Waxed & Buffed

A reprise of the double book launch, with both video and audio files, is available here, via the fantastical Greg Bem.

John Olson's review of Wax World: here.  And the Stranger's book editor, who (just like me) will never be Walt Whitman, reviews a trio of books, including Nico Vassilakis's staring@poetics: here.

ps.. Mark Wallace's review here.  Greg Bem's here.

Wax Buffet: Double Book Launch

Robert Mittenthal   *   Wax World  *  Chax Press
Donato Mancini    *   Buffet World   *  New Star Books

with film from Brandon Downing
Tuesday 3 May 8pm
Gallery 1412
1412 18th Ave (just north of Union) - Seattle WA

=====================
WAX WORLD

Robert Mittenthal

116 pages

Chax Press

Robert Mittenthal is author of Value Unmapped (Nomados), Martyr Economy, Ready Terms (Tsunami Editions), and the newly arrived Wax World (Chax). Irrational Dude, a chapbook of collaborative work with Nico Vassilakis, was published in 2009 by tir aux pigeons. Mittenthal was instrumental in creating and curating the Subtext Reading Series in Seattle.  

http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780925904904/wax-world.aspx
http://chax.org/poets/mittenthal.htm

Note on Wax World

It’s an unfortunate iron that walks stiffly over us, pressing our clothes. 
I miss the comforts of a baggy garment which covers everything while revealing very little.

How do we come to come to speech when language has been stolen from us, when we’ve lost our words?  What can words convey, when they belong to the interests of the cultural industry as it serves the interests of commerce, industry, government, warfare. 

We’ve lost the word for what connects our public and private selves.  Pre-owned words whitewashed and hung out to fade in the sun.  It’s a contest where juris-diction is denied.  There is no room to plead for the last poet standing.  And without standing, we’re left outside.

We are left with a surface, a wax or skin which registers the vague and shifting impressions.  In this wax world of malleable, soft, false imitation, distorted surface is the only reality we know.  The truth of appearances is that there are only appearances. 

How then to say something clear, definite, decisive.  How offer any certainty of thought or opinion without bullying the reader, the audience?  How make a music out of such unpromising and recalcitrant shifting materials?

The writing in Wax World comes from that condition, explores it, tries to build with that wax, with materials that shift and slide and change even as you use them.

===============

BUFFET WORLD 

Donato Mancini

128 pages

New Star Books (Vancouver)

textual poems, visual poems and conceptual writings. 

statistics & food & capitalism & death.

full colour.

composed 2003-2010.

for more details, see the New Star website:

http://www.newstarbooks.com/book.php?book_id=1554200547

________________________________

The interdisciplinary practice of Donato Mancini focuses mainly on poetry, bookworks, text-based visual art and cultural criticism. His two New Star books of procedural and visual writing, Ligatures (2005) and Æthel (2007) were each nominated for the ReLit Award, and Ligatures received honourable mention in the Alcuin Book design awards. Mancini's collaborative visual works have been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Scandinavia and Cuba. Notable exhibitions include Surveillance Sketch(Artspeak, Vancouver 2003), Untitled: Conversation Loops (The Western Front, Vancouver 2004; with Miguel da Conceicao, Jacob Gleeson, and Elisa Rathje) and Angels in the Angles (Gallery Atsui, Vancouver 2009; with Marina Roy and Christian Bök), and an upcoming exhibition of print objects at CSA (Vancouver). He also co-directed the world's first genuine in-world avatar documentary AVATARA (Centre A, Vancouver 2003), now part of the Ubu Web international archive of experimental film and video. Long time member of the Kootenay School of Writing, he was a principal curator of the interdisciplinary N 49 15.832 - W 123 05.921 Positions Colloquium at VIVO in August 2008. Other recent publications include a book edition from Fillip Editions (Vancouver) entitled Fact `N' Value, as well as poetic and critical writings in publications such as The Capilano Review, Open Letter, West Coast Line, Rampike, W, The West Wind Review, Parser, ditch, Poetry is Dead and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing.

