Column

Lucy Ives is Editor at Triple Canopy and author of Anamnesis, a book-length poem published by Slope Editions on the last day of 2009.

##### Three notes:

> 1\. The affect I perceive in painting may be no more relevant to the effects of literary language than any other context-producing affect.

> 2\. Painting has often been representational and affect is included in painting. But affect – in or as itself – is not representational, in the style of an image. Affect moves differently than, say, naming.

> 3\. I want to create a reader. This is what I am doing, in writing.

##### An anecdote:

A postcard reproduction of a painting by Eugène Delacroix was for many years affixed to a bulletin board in the kitchen of my par- ents’ apartment. At the time of the appearance of this postcard (of _Young Orphan Girl in the Cemetery_, c. 1824) I was seven or eight years old. The postcard remained in place, as postcards do, for three or four years more. During this period, microwaving frozen muffins, et cetera, I had plenty of opportunities to examine the face depicted. Things about it disturbed me. Not least among these was the fact that I could not determine the figure’s age. Was she a child? A teenager? Early _twen- ties?_ Was I even sure that she was female? And then there was the question of the purpose of the painted image: What, exactly, was I meant to believe was occurring here? Someone leans hard to her left in a landscape, seems to rush in one direction without moving. (I did not know the painting’s title.)

I perceived something unhinged, thick in this face. The staring face is turned away, addresses an invisible entity (the sky?). The girl seemed to be an example, but of what I could not say, although her exemplarity seemed important, like a warning seems important.

##### An expression:

Many people think of affect as a kind of performativity, an act or pattern (an “act” in the sense that it is both artificial and _real_, in the sense of “happening”). Affect is a social act.

In the painting, it occurs to me that affect takes another form, that of an “X,” a quantity present and (in this strange fact of English) affecting. When I look at this painting, something seems to be held open for me, not just an eye or a mouth. It runs contrary to the painting’s title, its supposed meaning: This is a child. This individual is bereft. This individual is exposed. This is an expression (a face, a complex gesture of a painter). This is an “expression” “of” “grief.” (The use of quotation marks becomes more emphatic, the longer I look.)

In a kind of eccentricity endemic to almost all of Delacroix’s figures, issues of anatomical proportionality lead to a heightening of the work’s weird _drama_ – what, in spite of that term’s potentially specious connection to painting, I want to describe as affect. Alfred de Menciaux, in an article on the salon of 1845, wrote, “If the impetuosity of M. Delacroix’s brush or pencil did not involve a tendency to join the legs too high or too low or to deform the arms – ultimately to flout the laws of drawing – my God, what a great artist he would be!”

Here, a massive fleshy ear demands the eye. A squished neck invites thoughts of anguish. What is that lump under the chin? An eye several times the size of the end of the face’s nose bulges at the very edge of believability, i.e., the far right of the figure’s face. This face cannot be imagined head on. What would we do with the neck? The eyes would be impossibly far apart. We could not fit the eyes within this face. The mouth (slack, febrile, plush) is rotated slightly too far to the left. Teeth are revealed as if from the front. This is to say nothing of the strange collusion of flesh and fabric that forms the torso. The fabric pinched, an inexplicable empire waist; the girl’s left shoulder turned to the eye at an impossible angle.

##### Anyway:

In his diaries, Delacroix does not discuss the _Orphan Girl_. This painting was a study for _The Massacre at Chios_ (1824), an enormous historical painting depicting the genocide and enslavement of Greeks on the island of Chios by the Turkish army in 1822.

Around this time, in his diaries, Delacroix has a habit of using Italian to describe as- signations with his mistress of the moment, Julie. We can assume that the orphan girl’s head is hers. I am not a Delacroix scholar, but the trouble in the fashioning of the figure, the marriage of childish face to shrunken adult body, seems to have something to do with desire. We can’t ignore the exploitative aspects, the weird presence of breasts, open mouth, nostril, ear. The body appears recently shaken. It has just been seized and roughly shaken. Here things are, as we like to say in the _U.S._, “personal.” The face and torso are not yet in service of something larger, i.e., a prurient view into war in the near east, but soon they will be.

Anyway, as Delacroix admonishes a putative student, in his _Meditations on the Art of Painting_, “…in truth, you yourself are the subject…”

##### I mean:

The effect of the unreality of this painting is to create a viewer. I think about it, this ef- fect. A writer could, likewise, create a reader. I find much to despise in Delacroix’s paintings, yet his idea about his viewer is so obvious. It seems like a trick one should try to understand.

We are all familiar with the idea of creating an audience. But what would it mean to create a reader? Could a writer create a reader who had not previously existed, an entirely new reader? I don’t, for example, necessarily intend for a new reader, so called, to be a real person, or even a possible series of people. Perhaps creating this new reader is also about creating a kind of permission. Perhaps we could be more desirous of reading itself, or – if there is no way to have _reading itself_ – then: a present of reading. I will quite willingly trade meaning for the present.

Writer

Poetry

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Representation

Academia

Painting

While contemplating a postcard of Delacroix’s Young Orphan Girl in the Cemetery posted on her fridge, Ives explores the ability of paintings to create a “viewer” whose interpretation of the work is contrary to the more obvious literal meaning of a title. The “viewer” is created through affect – the expression, the feeling, and the poetry of the painting itself. Ives strives for herself, as a writer, to similarly create a “reader.”

On Writing: Meditations on the Art of Reading

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Activism

Artist-run centres

Collaboration

The space between poetry and art has ceased to be so well defined. Increasingly, with collaborations, combined readings or exhibitions, performances, and even within art writing, poetry has found its own cachet in the art world. Through a series of personal encounters in Vancouver and Montreal, Simpson describes his own interpretation of (poetry’s place) the place of poetry within contemporary art conversation. 

Inventory: Poetry

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Walter Phillips

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Editorial

One of the things that defines _C Magazine_, and which differentiates it from other publications, is the way it plays host to very distinctive, and often divergent voices. We encourage formal and stylistic experimentation among our contributors, which produces enormous variation in how ideas and artworks are presented. This allows contributors to present their ideas in very specific ways that don’t collapse into a general viewpoint or uniform style of the magazine. Among the other potentials of C is that we have a great deal of latitude to experiment with the methods and processes of producing the magazine itself. In response to solitary editorial working practices, I’m interested in making our editorial processes more collaborative and more dialogical, and introducing conditions that shift the content and style of the magazine.

In this spirit, I’ve enlisted some of the people who have been involved with C in recent years – Kari Cwynar, Danielle St-Amour and cheyanne turions – to guest edit an issue on poetry. Together they’ve created an extraordinary issue, where artists and writers explore the intersections of visual art and writing, challenging and advancing formal methods and addressing political forces that are at play in language-based art.

##### by cheyanne turions:

I once heard my friend CAConrad say,_“I don’t want to write poetry, I want to be poetry.” And I feel like what I would like to do is to be an instrument of poetry, a servant of poetry. What I understand poetry to be is the practice in which we cultivate and serve and protect our sociality by constantly changing it, by constantly disrupting it and improvising upon it. And I would like to be an instrument of that, a participant, so to speak, in that practice._ Fred Moten, in interview with Housten Donham

A many-pointed constellation took shape in the production of this issue: labour and care arising amongst Kari, Danielle and I as guest editors, in dialogue with a cast of writers through their urgent subjects, encouraged by the infrastructure of _C Magazine_. Throughout these pages, there are all kinds of support structures, bolstered by challenges made and taken (the delicate dance of listening made flesh). If there is a burgeoning collectivity that the voices in this issue conjure, I would like to think that it first took root in how this issue was made.

