15537 RW LSM Book.rp1.indd - Organism for Poetic Research

L i g h t SoLubLe
MediuMS
FRONT cover
inside FRONT cover
Light-SoLubLe MediuMS
Table of Contents
Preface
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The Letter
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The Works .
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Bios
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38
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Preface
Organism for Poetic Research
Brooklyn, New York
2015
Designed and edited by Rachael M. Wilson + Ada Smailbegović
All rights reserved by individual authors.
rganism
Op
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for
In February or March of 2014, Katya Yakubov and Daniel Hess of The Picture Show, an independent
microcinema in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, invited us to collaborate on a film and poetry project. We started
discussing the collaboration in the early summer months and came up with the idea for Light-Soluble
Mediums. Ada Smailbegović and Rachael M. Wilson wrote a long document called “the letter,” which was
printed on tabloid-sized salmon-colored construction paper and then mailed, and otherwise distributed,
to potential respondants, including filmmakers, writers, artists, academics, and other denizens of spaceship
earth (Nasa would not beam our letter to outerspace). The letter is reproduced, with some changes, below.
In response to the letter, we received films, essays and artworks which were screened and performed on
April 25, 2015 at The Picture Show. This publication is one means of documenting but also extending the
screening. In this way, Light-Soluble Mediums is a process-based publication: encompassing the initial
provocation, the mailing of the letter, the film screening and performance, the publication in print and on
the web.
The publication and films can be found at the OPR’s website: www.organismforpoeticresearch.org.
1
The Letter
The Letter
From the preface to the letter:
Description of Change 1
We’ve written a letter of sorts, attempting to convey
how sincerely we want an image in time. We ask
that you consider our “letter” and respond with a
“movie.” To be sure, we are interested in all manner
of response so long as they involve, in some capacity,
a projected image or something you might persuade
us to consider as such. We are interested in the
way images pull off texts and the way a text might
detach and reattach itself to images.
Flat shapes of purple stillness flatness. Some outstretched into the curving outline where waves
forward texture of green green green becomes an
outwardness and a division of color. Forms of fuzzy
orange far-away stillness. Dots of orange outstretched array. A shape that attaches and detaches
with hydraulic slowness. A flat purple coldness. A
tube and a tube and a tube lifting.
Rachael M. Wilson
Ada Smailbegović
make me a chef, I know, but you should try my
ham and peccorino sandwich. I do it on a flauta
bread drizzled with olive oil. I know what a
movie is. Do you?
the green entering into red entering into green. A
flat purple coldness. A tube and a tube and a tube
lifting.
-These descriptions were created while watching a YouTube
clip of a BBC program “Creatures of the Deep.” It depicted a seafloor covered with many starfish of different colors.
With the aid of a camera, capable of capturing increments
of change at a different number of frames per second than
the human eye, the stillness of this underwater scene was
transformed into one filled with innumerable flooding
detail of movement occurring at rhythms of starfish time.
A synonym is just another word for a description:
a hypertactic but propositional logic, nonetheless.
What’s a synonym? If it were just a word for another
word, there wouldn’t be any difference. Only a fool
doesn’t see a thesaurus for what it is: another name
for a dictionary.
—Roget
2.
“First a sea gull looking into the grain in order to
look into the grain it must be flying as if it were
looking at the grain. A sea gull looking at the
grain. Second a sea gull looking into the grain.
Any moment at once. Why is the grain that
comes again paler so that it is not so high and
after awhile there can be very many of a kind
to know that kind.” Or, when we were walking,
“the trees skirting the wood stripped of the network of their upper boughs, which are stiff and
erect, like black skeletons; the ground strewed
with the red berries of the holly.” Or, “again her
form became dimmer; the sky flat, unmarked
by distances, a white thin cloud.” Or, “she sailed
along, followed by multitude of stars, small, and
bright, and sharp.”
Description of Change 2
We wrote you a letter of sorts. It was our attempt
at making a movie, or getting at a movie without
the film. Now we want your movie, your film, your
moving image to be thrown on a vertical surface
with light. We’ve written all this to express how
sincerely we want images in time, images that peel
off texts and texts that peel away from films. Send
us your movies. There are no length requirements.
There are no known constraints.
Flat shapes of purple stillness flatness. Some outstretched into the curving outline where waves
forward texture of green green green becomes an
outwardness and a division of color. A teeter tottering advancing tips pulled upward to feeling. Forms
of fuzzy orange far-away stillness. Over the vibratory needles extruding the center outward. Pumping
down with an undulant shaking that opens five
directions. Dots of orange outstretched array. A
shape that attaches and detaches with hydraulic
slowness. Zones of overlap the green entering into
red entering into green. A flat purple coldness. A
tube and a tube and a tube lifting.
