Writing Machine
Machines human, technological and inanimate. Writing Machine is where tools of control are highlighted, tasks of editing, organising, indexing and creating meaning are de-naturalised. Futurism is in the air. The Writing Machine manifesto dictates that language is not transparent, writing is not direct communication. The space in between words is where agency lies. As such, the Writing Machine demands that the writerly tools for Performa 09 are taken to task critically and creatively.
We respond in the form of ‘Writing Live Unedited’ – a mechanised, uncensored profile of all the existing material on the Writing Live website that readers can curate their own way through. ‘Writing Live is…’ – a collection of layered, ever-changing, potentially differing testimonies concerning Writing Live authored by the Writing Live fellows themselves. ‘The Community’ – Writing Machine biography writing exercises, exploring who and what seeps through the sentences artists write about themselves.
Writing Machine shows layers of (un)truth, highlights the porosity of text and the performativity of meaning. The Writing Machine is a system for creating new automated textual works in relation to Performa09.
Workshop 2, with poets Charles Bernstein and Tan Lin, will be part of Writing Machine.
Throughout Performa09 Writing Machine will produce documents in relation to the work at Performa09 – essays, pictures, live work, spoken word- which will be uploaded onto the Writing Live site.
Writing Live home
Writing Live is…
Diary
The Community
Scoring Performa
Writing Encounters
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The Unread Writing Live Manifesto
By RACHEL LOIS CLAPHAM
Written to be read aloud at the Writing Live Symposium 21 Nov and subsequently not.
We are for suspicion as active, productive, in progress and not sitting on the fence
We are suspicious of clarity, of access
We are suspicious of language, of writing as direct communication, the ability of text to reveal anything
We are suspicious of critical distance and objectivity
We are suspicious of research
We are suspicious of responsibility to the work
We are suspicious of judgment and opinion
We are suspicious of craft
We are suspicious of editing
We are suspicious of art history
We are suspicious of professors, the institution and of frontal panel debates
We are suspicious of the institution of the artist
We are suspicious of the ability to escape the institution
We are suspicious of people who talk about the institution too much
We are suspicious of experimental
We are suspicious of deliberately obscure
We are suspicious of [leave blank for the reader/the audience]
We are suspicious of the reader/the audience
We are suspicious of writing in Microsoft Word (or the MAC equivalent)
We are suspicious of Helvetica and Times New Roman
We are suspicious of being suspicious
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A mechanic accident, after
“3 Lectures + 1 Story = 4 Evenings”
Alexandre Singh
White Columns
320 W. 13th Street (entrance on Horatio St.)
Monday, November 9 – Thursday, November 12, 8:00pm
By MARY PATERSON
I must apologise for the noise you hear. On the second night of 3 Lectures + 1 Story = 4 Evenings, Alexandre Singh began by apologising for the building work happening around us in Manhattan. As he was sure we all knew, there was a large scale construction project materializing above us in this city. Inside the calm, quiet gallery space of White Columns on a Tuesday night, none of us could hear a sound except the hum of Singh’s overhead projectors. The building work that Singh referred to was one of many fictional frames he constructed: conceptual scaffolds described in material language, to give substance to the networks of his imagination. An inn in the middle of a jungle. A pirate ship that captures Santa Claus. A storage system for ecology.
Nevertheless, I must apologise for the noise you hear. The stutters and splutters and coughs and sweeps of pages turning on these recordings are not what Rachel Lois and I intended to happen. Two writers trying to pin down our thoughts about Singh’s performances, we were surprised to find that the recording machine had snatched our thoughts away from us. Instead of an imprint of our conversation, the machine has composed a miscellany of almost thoughts, of half-sentences and nearly-theres. In doing so, it erased the memory of our conversation, in which we mined the intricacies of Singh’s practice, excavated its artistic heritage, pinned it like a butterfly against the wall of art and in the case of history.