The conceit that poetry and visual culture are separate genres is repeatedly undone throughout these pages. This is not to say that they converge into a hyphenated or hybrid style, but that the agency embedded in the world of appearances, alongside the strange compositional possibilities of language, marks a specific strategy that renders visible a politics of world-making. Perhaps not always, and perhaps sometimes used to deleterious effect, but here, throughout these pages, the confluence of poetry and visual culture operates as a critique of how meaning is constructed. What arises is the imperative to interrogate one’s participation in systems that otherwise work to make themselves invisible. Consider Fan Wu’s call to afford comparable material and intellectual weight to source-language and target-language in acts of translation; or Lucy Ives’ simultaneous desire for and experimentation in creating a temporally specific reader through writing; or Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s use of equivalencies to recast the world in a whisper. There is a momentum here, taking us elsewhere.

_“All in all, the poem protests, and for the poem there is the protest that refuses the separation between language and life…a poem doesn’t tell. It makes.”_[^2]

##### by Kari Cwynar:

I’ve been the Assistant Editor of C since January 2015, which includes the responsibility of assessing pertinent themes in art writing and criticism for upcoming issues. Poetry was an immediate choice, not only as a genre I often turn to, but as one with an important and evolving relationship to the art world. Danielle and cheyanne came forward at the same time with similar investments. We discussed hybrid artist-poets, material poetry, poetic press releases and artist talks, the idea of “trend.” We looked back to precedents, unwilling to see the art world’s current interest in poetry as new, but as a lineage. But we always returned to the politics and performativity of poetry – the essential thing that poetry can do as form, what it can offer writers, thinkers, artists and activists, its availability as a mode in which to enact life. It’s a tenuous statement, to decide that one form offers more political affect than another, but read Nasrin Himada’s contribution to the issue, on poetry, resistance and the body, or Rachel Valinsky’s close reading of a series of works by Gins and Arakawa, who used poetry as means to further their radical politics around the reversibility of life and death: the refusal to die. Read poet and artist Olivia Dunbar’s review of the exhibition _Them_ at the Schinkel Pavillon and consider a candid, unbridled poetic voice, one that sheds the posturing of art criticism as such.

What I see most in assessing the current relationship of art and poetry is the sense of a group of thinkers looking outside artistic and literary conventions and more significantly beyond the status quo of civic life. It is in poetry where readers and writers actively reject Kenneth Goldsmith’s “remix” of Michael Brown’s autopsy report or Vanessa Place’s adoption of the voice of Mammy from _Gone with the Wind_. Poetry is a form that cultivates its readership, and constantly re-negotiates positions and subjectivities.

##### by Danielle St-Amour:

In April of 2012, Lisa Robertson gave a talk at Concordia University called “Risking Rhythm.” In her talk, Robertson considers the Saussurean division of language into “signifie” and “signified,” naming it as the “definitive gesture of 20th-century intellectual methodology.” This dual nature, she argues, is a cornerstone in the methodology of a surveillant, codifying system. It is through the instrumentalization of this division, she states, that bodies are separated from agency, as materiality is separated from meaning.

“Against all poeticizations, I say there is a poem only if a shape of life transforms a shape of language and if reciprocally a shape of language transforms a shape of life.”[^1]

Through conversation around this issue, we agreed that the most engaging proposition of poetry was its ability to both engage and enact life. We sought work where we saw the sensorial and the physical combining to make new spaces; new bodies reforming material and meaning. We endeavoured to include those who make life of poems (CAConrad); make words and histories recombinant (Robertson and Doris); coalesce language, form and body (Lippard, Lukin Linklater, La Melia, Turgeon); and use prose as radical material (Himada). With hopes that language, here, is granted status as both the method and the main business, with reverence to its possibilities and its slippages.

[^1]: Henri Meschonnic, A Rhythm Party Manifesto. Translated by Lisa Robertson and Avra Spector. 2010\. _http://xpoetics.blogspot.ca/2010/08/rhythm-party- manifesto-by-henri.html._
[^2]: Ibid.

Amish Morrell is Assistant Professor at OCAD University, where he teaches Criticism & Curatorial Practice, and Visual and Critical Studies.

Editor

Kari Cwynar is a curator, writer and editor based in Toronto, where she is Director of Kunstverein Toronto and Editorial Director of _C Magazine_. She writes on contemporary art for publications and catalogues, contributes regularly to _Frieze_ and _Metropolis M_.

Guest Editor

Danielle St-Amour curates, writes and makes work in and around Canada. She is currently curator in residence at SBC Gallery in Montreal.

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Kari Cwynar, Amish Morrell, Danielle St-Amour, and cheryanne turions introduce the theme of “poetry” for this issue. 

Editorial: Poetry

Feature

CAConrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is the author of seven books, with the latest titled ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books, 2014). He is a 2015 Headlands Art Fellow, and has also received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Banff, Ucross, RADAR and the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. He conducts workshops on (Soma)tic Poetry and Ecopoetics.

We poets have been the ugly cousins of the arts for years, painters asking us to write poems serenading their paintings. Collaboration can mean creating together, but it can also mean being a traitor and working with the enemy. Let us honour the first of these definitions.

(Soma)tic Rituals can fuse with any artistic discipline. For instance, the poet creates half the ritual, the painter the other half. The two halves are then combined to make one ritual we both perform together to write and paint. I have created (Soma)tic Rituals to collaborate with such artists as Candice Lin, Yuh-Shioh  
Wong and Jonas Slonaker, among others.

Here is an example. A poet and a painter deposit letters for one another inside newspaper boxes on opposite sides of a street. We wave to each other, then begin reading the letters, which explain the ways we would like to die. _Found in the morning on the floor of a boat after being impaled in the chest by a swordfish while night fishing. Or fragment of my bloody shirt found after having sex with lions._ We read our letters, then begin writing or painting in view of each other.

An hour later, we meet in the middle of the street to embrace and dance the foxtrot, with the painter leading, then switching to the poet leading. We return to writing and painting within view of each other.  
The experiential collaboration of (Soma)tic Rituals has infinite possibilities and there is no reason for poets to ever again subjugate ourselves to other artists.

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Philosophy

The term (Soma)tic Rituals describes a collaborative experience created by CAConrad. In order to avoid the typical subordination of poetry to other artistic mediums, CAConrad suggests an equalized ritual with one half being created by the poet and one half by the visual artist. With infinite possibilities the poet will be elevated to his/her proper place beside the artist.

(Soma)tic Ritual Collaborations

Nasrin Himada is a Palestinian writer, editor and curator based in Tio’tia:ke (Montréal), in Kanien’kehá:ka territory. Their writing on contemporary art has appeared in Canadian Art, Critical Signals, The Funambulist, FUSE Magazine and MICE Magazine, among others. They are the co-editor of contemptorary.org.

##### Preface

Knowing I am from a place I’ve never been makes me into you. _A settler in Canada._  
The backdrop is always there – behind me. Palestine is there.  
“You keep following me,” I imagine saying under my breath.   
But Palestine is also beside me: always a thought in fruition, like a companion for life.  
And sometimes I feel as though it is in me, creeping up from my stomach, getting caught in my throat. Palestine is pain.   
At times, Palestine is facing me. I see. There is nothing there. Too much is there.

> “May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth.”   
> (Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme)

That is the way I live Palestine – as a memory to come, as a memory in the making.  
Memory is where I come from.  
Palestine’s story is summoned through enunciation:   
Through what I see, how I read, what I say, how I say what I say. There is rigour in performance:

> “The great potency of potentiality.”  
> (Clarice Lispector, Água Viva)

This is pre-personal.  
Uttering the words, “I am Palestinian,” is an act of love.   
Uttering the words, “I am a prison abolitionist,” is an act of love too.  
Sometimes I confuse the two.  
After all, it is in practice that counts:

> “Could it be that what I am writing to you is beyond  
> thought?”  
> (Clarice Lispector, Água Viva) 

The practice of saying what is me, in the actual, realizes a you.  
Palestine is you.