Description of Change 3
Flat shapes of purple stillness flatness. The curvature
a horizon not a climb into. A green flicker folding
flatness of paper outward. Sinuous and then. Some
outstretched into the curving outline where waves
forward texture of green green green becomes an
outwardness and a division of color. A teeter tottering advancing tips pulled upward to feeling. Forms
of fuzzy orange far-away stillness. Roam to tips and
open to tips. Over the vibratory needles extruding
the center outward. Pumping down with an
undulant shaking that opens five directions. Dots of
orange outstretched array. Frolic hanging long into
and outward sea saw. A shape that attaches and
detaches with hydraulic slowness. Zones of overlap
Look, if I knew what a movie was, I wouldn’t be
asking you to read this. How’s a picture different
from an image? How’s an image visual? Some
people cook and I make films. Now, I can make
myself a sandwich but that doesn’t mean the deli
guy is a director. So what if he uploads iphone
movies to Youtube of his dog taking a shit.
Actually, I’ve seen his movies and they’re pretty
good. Amateur but interesting. That still doesn’t
2
Because my grandmother was wild about the
drive-in,1 her older sister got her a job where she
worked, at a drive-in movie theater in Orange,
California. Someone didn’t show up to her shift
one day, so my grandma did instead. She was
fifteen, and she began working as a cashier. She
stayed on at the drive-in in Orange, California
until another opened in Long Beach, where she
transferred.
My grandmother was not interested in movies
but in the culture and atmosphere of the drivein. In her high school English honors class, she
wrote an essay on the history of drive-in movie
theaters. “It was easy to write when it was about
something you loved,” she told me.
3.
“What, in fact, is a sensation? Is it the operation
of contracting trillions of vibrations onto a
receptive surface. Quality emerges from this,
quality that is nothing other than contracted
quantity. [...] Thus a piece of sugar only makes
us wait because, in spite of its arbitrary carving
out, it opens out onto the universe as a whole.”
At the drive-in in Long Beach, my grandmother
worked with her best girlfriend. They both met
1. Leo Steinberg’ Other Criteria begins, “Because I was
wild about art, Mother at last took me to a museum...”.
3
their future husbands while working there. My
grandpa was an usher, and he sold concessions in
the breaks between movie screenings. The drivein was always a double-feature.
The projects of geometry. Fitting desire into
shapes and hours. What kind of a thing is a
block of sensations that exists somewhere in
space. Are all sensations composed of a combination of other sensations or are they singular?
My grandpa was drafted into the army during
World War II, so my grandparents were married,
and they moved to Washington state where he
was stationed. They were there just a few months
before my grandpa was discharged (he was
asthmatic), and they moved back to Southern
California. All my grandmother remembers of
this time was that it rained.
What is the geometry of sensation? That one
should feel her thoughts as immediately as a
color of an object. That one should feel her
thoughts as immediately as a color of a canary
or the sea. Thought may be a folding of material
into a besideness that sits next to an object,
but now operates with another kind of time.
“To recover anything like the full treasure of
scattered, wasted circumstance was at the same
time to live over the spent experience itself, so
deep and rich and rare, with whatever sadder
and sorer intensities.” These are the occurrences
of Henry James’s ghosts, not of the dead, who
are simple, but of the materiality that objects
make in their doubling, that sits beside them,
on a table, ordered as the cuttings of a violet are
ordered by shape, size or incline. What is the
geometry of sensation? That one should feel her
thoughts as immediately as a color of a green net,
with something entangled in it, also green but
more firm, and a white thread. “The effect of this
in turn was to find discrimination among the
parts of my subject again and again difficult—so
inseparably and beautifully they seemed to hang
together.”
Eventually, my grandpa became a civil engineer
and my grandparents had three kids: my mom,
my uncle and my aunt. When the kids were still
young, my grandma took a part-time job at a
ticket booth in a nearby cinema in Santa Ana.
She worked matinees on the weekends while
my grandpa stayed home watching the kids. She
wanted to get out of the house, and she liked
being near the movies. I asked if she ever stayed
to watch anything after her shift ended, and she
said no, she had had other things to do.
The layers of layers of something moving of,
the layers of layers of something moving in,
the layers and layers of something moving in
sensation, so that it stands out in relief, so it
dusts something and moves over and over the
dusted site and so is a leveling and so the pink
shapes of the paper folded as ships may sit in the
sideline of water, in the night, in the invisible,
having come out appearing on the surface of the
visible. The weight, the current weight, having
been the same cloth, the same rudimentary
shape of the carton, the same visible contours,
the fingers in their separate motion from point
to point in the pink folded shape. The layers of
layers of something moving in sensation, seeping
This is the front yard
of my grandparents’ house
on Ball Road, in Anaheim, California
These are the eucalyptus trees
leading up the walkway
that leads to the backyard
4
This is the peeling eucalyptus
tree bark: splotchy, spotted,
and the silvery gray-green leaves
the covering of, made of the visible, the dust of
liquids and objects of liquid; not knowing the
interruption in the sequence and so come to
the cut of separating from the visible the whole
folded world, the ground folded and dropping
underneath, having made the cut out world of
the huts and the shapes, the water houses that
hover on sticks, that form a shape around the
visible so that it enters a square of space, the dust
of stable and unstable substances of pink ribbon
and of yellow and of the sequential. And so the
gold square shape pressed on its sides beveled
or cut at a slant as a lake is cut at a slant, having
separated itself in eights, in yards of something,
lines where the lines are almost a materiality of
sticks, such is the folding of the sail, a drawing at
each wrist, redness, solving the problem that is
proximity, that makes irresolvable the seeing of
the visible.