If the swoosh of our pages turning as we leaf through scores of scribbled notes resembles the sound that Singh’s transparencies made as they slid off the projectors and onto the floor; if the rasp of a cough breaks the flow like Singh’s nervous asides, when he slipped out of character, out of the confidence of knowledge, to perforate his method with his own fallibility; if the tic of repetition runs through these recordings like the ineffable unconscious that structured Singh’s four night run; if Singh’s work is reflected or refracted in these recordings in any way, it is merely by chance.
It is simply an accident. The recordings motion towards knowledge but represent nothing that can be known. Only the inhuman logic of the machine – which, by the way, has never done this before, and has been fed with new batteries – knows what principle conducts this strange speech. But now that it has been conducted, now that the machine has come to usurp the speech and the thrilling authenticity of the event, you must agree that it does stand for something. Like a photograph taken of a dancer in the air, of a painter in his studio, or a lecturer mid-flow, the recorder has blinked at something, and transformed it into a legacy.
And who is to say, that the inhuman logic of this machine is less real, less authentic, than the structuring intelligence of a classical education or an Art History degree? Surely it’s only a matter of survival, of species loyalty, that leads you to choose the choices of a child over the reasoning of the recorder? Perhaps it is not the decisions that you make, but the act of deciding, that is the pre-requisite for knowledge. It does not matter what shape the foundation stone takes, as long as you believe it is there.
And perhaps our machine, our foundation stone, is buried deep beneath the fictional edifice of a new Manhattan, the city that Singh built. Perhaps it lies next to the box for Singh’s conceptual cards, a self-describing mnemonic, a story that defines its own logic, in order to define the world.
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100 Years of Performance (Writing) (Version #2)
By RACHEL LOIS CLAPHAM
I spent the afternoon in 100 Years (Version #2) at PS1, a show that “drafts a short history of actions, events, situations, happenings, and performances beginning with the Futurist manifesto in 1909 and continuing to the present.” The show’s own interpretation material described it as ‘a chronological archive of performance from the last 100 years for the use of future students and historians’. This prospect filled me with dread. Peripatetic, disparate, global performance practices – practices that are deliberately and indelibly rooted to their site specific moment- pulled together under one roof, and presented in solid, chronological lines from the perspective of a select few who may or may not ‘have been there’. 100 years of critically ‘missing in action’ performance all neatly wrapped up for the purpose of future students and historians, future academicians, future academies. This may also be an over-reaction on my part. Because three hours later and I am elated by the all too rare footage from performances past, present and future amassed in/by the show (all too rare because it is locked up in archives – pending funded publication or exhibition opportunity – no doubt). A note re. over-reaction, it also turns out that the word ‘draft’ in regarding 100 Years (Version #2) is significant. The content is actually subject to change during the exhibition’s lifetime: there is a shifting programme of projections in the main space. And the chronological timeline – as well as the paper based archival material it contains – is signaled as provisional via lightweight reproductions and facsimiles. This notion of the exhibition as a draft, a work in progress or ‘unfinished’ although important, is in reality symbolic at 100 Years (Version #2) – how those other than the museum’s curators change the material is unclear.
My joy at experiencing the basic, grainy and frank to-camera performance footage by artists Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Ana Mendieta and Joan Jonas from the 1960’s makes me wonder what the fall-out from the future archive of performance remains will be with regards to critical writing.
Questions for the now. What will be the future archive created by practitioners such as Siobhan Davies Re-Play, Open Dialogues and Writing Live Fellows (to name but a few collaborative, speculative or creative performance document generators)? Such writers look equally towards the performance that is their subject as they do away from it, veering towards their own artistic practice. It is a contemporary critical standpoint partly borne of a dialectic tension with formalistic, or flat, documentary practices of performance in the last 50 years – including many of those displayed at 100 Years (Version #2). And here I’m noting the many videos borne of a trusted single video camera pointed at the ‘main performer’ or ‘main action’ by someone other than the artist; modes of capture used in 100 Years (Version #2) as neutral record or faithful witness (or at least uncommented upon as such).
Document on performance = historically faithful. Document as performance= not so?