##### Beginning From The Middle

A year ago, I repeatedly watched Ana Mendieta’s filmed performance _Body Tracks_. It is a performance/painting/film shot on Super 8 in a gallery space in 1974\. The film is one minute long, in colour and silent. Mendieta’s back is to the camera; she is standing up against a white wall, her arms extending up and outwards in a V. She starts to slide down the wall, slowly, methodically, her arms coming closer together but never touching. As she slides down the white wall two red streaks follow from her arms, her arms moving with the rest of her body all the way down to her knees, at first marking red curves on the white wall, and then straighter lines down to the floor, all in one continuous movement. Mendieta then gets up, off her knees, looks at the tracks she made, what her arms made, her sleeves soaked in (steer) blood. She turns and walks off-screen.

I am reminded of the concept of prearticulation that philosopher and dancer Erin Manning came up with to express “the feltness of language in the moving, before the saying, between the words.”[^1] Mendieta’s film is all but one minute long, but the effect of the movement that results in these tracks is haunting and at the same time comforting. The act/performance/painting is extraordinary and I am left with an enduring sensation. One I am not able to name or express in words in any language I know. The effect of pre articulation ensues, as if under a spell, and with no words to describe the experience of the feeling or sensation I am compelled only to return to the piece again and again. In this way, the video creates a constitutive relationship with the sensation of prearticulation. This is material in the sense that it’s felt in the body. Thinking is what is going on here; thinking as sensual experience. I return to the piece. It has me entrapped in the prearticulation of a thought; Mendieta’s _Body Tracks_ has a hold on me.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I wrote to a friend: “I keep thinking about Ana Mendieta, about all the blood, the violence in her work and in her life, how they are entangled with earth, the _Rape Scene_ piece, her fucked up husband who probably killed her. I am freaked out and can’t sleep. For real, I had insomnia last night because I kept thinking she was going to appear in my dreams.”

The intensity of the hold is activated through the compulsion to return to Mendieta’s work, the instant of which is felt in a prearticulated state. This feeling is un-nameable. But, I also refuse to try and describe its logic, analyze its intention, read it as a representation – as something that stands in for something else. The red of the blood is not the art object. Mendieta’s body is not its subject. Neither are we – the audience, the viewer.

Brian Massumi writes on the encounter with art, “We never just register what’s actually in front of our eyes. With every sight we see imperceptible qualities, we abstractly see poten- tial, we implicitly see a life dynamic…because something has happened: the body has been capacitated. It’s been relationally activated. It is alive in the world, poised for what may come.”[^2]

How then do we examine a situation from the point of view of its possibility, its life dynamic?

What is _Body Tracks_ helping me think?

In watching Mendieta’s filmed performance, I decide it is a poem. I decide it helps me think of the power of the poem. Our bodies give life to expression that resists containment in articulation. They resist _making sense_. The power of poetry resides in language, specifically in how language is used to register the experience of the inexpressibility of thought. The power of poetry also resides in the image, in the composition of an image, what breaks perception open. For this reason, I read _Body Tracks_ as a poetic event. Its duration felt in intensity expresses the breakdown of category.

##### Poethics

In watching Mendieta’s piece as a poem, I am moved by Denise Ferreira da Silva’s conceptualization of Poethics: “A Black Feminist Poethics becomes here in a World imaged as endless Poethics: that is, existence toward the beyond of Space-Time, where The Thing resists dissolving any attempt to reduce what exists – anyone and everything – to the register of the object, the other, the commodity.”[^3]  
At times, I am not moved by your solidarity. You don’t know, and you will never know how anti-Palestinian racism is felt or experienced, what that does, how it apprehends the body. And it is in this _not knowing_ that separates me from you, and makes me different than you. Our difference is marked: politically, bodily, emotionally and intellectually. Upon acknowledging this difference I understand that solidarity is not about unity. It’s about the dissolve that Silva speaks of. That is why I write, “Palestine is you.” The power of poetry for me, the power of writing, is the power of expressing what feels impossible to express in language. How do we move beyond modes of representation that deem the object/subject as readable? I want to write away from what I think I understand. The power of the poem resides here: in making felt the process whereby an expression is coming to terms with un-thought.

“The act of writing is the act of making soul, alchemy.”  
(Gloria Anzaldúa)

The poem expresses fleeting instants that make me and unmake me. Sometimes the instants undo a sigh, other times they fire up rage; mostly, in urgency, they are quick to leave the body. I read and write poetry as a practice. I think of writing as a practice that honours my process, my experience, as it continuously changes in the instant: the Poethics of process as practice conjoins words to life, to how we live in a body.

In how I experience time, giving time to time, time to appreciate the ways in which in bed we lie in difference, in separation; we lie in between what comes to be touch. And that gesture bears no repetition, that’s what we get addicted to. How it can never happen the same way twice. Going back for more is probably what we want to call love. But it’s affection in its purest form and that’s what we take for granted, touching someone we want to touch us lets us let go, give in to what’s real in the world. We’re then really part of the misery and it’s all that we can do to remind ourselves that we have a body.

##### Palestine, A Haunting

Palestine is what I return to each time I write, and in returning to it, another proposition is made: What next? For me, having never been there, Palestine is more an apparition than a place. An apparition that keeps me in check, that reminds me of where I come from, that shows me there is always possibility in many returns. Palestine has attached itself to me. It does not belong to you. Palestine is a positioning, not a question. It is definitely not your question. “The Palestine question” is not a question, and certainly not one that needs your probing, or is interested in your investigating, or your scrutinizing. It is not an object that names your politics, radicalizes your research, glorifies your genre. How about instead: “The settler question.”

I am committed to Palestine because it grounds me in something felt, a lived experience, where memory is formed, that is part of how I constitute a history, even a fantasy. When I call it in, Palestine appears. And that is what informs my practice. It is heritage-based so as not to forget that Palestine is a place that is of the body. My commitment to Palestine is in not forgetting that there is power in honouring lineage _in the flesh_. And it is through the flesh that memory is created, activated, released, expressed and thought. It is through the body that I write Palestine; its appearance is a haunting. A haunting because for me Palestine is always there in thought. This haunting is what keeps the possibility for thinking alive. Writing brings me closer to thinking, and hence, my capacity for expression is renewed.

Feeling Palestine in proximity helps me consistently question what I do.

Talking to a friend, she asked how, as an immigrant, do I think of myself as Canadian? I simply replied that I don’t. I said: “I don’t ever say I am Canadian. It’s not only that I am not from here; I don’t want to be from here. This is not a place _to be from_. I am Palestinian, and my position as such is one that refuses the politics of settler colonialism. So as long as I live here and not there I am responsible for giving this land back to the people to whom it belongs. That is the responsibility I carry here, to give the land back.”

Feeling Palestine in proximity helps me think about decolonization.

