Evergreen Course Blog | Spring 2011 | Reclaiming Public Spaces

Dear All,

Here is just a small sampling of things on movement & gesture to be listened to/read/looked at for tomorrow.  Instead of choosing several different artists, I focus, besides the Beckett (top) and the Debord essay (bottom), on ONE artist, who works collaboratively, and whose transformation from page to gesture I think is exemplary of some of the paradoxes, problems, and trajectories we’ve discussed thus far – of how, when the page is felt to be somehow inadequate for a particular mode of creative writing, a certain poetical project, one might proceed to move beyond the physical page and into the sphere of nearly complete gesture.

We’ll spend about half the time doing lecture proper, then half the time trying out these groups, getting together, chatting, etc., in prep for Saturday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u2DAp6fceQ&feature=related – Beckett, excerpt of Film

Rodrigo Toscano, Relay, poem (movement – headed off page?)

http://www.durationpress.com/authors/toscano/relay.html

Rodrigo Toscano, Traux Inimical, same interests now translated from page to audio/sound/play [LISTEN ONLY TO PART ONE]

http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Toscano/BPC/Toscano-Rodrigo_02_Truax-Inimical-Pts1-3_Segue_NY_3-25-06.mp3

Rodrigo Toscano, thematic interests in collaborative work, interruptive poetics, modulation of form indicative of intersecting, colliding socioeconomic classes, etnicities, languages, translated now from page to mostly gesture (some lines remain, but the audio is now acted out through large and small movements, with allowance for actors to improvise) Collapsible Poetics Theater – Documentary Excerpts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5P61GkqKPU – rehearsal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7B8X2OWwHM – rehearsal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDZLV-XmRa8 – rehearsal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK16LO6c9xo – rehearsal (working out body movements)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ploLvmuJIEM – performance excerpt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUJiFY5gelc – performance excerpt

Toward a Situationist International

Guy Debord

OUR CENTRAL IDEA is the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality. We must develop a systematic intervention based on the complex factors of two components in perpetual interaction: the material environment of life and the behaviors which it gives rise to and which radically transform it.

Our perspectives of action on the environment ultimately lead us to the notion of unitary urbanism. Unitary urbanism is defined first of all as the use of all arts and techniques as means contributing to the composition of a unified milieu. Such an interrelated ensemble must be envisaged as incomparably more far-reaching than the old domination of architecture over the traditional arts, or than the present sporadic application to anarchic urbanism of specialized technology or of scientific investigations such as ecology. Unitary urbanism must, for example, determine the acoustic environment as well as the distribution of different varieties of food and drink. It must include both the creation of new forms and the détournement of previous forms of architecture, urbanism, poetry and cinema. Integral art, which has been talked about so much, can be realized only at the level of urbanism. But it can no longer correspond to any of the traditional aesthetic categories. In each of its experimental cities unitary urbanism will act by way of a certain number of force fields, which we can temporarily designate by the classic term “quarter.” Each quarter will tend toward a specific harmony distinct from neighboring harmonies; or else will play on a maximum breaking up of internal harmony.

Secondly, unitary urbanism is dynamic, in that it is directly related to styles of behavior. The most elementary unit of unitary urbanism is not the house, but the architectural complex, which combines all the factors conditioning an ambiance, or a series of clashing ambiances, on the scale of the constructed situation. Spatial development must take into account the emotional effects that the experimental city is intended to produce. One of our comrades has advanced a theory of “states-of-mind” quarters, according to which each quarter of a city would be designed to provoke a specific basic sentiment to which people would knowingly expose themselves. It seems that such a project draws appropriate conclusions from the current tendency to depreciate randomly encountered primary sentiments, and that its realization could contribute to accelerating that depreciation. The comrades who call for a new, free architecture must understand that this new architecture will primarily be based not on free, poetic lines and forms — in the sense that today’s “lyrical abstract” painting uses those terms — but rather on the atmospheric effects of rooms, hallways, streets — atmospheres linked to the gestures they contain. Architecture must advance by taking emotionally moving situations, rather than emotionally moving forms, as the material it works with. And the experiments conducted with this material will lead to new, as yet unknown forms.