Back to writing. (Did we ever leave?) Specifically to how critical writing as a document of something else, something like a performance, might be looked to. And how this act of looking in writing might be critically diverted.
Looking away from a performance (in writing) is a trajectory based partly upon a suspicion of contributing to a whole, linear or art historical archive. It is a position that acknowledges language as a necessarily unfaithful and instable medium, movement as always already punctual (to paraphrase Laurence Louppe) or performance as always already text. This wayward trajectory also takes its cue from the live – from performance’s own (allegedly marginal) relationship to art history that opens the way for oppositional or inattentive modes of analysis, from its porous or speculative nature. It is a position hard won by contemporary artist/writers looking for sympathetic responses of, to and as their work. But is it a privileged position, one with the benefit of (100 years of) hindsight?
Some questions for the future. What of future hindsight, or foresight? What will the future history of such writing practices be in relation to performance? An archive of queered, unfaithful, tangentially associative documents with hoards of bemused scholars running after them trying to glean facts, bemoaning that wonderfully artistic moment back in the early Twenty First Century that valued ‘looking away’ but leaves scholars in the Twenty Second Century feeling robbed of any clear performance ‘money shots’. In what way will the inattentive archive we are creating lead future historians to fabricate their own draft of performance history?
And back to 100 Years (Version #2) at PS1.
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Writing Machine Audio Clips
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Release form written by Charles Bernstein for the Writing Live Fellows.
A poem.
release poem charles bernstein for Writing Live Fellows 08 11 09
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Frequencies of Public Writing by Tan Lin, notes for Writing Live.
(Left in space after writing workshop)
tan lin frequencies of public writing-1
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Notes on Poem Profiler exercise by Charles Bernstein for Writing Live
Bernstein_Poem-Profiler exercise fro Writing Live
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| Energy of opportunity and power A peer group within the Biennial and a conversation that runs alongside it A line taking itself for a walkThis is a very old fashioned nethod of transmitting information It’s been quite effective to stick me in the ribs. That’s how it’s working so far. In terms of what will come out of that – the process is very slow. It’s very hard to do critical writing in the art world. It’s extermely hard to do it in an art world setting. You are always complicit. My issue is with the erasure of poetry. A phobia of poetry. The erasure of history and the history of the verbal domain from art practice. Any attempt to say that writing is outside performance is an attempt to reify […] You can never not perform Writing is always involoved in publication, republication, reading, performance. I wonder if poetry in visual arts is currently a discursive fad If you’re writing you’re responsible to the medium of writing. How can you give an account of an external document? The publication and distribution of a text fundamentally change its meaning. The textual form is a performance Learn poetry as a second language Cultural currency There is an asynchronicity between making work and interpreting it Stigma Expertise Architecture Cross-disciplinary I love what you say; you articulate it so perfectly There is a difference between appropriation in the art world and appropriation in the printed world The press release is ready to go in the book Thinking in language All language is rhetorical The distinction between writing and reading is an intentional aspect of writing The ability to manipulate social codes. You can’t avoid that I listen to what people say and respond in ways they don’t expect. That’s what I do 15 to 45 seconds. That’s the difference between me and a real conceptual artist. That’s about as much time as I’m prepared to give to it As a thought experiment, you’ve already done it It’s worth doing but I’m not sure if it’s worth doing in real time To actually do it and be interesting would take much much more time than you actually have together I value the possibility of talking and exchange rather than making a product Failure doesn’t matter because you can chalk the failure up to chance It could not be removed All those comments – entirely didactic Pseudo-profundity You negated yourself by your double mock profundity The performance is greater than the text we produced Non linear patterning is fundamental to writing. But it is entirely resisted by rational discourse
Room 215, Cooper Union Sunday November 8 2009, 10.30am – 5.30pm Phrases spoken by Writing Live Fellows and guests Charles Bernstein, Tan Lin and Roselee Goldberg, as (mis)heard by Mary Paterson ___________________________________________________________________ |
