Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

IN Class Writing 11/6

1 Hannah Hoch The Beautiful Girl

I clock tick work round spin. I clock tick work round stop. Tires are another name for feet, feet tired tires spin round sounds clock tick work. Hair piece here piece round piece work spin paper rip rent fabric spin. Hip hip hypnotize spin one two one two. Clock gears grind gears here. Gears now hear, piles now simile wiped away to fight. Paper for awhile grinds pulp grinds eye grinds minds. Bump and grind bumped minds. Hair is in the mechanism clogs drains, drains slow brains. What if the circle was recycled? Legs are simple machines called levers. Apply pressure and see result, double your power through machines, simply divide and conquer. We can rebuild tired spin clip clop the clock machine lives or is broken or fights. Dip dot the landscape, marr make the landscape, hair flip landscape, iron wrinkle landscape, circle round the landscape.

2 How I fell in love with my prosthesis

Dear Pentax K100,
You are my eye. I could stare into your monocular lens for hours. We have made beautiful images together. Tripping your shutter makes me shudder, sliding back that curtain. Your mechanisms are a part of me.
Dear Pentax K100,
I find your 50mm lens stifling. I need someone with more range and versatility in my life right now. Goodbye
Dear Pentax K100,
I don’t understand this new plastic automated body. I want you back. I want back your metal body that is indestructible. Why did I ever leave you?
Dear Pentax K100,
You make me tense. The muscles in the back of my neck contract and I just can’t relax. I can’t see what I want out of you anymore. When I look into the mirror, the viewfinder, I see my face with your ugly eye attached to it. You removed me from my friends. You were a buffer so I didn’t have to interact with people but you left me empty with only images to live in. Open your eye/shutter all the way open to F2 if you must and look at me. What world are you living in? Now I am shaky, it is below 1/60 of a second and I can’t hold you anymore. It’s not you its me, its art.

paper attached

I am: serious and fun. I get really involved in projects and then they are my life.

I want: a group that is both disciplined and fun, excited about their own work just as much as everyone else’s work, can brainstorm and respond in critique, and shows up and does the work.    

I am interested in doing a photographic project for winter quarter. I want to work with set up situations and putting fake things on film. Topics I am thinking about are spirit photographs (like double exposed frames showing living and dead) and looking at the critiques of Apollo moon photos (exploring the claims of why they are fake).

I am thinking about Jeff Wall’s work and the flow from painting to photography to cinematography, has the cycle through these mediums been aimed at the same goal? What is the goal? What is being represented? What history are they playing within?   

Obits(2)

That shirt from 3rd Grade
The shirt descended into shreds. It had been well loved-worn. Washed every night to be worn everyday. The shirt was disappeared by a mother. We will always wonder what happened to it- where it went. We hope it is currently with that lost teddy bear in the afterlife. There is an empty spot in the drawer it used to live in. It is outlived by its wearer, somehow.

This is the obituary of a bullet. That killing idea is dead. It was shot. Its purpose has been eliminated by the idea of war tactics. We alive have not felt its presence, only its absence. It tore through dimensions, through moral dimensions. How do we talk about something that is dead? In niceties? In harsh plainness? This bullet is outlived by no one or everyone. It is not the death of death, no ideas, just one bullet lost to a war that has already claimed so many other bullet’s lives. The bullet leaves behind three children and a grieving wife. It leaves the gun empty. It reliquary fashion it will show itself. Its corpse has already had numerous miracles attributed to it. This bullet served its country. Actually it is MIA, never recovered, empty casing. It went off target and its passing has gone unnoticed.

Beneath the surface a living lung fish.
Out-and-in that in is order. Order that in statements backwards are Questions? Questions are backwards statements in that Order. Arrangement, that is order. Concealment, that is in order. Order that is in me. Me in is that Order? Order in. Order out. Take out Order. Take out order. Take order. Take orders for example. Order to breath. Line the understood. Line the understood with padding for lungs are rusty and tend to stick and pull at ribs. I will understand in order, order in understand. RacecaR. RacecaR. RacecaR. Exit entrance order enter exit. Order repent order actions. Order Odor breath beneath the surface. Breath Odor. We breath with our eyes, softness with precision. We regulate the levels in the atmosphere, softness with precision. We travel softness with precision. We lament the slowness of the carriage, the slowness of the carriage, the mud that clings softness with precision. We cry carbon dioxide from our skin. The colony of cells, colonized conquered with softness and precision. Is this what it means to have precision with no sense of accuracy?
This is rhythm? Harsh on a glittering goldfish. Beneath order does Jehovah surface?
Push, and watch your breathing. Body from form beyond affected.
Order reversed is jumbled. Jumbled is reverse order.
Line the understood, the path understood cut by the wagon wheels of order a spoke in the center. A rhythm in those cells exist a rhythm those cells exist.
Push pull.
Known and unknown keep regulated this high regulated force. Gasp and Pant.

Create a dialogue between myself and my gender. What would my gender say? What would my self say? Where is the difference? Am I performing myself or my gender? Is gender a character?

Relationship between identity and gender.

Option 1: Gender as a character, self character and body as character/object. How they move in space around eachother- what comes between which ones? Are they tied together by a rope circling? (improve game- enemy and protector- body between gender and self)

Option 2: Gender doesn’t exist as a character, Gender doesn’t exist.

Option 3: Gender exists as a character for some identities but not for all represented

Option 4: Gender character multiplying

Option 5: Play all options, all nowheres. At the same time, backwards, sped up/slowed down/ mix up

This American Life about Testosterone- http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=220

How much of our identities are tied to the chemistry of our bodies?

What if all difference is constructed? I thought we were supposed to celebrate differences. I thought the buzzword word was diversity. Look around and visualize the difference, skin color is visible, defines black or white. What about when we can’t see the difference, hidden difference below the surface? Where is difference, is it real, is it the space between? Difference as defining and measuring populations. I’m white, no I’m Norwegian, categories not so apparent but insist on claiming it. Race is important, race is not important. We are all the same, we are all different. What happened to the Family of Man? The system relies on the existence of difference. We need to read your body, not your body but out reading of it, our need to know. Hey where are you from? I’m from Bothell. No, where are you from? Oh, I guess you mean Cambodia. We want to know what makes people different. Where are you from, no really, where are you from? They look different. What is the deal with diversity? Do we have to visually present it? Isn’t there diversity in people who look visually the same? What are the assumptions in visualizing diversity? Where does diversity come from? Where does diversity live, what does it look like? Look, don’t look. See, don’t see. Categorize, assume, don’t. Recognize, forget. Do I see you? Am I trained to only see the differences? Am I trained to ignore the differences?

Script Attached

Deborah Oropallo