This is the scrub grass
short and rough
but our feet don’t feel it
This is the high stucco wall
that shelters the backyard
from the Ralph’s parking lot
Of all memories
of Southern California
there is one kind of light
Here is a sliding door
a sliding glass door
a sliding screen door
Invitation: On the Movement of Qualities / or Thin
Films
Can description act as a technology of amplification? Flooding the delineated frame with
luminous grain of detail, and, in turn, rendering
perceptible a more variegated sense of the kinds
of change that are dynamically constituting the
present and configuring the future?
Of course, time is the thing to get at, but also
space— spaces— and if I can kind of paraphrase
this elsewhere-writing, then I’m thinking of what
I referred to there as an ‘attachment’— and of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, specifically from his
essay “Eye and Mind,” where the body is a kind
of moving aporia in the visual that sort of holds
it all together— If that were like the camera...
but then what would be the scenario that would
produce the utterance “He was filled with the
strange sensation of the fire coming out of the
back of his head,” because that is a definite
statement. What seems worth noting here, too, is
For instance a quality rendered isolate within one
material and then moved across to something
else; for instance, can the vapor at the edge of
a cloud peal off as if with a texture of “tearing
cloth,” and then an instant later fold “like the
corner of a handkerchief ” and then begin to
coil “as a ribbon or a carpenter’s shaving may be
made to do.” Can a tint of a cloud acquire the
sheen of egg-white, the texture of wool, the inner
5
the condition of silence and what— ok, yes, what
a relief it can be.
marbling of an oyster shell? Can metaphor move
qualities between materials: “The green paths
down the hill-sides are channels for streams. The
young wheat is streaked by silver lines of water
running between the ridges.”
This is in blue.
Or a material-semiotic isthmus: as DW notes the
changing appearance of the sea in her Alfodexen
Journal as “perfectly calm blue, streaked with
deeper color by the clouds, and tongues or
points of sand” on January 23rd 1798, and then
again as “the blue-grey sea, shaded with immense
masses of cloud, not streaked” on the subsequent
date of January 26th.
A downpour of rain drew the tour to a close
and prevented an auction of abstractions from
taking place.
Is this mediation, or would the movement across
media: from paper to cloth to film have the same
effects? Or, words may be only very thin and
mobile films that can lift something off and carry
it across to something. That is, move meaning
“across materials,” carrying the sheen of eggwhite, the texture of wool, the inner marbling of
an oyster shell into the luminosity or a “tint” that
shifts as a thread through the assembling and
reassembling clouds.
Acknowledgments:
Acknowledgments:
This last passage of this letter contains the words of
Friedrich von Schlegel and Claire Bishop. An earlier
quotation from Roget’s Theseaurus is falsely attributed.
These texts arise from Gertrude Stein’s “An Acquaintance
With Description,” Dorothy Wordsworth’s The Alfodexen
Journal, Gerard Manly Hopkins’ Journals, the game of
hopscotch, BBC program “Creatures of the Deep,” Lisa
Robertson and Stacy Doris’ Notes on Perfume, and also
Robertson’s essay “7.5 Minute Talk for Eva Hesse (Sans
II)” in Nilling, Aristotle’s Poetics, Spinoza’s Ethics, the performance of “More Mutable Than You” by Jumatatu Poe
and Jesse Zaritt hosted by Triple Canopy, Henry James’ A
Small Boy and Others, and Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonism.
Ah, well, Amelia and Camilla were just getting
involved in an increasingly lively discussion
about a new play when two of the expected
friends, Marcus and Antonio, joined the
company, laughing loudly.
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Zak Margolis
What is the nature of Cinema? Is it merely the illusion of motion, of one image flashing on the retina, only
to be replaced by another, and another, and another… Strange, isn’t it? That you would look for truth in
those flashes of light? But, your memory is blurred and unreliable, and your parents have been keeping
secrets from you, and their parents from them. So really, you have no discernible history. There is no story.
You are a traveller. Naked and alone. The only realness is captured in a certain kind of flickering light. And
behind that lies your final journey.
In Poetics Aristotle suggests that metaphor
involves the application of a word belonging to
something else either from the genus [genos] to a
species [eidos], or from the species to the genus
or from the species to a species, or according to
analogy. Or, as LR notes, “metaphorical meaning
does not identify itself with a position; it moves
in a fluctuation, serially, to indicate modes of
materiality.”