ABOUT BUFFET WORLD 

Visually and conceptually dynamic, Buffet World is Donato Mancini's smorgasbord of verbal and visual poems about food, trade, and life under late–late–capitalism. 

The various ingredients of Buffet World capture Mancini's dissatisfaction with current social conditions. Buffet World underlines our inescapable complicity as (constantly) both victims and victimisers in a system that should leave us choked with rage, but more often dazzles us with surreal spectacle. 

The images in Buffet World are colourful and almost garish, and the words are brilliantly manipulated. Equally concerned with the violence done to our planet, our bodies and imaginations, these startling, funny poems perform a deep cultural critique.

========================

Brandon Downing is a writer and visual artist originally from California. His books of poetry include The Shirt Weapon (Germ Monographs, 2002) and Dark Brandon (Faux Press, 2005), while a monograph of his literary collages from1996-2008, Lake Antiquity, was released by Fence Books in late 2009. A long poem, AT   ME, will be released as a chapbook by Octopus Books this Fall, while his next collection, Mellow Actions, will be published by Fence in 2012. In 2007 he released a feature-length collection of collaged digital shorts, Dark Brandon: Eternal Classics, with a 2nd volume forthcoming in 2011. You can see some at www.youtube.com/user/bdown68, along with his photographic and other work at http://www.brandondowning.org/

Mission Impossible -- with Alain Badiou

It is not often than a momentous Badiouian event occurs.  And the recent events in Tunisian & Egypt are all the more amazing for their spontaneity.

This is your mission should you choose to accept it.  All that is solid melts into air.

Badiou's (somewhat utopian) goal is to follow the "destiny of an event" to solve "unsolvable problems without the help of the state..."  [All quotations here from Badiou's editorial last month in Le Monde.]

Badiou celebrates "the principle that Marat never stopped reminding us of: when it comes to freedom, equality, emancipation, we owe everything to popular uprisings."

Badiou is against all forms of constituted statehood.  " ...our states ... prefer management to revolt, they prefer claims, and “orderly transition” to any kind of rupture."   One can read this absolute rejection of the state as a call for a kind of Maoist continual or permanent revolution.

His politics becomes almost pure math.  The event resonates out of revolutionary movement, a movement which is paradoxically without a party.  More generic than general, it's far less organized and more spontaneous than any party.  Badiou's "event is the sudden creation, not of a new reality, but of a myriad of new possibilities."

It's a brilliant abstract mathematics, against all forms of representative democracy.

One may want to spin Badiou's theory of the event in a more practical way vis-a-vis Egypt, e.g., to argue that the fidelity to these heroic recent events generates a kind of universal obligation, very broadly felt, that will impact how things unfold.  This optimism is very compelling, i.e., one wants to believe that the fidelity to this event will "haunt" -- in a very good way -- what unfolds.  I think it will prove to be a very powerful point of reference both for citizens and future leaders.  But this sort of statement is probably too practical for Badiou, who has given up on all representative forms of governance.  And his notion of "fidelity" -- or fidelity to the idea of fidelity -- is to him useless in reconfiguring or reconstituting a political state or any economic situation.  Thus for example, he could have little to say about the problem of the Egyptian military as an institution engaged in both economics and politics.

In the wake of the immediate climax (the evacuation or literal separation of heads of state), Badiou has perhaps nothing left to theorize -- it is as if these events demonstrate or prove his theorems.

It is tempting to read Badiou's editorial in Le Monde as a post-coital cigarette.  He promises his fidelity to this most lovely event in more than 200 years, aka the Paris Commune.  He's been dreaming of this night for a long time.

The problem that arises after the post-coital cigarette is that the heads of state won't stay evacuated.  Undoubtedly when the "new" state is constituted, power will corrupt.

The events of Tunisia and Egypt provide what may be Badiou's best of all possible examples.  Hard to believe that he will not scratch out more formal paeans to these events, which he may take as mathematical proofs of concept.

