O the virtue of ignorance! So much nothing in this Doom life!
Here’s the thing: who’s going to read this? Ask anyone but me. By Hercules, no one, not one person, no single body. Either sing a duet or be dumb in silence. Nothing between.
“How deplorable to be deploring of art!”
(There’s no basket big enough today). Go ahead and choose a Darby English to whatever thish is (Description of a Life? Notes? Terror?).
A dearth still sweeps across the land. If anyone in D.C. makes light of anything, no need to whiff outside ourselves for the unholy stench. In US who hasn’t – can I whisper it? Into this hole? When I consider Ok Boomer life and all that grey (Ing.), my sides burst and out it comes: Oh my, Oh my, Oh my!
Here’s the Thing: a satire is (still is) about the way Satire writes, what kind of writing it must be. It cancels out its own voice in the mimicking, re-echoing of scepticism. Not 2016 again? Of course not! Early voting, suburban whites, bad Trump debates badly with himself, economies of pestilence – they all will save us (so sings the Columbus Chorus). Writing, then, for a public: the slogan is vote inside and out.
There was another Women’s March this weekend (‘Thousands protest Trump’s Supreme Court pick at Women’s Marches’; ‘Hundreds gather for Women’s March to protest Trump, Barrett nomination’). Back on January 21st 2017, hundreds of thousands in Washington alone, while Nancy Spero’s women march through time.
Caroline Bergvall’s Alisoun sang then for us to shake of the shadows and get out into the crowded structures of the day.
Yes,
says the voice
says the sound of the voice
says the feeling of the sound of the voice
not a voice but a space but a sound
Start walking
Yes
keep
walking yes keep marching breathing yes
says the feeling of the sound of the voices of the crowd
I didn’t hear this voice then. It took this one-time classicist’s descent into departmental hell (a story for another time) and escape at an unfinished exhibition (cf. next week) to get round to listening to Every Time A Ear Di Soun. Huddled together on Mixcloud; after the live light has flickered out.
Even then I didn’t heed the call. It took a reaching out, a call for response. Only then with an audio file in an email, shared on Doom for an unfinished distance learning. Re-echo listening notes read something like this (by Molly Burke):
Oh my oh my oh my…
I listen while gardening my daughters on a walk with their father. Hearing the sounds of the women’s march a reminder of the trauma…the grief the (hope?). …
Standing in line to do early voting the line is wrapped around the building the election is still three weeks away. Maybe I feel hope again but in some ways I’m afraid to
Or this (by Lori Esposito):
Then there’s Barrett with a face of the colonizer, starring back at us from a future Cassandra Press Reader (by Kandis Williams) or $100,000 bill. The choice is…
A few days ago I was in bed thumbing The Land We Are (a book included in Potu faitautusi: Faiāʻoga o gagana e, ia uluulumamau! – a reading room created by Dr Léuli Eshrāghi at the Columbus Printed Arts Center).
I was about to read ‘Writing Touch Me’ by Skeena Reece and Sandra Semchuk to transport me back over the border the National Gallery of Canada and Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu continuel and Reece’s video, which I stood before momentarily and now wished I’d stayed longer to take in.
I flipped the pages only to stall on Leah Decter and Ayumi Goto’s ‘Call and Response’ – comprising photographs between the beaver’s bite and the (sonorous) shadow and a joint text. I found myself in its crescendo, reading:
resisting
the working of systems
that ground the longevity of a presupposed ethical act
untenable relations
racing
deracinated turbulent knowledge
foot notes
thread subterranean entanglements that
sustain
while surpassing compulsing
self-litigations
reconfigure social conventions
in cite new tracts
assured in the means to include all one
in the many
what remains behind
but the residues of those affiliations
borne witness
breath beyond the subjective edge
standing with
This breath beyond took me past Reece to Peter Morin (who appears on the book’s cover) and his land:breath at the Requited Flame (RF) of Àbadakone. I missed the performance, but caught Electric Prop and Hum Freestyle Variations, by Maria Hupfield, with Ange Loft (you can see Amateur me there in this photo).