##### Decolonize Or Die

The Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo (MCAG) is an anti-racist, anti-colonial poetry collective that has written many manifestos and critiques against the on-going racism and white privilege in the conceptual poetry scene. Most recently, they ran their own Twitter feed campaign to denounce Vanessa Place’s Twitter project, where she tweets racist language from the awful book _Gone With The Wind_ using a photo of Hattie McDaniel, the actress who played Mammy in the film, as her avatar.[^4]

Before the call to denounce Place was visible on Twitter, MCAG had already written a beautiful manifesto directly connecting conceptual poetry practices to white supremacy. This manifesto, “The Mongrel Coalition Killed Conceptualism,” was published online shortly after Kenneth Goldsmith performed “The Body of Michael Brown.”[^5] This is an excerpt from MCAG’s piece:

> \_For those of you defending, indifferent, and silent – we are shouting at you. We see you. Your silence does not protect you from judgment; it secures the legacy of your fathers.  
> If you feel surprised – and shout – “we didn’t know” shout only now  
> “this isn’t okay” – do us a favor and stop performing the masquerade of innocence.  
> KG, VP, the Imperial “conceptualist” approach is not surprising. It’s racism downloaded and updated for our times. It’s always been racist. The film of cream cheese.  
> Excavate your lives, memories, “art” – do not let go of the fissures,  
> the echoes of colonial pillaging you inherited  
> “But he always did this”: Exactly. And where were you?  
> We call for this facade of “art” and “poetry” to be forever de-legitimized, dismantled and archived (do not forget or forgive).  
> because it has been made clear that only some bodies will be granted life because the white colonial fantasy sustains a war against black and indigenous life  
> because the imaginary of white supremacy exists to suppress our incantations (how else could it survive?)  
> and the only defense they give is defense of their right to bear arms we are impatient and mongrelized and will not rest without  
> FULL ACCOUNTABILITY AS OUR VENGEANCE  
> full accountability as our vengeance  
> We invoke you to claim your place on one side of the tracks get the fuck out of your white supremacist togas  
> No more cowering under the liberal cry of “too much yelling.”  
> No more cowering under “I don’t believe in public shaming.”  
> YOUR PUBLIC SHAME WILL NOT ECLIPSE OUR (PRIVATE) PAIN. DECOLONIZE OR DIE.\_

I first encountered MCAG when a friend in Los Angeles sent me a link to this manifesto, which is published on the group’s website. Upon reading it, I instantly felt protected, engaged, like someone had my back. The adamant refusal to accommodate, to forgive, to give excuses, to let artists and poets get away with utter racist bullshit – there is no space here for that. Like MCAG writes: “because the white colonial fantasy sustains a war against black and indigenous life.”  
This is as serious as it gets, but the thing is, it is never taken seriously enough. What is at stake – in how we position ourselves, how we do and say what we do in art or poetry – is life itself. How do I contend with this as a writer? I am in agreement with poet Kenji C. Liu when he writes about MCAG’s manifestos as opening up possibilities that push us to ask, “What is a mongrel poetics?”

Liu writes:

_MCAG employs the strategic use of high intensity critique to interesting effect. In my view, it’s a recognition that more polite forms of engagement often go unheard. Politeness and respectability are the entry fees to middle-class whiteness, preconditions one must meet before whiteness deigns to listen. It’s a privileged refusal to listen unless the other submits to civilized (colonial) terms of conversation. mcag is a refusal of that refusal, as well as a firm, sharp poke into the nest.[^6]_

I am in support of MCAG. I am in support of refusing the white refusal to listen to voices that don’t conform to colonial standards of politeness, etiquette and approach to conversation or confrontation. I think it’s necessary to do so frequently: to put into practice a mongrel poetics. But I also know I get exhausted “by the body load of speaking up.”[^7]

This is when I turn to art, and to poetry and to writing. To release this exhaustion into something else that can still express the refusal of that refusal. In a way, that is why Mendieta’s filmed performance became a point of return for me. That performance refuses something that I feel in affinity with, in its wordless expression. Even if I don’t know. Even when I am not _in the know_. When I write that my practice is heritage-based, lineage in the flesh, I am referring to struggle in its iterations of expression: what a body lives with, and how a body lives. In writing through/with/for Mendieta, I am gathering my people close, I am reaching out for help, I am choosing my allies. Mendieta is one. mcag is another. In writing, especially in writing about art, I know I feel less alone. In reading, and especially in reading poetry, I know I am less alone. Writing is how I know I am not alone in struggle. The art of poetry, and the poetry of art, help me live in proximity to those who know that a body knows. And it is in the body that I feel knowledge form, and it is from the body that I want to continue to shout, “This isn’t okay.” Because I know.

When MCAG writes, “DECOLONIZE OR DIE,” it is just that clear: DECOLONIZE OR DIE.

The act of speaking up is an act of love; it is a practice of abolition in the everyday. At the same time, I understand that, given exhaustion, remaining silent is an act of love as well, an act of self-preservation. But my intention is to practice speaking up in the various ways that I can, specifically through writing. The violence of racism is real. Its effect is more than palpable. It seems obvious but bears repeating. This is trauma on the body that lives in the flesh. This is the difference that separates me from you, my white friend. Even if you’re in solidarity with whatever, the concern should be with _you_.

In the words of Fred Moten, this is what I mean: “the ones who happily claim and embrace their own sense of themselves as privileged ain’t my primary concern. I don’t worry about them first. But, I would love it if they got to the point where they had the capacity to worry about themselves. Because then maybe we could talk. That’s like that Fred Hampton shit: he’d be like, ‘white power to white people. Black power to black people.’ What I think he meant is, ‘look: the problematic of coalition is that coalition isn’t something that emerges so that you can come help me, a maneuver that always gets traced back to your own interests. The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?’”[^8]

With that, I say: Watch out. There is a mongrel amongst you.

[^1]: Erin Manning, Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 158–159.
[^2]: Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (London, England; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011), 43.
[^3]: Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics:  
The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World,” in The Black Scholar 44.2 (Summer 2014), 91.
[^4]: MCAG also sent tweets to The Association of Writers & Writing Programs demanding Place be removed from her post as a judge  
on the subcommittee for their Los Angeles 2016 conference, where she would be evaluating submissions. During that time a petition was started on Change.org in support of MCAG’s preliminary tweets. Place has since been removed from the subcommittee.
[^5]: In August 2014, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black teenager,  
was shot six times and killed by a white cop named Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. In March 2015, just a week after the US Department of Justice cleared Wilson of all charges in Brown’s death, poet Kenneth Goldsmith participated in the Interrupt Conference at Brown University where he read a text called “The Body of Michael Brown.” Goldsmith is a conceptualist poet whose practice involves taking existing texts and re-mixing them.  
In the case of “The Body of Michael Brown,” he used various autopsy reports of Brown’s body, mixed up different sections from these reports that depict Brown’s body in detail, read them out loud to the audience and ended his performance by fo- cusing on Brown’s genitals. Because of all the outrage, Goldsmith asked Brown University not to disseminate the video of the performance.
[^6]: Kenji C. Liu, “Mongrel Cry: The Possibilities of Mongrel Poetics,” in The Blood-Jet Radio (May 15 2015) https://thebloodjet.gpo
[^7]: Bhanu Kapil, “Vanessa Place, The Mongrel Coalition and Sector  
17: Notes on Poetry, Violence and Community,” Reading Moten in the Cherry Orchard (blog), May 14, 2015\. http://jackkerouacispunjabi.blogspot. ca/2015/05/vanessa-place-mongrel- coalition-and.html?view=classic
[^8]: Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 140–141.

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Colonialism

Identity

Diaspora

Body

How do we locate ourselves in our current place when our ethnic origins belong to a country we have never been? Nasrin Hamada explores the impossibility of articulating in words her diasporic experience. She asks for a poetry expressed by the body, the power of which will allow us to move beyond the conventional object/subject means of representation. For Hamada, Palestine is a “positioning”, a physical reminder of where she comes from. It is not a question – political or otherwise, but a place of lived experience that inhabits her body and that releases itself through her poetry.

A Positioning, Not a Question

Tiziana La Melia is an artist and writer based in Vancouver.

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Language

Lippard positions orality as an action that triggers the awareness of the other – if we speak, someone must be there to hear it. With writing and symbols of language we have lost the shapelessness of language’s origins as it rolls off the tongue and travels the space between us before ceasing to exist. For Lippard poetry lies not just in writing, but in the speaking of text that draws it back into and out of our bodies.

Three Parts on Poetry: Orality and Action, The Edges and the Centre, Voices On Her Cures

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Sensory

Manifesto

Robertson revisits her three-part collaboration with Stacy Doris – an ode to the forgotten senses of smell and sound that operate by vibrations and not their molecular, physical structures. In the vibrations are revealed life and death, complexity and contradiction, freedom and revolution. The examination of these vibrations is taken up and cultivated by “the perfume recordist.” By studying the scents and sounds imbued in perfumes from 18th-century France, the perfume recordist establishes a recognition of political, social, and economic changes not only in the past but also in the immediate present. 