Psychogeographical research, “the study of the exact laws and specific effects of geographical environments, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals,” thus takes on a double meaning: active observation of present-day urban agglomerations and development of hypotheses on the structure of a situationist city. The progress of psychogeography depends to a great extent on the statistical extension of its methods of observation, but above all on experimentation by means of concrete interventions in urbanism. Before this stage is attained we cannot be certain of the objective truth of the initial psychogeographical findings. But even if these findings should turn out to be false, they would still be false solutions to what is nevertheless a real problem.

Our action on behavior, linked with other desirable aspects of a revolution in mores, can be briefly defined as the invention of games of an essentially new type. The most general goal must be to expand the nonmediocre part of life, to reduce the empty moments of life as much as possible. One could thus speak of our enterprise as a project of quantitatively increasing human life, an enterprise more serious than the biological methods currently being investigated, and one that automatically implies a qualitative increase whose developments are unpredictable. The situationist game is distinguished from the classic notion of games by its radical negation of the element of competition and of separation from everyday life. On the other hand, it is not distinct from a moral choice, since it implies taking a stand in favor of what will bring about the future reign of freedom and play.

This perspective is obviously linked to the continual and rapid increase of leisure time resulting from the level of productive forces our era has attained. It is also linked to the recognition of the fact that a battle of leisure is taking place before our eyes, a battle whose importance in the class struggle has not been sufficiently analyzed. So far, the ruling class has succeeded in using the leisure the revolutionary proletariat wrested from it by developing a vast industrial sector of leisure activities that is an incomparable instrument for stupefying the proletariat with by-products of mystifying ideology and bourgeois tastes. The abundance of televised imbecilities is probably one of the reasons for the American working class’s inability to develop any political consciousness. By obtaining through collective pressure a slight rise in the price of its labor above the minimum necessary for the production of that labor, the proletariat not only extends its power of struggle, it also extends the terrain of the struggle. New forms of this struggle then arise alongside directly economic and political conflicts. It can be said that up till now revolutionary propaganda has been constantly overcome within these new forms of struggle in all the countries where advanced industrial development has introduced them. That the necessary changing of the infrastructure can be delayed by errors and weaknesses at the level of superstructures has unfortunately been demonstrated by several experiences of the twentieth century. It is necessary to throw new forces into the battle of leisure. We will take our position there.

A rough experimentation toward a new mode of behavior has already been made with what we have termed the dérive: the practice of a passional journey out of the ordinary through a rapid changing of ambiances, as well as a means of study of psychogeography and of situationist psychology. But the application of this will to playful creation must be extended to all known forms of human relationships, so as to influence, for example, the historical evolution of sentiments like friendship and love. Everything leads us to believe that the essential elements of our research lie in our hypothesis of constructions of situations.

A person’s life is a succession of fortuitous situations, and even if none of them is exactly the same as another the immense majority of them are so undifferentiated and so dull that they give a perfect impression of sameness. As a result, the rare intensely engaging situations found in life only serve to strictly confine and limit that life. We must try to construct situations, that is to say, collective ambiances, ensembles of impressions determining the quality of a moment. If we take the simple example of a gathering of a group of individuals for a given time, it would be desirable, while taking into account the knowledge and material means we have at our disposal, to study what organization of the place, what selection of participants and what provocation of events are suitable for producing the desired ambiance. The powers of a situation will certainly expand considerably in both time and space with the realizations of unitary urbanism or the education of a situationist generation.

The construction of situations begins beyond the ruins of the modern spectacle. It is easy to see how much the very principle of the spectacle — nonintervention — is linked to the alienation of the old world. Conversely, the most pertinent revolutionary experiments in culture have sought to break the spectators’ psychological identification with the hero so as to draw them into activity by provoking their capacities to revolutionize their own lives. The situation is thus designed to be lived by its constructors. The role played by a passive or merely bit-part playing “public” must constantly diminish, while that played by those who cannot be called actors, but rather, in a new sense of the term, “livers,” must steadily increase.