At bottom, the problem is that he never ever engages economics.  He sneers at the very idea.  The State is his problem, and it's an exclusive problem.  To him perhaps the Market is always a secondary problem, ie, merely part of the situation that will be overthrown with the state.

One can understand & largely agree with the critique of the how "democracy" under neoliberalism has lost any connection to the direct expression of the people, with the complete commodification of political choices.  Did you hear that Sarah Palin was trademarking her name (aka her brand)?  If only this were a joke.  And of course with the so called global economy, many states are just doing the best they can (eg, like a CEO of a corporation) to maintain the position of their economies in the global market.  How "democratic" is that, really?  Not very.  The independence of the monetary policy and judiciary in the US can't really be thought of as consistent with democratic expression of the people.  It strikes me that Ranciere is right to say that democracy should no longer be used as a noun.  But as an adjective it can still be useful; that is, behaviors, structures, institutions can be categorized as more or less democratic (i.e., rule by and for the people; or an expression of the people).

Badiou refuses to engage the excruciatingly complex network in which any subsequent actions have to occur.  Perhaps he just can't bother with practical details.  He is, before anything else, a thinker of the event.  (I'll have to try to engage Badiou's Handbook on Inaesthetics, and how his modernist readings fit into his model, at a later time.)

One last comment to connect to the discussion on Badiou v Schumpeter that I missed a couple weeks ago at the autonomous university general reading group.  Schumpeter embraces a similar theory of the heroic (and for him, a competitive) event, though it's an economic event not a political one.  Schumpeter's celebration of capitalism's creative destruction, i.e., a disruption introduced via innovation, is a frighteningly close analog to the disruptions that Badiou celebrates in his politics against the state.  Both are thinkers of the event, but they are almost a yin/yang match for each other.  What Badiou lacks, a theory of the event for economics, Schumpeter provides.  And vice versa.

For Schumpeter, Capitalism is a “process of industrial mutation – if I may use that biological term – that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.” [see S. Shaviro's excellent blogpost on Schumpeter]

Schumpeter completely perverts politics, turning democracy into a market-driven representative form that will serve his notion of violent economic events, aka capitalism.  As Charles Mudede once said, Schumpeter is the poet of the neoliberals.  Perhaps by analogy this makes Badiou the poet of the anarchists?

All apparent contradiction aside, whether one thinks of the violence of the New as a problem or an occasion for celebration, it seems true that the new is not always so violent.  The anthropocentric schemas of Badiou and Schumpeter don't account for less heroic lower-case events.  For B&S these are not events at all, but sometimes something very small can have very large impact.

The bright lines drawn by B&S don't allow for the more realistic shades of gray which, in Seattle at least, completely engulf us.

Boykoff on 2010 Vancouver Winter Games in NLR

In a new article in New Left Review, Jules Boykoff traces the genesis of the relations between Olympic sport and Capital.  Detailing the political economic contexts of the Vancouver Winter Olympics, where disproportionate long and short term public expenditures are made and short term profits privatized, Boykoff notes how this leads to government deficits and severe cuts to social programmes.  The masquerade (in the form of an economic boomlet) lasts only until the games end, and Vancouver is left with a nasty hangover that won't go away.

Similar to the recent US financial crisis, the Olympic Games create a finance bubble for the sporting facilities, housing, and over-the-top pomp that the IOC demands.  The developers and local powers-that-be would have residents of the city believe that this massive overspending is really a stimulus package, betting among other things on the future value of the "world class city" brand allegedly attained via hosting the games.

But more importantly here, Boykoff reports on the resistance to the games in Vancouver, cataloguing the actions taken by an impressively diverse list of groups, and describing the remarkable rapport created in this context.  Boykoff describes the anti-Olympics resistance as an "event coalition" quoting Tom Mertes' organizing concept from the global justice movement: "an ongoing series of alliances and coalitions, whose convergences remain contingent."