The Perfume Recordist

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Artists Books

Valinsky explores the works of Arakawa and Gins, who in 2010 founded the Reversible Destiny Foundation to act as a centre for theoretical collaboration across disciplines and for their architectural practices. The duo out-rightly refused their own mortality instead, and this rejection of death allowed for an intense focus on the present and an increased mental and bodily awareness. What Valinsky terms their “poetics of reversibility,” opens the perceiver-reader of their works to an expanded semantics, a new language that dispels complacency and automatisms, keeping us present and open to new forms of meaning and thinking. 

For Example (We Have Decided to Become Our Own Posterity): on Arakawa and Gins

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Tore Off

Artist

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Excerpt from Pissing

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe writer, academic and musician and a member of Alderville First Nation. Her novel, _Noopiming: A Cure For White Ladies_ will be released this September by House of Anansi Press.

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A poem written by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.

Constellation

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The First Drawing for Reflection Paper No. 5 and The Second Drawing for Reflection Paper No. 5

Aisha Sasha John is a dancer and author of _THOU_ (2014) and _The Shining Material_ (2011), both published by BookThug in Toronto.

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Do I have faith or am I stupid?

Designer

Publisher

Assistant Editor

Artist Project

**Alex Turgeon** is an artist from Canada. His work, research, and teaching centre around how poetry and architecture inform definitions of the queer experience as a built environment.

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Alex Turgeon’s artist project _Midday in the Garden at the Wrecked Beach_.

Midday in the Garden at the Wrecked Beach

Review

Magdalena Miłosz is a Polish-Canadian writer and intern architect living and working in Kitchener-Waterloo. She recently earned her professional Master of Architecture degree at the University of Waterloo, where her thesis focused on developing a critical, decolonial perspective on the architectural history of Indian residential schools. Her texts have previously appeared in _Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy and Breach._

Two screens face each other in a dark room, only a bench off to the side interrupting the space between them. Settling into this interstitial expanse of Shirin Neshat’s _Soliloquy_ (1999), viewers become mediators, with the series of scenes on each screen flowing not past, but through this audience – asking them, perhaps, to act as witnesses to the ensuing visual dialogue. The titles begin, in English and Persian; then, the sole character appears, clad in black robes and played by Neshat herself. She is looking out of two different windows: one in Albany, New York; the other in Mardin, Turkey, not far from the artist’s native Iran.

Neshat completed _Soliloquy_ in 1999, one piece in a diverse repertoire comprising photography, installation and a feature film. Six copies of _Soliloquy_ have found permanent homes in various institutions around the world. The one installed at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery this past winter arrived from the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal through its Momentum series, which tours major works in its permanent collection to different cities. As a digital artifact, _Soliloquy_ could easily be duplicated further, but the life-sized void between the two screens is integral to the configuration of the piece. The installation hinges on more than just the flatness of the screen and its illusory three-dimensionality, rather it depends on real space as the locus of interchange.

The projections alternate between the phenomena of observing and being observed, envisaging the simultaneity of these two states and their overlapping effects on the subject in multiple contexts. When Neshat’s protagonist is active on one side, she is often still on the other, her gaze focused beyond what is in front of the plane of the image – the ribbons of highways in America, the labyrinthine city in Turkey – towards the other screen, which functions something like a reminiscence or dream. As this woman gazes across the space of the gallery, the audience cannot clearly see what she is looking at, and the opposite screen becomes peripheral, both literally and figuratively. Likewise, if we turn to see it more clearly, we can no longer observe Neshat observing and we lose track of what she is communicating in the image of her silent contemplation.

The work encourages us to grapple with the impossibility of existing in two cultural contexts at once while revealing the potentially rich and complex experiences of the in-between. Much of Neshat’s work is concerned with the identity of the exiled, someone who exists neither fully here nor fully there, but paradoxically in both and in neither, and perhaps even in a third space that tentatively reconciles two seeming opposites. Based partly on her own experience of migration from Iran to the US and back, _Soliloquy_ takes up this theme quite literally, but also subtly produces an exilic effect on viewers as they physically occupy an indeterminate position between two visually distinct milieus.

Both the “West” and the “East” portrayed in the installation rely heavily on the built environment as a cultural symbol, in addition to composing the physical form of the protagonist’s story. In the “Western” half of the projection, Neshat drives down a congested highway, then stands in the bustling lobby of the World Trade Center in New York (before 9/11), watching her other, “Eastern” self reminiscing in a palace. In the next scene, she is walking up the grand staircase of the Cultural Education Center, a large Brutalist building completed in 1961 as part of the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York. Finally, she emerges once more in Manhattan, looking down into the light-filled interior of St. Peter’s Church, a modern structure, nearly devoid of ornament, sunk into the ground below a tall corporate tower. The stark contrast between the monumental, contemporary spaces of the “West” and the winding, complex, ancient spaces of the “East” is simple, perhaps, but nevertheless highly evocative of the genius locus of each place.

Because the images are hyperbolically juxtaposed, they serve to underscore that each place is a kind of ghost of the other, for we are always, sometimes painfully, aware of the other’s absence. In this way, Neshat touches on the modern condition of “homelessness,” which renders many of us unsettled, even though in the West, we are, of course, for the most part, settlers of one kind or another. She recognizes, too, that through our presence and absence, we change both the places where we move and the places we have left behind. In each sequence, the woman comes upon a group of others. There are Christian worshippers clad in white at St. Peter’s and Muslim mourners in black within the palace, their Eastern and Western chants overlapping in a final crescendo, followed by a quieting. The contradictions are tentatively resolved through a ritual cleansing on a rooftop. The woman in black is seen, on both sides, running into the distance, towards two vanishing points of solitude.

In both its form and content, _Soliloquy_ is heavily concerned with space and the ways it is moved through, occupied, produced and perhaps left behind. Although not explicitly political, it poses serious questions about migration, identity and culture that are relevant in a new way in increasingly “global” and digitally connected societies, possibly societies in conflict. _Soliloquy_ is no doubt now seen in a somewhat different light than when it was first shown 16 years ago, but the sojourn undertaken by its protagonist remains a powerful study in finding one’s place.

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This article reviews Shirin Neshat’s Soliloquy which shows at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery from January 16 to March 15, 2015\. 

Shirin Neshat: Soliloquy

Randy Lee Cutler is a Vancouver-based writer, artist and educator. She contributes essays to catalogues and art magazines as well as maintains an experimental relationship to pedagogy, gardening and walking. Her art practice takes up themes of food and sustenance through performance, video and textual strategies. In the intersections of gender, art, science and technology, she investigates the emergence of new cultural forms and expression. She is an associate professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC.

All the World’s Futures, the 56th Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor, focuses its energies on politics apparently founded in a belief that works of art have the power to address the global inequality of capital and opportunity. This vision is shaped by three filters, _Liveness: On epic duration, Garden of Disorder, and Capital: A Live Reading._ The theoretical and performative heart of this Biennale, located at the Giardini’s central pavilion, is an active space called _ARENA_ designed by artist-architect David Adjaye. Among its diverse program of live events are film screenings, piano performances, choral pieces and a seven-month durational reading of Karl Marx’s three-volume _Das Kapital_, directed by English artist Isaac Julien. Ironically, a new film installation by Julien, in collaboration with Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, debuted during the opening week of the festival, highlighting perhaps the economic extremes that have come to represent biennales worldwide. All this leads me to wonder how the curatorial premise informs the ways in which the artists at the Biennale are implicated in the very systems that they critique; and if this calls the function of such critique into question?