We have to multiply poetic subjects and objects — which are now unfortunately so rare that the slightest ones take on an exaggerated emotional importance — and we have to organize games for these poetic subjects to play with these poetic objects. This is our entire program, which is essentially transitory. Our situations will be ephemeral, without a future. Passageways. Our only concern is real life; we care nothing about the permanence of art or of anything else. Eternity is the grossest idea a person can conceive of in connection with his acts.

Situationist techniques have yet to be invented. But we know that a task presents itself only when the material conditions necessary to its realization already exist, or at least are in the process of formation. We have to begin with a phase of small-scale experimentation. It will probably be necessary to prepare plans or scenarios for the creation of situations, despite their inevitable inadequacy at the beginning. To this end we must develop a system of notations, which will become more precise as we learn more from the experiences of construction. We will also need to discover or verify certain laws, such as that according to which situationist emotions depend on extreme concentration or extreme dispersal of actions (classical tragedy giving a rough idea of the former, dérives of the latter). In addition to the direct means that will be used for specific ends, the positive phase of the construction of situations will require a new application of reproductive technologies. One can envisage, for example, televised images of certain aspects of one situation being communicated live to people taking part in another situation somewhere else, thereby producing various modifications and interferences between the two. More simply, a new style of documentary film could be devoted to “current events” that really are current and eventful by preserving (in situationist archives) the most significant moments of a situation before the evolution of its elements has led to a different situation. Since the systematic construction of situations will give rise to previously unknown sentiments, film will find its greatest educational role in the dissemination of these new passions.

Situationist theory resolutely supports a noncontinuous conception of life. The notion of unity must cease to be seen as applying to the whole of one’s life (where it serves as a reactionary mystification based on the belief in an immortal soul and, in the final analysis, on the division of labor); instead, it should apply to the construction of each particular moment of life through the unitary use of situationist methods. In a classless society there will no longer be “painters,” but only situationists who, among other things, sometimes paint.

The main emotional drama of life, aside from the perpetual conflict between desire and reality hostile to desire, seems to be the sensation of the passage of time. In contrast to the aesthetic modes that strive to fix and eternalize some emotion, the situationist attitude consists in going with the flow of time. In so doing, in pushing ever further the game of creating new, emotionally provocative situations, the situationists are gambling that change will usually be for the better. In the short term the odds are obviously against that bet. But even if we have to lose it a thousand times, we see no other choice for a progressive attitude.

The situationist minority first emerged as a tendency in the Lettrist left wing, then in the Lettrist International which it ended up controlling. The same objective movement has led several recent avant-garde groups to similar conclusions. Together we must eliminate all the relics of the recent past. We now believe that an accord for a united action of the revolutionary avant-garde in culture must be carried out on the basis of such a program. We have neither guaranteed recipes nor definitive results. We only propose an experimental research to be collectively led in a few directions that we are presently defining and toward others that have yet to be defined. The very difficulty of succeeding in the first situationist projects is a proof of the newness of the domain we are penetrating. Something that changes our way of seeing the streets is more important than something that changes our way of seeing paintings. Our working hypotheses will be reexamined at each future upheaval, wherever it comes from.

Various people (particularly among the revolutionary artists and intellectuals who have resigned themselves to a certain impotence) will respond that this “situationism” seems rather disagreeable; that we have not created any beautiful works; that we would do better to talk about André Gide; and that no one will see any clear reasons to be interested in us. They will evade facing the issues we have raised by reproaching us for using scandalous tactics in order to call attention to ourselves, and will express their indignation at the procedures we have sometimes felt obliged to adopt in order to dissociate ourselves from certain people. We answer: It’s not a matter of knowing whether this interests you, but whether you yourselves are capable of doing anything interesting in the context of the new conditions of cultural creation. Your role, revolutionary artists and intellectuals, is not to complain that freedom is insulted when we refuse to march alongside the enemies of freedom. Your role is not to imitate the bourgeois aesthetes who try to restrict people to what has already been done, because what has already been done doesn’t bother them. You know that creation is never pure. Your role is to find out what the international avant-garde is doing, to take part in the critical development of its program, and to call for its support.