I need to think this through but it is interesting that the "convergences" achieved and the "fun" felt by those in resistance might very well echo what spectators in a sporting audience feel.  There is an affective joy in the action of joining a multiple and/or in the feelings of belonging or identification.  If you own it, it will own you.  Political sport as dialogic, or sport as a dialogical politics? 

There also may be something to say here about Isabelle Stengers' notion of an ecology of practices, particularly where she resists general terms which "look for illustrations, for cases that are not causes but refer instead to their potential unity.  Unity always means mobilisation, what was asked from armies having to follow orders in a faithful and immediate way."  I think Boykoff is more attuned to Stengers, in that he is detailing situated concerns of diverse groups, and more interested in generic than general terms [via Stengers, "generic terms such as cause, obligation or risk... aim at conferring to a situation the power to matter in its particular way..."].

The Subject of the Subject

Learning to unravel, let’s start at the end: chasing intensity beyond or before recognition; thinking with the unknowns and bearing witness to intersections of nature and culture.

Attached to our surrounds and divorced from habit
We demand the right to contradict ourselves

A noun’s noun, we verb – in transit 
Oh, how the world breeds inferiority
In pursuit of a lexicon’s indifference

Strength through repetition.  Darwin’s winner demonstrates how a round peg squares its hole.  Grammar’s bias pronounced in short sentences: it cannot explain the logic of the subject.

It is when the new is no longer news – or vice versa.  It inverts when one claims one’s lost habit.  Coterminous with new habitat, the transhistorical subject is not a subject.  It is only that mentality in the world all around us.  It is the wonder that something new occurs.

A momentous passage forgets not
And loves not
It unlearns what it is to say uncle
An active not passive forgetting

To collaborate, it remains a mess of connections, of contradictions.  A thought wants what trouble kicks up – the fount a body makes in its new image.

This “you” & its precognitive other find that “history is this.  Not the same this.  Which lesson undoes again.  So, forget you, forget everything you know.”

It breeds its own subject – an inescapable genesis within time
The untied or loosened bond – not a negative
But learning the positive fact – the self-evident charge
I counteract – an impoverished religion

Irrational in each sentence.  Death in its perverse towers
Of undressed rhetoric – out of uniform compliance 
Unable to execute, I lost my appetite,
I forgot the cookies and ate the plate

This is a re-education camp as ungrounded action
An embrace of adverbial tension 
The deed without a doer
Free entertainment of a fearful agent 

'I' is the greatest, the most beautiful folio, the best of both words
For it is this aesthetic judgment needs an outside
Not reducible to the wicked witch in any direction
It need not precede its relations but must live within them

The parasite translates when Dorothy dances
Nobody stands behind the screen
It is not some contradiction of ourselves
 We move through a seascape of ships

Between self-assurance and obliteration
The trick to escape what emotion captures 

I’ve always been told I am not I
The nonce and its once
That perishes & collates each expectation, each expression
As invective against the news

To embrace that negativity that cannot be put to work
The positive unraveling as a constructive function

A clarity that is not merely subjective
Yields no noun behind the curtain

I approved this message for all those
who are not.  All department heads
Step alive – for once its bottoms up
Sinking slowly, predisposed to the liquidity

Of forms, each retrospect a lapse
For an action to be named later
For the litany of days – a stream of possible
Logics lie in the generals empty hand

Blind Luck -- Cris Bruch at Lawrimore Project

Reposted from here.  Show is up at Lawrimore Project thru 27 Feb.

Mallarmé was mathematically correct:  A throw of the dice will never abolish chance.  That is, chance is never retrospective. It would be like me saying that the odds of writing this sentence here and now were 10 million to one. Prospectively, the artistic process yields unexpected results.  What really matters is how something new occurs.

Cris Bruch works in collaboration with his materials and tools.  What results is contingent, rather than predetermined.  His process demonstrates how an act of experience is itself constructive, how the subject/artwork comes out of the world and not vice versa, i.e., the world does not come out of the subject.

