Today’s post is like that moment in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape when Krapp eats a banana and, several minutes later, slips on the peel he left on the floor. But in place of Krapp, we want you to imagine Trump, and for the banana, a gun. Maybe Banksy can help us visualize this:
Arming teachers, with guns, not bananas, is Trump’s answer to the horrific Parkland shooting. He adds that some teachers could be given “a little bit of a bonus” to get trained. A little bit of a bonus? We can only imagine what our billionaire excuse for a president would imagine a ‘little bit of a bonus’ would add up to. Teachers should ask what he thinks they earn, double it and then ask for a bankers-level bonus on top. Even then it wouldn’t be worth it. They would be signing up for two jobs at once and two incompatible jobs at that. A friend of ours is a teacher in Colorado and they have highlighted the ridiculousness of Trump’s plan as part of the #armmewith movement. Here are some of their requests:
At our public schools closer to home in Columbus, Ohio, even some books would be nice! Just now, we read that Trump, in his continued attack on the armed Florida deputy outside the school, boasts: “I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a gun’. Of course, if we can get over the image of Trump running, doesn’t the image of his heroic gunless presence just confuses the situation even more? What does Trump want? Heroic teachers with guns, heroic teachers without guns or heroes (with or without guns) and no teachers? Will they be riding in on horseback to save the day?
Not in Colorado or other nearby states, as Trump’s budget lifts restrictions on the shooting of wild horses. Why not just get the teachers to do that as well? On their way back from school and before the mountain of grading and preparation they have to do for the next day, send them off with their rifles to shoot some wild horses. Hell, why not just get them to skin them too and make some nice horse-leather-bound books for their students? They’ll have the money from their ‘little bit of a bonus’, so why not? At least then the kids would have some books.
Ok, so doubling down on Trump’s crazy is a dangerous rabbit-hole to follow. But we wanted to get you to those horse-leather books so that we could start referencing our two week period of posts from last year (March 6-19), as part of our drafting of two chapters from No Philosopher King – Ch. 3: Moving White Bodies and Ch. 4: Media/Medea/Medya. Here is how we see the chapters overlapping in two related questions: how does a valorized object become animated with a precarious presence (e.g. classical statue to the dancer’s body) and what forms of inscription or media enable this animation to return to being an object (e.g. horse to book)?
The connection between these two chapters is our resistance to the use of a ancient classical statue as a value-laden site for a privileged discussion of antiquity and contemporary art, by showing how this ignores the forms of media that enable its dispersion and diversity as an image. Take the following contrast: the simplicity of a photo of Apollo Belvedere taking a selfie to comment on Selfie Culture (March 7) compared to the complexity of this photo from William E. Jones’s project Fall into Ruin about the villa of Alexander Iolas in Athens (March 17), in which we find books bound in white horse leather alongside artworks (by Matta and Magritte) and ancient artifacts.
Taking Jones’ lead, we can find the Classical statue reanimated in interesting and critical ways, as with Allan Sekula’s transformation of a Hercules statue as a living symbol of American labor (March 18) or Nari Ward’s abstract sculptural work Ultra, dedicated to the ‘fuel gods’ (March 16). And where does the moving body in dance and performance fit in? Claudia La Rocco makes us focus on the tension between the dancing body and writing as both mutable forms (March 10), which makes us look at the drawings of choreographer Ralph Lemon in a totally different way (March 12). And teachers are not too far off in this process, as its is their bodies that are returning to the cave with Mette Evardsen (March 14), and not a gun in sight!
From here, let us turn to the media of inscription, how the living body becomes an object. Books can be embraced by performance and dance – as the Retrospective of Xavier le Roy (March 11) and Emails of Jérôme Bel (March 13), or resisted, in the case of Tino Sehgal (March 15) or Steven Parreno’s No Texts (March 9). Furthermore, there are more media of inscription beyond the book as the philosopher Adriana Cavarero turning her book into a video installation (March 6), artist Melissa Vogley Woods leads a workshop for school kids as part of an exhibition (March 8) and a philosopher John Rapko and artist Muntadas can work double time on an exhibition at Berkeley (March 19)?
Let us end by coming back to Trump’s banana. Instead of Banksy’s iconic Pulp Fiction, here is an appropriate image to resist his madcap idea to arm teachers. A photograph of Brett Goodroad’s Banana peel, now frozen for posterity, sent to Claudia La Rocco as part of an art exchange project in 2015.