The day after reading ‘Call and Response’ I was back on Doom, transported by a exhibition visit and another duet, this time by Hupfield and the poet Natalie Diaz. Here are my unedited notes in full. Watching Natalie Diaz and Maria Hupfield Doom conversation – different sensualities – sound of little bells on boxing gloves.
The physicality of the sound. Reminding me of glass, of rain, if you could hear what each raindrop sounded like when it hit the ground – sharp, sweet sound. An electric show – down to the color – fluorescent. Problem of connection to Indigenous people behind glass – feel connected – bring energy, life, vibrations into the space. Indigeneity – to be migrated rather than to migrate – one piece from each person represents an area – collective unified voice. Contemporary is not a word that can quite fold what is happening in the Indigenous artworld. Honoring living makers vs. artifacts – whole bodies of work & complexity rather than one work representing whole artist & region etc. It is such a generous space to think – what we hear, what we are able to see, energy in our bodies. Is there a difference between what is collaborative & what is collective? Collective ownership & collaborative ownership. Collaborative is about making – creating something that wouldn’t be possible individually – collectively may own that – different from having someone participate. Language cassette in Walkman – fight for our language – it is moving always & will arrive to you or you will arrive to it – so much waiting. Felt – material speaking its language – honor Robert Morris – earth & sky; recovery & loss. Felt as a more ethical choice – felt globe only land & water – no borders. Often when I perform, you have to bring everything & then leave – the bag would have everything in it (the idea of return) – nice to leave everything there. Return is a natural part of migration. Silver tongue. The sun (title). Listen to the recording of their answer to your question about poetic language – so important especially the idea that the process of writing is guided beyond the words written = it’s all poetic language – poetry not bound to symbols of things – acknowledging the impossibility of language – energy of the body & the land – hold, it cultivate it, tend to it – language makes me know myself in different ways & your objects are language – color is language – earlier performance – movement & speaking – thinking with your hands – things are happening that might seem intuitive – coming from previous experiments – possibilities of new imaginings – what else might happen around (performance art). When you writing, we think we know, but somehow our hand knows ahead of us – the line of text is moving towards something without knowing what it is going towards All Visible Directions Between Sky and Water with Natalie Diaz and Maria Hupfield | The New School on YouTube. The Supreme Court nomination hearings hum in the background.
Back to ‘Call and Response’, another missed performance, this time by Goto and Morin at the Toronto Biennial …Crow meets Salmon, prefaced by Reflections and Repercussions by Aki Onda.
And in a flash, we are back where it all began. I put on the record of Onda’s Nam June’s Spirit Was Speaking To Me (2017) to take me back to the Summer of 2017 and documenta 14, a call and response between Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany. (Yes, Europe is still a very dark place). Here’s the first secret I’ll share with you here: I didn’t listen back then to the Public Radio of Every Time A Ear Di Soun. No speaking spirit, no pink trombone, no whisper or gunshot, no musuem, no atlas radio, no ears speaking… Only in 2020 did I finally put my ear to the ground; for the resonances.
While in Athens, no listening space was there, either at the Megaron or at the Odeion. The only waves I caught, on my audio recorder, beyond the student-musicians practicing airs upstairs and the stateboarders scratching around the corner, were your campaign of whispers, Pope. L. I hunted them down across the two cities, asking for translation, offering interpretation. They even turned me into a thief.
Here is the thing, at last, the mixture of the whisper and the scratch I deposit here for the weeks of election campaigning mayhem to come.
Language, though spoken by all, is still a mystery.
There is no foretelling what “it” all means. No final word (Monica Szewczyk, ‘Pope.L, Aprophet’). Obi Sunt.
An unfinished exhibition.
[‘OH MY OH MY (Call for Response)’ is an extract from Chapter 2: ECHOES of the ongoing online project Like Wind on Rushes which drafts a book to come called Whisper into a Hole.]