An aphorism of Mallarmé’s more germane to Bruch’s work is: Ce n'est pas avec des idées qu'on fait des vers, c'est avec des mots.  (“It is not with ideas that one makes poems, but with words.”)  One might translate this in relation to Bruch’s practice as:  “It is not with space that one makes sculpture, but with time.”  That is, in conjunction with material, Bruch takes time and turns it into space.  Just as words and ideas combine to make a poem, time and space combine with material to make sculpture, with some priority assigned here to words and time.

At bottom, Cris Bruch’s art practice is a material process.  Each work is the result of a temporal engagement, a proposition where labor power meets physical material as the result unfolds or reveals itself in space.  This space is where both meaning and form are made.

Elizabeth Bryant says it very well in a 2007 catalog essay: “The making is its own form of thinking, form clarifying meaning.”  The goal is indeed to make a “work of attentiveness and possibility.”

The fortuitous acquisition of weathered wood, used here as exterior cladding, led to the conception of Blind.  The material was the initial constraint; the idea for the shape of the armature followed.  Blind comes into existence one thin wooden strip at a time.  Fit, clamp, glue and wait and repeat. It is not unfair to say this wood worked on Bruch as he worked on it.

To quote from an old essay of mine regarding Don’t Feed It: “As personal as Bruch’s works are, always refusing to take their surfaces for granted, he nevertheless achieves a powerful kind of impersonal expressionism, as if the materiality of his pieces were autonomous, not reliant on (i.e., not mere products of) the manner of production.”  Likewise, Blind seems autonomous, somehow unified – not something made up of parts. Resembling a cloak, Blind is a life-size enclosure, large enough for the artist or some mysterious Mechanical Turk to be hiding within, alive in the armature.  Bruch writes: “Blind is also very much about waiting, though as a complete enclosure it’s not of much use for hunting visible things – more of a hunting device for invisible things.”

It’s difficult to resist an analogy here to Leibniz’s monads.  Leibniz’s metaphysics posits a multiplicity of individual (and indivisible) substances or atoms which he calls monads. A monad is an object that withdraws from us, it has no windows.  We can only know it partially.  In Greek, monad means “unity” – it is an expression of identity, closure, singularity.  It is a force of representation; it actively reflects the universe from its own perspective.  Proceeding from internal activity, monads are at once material and mental – both particle and perspective. 

Perhaps Blind is such a thing – a monad, like our cousin “it” – mere particle or speck in the plurality or parliament of things – a realm where the it’s outnumber the me’s.  But unlike Leibniz’s monads, which have no access to the outside, Bruch is fully engaged in both internal and external activity.  While the art object that emerges may resemble a monad in its unity and singularity, Bruch’s process is not a windowless one – he simultaneously looks inside and outside. 

In a way, Blind does present a problem to the viewer – how to relate to or commune with it – that is similar to Leibniz’s far more generalized problem: how can monads communicate at all?  But while Leibniz gets lost in a theological bubble in his attempt to account for the seemingly infinite transactions of monads, Bruch is simply, directly grounded in his process. 

In the process of creating work, Bruch interrogates his own relation to the materials he’s working with, and tends to the meaning that unfolds.  The goal, he says, is “to make the shifting relation between exteriority and interiority compelling… to create an affective experience that extends beyond personal interest, often through an indirect appeal to the body.”  When he says that he aims to “mine the emotional implications of physical space,” I take him to mean that he hopes to investigate how one can begin to account for the emotion and meaning captured in this process, knowing full well that there will always be something lost, that eludes capture.

Bruch’s series of ink drawings – Freshets (which Websters defines as “overflowings of streams caused by heavy rains or melted snow”) – are closer to blind luck than Blind is. Waiting and watching as the ink (the bait) interacts with water and paper, Bruch reels these drawings in.  With a considerable amount of attention, he watches the ink run and blur, revealing their mineral contents as they stain the paper with subtle hues. Bruch calls these drawings a guilty pleasure, and I suspect that’s because he’s had good luck.  He’s collaborating but he feels the materials are doing the bulk of the heavy lifting.