As the Biennale’s first curator of African descent, Enwezor has brought together artists seldom represented on such an international scale, with Africans in particular taking centre stage. _All the World’s Futures_ showcases 136 artists from 53 countries, 89 of them appearing at the Biennale for the first time. This of course is admirable and important, despite the fact that much of the exhibition feels repetitive due in part to the dominance of video, the density of work on display and the often didactic quality of Enwezor’s aesthetic choices. While some individual artists stand out, especially Taryn Simon, Mika Rottenberg, Hito Steyerl and Steve McQueen, this Biennale was not as engaging as Massimiliano Gioni’s 2013 _The Encyclopedic Palace_, which highlighted a greater appreciation for visualizing knowledge and personal cosmologies in contrast to Enwezor’s curatorial reimagining under the aegis of global action and social change where political theory more often than not has replaced the material energy and aesthetic wonder of artistic practice.

In addition to the two large curated spaces, the Arsenale’s Corderia (rope factory), an extraordinary 316-metre–long building, and the Central Pavilion in the Giardini di Castello, an oasis of greenery laid out during the Napoleonic era, are 29 national pavilions, built in various periods by the participating countries themselves. Additionally, the many national pavilions set in palazzos around Venice and the 44 collateral events further expand the project. The Australian Pavilion housing Fiona Hall’s negotiation of money and labour and herman de vries’ exploration of natural processes at the Dutch Pavilion are memorable examples of accumulation and engagement with local histories. The Golden Lion for Best National Participation was awarded to the Republic of Armenia, whose exhibition involves a breathtaking 10-minute boat ride to the monastery on the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, where artwork by contemporary artists from the Armenian diaspora speaks predominantly to the now 100-old Armenian Genocide. Like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, cited in Enwezor’s curatorial statement, the future is behind us as we move with our backs towards it and all we see is the accumulating detritus of our collective past.

Within this larger framework, the Canadian Pavilion stands on the Giardini grounds, hosted by the National Gallery of Canada and guest-curated by Marie Fraser with an installation by the three-person artist-collective BGL (Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère and Nicolas Laverdière). The work begins with the augmented lettering on the outside of the building spelling out _Canadassimo_, a literal sign that the pavilion has been amplified, expanded and transformed into something much more than itself. The suffix _\-assimo_ is a common form of emphasis in Italian, adding a qualifier of remarkable extremes. In this case, the Canadian Pavilion, with the appearance of a site under perpetual construction due to its scaffolding and recycled materials, is an art world version of Canadiana and more specifically an ode to the architectural and cultural vernacular of _la belle province de Québec._

The pavilion is accessed through the replica shopfront of a classic Québec dépanneur (or “dep”), a store that sells beer, canned food and other household convenience items. (Apparently the material for the installation was transferred by boat, filling three 12-metre-long shipping containers.) With its poor lighting, stained walls and seemingly out-of-date goods, the _simulacrum_ is initially quite convincing. The artists have altered much of the packaging by blurring images and text, making for a drunken effect that evokes a midnight run to the local dep for emergency cigarettes and cheap wine. The aesthetic would have been more convincing had all the objects been transformed; instead, only some of the boxes of Kraft Dinner, cans of Habitant soup, et cetera have been treated with hallucinogenic alteration. Once through the beaded curtains of this anteroom, the viewer finds the living space of the proprietor-artist-\_bricoleur\_, though it can also be experienced as another promising, but unfinished concept: there are few signs of habitation. The next room, what BGL has dubbed “the studio,” is where our corner store entrepreneur reveals a hoarder’s sensibility with an endless display of objects and materials. The debris includes discarded sports equipment, recycled junk, tools and shelves of terracotta sculptures. These latter forms, perhaps effigies to different gods, allude to the fact that many dep owners are often immigrants who bring their own cultural interpretations to these popular Québec institutions. In the centre of this room, tin cans are covered with colourful drips of paint. BGL’s sensibility is playful yet unresolved especially when these overly aestheticized objects are juxtaposed with the more mundane, more real _bric à brac_ surrounding them. The kaleidoscope of paint cans suggests the residue of some kind of labour, perhaps the decoration of the terracotta figurines and yet they remain in their raw, untreated state. Ultimately there are too many gaps to make the entire proposition convincing. Is _Canadassimo_ one large and inconsistent artifice or the uneven narra- tive of an outsider artist holed up in the back rooms of his dépanneur?

Conceivably, an engagement with labour and value is made manifest in the last of these adjoining rooms where a staircase leads to a second-floor outdoor terrace built of scaffolding and recycled materials with an elaborate Plinko contraption. The viewer can drop change into a slot and watch the money roll down the transparent walls inside the pavilion. The accumulation of stuff, whether old consumer goods, multi-faith sculptures, cans of paint and now money falling from above, points to themes of value (and devaluation), accession and excess. _Canadassimo_ offers a seemingly lighthearted reflection on the Biennale’s curatorial theme and the principal questions that it poses: “How can artists, thinkers, writers, composers, choreographers, singers, and musicians, through images, objects, words, movement, actions, lyrics, sound bring together publics in acts of looking, listening, responding, engaging, speaking in order to make sense of the current upheaval? What material, symbolic or aesthetic, political or social acts will be produced in this dialectical field of references to give shape to an exhibition which refuses confinement within the boundaries of conventional display models?”[^1]

Merging with the larger questions posed by the Biennale, the notion of the shop as studio is an intriguing motif that echoes beyond _Canadassimo_. For example, Francesc Ruiz’s magazine concession at the Spanish pavilion sells queer erotic graphic novels in homage to Salvador Dali. While the focus is not on the vendor _per se_, the installation points to the dominant role of art as commodity. Meanwhile Greece welcomes the viewer to _Why Look at Animals? AGRIMIKÁ._ Here, artist Maria Papadimitriouís has transported all the effects of a real tannery shop from the port city of Volos to the pavilion. The work is simultaneously a commentary on how humans coexist with animals and an allegorical reflection on the state of democracy wherein rights do not apply equally for all living beings. The highlight of the installation is an unsentimental video portrait of an older man recounting his life experience in this trade. The camera’s focus on his weathered hands evokes the passage of time and the very leather produced from years of toil.

Across Venice, on the other side of the Accademia bridge, is the Newfoundland & Labrador exhibition hosted by the Terra Nova Art Foundation at the Galleria Ca’ Rezzonico on the Grand Canal. The exhibition titled _Under the Surface_ and curated by Chris Clarke presents work by Jordan Bennett and Anne Troake. Bennett’s _Ice Fishing_ comprises an installation of a fishing shack and multiple video projections. The intimate documentary account between the artist and his father offers insight into the role of ice fishing in cultural and daily sustenance. The piece, both charming and informative, includes a banal voice-over by the artist that devalues an otherwise poetic rendering of life on the eastern edge of Canada. Troake’s 3D video projection, _OutSideIn_, is a haptic exploration of two dancers crawling their way through earth, roots and tree branch structures. The portrayal of landscape as a formative space where local ecology ultimately transforms the self into a collective force is generated across the two works. This sensual engagement with the natural world is in sharp contrast to the Canadian Pavilion where hidden artistic ambitions meet vernacular entrepreneurship.

It is unclear whether and how the national pavilions are meant to take up the Biennale’s larger curatorial theme. _Canadassimo_, with its dramaturgical space, is a playful figuration of disorder, accumulation and excess though the execution of the concept has yet to be fully realized. The most intriguing reading of Capital is Mika Rottenberg’s _NoNoseKnows_ installed at the Arsenale. Framed as yet another shopkeeper’s space where the product is raw pearls, the work’s focus is a looping and hallucinatory video projection of rows of Chinese women labouring in the manufacture of cultured pearls. (Rottenberg incorporates “real” documentary footage of the prodigious pearl-making facilities of Zhuji, south of Shanghai.) Above the production floor, and linked by a human-powered pulley that makes a fan spin, a large Caucasian woman sits in an office sniffing bouquets in an ill-fitting suit, and suffering from an allergic reaction to the flowers. As her nose becomes impossibly irritated and elongated she violently sneezes out plates of Chinese food and pasta, ostensibly for the women working below. In this surreal vision, everyone is enslaved in a haunting depiction of global commerce, women’s labour and the inhumanity of all the world’s futures.