He had wanted the evening to be threatening
and subversive but it had fallen into a rut
through a lack of preparation and because certain
people didn’t show up, namely, a porcelain
repairer named Joliboit and a peanut seller who
were supposed to comprise an orchestra.
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Origin of the True Cinema
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6
7
Fresh Paint
Astoria Park
Fresh Paint pits a low rise rental building against
a low-income construction worker who once
worked on building it and who now is an
occupant. Blending abstract musical compositions with muted pastel tones, the film explores
formal considerations in an experimental
narrative with semi-autobiographical undertones. Part documentary and part theater, the
film interlaces shots of the real conditions of
the building site with staged prop sculptures
and exaggerated actor performances. Narration
written by Mike Loncaric and Sound in
collaboration with Dennis Ha.
Astoria Park (2014) is a short film by Anna
Moser and Josiah Cuneo. The project began on
September 28th, 2013, when Moser and Cuneo
spent an afternoon together using handheld
microphones and cameras to record their
visual and aural impressions of Astoria Park in
Queens, a site chosen for its unfamiliarity to
both of them. An abandoned swimming pool
conjured the uncanny sensation of an inverted or
excavated monument. Rusty bars of a wrought
iron fence were instrumentalized as the source
of an echo chamber. The final work reveals
traces of a single day filtered, deconstructed,
and reassembled through collaboration and
contingency. [Collages by Anna Moser. Sound by
Josiah Cuneo. Hands variable.]
Julian Hou
Anna Moser and Josiah Cuneo
A Temperament
Yves Sheriff
Luxuriate
Alison Davis
A meditation on opulence, desire and excess
Luxuriate uses stop-motion to animate secondhand fur pelts and gold chains. The hypnotic
movement of the chains over fur indulges the
tactility of the materials while highlighting the
contrast between the hard mineral and the soft
biological natures of these desirable objects.
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“A Temperament” wishes to illustrate, through
a simple narrative construction, the geometry
of a specific sensation: the tickling that happens
when someone is observing something in an
open angle. The horizontal lays of sound, image
and meanings are moved across by the idea of an
ivy, which establishes the sensitive relationship
between intuitions and language. To help
myself, I used some parts of the beautiful book
of Gaston Bachelard, Intuition of the Instant,
where he enjoys to observe the complexity of
a sensation, stuck in time’s elasticity, and the
limits of our words, unless it is poetry “a kind
of desire for attention, in the dark now; the
duration being in grammar and syntax, like an
opportunity.”
9
Nykur
there are known talismans against this creature,
the greatest of which is simply to say “Nykur”
aloud. The water horse cannot stand the sound
of its own name, and immediately drops its
doomed rider and returns to the water upon
hearing it. On occasion, this reversal of spell also
entails punishment for the Nykur as it assumes
the shape of a normal horse, and is forced to
plough the fields.
Amie Robinson
“What would an ocean be without a monster
lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep
without dreams.”
—Werner Herzog
The ocean covers seventy-one percent of the
Earth’s surface, yet over ninety-five percent of it
remains unexplored. The thought of a monster,
like those portrayed in the sea odysseys of science
fiction, is not entirely far-fetched. Consider,
then, the water horse, a common creature in
Scandinavian folklore. In Iceland, this mythical
horse is called Nykur (also Nóni, Nennir, or
“takers,” and Vatnaskratti, meaning “water
demon”). Little is known about the Nykur’s
origin, but the figure has many counterparts
in neighboring countries and mythologies. In
Orkney, it is known as a Nuggle; in Sweden,
Bäckahästen; in Germany, the Nix; and Celtic
legend refers to him as Kelpie. The Nykur
appears as an ordinary, and rather docile horse,
albeit with one peculiarity—backwards hooves.
The fabled beast lurks along the shores of oceans,
lakes, rivers, streams, and bogs. Some believe
that the creature’s loon-like whinny is an omen
of a future drowning, and that during winter the
sound of breaking ice is actually the neighing of
a Nykur.
The Fungal Soul
Derek Woods
The Fungal Soul is a video essay that observes the
life of the Kingdom Fungi, which are neither
plants nor animals. The video asks what sort of
soul Aristotle might have given the fungi if he
had considered them in his ontology of animals,
vegetables, minerals, and humans.
With its head down and hooves hidden in the
water the Nykur appears friendly, and lures
people to sit on its back. Said to have sticky
skin, the unsuspecting victim—usually a young
child or recent mother—cannot free herself as
the Nykur gallops into the water and drowns its
prey. Like all proper myths, the tale of the Nykur
serves as a warning: here, for children to stay
away from the water and, thus, the chance of
drowning.
While recitations of the Nykur myth conjure
morbid images of children cutting their hands
off to free themselves from the adhesive hide,
10
11
3 Pockets di O Getti
Tiziana La Melia and Tamara Henderson
16 mm color film with optical sound Length:
2:25 mins. Sound: Julian Hou, Johan Bjork,
2013
tasche vinile di babys breath making vapour,
tasche a rete di dutch still life (oyster, coral,
glass of beer, shrimp), tascha piatta cut out of a
painted back drop.