Hi All,

Looking forward to seeing you at my place for the mid-quarter, casual seminar & get-together.

Here is my address:

1414 Madison Ave (along bus route heading downtown from campus)
Small white house with purple trim – corner of Plymouth and Madison, across street from Garfield Elementary baseball diamond

Please show up for a short seminar at 4, and feel free to stay until I kick you out, probably by 8pm.  You need not stay the whole time, of course, but please stay at least for the duration of a class (4-6).  You are also welcome to bring refreshments, though this is not necessary – we will have minimal refreshments on hand.

Please DO BRING any work you have done, lately from class, outside of class, or prior, that a) you would like to share with your small group and/or b) that you would be interested in sharing with the whole class.  We will have time at end of seminar to break into a reading of sorts – multiple media are welcome.  But, for sake of keeping things rolling, please keep your readings/sharings to 5 minutes MAX.  You need not read/share with the whole class at end, but as usual with our gatherings, you are welcome to do so.

If you are planning on sharing something and already are certain that you will, let me know if you can, so I can make a lineup prior to your arrival.

See you all tomorrow
Solidarity,
David

Dear All,

Below are the week’s “readings.”  They are all audio files – as this week we are moving from the physical page as art object, to sound poetry, which may or may not use or deal with physical pages.  The last file bridges us into performance, situationism, gesture, and “happenings,” for next week, i.e., the last file includes video and voice as persona.

I send these a bit late because I wanted not to interfere with that great discussion that has begun online.  So many excellent thoughts are streaming in – keep up that conversation.  Lots to talk about this Saturday for casual seminar, it seems, which at that point we will be settling into our groups and going from reading and small writing work to the working primarily on the performative events.  Remember, groups will be solid by Saturday – thanks for all your input, do keep it coming, as it’s helpful to know your ideas and preferences.

There are three optional listenings here- two attached are sound pieces that I did for UbuWeb and the American Cybernetics conference (one uses Chris Mann’s “For Headphones” as found poetry, cut up by me), and the other is below – a John Cage piece that we will be listening to and working with in class.  Again, these are optional.

See you tomorrow
David

Christian Bok:
http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/bok/Bok-Christian_Seahorses-and-Flying-Fish.mp3

Steve McCaffrey/bpNicol (The Four Horsemen) -
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/bpNichol/Ear-Rational-1982/bpNichol_15_Alphabet-Game_1972.mp3

Tracie Morris on Sound Poetry
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Morris/Close-Lstening/Morris-Tracie_09_Discussion4_WPS1_NY_5-22-05.mp3

Tracie Morris – Petro
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Morris/Close-Lstening/Morris-Tracie_12_Petro_WPS1_NY_5-22-05.mp3

Chris Mann – PRESS UPPER RIGHT BUTTON, FAR RIGHT CORNER, THEN FEEL FREE TO PLAY
http://theuse.info/

Caroline Bergvall, About Face
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Bergvall/Bergvall-Caroline-About-Face-2004.mp3

Finally, heading from sound to sound + video, Linh Dinh, “Late Weather”
http://lowerhalf.blogspot.com/search?q=Late+Weather

And finally finally, heading from sound and video to Situationist-inspired “derive / automatic poetry…” from Sam Truitt, Vertical Elegies
http://ubu.wfmu.org/sound/truitt_sam/Truitt-Sam_01_rock.avi

——————————————————-
For In-Class Writing Activity, John Cage - “Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake” ( a longer audio file you can listen to ahead of time if you wish)
http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/dial_a_poem_poets/nova/Nova-Convention_12_cage.mp3

Dear All,

***IMPORTANT NOTE: READ THIS EMAIL TO THE END – IMPORTANT SCHEDULE INFO AT VERY BOTTOM OF THIS EMAIL***

Apologies about getting this work to you a little late, but for the most part you’ve already read this week’s readings.  Please refamiliarize yourself with the two altered books I assigned last week, the Gardner and the Nelson below.  On the other reading: please read the Jenna Osman essay on found poetry and then read the Fitterman fragment.