Despite some inspiring work and a deserving curatorial premise, the Biennale continues to underscore the particularly troublesome, entangled relationship between international relations, the art market and capital. With its focus on the politics of labour, information and spectacle, Marx’s analysis of the fetishization of the object as commodity has been dialectically subsumed under the sign of art.

[^1]: Okwui Enwezor, Curatorial Statement. http://universes-in- universe.org/eng/bien/ venice\_biennale/2015

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This is a review of the 56th Venice Biennale showing from May 9 to November 22, 2015\. 

All the World's Futures: The 56th International Art Exhibition, Venice

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This is a review of ManWoman’s Heart of Longing showing at Calgary’s Stride Gallery from June 12 to July 17, 2015\. 

ManWoman: Heart of Longing

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This article review’s Laurie Kang’s Deferring Diffractions which is showing at Toronto’s 8-11 from January 18 to February 14, 2015\. 

Laurie Kang: Deferring Diffractions

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This article reviews Elizabeth Zonvar’s THE CHALLENGE OF ABSTRACTION which is showing at Toronto’s Daniel Faria Gallery from May 2 to June 6 2015\. 

Elizabeth Zvonar: THE CHALLENGE OF ABSTRACTION

Erica Prince is a multimedia artist based in Philadelphia.

Julia Feyrer and Tamara Henderson’s _Consider The Belvedere_ at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia is an unsettling escape into an abundant dream world. Inanimate objects are imbued with power and personality, and familiar materials are manipulated to reveal deeper, more dangerous energies. _Consider The Belvedere_ is the second of a three-part project that began with _Bottles Under the Influence_, which was presented at the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre in 2013\. This latest collaboration includes the first two 16mm films in an installation that doubles as a stage set for the production of the final film in the trilogy.

Feyrer and Henderson have created an overwhelming atmosphere – a dark, dense space with patches of brightly coloured light emanating from behind glass, like a nocturnal animal exhibit in a zoo. One begins to feel like a detective assessing the aftermath of a crime, piecing together the evidence found in ritual detritus and alchemical leftovers.

The show is divided into three sections, arranged in the gallery in no obvious consecutive order – _The Night Times Press Bar, The Beach_, and _The Hotel Room_.

At _The Night Times Press Bar_, viewers are invited to type up their dreams and watch them join the collective unconscious in a purple projection. Dreams disappear after a few seconds, perhaps invisibly archived in a collective dream cloud. _The Night Times_ newspaper is a takeaway publication that neatly arranges Feyrer’s and Henderson’s dreams into universally relatable categories, such as movies, classifieds, bugs, et cetera. The artists’ dream transcriptions are akin to the automatic writing and poetry of the Surrealists. The Surrealist poets considered this their research, attempting to find absolute truths hidden in the extensive metaphors of dreams. One can’t help but assume that this is where it all begins for the collaborative duo – a dedication to this Surrealist research, this gathering of poetic source material that is accessible to all of us, just below the surface.

The bar itself is a large table with a base constructed to look like the facade of a shrunken building. It is inset with small windows, some open to reveal miniature interior vignettes, and some closed with blinds and curtains, making us guess at what’s inside. The viewer is forced to peek in like a giant Peeping Tom, looking for action in an abandoned hotel.

Three large woven scrims stand nearby, nets of tangled detritus, like huge, messy dreamcatchers. Each is constructed with decidedly different materials – phone cords and Vitaminwater bottles, chicken wire and drop-ceiling chunks, fishing line and sea grasses. Perhaps each possesses specific dream filtering capabilities that will be revealed in the third film.

_At The Beach_, we are invited to sit on a large, wormlike pillow sewn from towels to watch _Consider The Belvedere_ (2015) on a projection screen that floats above a beach of plastic pellets. The film was shot in the exhibition at The Banff Centre and on location in Vancouver at the Belvedere apartment building. Filmed with an unsteady camera and punctuated by evil laughter and a phone call to a detective, the film references the mys- tery genre. The main character is a tall, suspicious yellow bottle with an Al Capone hat and an unmistakeable silhouette that glows through the mini blinds like a bat signal on a hotel room wall.

_The Hotel Room_ is covered in plush, white carpet. Here, we encounter _Bottles Under The Influence_ (2012), the first film in the trilogy. Here, glass bottles from the collection of the Historical Museum of Wine & Spirits in Stockholm reveal themselves to us through their gestures, in relation to one another and through the carefully arranged scenarios they find themselves in. They overflow and explode, soiling white snow with their colourful contents.

One wall of _The Hotel Room_ is lined with black mini-fridges, each containing a gestural, thick glass vessel with such titles as _The Old Hag and The Pest Detective_. These bottles are more sculpturally distinct than the ones in _Bottles Under the Influence_, perhaps sculpted by the artists to embody specific characters and contain their essence. In any case, they glow with auras of coloured light and their contents are detailed in the exhibition labels, noting alchemical mixtures like valerian root and moonshine, or a chance mixture of the contents of all of the other bottles.

In the centre of _The Hotel Room_ are two yin and yang beds inset with life-size, glowing glass figures. Painted abstractions and a nightmarish bedside-table fountain complete the scene. This extremely foreboding scenario will inevitably play a part in the third film, and it is impossible not to imagine the cinematic potential. This is the first time in this body of work that we have seen a human figure. Perhaps the third film will address the sleeping bodies in relation to one another, which may be a version of the artists themselves.

The show demands something of the viewer: a time investment long enough to appreciate the abundance of sub-plots, and a willingness to surrender rational thought in an effort to become intoxicated by the shadowy, surreal atmosphere. Feyrer and Henderson are extremely generous with their clues, but the generosity leans towards the material. The subjects remain freely disjointed, filled with dream logic and regurgitated materials. We are left to speculate, knowing that a clear verdict is not the goal.

In the _First Surrealist Manifesto_ (1924), André Breton speaks at length about dreams, and finds it “incredible that this important part of psychic activity has still attracted so little attention.”[^1] _Consider The Belvedere_ reminds us that, in 2015, we still have a long way to go in reconciling our waking states and our dream states. The dreams have always been there, but we have been ignoring what seems indulgent, irrelevant and nonsensical. Feyrer and Henderson are reclaiming dreams as a compelling subject for art-making in a contemporary context. Leaving the dark gallery at the ICA and stepping out into the sharp light of day is like waking from a dream, that flash of lucidity where it seems plausible that the dream world is as substantial as this strange waking life.

[^1]: Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism: The Modern Artist and His World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 66.

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This article reviews Julia Feyer and Tamara Henderson’s Consider the Belvedere showing at Phildelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art from April 22 to August 26, 2015\. 

Julia Feyrer and Tamara Henderson: Consider the Belvedere

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This article reviews the group show THEM,featuring Alina Szapocznikow, Alisa Baremboym, Aleksandra Domanovic, Sarah Lucas, Katja Novitskova, Carolee Schneemann and Anicka Yi. The exhibition showed at Berlin’s Schinkel Pavillion from June 13 to July 26, 2015\. 

Alina Szapocznikow, Alisa Baremboym, Aleksandra Domanović, Sarah Lucas, Katja Novitskova, Carolee Schneemann and Anicka Yi: Them

Automation, broadly speaking, is the reduction or removal of human intervention from any process. Any task or process, at any scale, requires some expenditure of energy across some duration. At this point in time, an exhausted consumer majority believes that if we can save that time and energy, and still produce equivalent, satisfactory results, we should.

While I could perform Siri’s searches myself, I might be driving. So I’d have to pull over but I’m also in a hurry to perform other tasks, as usual. Time is thus saved and potential energy is never expended. Similarly a dishwasher compresses both the event-length and the physical intensity of the labour involved with washing dishes by hand.