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15
Room Motion1
Since Friday the baby’s breath is matching the
frequency of the rosemary shrub. Sneeze. You
murmur Ssslabs. Light is two rectangular tables,
its propulsion is its geometry. The plant slackens
the boundaries between figure and ground. Possessed
by its own surroundings, it becomes ground
ground.
Tiziana LaMellia
INT. Apartment 501-1856 Frances Street. Light in
a glass of purpureal Kool-Aid suspends a blooming
baby’s breath in the living room. A cloud of grease
enters through the sliding door. Description prints
on the glass’ clear volume. From the IMB wheeler
writer 1000, I am the unpopular soap opera writer
Jack Gable.
1 The change in font weight within this palimsestic text
indicates outside sources: Shane Krepakevich, William
Faulkner and Lisa Robertson through Krepakevich,
Salvador Dali through Rosalind Krauss.
Slats shut show the nylon dust on its plastic eyelids.
It articles nicotine, fingerprints, exhaust. Light’s
glutinous body licks the rosemary bush: getting
stuck on its wooden effluescent structure. Jack
reads the needle. The brittle fade of shade from the
deep balcony is a measure of the last few months.
A recumbent housefly is filled with cigarette butts
sporting this season’s fashionable ombré: lax last
vowel, wet/dry, head to toe. The plant’s body posed
in light stops as shape...Once upon a time, a
muscular thought push up.
Waves Study
John Melillo
But my heart would still yearn for the sound of
the waves.
The bright crests of innumerable waves.
This is a documentary of residuum all over the
greasy glass. It is momentary and legible in
the faint light, which the raindrops brought
particle by particle into the gloom and
released, miming Vancouver’s February sky. Jack
stares at a tiny point of a light that he takes to
be a star but is the glowing tip of a cigarette,
the only visible part is the object in question.
Tears of light coruscate to article the fingerprints
around the flush handle. When light’s glutinous
body finally hit a plant, it is the third paragraph,
and a chiaroscuro pose is a letter dependent on
light for its continued arrival and maintenance of
form...A knock knock joke, enter a Faulkner quote,
walls are description, description are walls.
Positioned at the wheeler writer while I write,
it is strange not to zone into the screen, but into
white on white of the wall. A soundtrack of clunky
words leaving tracks across the paper in chunky
platforms...I remember you wrote something about
the speed of light in contrast to the speed of plants,
which brings me back to the rosemary shrub eaten
up by light.
…the world ceaselessly assails and beleaguers
subjectivity as waves wash round a wreck on the
shore…
For all the loud breach of the waves at will.
That is, this is an arbitrary concatenation of wave
figures, drawn at will (willfully) from the vast
under-archive of wave-noise.
Letter For Anne-Claire
Now it is 2015, the video is not a baby anymore,
it is three years old; on the cusp of leaving the
toddler world. Who knows what the video will
look like as a teenager or as an elder, and who
knows how it will act in these later stages of life.
Nothing is very conclusive at this stage except
for the fact that the video will certainly be a
pedophile (an art-on-art pedophile that is). I
say this because I have recently noticed that the
video has become utterly captivated with itself
at the youthful age of three and it is obvious
that this toddler captivation will continue for
the rest of its life and will inevitably leak over
onto other three year old art works, lusting after
these recently made creations and sometimes
establishing a more than cozy proximity to them.
Arvo Leo
(Letter = 2011, A0 size)
(Video = 2013, 2 minutes and 45 seconds)
A few years ago a woman named Anne-Claire
invited me to a dinner party in Rotterdam but
I was away in Paris so I requested a dinner rain
check; a rain check request in the form of a large
poster folded up and sent in the mail (like those
over-sized checks people sometimes hold and
smile with for photos). I suppose I could have
just sent Anne-Claire an email, but I decided
I would use this opportunity to exaggerate
the mundanity of daily correspondence while
fondling the veil of social etiquette slightly.
Coincidentally, in the year between the making
of the Letter and the making of the Video (the
year of 2012) I was invited to show AnneClaire’s letter in an exhibition in New York; an
exhibition called The Work Locates Itself. I showed
her Letter along with another work (a brass
plaque) that is called Field of Snow. Through a
short piece of text engraved into the brass plaque
Field of Snow simply encouraged someone to
put their cheek on the cold metal and pretend
that they were lying outside in the snow. To
provide the audience with more information
about these works I wrote a brief didactic panel
called Two Amputated Legs. I hope by sharing
this didactic panel again in New York, within the
OPR publication, it will help shed some further
light on Letter For Anne-Claire, but also more
generally, on things that don’t exist anymore or
haven’t existed yet, but sometimes feel like they
are existing right now at this particular moment
in time, like rain checks waiting to be redeemed
or phantom limbs playing tricks on a legless
being.
