). Also on Nettime Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) pointing to this blog entry by Steve Shaviro reviewing William Gibson’s Spook Country. I wasn’t so keen on the book myself (I just finished it and liked Pattern Recognition rather better) but Shaviro makes an interesting case for it.

Flight

30 August 2007

To Brussels tomorrow (and then by car to Gent) for a re-rehearsal with the cast of That Night Follows Day, which starts to tour again very soon. Rotterdam is first, Graz is second. Looking forward to seeing it again. Victoria have done a four-language edition of the text – looks great – I just got proofs of the cover. Photo by Phile Deprez.

That Night Follows Day Cover

 

Going Back

29 August 2007
J.G. Ballard from Shanghai Jim

I keep trying to think what would have happened had the war not taken place. I would have gone on living here [at Amherst Avenue], and probably would have gone on living in Shanghai. So I see around me here a sort of alternate life that I never actually managed to live because of the war.

Just came across this impressive website called Ballardian, devoted to all things J.G. Ballard.

The top item currently is a long review/reading of a 1991 BBC4 documentary called Shanghai Jim. I remember watching this documentary (quoted above), when it came out I guess, around the time they released The Kindness of Women. The frame for Shanghai Jim – which touches on events from Empire of the Sun – is that Ballard goes back to the city for the first time since just after the war – revisiting the camp in which he and his family were held, the house that they lived in and so on. There’s something very interesting about this process of return/revisiting, I think partly because going back to anything, is such an elusive experience, and because it’s so very resistant to capture, especially in the visual field. I mean what part of that complex, webbed, uncanny feeling of time-passed and time-collapsing can be captured on film? Very little, although David Lynch might get close to it, at least as on-form as he is Inland Empire. Even on the grainy youTube of Shanghai Jim though there is something extremely compelling about Ballard, in his super-well-spoken/unruffled/well-mannered way, navigating his way through the locations of his own past, sat out-of-place and out-of-time in his white blazer and his hat, top shirt-buttons undone, in the tiny room of Lunghua Camp’s G block in which he, his parents and his sister were interned for nearly three years. “This little room…” he says, looking around “..is in fact probably as close as I’ll ever come to home, surprisingly…

Make Things Happen

28 August 2007

Discussing Tom McCarthy’s book Remainder with Hugo, which I wrote about already here. As we’re talking we get on to artists and Hugo’s describing a conversation he had with Paola Pivi, whose extraordinary staged scenes, often involving displaced animals, or large objects or people, in relation to extreme or unexpected landscapes, he has often worked on with her. Paola’s is the donkey in the motorboat stranded motionless on a flat sea, the helicopter overturned and rested on its rotorblades, the pair of zebras stood in the mountainous snow, the alligators turned and swirling in lakes of cream. H. says that sometime ago Paola wondered aloud to him if, aside from the demands of having to make tangible work, she might prefer not to photograph these scenes at all – confirming in the end that she’d rather just stage them as events; to organise the logistics, make things happen and then simply sit back to watch.

I wondered since about the difference between the compulsion to write something into existence and the compulsion to actually make something happen. Perhaps there isn’t so much difference as one might think, at least if you believe what Burroughs wrote in The Adding Machine, where he sees writing as kind of magical or political practice that makes things happen in consciousness, in order to see those same things made manifest at some future point; that “the purpose of writing“, he says “is to make things happen“.

*

Somehow related (I think).

In Berlin at the weekend during the artists talk/discussion at HKDW, William Pope L. said something like this (any error caused by my slow typing):

I guess I’m interested in making interventions inside people’s heads.
Kind of like neuroscience for theatre. That would be good you know – to build a sculpture actually inside peoples consciousness… and then do shit in there.

(Works best if you can imagine the ironic (?) mad-scientist glee with which William laughed after saying this).

 

Some Reports

25 August 2007

From Devon M. wrote this:

All ok here apart from a couple of hours in a and e on Friday. A chain of
events, pick, concrete, eye, concrete. Bleeding eye. Nice. N was only asking
for a story with bleeding eyes the other day (true) so I came home and he
got a live one. All ok but v sore and I look like a terminator abt to be
mashed, or mid mashed. Light is a problem at the moment.

 Meanwhile, in post Apocalypse Liverpool:

I'm a Nogadog, me. I've been one for four years and I'm 17 now. I thought it was a good thing when I was young. It was all my mates. You are just a Nogzy soldier. We are all Nogzy soldiers.

More here

 

Promises, Passwords and Signals

23 August 2007
John Baldessari

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beautiful Robert Smithson drawing at the amazing Ubuweb. Also nice list-work from Bruce McLean and the John Baldessari as proto-Bart above. I am going to lose myself in there sometime when I get near a decent connection (see below).

*

I am stood in the narrow part of the hotel room, right up by the door, with the laptop raised above shoulder height and turned at a slight angle in order to catch the ghost of the fucking wifi signal that haunts this annex. I have resorted to this only in desperation after the previous tactic of shifting position slightly on the bed for fifteen minute periods failed to find the tiny pocket of signal that sometimes can be found there, tangled in the sheets. If you get this message please come and get me. I am in room 133.

*

From the train, coming here, days ago.

The kid I can’t see who’s sat behind us says:

But you cant be scared, because it is your voice.

And then later:

Mum can’t turn her voice into your voice.

*

Automatically generated:

Please note that your temporary password for the ****** System is: starsshame

The password is case sensitive.
Your UserId has been sent in a separate email.

Preparations

21 August 2007
Vlatka Hovat - This Here and That There

Vlatka is getting ready for her eight-hour performance This Here and That There at HKDW in Berlin, this Friday. I am helping her prepare which means for the most part I am sitting in the sun and watching her. Sometimes, with the stop watch on my phone, I have to time how long it takes for her to shift the 50 chairs into a new arrangement. The tech guy is great but he’s reluctant to believe that she wants to move the chairs all around the building on her own – he has someone that can help her. Vlatka says no; her shifting the chairs is the piece. He says OK, but he adds that there’s someone scheduled to be there – so its really OK for her to change her mind.