Every art exhibition to some extent collaborates with the given space and the social context that impacts decisions regarding what is shown and how it is shown. Blind occupies one month of Lawrimore Project’s one year performance, each month relating in some way to a particular two-page spread of Mallarmé’s un coup de des, which famously explodes or doubles the frame of the page.  As Donato Mancini succinctly says: “Mallarmé activates the blanks, creates the page as an arena for action...”

In the spirit of un coup de des, Lawrimore makes use of limited space as an arena for action: he constrains himself in a space, for a set duration of a year, in a social context where he is forced to deal directly with everyone entering the gallery. It feels a bit like one is entering Scott’s therapeutic galaxy, triangulated in the enclosed space, between the art, and performer-dealer.

The experience of Bruch’s Blind enclosure within Lawrimore’s open enclosure is a sort of Rorschach test.  What’s important is that it is yours to behold.  It is your Blind relation that matters, it is your chance to have an encounter, to construct new relations.

Working Day (from no walking it back)

So that the acculturated Cherokee breathes
As the aforementioned men go off in open air

To be entertained, to evade the footpads
Vandals and thieves

Unclimbable steeps
A mass of white haired sheep

Their restless education
Fingers bent back to claws

As hours condensed and bred fears
In those freed yet unable to sell their freedom

Each compelled to each – to follow steam

Empowered in the fibre of a plant

A factory squares with no theory
At first utopian the second suburb

Cloaks and escapes
Made for its mall – croquet dogs

Each factory acts to consume
A miraculous mile of shops

A symphonic time-sink that ditched
And drains humanity

Unsatisfied work each night when sex
Labors to produce its spring

Winter's seasonal
Whose Friday night gains encamped

In overheated huddles
Adrift in faulty definition where farce repeats

Each word unclear as spectacle charts
The sandwiched female lungs

Disarmed by law, pirates
Repackage Jeffrey Daumer’s flesh

They embrace the false history of fine talk
But every mouse has a moral view

The most angered Author answers all things
No friend of commerce, Handicraft

Divines what's conquered
We trend toward unconditional cries or laughter

Despite protests to the contrary
Lazy enthusiasts trapped in economic circumstance

The miller's bandit after the thresh
400 years of unmastered debt

To eat the higher proportion of wages
One extorts one’s hired portion

Quick sleep in the famished sea
I worked over at Pottery Barn and perished instantly

Wedgewood’s factotum at fever’s pitch
The porcelain habit yields no place to piss

Enforced through history
Best intentions emerged in relays

Batons passed where knowledge enacts
Little machines – somatic fire drills

Let's call her princess for
A little bird one day was king

I don't know where he lives
The devil in deed a good person

God is that dog
Fought last week and lost

Lifeless haunts in the dark
No specter, no shadow, no chance

The little circle jerk of a citizen
The mini-series which fails to minister

Miseries naturally scarce
Left in short air

The cheese-man smiles as profit advanced itself
The food stuffs of the Gila monster

Stretched to include all persons
And corruption of the shameless parts

Each product seeks the powers of commerce
Forced participation in a market adequate to the new

Each mode feeds what
Sinks or swims in labor pools

Hot tubs of adulterated fact
Whose primary law demands increased production

Profit is borne out of the day's divide
That divines a hour of rest, to salt ones wound

Silence lapsed in the din of a listless ship
Yes, moments are elements of profit

But the nation needs strong warriors
Not diminished specimens of gelatinous mush

Parasites in the folds that lack all extremity
And unmediated mass of shit

Forget the story of who I was
I sold my soul

Rethinking the consumption of lost time
Let’s feed the rich or erase them

Little lords and vassals who made the pencil possible
To account our endless hours of distress