I also like that the rain check is just a coupon
to guarantee something else in the future. It is
absolutely useless aside from what it promises. If
you wake up one morning and there is no water
coming out of your shower you may eventually
notice that your landlord slipped a rain check for
water under your door. But sometimes when you
go in the shower you want more than just watereventually, or coming-soon-water. Sometimes
you need water at the moment when you need it;
even if it’s rainy, even if it’s stormy out. Therefore
on these pleasant days when the shower water
is already available when you need it, you could
just use the rain check as a towel. Let it be
physical and tangible and somewhat absorptive.
Let it be useful in the present rather than in the
future for a change.
Then two years later when I was applying for
a grant or something I was having a difficult
time summarizing Anne-Claire’s letter within
a single image so I made a video to better
articulate the devilish details. What happened
next was the video slipped away from being pure
documentation and began to grow a life of its
own. It is a life that grew from a letter yes, but
it’s also a life that grew from an inability to not
always be able to summarize things succinctly.
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17
Two Amputated Legs by Arvo Leo
Today, for The Work Locates Itself, Arvo Leo is presenting two
works; a letter he once mailed to a friend (Letter For Anne-Claire)
and a cold metal plaque (Field of Snow). In relation to location
and distance, Letter For Anne-Claire has a ritual origin that very
much exists in times past (17.02.2011) whereas our dear plaque
(Field of Snow) happens to be right here - in this room, in this
time - sharing with us the location of its rituality. This is not to say
that Letter For Anne-Claire has become barren, unapproachable,
or is lacking in presentness, it simply means that the vestiges of its
aura are being kept erect and mobile by the crutches of history.1
(It should be made clear at this moment that these two works
are in no way racing against each other, nor are they moving
towards any concrete destination. They have however reassured
us that they are remarkably comfortable in their own footwear:
one wearing a pair of wooden clogs and the other wearing a pair
of snowshoes respectively.)
It is cold. The white moon is up among her scattered stars – like
the bare thighs of the Police Sergeant’s wife – among her five
children... No answer. Pale shadows lie upon the frosted grass.
One answer: It is midnight, it is still and it is cold...! White thighs
of the sky! a new answer out of the depths of my male belly: In
April... In April I shall see again – In April! the round and perfect
thighs of the Police Sergeant’s wife perfect still after many babies.
Oya!4
It is rather crude that we regularly relegate an audience member
to the state of mere viewer, like they cannot do anything else
but look at things. I would suggest as an alternative, for this
particular exhibition at least, we call our active participant a
senti-conglomerate; one who evenly coalesces the acts of hearing,
smelling, feeling, tasting, viewing, and thinking.2 This will allow
all sense parties, free from neglect and exile, to be able to achieve
a nurturing equanimity worthy of their abilities.
Letter For Anne-Claire (2011)
Field of Snow (2011)
Field of Snow is naturally a cold chunk of metal. Or, put another
way, it is the prepubescent grandchild of the 17th century poet
Matsuo Bashō and the modern general practitioner William
Carlos Williams. What occurs in Field of Snow is a subtle
evocation; the senti-conglomerate’s senses are lightly blanketed in
stimuli akin to that of being in snow - I feel (cold metal) and
I see (white walls) - therefore I am able to envision a long line
of my own footprints in freshly fallen snow leading up to, and
terminating at, my own fallen body; face down or on its side,
uncertainly dead or uncertainly alive.
Under the bright moon I walked round and round the lake – All
night long. Build a fire, my friend. So it will crackle. I will show
you something good, A big ball of snow.3
It should be mentioned in concluding that this work was brought
into the world in order: For words to not have to do all the talkin’.
For your left or right cheek to experience a real winter. For the
experience of closed eyes to be commensurable to the experience
of open eyes. For the body to be able to lie in the gallery for a
change, because unlike money, often do we have to stand, but
rarely do we get to lie.
The surrealist moment in ethnography is that moment in
which the possibility of comparison exists in unmediated
tension with sheer incongruity5…………. Dear Anne-Claire,
Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody
knows about, interests me a great deal... Personism has nothing to do
with philosophy, it’s all art. It does not have to do with personality or
intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal
aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself),
thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving
vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while
preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.
That’s part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with
LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with
someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and
wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing
that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the
poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement
which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem
squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the
poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two
persons instead of two pages.6
1. The secret of all art, also of poetry, is, thus, distance. Thanks to distance the past preserved in our memory is purified and embellished. When what we remember
was occurring, reality was considerably less enticing, for we were tossed, as usual, by anxieties, desires, and apprehensions that colored everything, people, institutions,
landscapes. Remembering, we move to that land of past time, yet now without our former passions: we are not afraid of anything, we become an eye which perceives
and finds details that had escaped our attention. - Czeslaw Miłosz
2. Let us not forget that in the long run it is enough to create new names and valuations and appearances of truth in order to create new ‘things’. - Fried N.