SO: as I wrote before about the altered book, to get a sense of where we’re headed in lecture thereabout, feel free after doing the readings below to peruse our optional blog.  But: what do the found poem (or found prose piece) and the altered book have in common?  Why put these things together?  Well, both are, for me, instances of yet other ways to think of “performing text,” but are also forms that very much rely on a) plagiarism (hey, a good thing sometimes in poetry!), and b) relatedly, appropriation of often well known texts or tropes.  Both are, in a sense, collaborations, no?  Albeit not with a live person, but “overt” collaborations with other texts, not, say, the more subtle idea of “unavoidable collaboration,” i.e., “we’re always collaborating whether we know it or not” that Gabe brought up – a subtle and good point, so perhaps the distinction is in degrees?  Anyway, chew on these things, their connections, etc., as you read this work.  Should be fun. (Note: Bruce Andrews is introducing us to Rob Fitterman in the excerpt below, and we encountered him before in a completely different arena – in visual poetry).

See you Weds!
David

http://jacketmagazine.com/32/p-osman.shtml – Jenna Osman on found poetry

http://bostonreview.net/BR26.5/fitterman.html – fragment of Rob Fitterman’s found poem cutup trilogy, “Metropolis XXX” (a cutup of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, interspersed with “found” lines from streets of Manhattan)
http://www.dusie.org/ebbport.pdf – Susana Gardner, altered from EBB

http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/works/altn.xml – Altered Book, Beverly Nelson (press “images”, and then read/look at the book via zooming in, clicking the right arrow, etc – play around till you get to end..)
————————————————————- OPTIONAL —————————————-

The Isou film, his Lettrist Manifesto, parts of which I was going to show last week.  Feel free to look.  It’s fun!!!  Or maybe not.

http://www.archive.org/details/venom_and_eternity

—————————————-SCEDULING CHANGE/INFO————————————-

This upcoming Saturday, instead of class, those interested will be going to procession of the species with Diann.  Get in contact with her if you are interested in going.  For the rest of you – instead of taking the whole darn day off, it’d be good to maybe work on forming ideas to bring to your group regarding what you might want to do…

To make up for that missed time (no class Sat), I propose that we do a session the following Saturday at my house, PRIOR to us moving into “get together mode.”  That is, instead of losing that Saturday to the class get-together, we’ll have small group work for 1 1/2–2 hrs, then hang out for refreshments, music, etc.  So, 4pm at my house Saturday after next, with directions coming to you next week.  6pm onward we can relax, enjoy, even more than we will be relaxing and enjoying seminaring in a place not on campus.

PERFORMATIVE EVENT GROUPS:

Please email me who you definitely do want to work with and who you definitely do not asap (unless you have no preference whatsoever). Let me know, too, any other pertinant info, like what sort of thing you’re interested in (medium or media, say), and whether you’d rather work with folks who have experience in collaborative work or would rather be with folks who maybe don’t have any experience.  We’ll try to work it out so that you have the greatest level of ease going into what should be considered a fun experiment, hard work yes, but something for which we’re not being “judged.”  From that data I will then form groups of 3 or 4 and post them via email and blog next week.  After that we can tweak, but we’ll only have that following Saturday to try the tweaking – then it’s off to the races…don’t worry – I don’t get off the hook, either.  If you need me as a prop, a worker bee, a whatever, let me know.  I don’t take all requests, but I will take some.