Earlier this year, Amazon unveiled its Dash Button, a service that allows Amazon Prime subscribers to compress and partially automate the process of replenishing their most used products. In a short trailer online, we see a home filled with little stick-on Dash buttons, placed near the products to which they refer. Detergent, moisturizer, espresso pods, yogourt cups. When we notice our supplies are running low, we push the button and an order for replacements is fully automated with the aid of stored personal information.

Processes automated both actually and potentially here include (but are not limited to) a trip to the store, the removal of a credit card from a wallet, the transport of the product itself and the reiterative choice to purchase the same product. The compression, subsumation and obscurance of the first three physical processes are less interesting to me than the automation of the last.

When my detergent runs out and I go to the store to replace it, even if I plan on repeat purchasing the brand, I still have to actively make the choice to do so when confronted with 30+ commercially available detergents. At the very least, I have to visually locate it in a busy field of competing brands. The choice to purchase the same brand is a new choice every time and Amazon knows that actively making that choice in repetition is a fool’s errand to the store.

An interior process local to my body (choice, a desire to reproduce results that have pleased me in the past) has been automated, externalized and outsourced to a nonhuman entity that can do it more efficiently.

Ian Crouch, in a piece on Dash for _The New Yorker_, makes the automation of these processes a problem of consumer ethics. The Dash trailer’s admonition that the consumer not “let running out ruin \[their\] rhythm” is, for Crouch, a site of “real dystopia.” Crouch suggests there might be “actual value in running out of things” and that it can be “a check against the inertia of consumption.” He calls this break “a chance to make a decision, a choice – even if that choice is simply to continue consuming.” “Shopping should make you feel bad,” he says, “if only for a second.”

But why? Why should shopping make us feel bad? Is feeling bad the only way to be a responsible consumer? Why should anything make us feel bad when a largely selfish and intolerant global community primarily expresses itself through violence, forceful inequality and suffering? Will guilt and self-loathing save us? Across a comprehensive gradient of economic and class strata, the end goal of the things we purchase is making us feel good, or at least better, even if these purchases are often short-sighted, wasteful, violent or self destructive.

Whether or not capitalism is the primary ontological framework for these patterns of consumption/suffering, it certainly defines the pace. Especially with regard to automation, it’s always a 24-hour work day somewhere, for something. When Amazon expresses its concern that running out might “ruin your rhythm,” they don’t necessarily mean the rhythm or tempo of an embodied human labour force.

“For its part,” says Paul Allen Anderson, “capital never sleeps.” Anderson, whose paper on Neo-Muzak recently appeared in Critical Inquiry, examines the affective-consumptive desires of “web dependent cognitive laborers and others,” i.e. anyone with a mobile Internet connection. As long as humans “chafe at the call for continuous interface,” capital’s “functionaries can only forestall bodily fatigue and nervous collapse…through a rigorous regime of affect management.”

Buying detergent, however, doesn’t make me _particularly_ happy, so, if I’m really going to “perform a normative positive mood at work and in social interactions,” I’ll probably engage in outsourced and potentially automated processes of “virtual vicarity,” which Anderson defines as “the partial exteriorization and mechanization of emotional activity otherwise branded as personal.” Like Amazon’s automation of my choice to continue purchasing the same pleasing brand ad infinitum, services like Pandora, says Anderson, externalize and automate a choice-making process calibrated to the alleviation of a suffering I don’t have the resources to address, at least right now.

While Anderson’s study focuses on streaming music as it exists in the workplace, Pandora and Spotify are also widely utilized for recreational listening. In parallel, I use Amazon for more than the repeat purchase of detergent and espresso pods. If I need variety, novelty or newness in the recreational products I consume to forestall Anderson’s “bodily fatigue and nervous collapse,” the automation of my consumption becomes more complicated. There’s no Dash Button for the books I buy on the site and I don’t want the same book over and over. I’ll collaborate with their recommendation algorithm when given multiple choices, but I don’t know if I trust it to automatically make my next purchase. Pandora, on the other hand, _does_ automate choices like this and so do Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, and any other streaming service with auto-play functions tailored to individual users.

If Pandora can do it with a tolerable and relative accuracy, at least for a few hours, there’s no reason that I couldn’t ultimately have an Amazon Dash Button for the books I read, something unexpected and different every time. A Dash Button next to my reading chair, pushed when I’m nearing the end of the book.

This sort of automation, however, is a long way off. Most current “predictive” or “adaptive” technologies are actually just simple machines, designed to steer users to branded content and strategically placed impulse buys (or streams). Even if they were designed to function as artificial intelligences, the predetermined sandbox of possible choices for a user makes complex and truly “adaptive” processing impossible.

Perhaps this is why the customer review persists as it does. Amazon easily has more reviews than it does products. Humans are great at inference and the qualitative space between five miserable stars is certainly equal to the “over 450 musical attributes” identified by Pandora’s Music Genome Project®.

_Perfume Area_ is a collection of perfume reviews written by artist-designer-authors Laurel Schwulst and Sydney Shen (the book was designed by Bryce Wilner). As of this writing, it exists only in an edition of 300, published by Ambient Works, and is not available on Amazon. It is that portable, affordable art object, refusing to assign primacy to either its text or its design: the artist-book. In May, Schwulst and Shen read excerpts from the book at New York’s Printed Matter while David Ertel supplied background music.

Each perfume is a small prose pocket world, a tiny set of ontological assumptions set into motion. Smell, as alluded to by Ertel’s musical accompaniment, is rarely an autonomous sense; it almost always comes bundled with not just acoustic, but visual and haptic qualia, too. It is hopelessly, complicatedly embodied. Like most product reviews, the authors extrapolate this sensory bundling into a contextual framework. This is what allows it to exist in the consumer imagination, so the buyer knows what they’re getting into. While the perfumes reviewed are, for the most part, commercially available, the texts themselves are speculative, fantastic and verge regularly on the science fictive. Despite its futurity, and maybe because perfume lives in some hopelessly specific and embodied _area_ even further away from automated consumption than books and music, the perfume area is _moist_, it has problems. It’s not a dystopia, necessarily, though individual reviews might be, but it’s still not a unified utopian vision. You do not hover or quantum leap down Milk Road, you ride a motorcycle (as in the 5-flower review of Le Labo’s Lys 41). In Schwulst and Shen’s gentle future, aliens are sweating, humans are drinking Lactaid and for all the gleaming chrome, post-apocalyptic abandoned malls and conjured simspace, we still fall asleep with our hands in bags of potato chips and knock over the bong.

When _Perfume Area_ began, it was a project that lived exclusively online but it was not a work for Twitter or subversively posted to sites where perfumes are available for purchase and review. As well, the website and book are each a semiautonomous forum, a collected set of ontological functions – different stories from the same world. Besides its more general futurism, _Perfume Area_ has this in common with science fiction, too: a structural and accretive approach for world building. Perfume, under the supervision of Schwulst and Shen, becomes, like all of the products we purchase, a reflection of the various intersecting economies of consumption and desire in which we find ourselves suspended.

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This is a review of Laurel Schwulst and Sydney Shen’s Perfume Area (New York: Ambient Works, 2015). 

Perfume Area by Laurel Schwulst and Sydney Shen

Fan Wu is currently seeking synthesis between _qi_, Daoist energy cosmology, and _libido_, Freudian erotic drive. He loves to be in touch: write to him at fanwu4u@gmail.com.

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This is a review of The Animated Reader: Poetry of _Surround Audience_ edited by Brian Droitcour (New York: The New Museum, 2015). 

Brian Droitcour, ed., The Animated Reader: Poetry of "Surround Audience"

Tess Edmonson is a writer and editor based in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

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This is a review of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015). 

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Issue 127