3. Matsuo Bashō
4. William Carlos Williams
5. James Clifford
6. Frank O’Hara - September 3, 1959
18.01.2012
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19
Her Work
It acknowledges the presence of an audience,
winks, then slides beneath the horizon. It is a
form, not an emotion. And because it is not
really a face, but rather the creation of an actor, it
can disappear even while remaining onscreen.
Lucy Ives
There is a face Sharon Stone had. Or: it was a
face she did, made. The face lasts for just two
films in the early nineties, both written by
Hollywood operator Joe Eszterhas: Basic Instinct
(1992), Sliver (1993). Stone is remarkable in
these two films, which are somehow the same
film, occurring in a single symbolic system if
not the same world. Sharon Stone does not play
the same woman in both films, but both films
concern themselves with reading and writing:
Stone portrays a novelist and then an editor.
These roles follow on the heels of a radically
different Stone in Total Recall (1989). Stone had
a less active face, there. It was tanned and flatter,
slightly fleshier, fuller yet stiffer. In Total Recall
she is clayey, athletic; wears a pants suit and
is summarily executed (gunshot to the head).
“Consider that a divorce.” (Or, as the line is
actually spoken by Schwarzenegger, “Consida dat
a divoarce.”)
I’ve worked out the symmetry of this agile
face. Eyes: horizontal diamonds. Nose: vertical
diamond. Mouth: two coinciding diamonds.
Symmetry upon symmetry. An eerily proportionate face that could be quickly cut from
folded paper.
A biopic explains the transformation of Sharon
Stone on these terms: a great acting teacher.
But for me there is something about the parallelism of these two early nineties thrillers that
produces not so much “acting” as very carefully
choreographed and highly significant posing on a
small scale. (Indeed, the characters are more like
allegories for the effects of writing and reading
than actual women.) Stone, a former model, is
plastic; her pale face often motionless, frozen,
stony, even. Then: an instantaneous reconfiguration. She poses as writer, as reader. She is
a model novelist and model editor, her facial
gestures at once abstract and fascinating, meaningful though devoid of sentiment or sympathy,
more textual than human. As when the police
first appear at the home of Catherine Tramell in
Basic Instinct: Catherine is seated on her balcony
overlooking the northern Californian coast. It is
late afternoon, the sun oblong, ready to sink. The
police insult Catherine, “Are you a pro?” “No,
I’m an amateur.” The face opens perfunctorily.
It is said that symmetry has a power that is not
always just, not always “even.” Symmetry can be
dislocating, can have multiplicative effects. As
Henri Focillon writes in Vie des formes (1943),
“[Form] is the strict definition of space, but
also the suggestion of other forms. It maintains
itself, propagating in the imaginary, or rather we
tend to think of it as a sort of fissure, through
which we make our way into an uncertain realm,
neither fully comprehended nor thought, a flurry
of images waiting to be born.” Symmetry could
function as a kind of warning to the rationalist;
we perceive it as comprehensible and recognizable, just before we see, as in a hall of mirrors, an
infinite series of images, multiplying along the
axis of symmetry. Georges Didi-Huberman: “…
all symmetry awaits the event that will dislodge
it in a single blow.”
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The orderly face of Catherine Tramell is, then, a
recognizable sign of the doubling that attends it.
The face, I repeat, is orderly. (She is crossing and
uncrossing her legs.)
(just because one has killed, does not mean
that one must kill), she continues to take solace
and significance from friendship and physical
intimacy with others who have killed impulsively, “without knowing why.” These are usually
women and they figure in her books, informing
her heroines. This is, until Catherine meets
“Nicky,” or “Shooter,” the Michael Douglas
character, a male killer and her (apparent)
Dionysian equal.
1. rectangular brows
2. expressive teeth
3. held gaze
4. gentle lift
5. dead laugh
6. frank and placid
7. bone structure revealed by age
8. waiting (artificial)
9. “I’m a writer. I use people for what I write.”
10. looking not listening
11. focus all the way to the end of the sentence
12. chin her largest feature
13. eyes like checkmarks
14. choice, before expression
15. lines extend from her eyes
16. eyes like saucers
17. eyes that “tip”
18. brows softly penciled in
Basic Instinct’s Catherine is reflected and very
nearly repeated in the film’s cinematic doppelgänger, or unacknowledged sequel, Sliver. Once
again, Stone stars, here as an editor, Carly Norris,
not a writer. 35 year-old Carly is in search
of a “real relationship,” in which “something
happens.” Details are vague. Carly is stalked by
two men, one of whom is a writer and serial
murderer (of women), an anti-Tramell himself,
the other a gym-body multimillionaire with a
deep-seated need to monitor the private lives of
others and the technological means to do so, to
Catherine Tramell is a writer. In my reading of
the story of her life, she, as a child, plotted and
carried out the murder of her parents (childishly
and out of curiosity, to “see if it could be done”),
inherited millions, then became the author of a
book about this crime. Perhaps the killing was,
in some sense, a first taste of her identity as an
artist. Though Catherine has learned her lesson
cinematically fascinating ends. Many of Basic
Instinct’s themes recur: confusion of narrative
plots with murderous traps; the question of what
kinds of knowledge can be reliably gained from
observation, what physical intimacy means when
not undertaken for the purpose of procreation.