ARC OF WEDS LECTURES NEXT 3 WEEKS:

This week, found/altered text

Week 5 – we leave the normative page behind and do sound, gesture, & “theatricality from Situationism to Steve McCaffrey and the Four Horseman to Tina Darragh and Rodrigo Toscano

Week 6 – we round out our major readings for the course by returning to the page – procedures, forms, and instances of collaborative writings (2 or more authors), including translation work (Linh Dinh’s video poems), translation as we normally think of the term, Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney, authors of “Eclipse,”; example of ekphrastic writing (1 or more writers in collaboration with 1 or more artists of other media); and, perhaps, if anyone has work of their own by then – your/our work!!!

Dear All,

Here are the readings for Weds. It appears as a long list, but don’t forget, these are concrete and visual poems, along with two beautiful altered books.  What are concrete and visual poems?  “Vispo,” as the movement is now called (kinda gross), comes out of Dada and Fluxus.  Again, here, the ideas set forth have sociopolitical, as well as performative, implications.  From early Dada works, especially among the group of artists within the broader early French movement that called themselves “Lettrists,” there was the notion that a) normative modes of speaking, writing, and living, were habituated and harmful.  Many Lettrists, with neo-Marxist backgrounds, felt that the elemental structures of poetry and writing in general, needed to be deconstructed, and viewed as codes made up of material sensuous objects that can be invented anew, thus inventing a new way of thinking about self, other, community, etc.  More on this in lecture.  But that is the background for what has turned into a broader movement of writers and artists looking to move away from the sentence as unit of meaning, and move towards the physical structures that make up languages, moving ever further from the normative “page” and normative notion of “the book” and “the poem.”  Think reinvention, interrogation, and new media as you look at these.

Regarding the altered book, just look for now at these 2 below, and if you feel like hearing about where my lecture will go, think about the photo of the Talmud I showed during the opening lecture, and feel free to visit the optional “discussion” blog covering my two programs, here: http://davidwolach.blogspot.com/ (scroll down till you get to my entry on Gardner’s “Altered Book”).

Ultimately, what do visual poems and the altered book have in common?  How do they relate to “movement” on and off the page?  In what sense are they “performances” of text?

See you Weds.

Very Best,
David

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Hugo_ball_karawane.png&imgrefurl=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hugo_ball_karawane.png&h=560&w=366&sz=96&tbnid=EmjR_7js9PiOgM::&tbnh=133&tbnw=87&prev=/images%3Fq%3DHugo%2BBall&hl=en&usg=__yIQEz2L8Kuo0XoJ-XUYwlULQ1HU=&ei=7azjScHoE4WItAPLnKWrCQ&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=4&ct=image – CONCRETE POEM, EARLY DADA

bpNichol

http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/bpnichol/bpaf03.htm – Concrete Poem
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/bpnichol/bpaf10.htm – Concrete Poem
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/bpnichol/bpaf08.htm – Concrete Poem
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/bpnichol/4hm-int.htm – OPTIONAL, the first writings regarding bpNichol’s and Steve McCaffrey’s sound – performance – poetry troupe, which we will get to when we get to sound poetry and performance & collaboration (weeks 4 and 5)

Betty Danon

http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/danon/bd-staf1.htm – Concrete poem: keep clicking “next” until you get to artist’s statement, read that.

Bruce Andrews

http://www.vispo.com/A/aa.html – visual poem (feel free, once you’ve done the readings, to look around this site – some interesting things, some not so much)

Wheelhouse Installations

http://www.wheelhousemagazine.com/archive/spring_summer08/give_it_up.html – Concrete Poem, Jesse Patrick Ferguson

http://www.wheelhousemagazine.com/archive/winter08/portal_1.html – Concrete Poem, Andrew Topel

The Altered Book

http://www.dusie.org/ebbport.pdf – Susana Gardner, altered from EBB

http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/works/altn.xml – Altered Book, Beverly Nelson (press “images”, and then read/look at the book via zooming in, clicking the right arrow, etc – play around till you get to end..)