(And how we can control our relation to physicality, to the human organism—if our eyes will
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give us the means to do this, if images will give
us this edge, if reading and writing will be of any
help at all.)
very certainly an act, something that we actively
choose to do. This can also be said of the act
of describing that which we have perceived in
words or gestures.
Within this mirror world, a kind of Basic
Instinct1, Stone’s face is a series of perfectly
symmetrical ovals, wet-nosed and vulnerable and
somehow always more active than the variously
obsessed, implausible, and sometimes violent
bodies surrounding it:
What Sharon Stone portrays in these two films is
great, or more than entertaining, not because it is
the depiction of a character or “real” human, but
because it is a portrayal, a discussion on plastic
terms, of the interaction of human agency and
perception in or as a face. It is a discussion of, a
discourse upon the act of perception, and this
discussion or discourse is undertaken by means
of facial expression alone.
1. patience with strangers
2. rabbit-like
3. furrowed brow
4. freckles
5. fear
6. careful pleasure
7. makeup-free
8. sympathetic
9. caution
10. something perpetually deceives
11. concentration in eyebrows
12. face as decision
13. face as sentence
14. face as syntax
17. barely moving smile
18. sleep-walking
19. smile pushes high into cheeks
20. furrowed brows
21. “trouble” of arousal
22. careful makeup
23. yellow hair
24. joy and mistrust
Both films concern the act of seeing and of
being seen, which is to say: perceiving that one is
perceived, seeing that one is seen, and manipulating that perception. Sharon Stone’s genius was
to have described this dialogic relationship using
a single face—rather than two faces. She is—
singly—a portrait of exchanges that would seem
possible only between two people (or, between
one person and a camera). Her face seems always
engaged in the act of deliberating the question of
what should be done with perception, what the
value of perception is and to whom—in its truth
or untruth—it belongs:
Human agency enters the phenomenal world in
which it is rebuffed. We see it retreat and gather
its forces. We see it learn. The face watches for
the coming future in the present. The face has
not yet happened, yet the face registers, reveals a
response already. The face is soft. The face is quite
literally soft, very soft. It gathers up something
like force, the ability to be at once affected and
affecting—and to display at the same time a
third position: an awareness of this dynamic.
The face is soft in that it displays the possibility
of these multiple positions. It poses here, very
briefly statuary. Now it is in motion again. It
swims forward into, between, and among. It
readies itself to be recognized.
Images to follow, but later (be patient).
What I have most wanted to say, in my lists
above, for example, about Sharon Stone’s face
is that—in its reactiveness, its excitability, its
vows of weakness, its impenetrability—it reveals
an idea about the relationship between agency
and perception. Something that has never been
entirely clear to me is whether or not seeing is
actually an act. We open our eyes and most, or
very many, of us just see. We often do not choose
whether or not we see, and yet perception,
whether or not we perceive something or other, is
I don’t know if this is acting. I don’t know how
much this has to do with Eszterhas’s scripts.
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Sharon Stone’s face may itself be a kind of a
manual or didactic text on the twin subjects
of suffering and knowledge. “Soft core” was of
course a genre expressly designed for women
with disposable income at a certain recent historical moment, yet Stone does not depict merely
or exclusively a fantasy of feminine control or
passivity or desirability. She makes of herself a
demonstration of a place beyond being moved or
moving, not a detachment but rather the most
intelligent kind of engagement. This has little to
do with either screenplay or plot.
in fact a highly polished, carefully edited and
complete work. Eszterhas had done all he could
to control the story of Basic Instinct but presented the script as something shared previous to
completion, a hasty guess. (This reminds me of
the time I successfully subletted an apartment on
very short notice by cleaning it assiduously and
then apologizing repeatedly to the acquaintance
who came to see it—for the first time, I should
add—for how messy it was.) There is a period of
time in looking or reading during which the one
encountering a text can’t be prepared for what
he or she sees. It is this early time that the writer
can control, even if she cannot fully control the
words. This is a writer’s advantage.
This is work, I tell myself, as I am watching.
I don’t know if it’s a good thing—or even an
appropriate equation. I can’t see the face of
Sharon Stone (her “actual” face); I can only
see the face she enacts. Her acting is powerful
because it becomes an allegory for another
activity, at least in my mind. In the weird mirror
of these two Eszterhas scripts Sharon Stone
becomes a figure. She is a geometry, a series
of lines, pattern. She is a figure for writing, a
surface that is writing’s reflection and/or twin.
I think, too, that this is what Sharon Stone
means, what her face means in these films. It
is in this space that Sharon Stone is an actor
working. Her face works here. She plays upon
anticipation, which is to say, the difference
between the known and the unknown. The
police are slower than she is. The readers and the
watchers and the psychiatrists and the predators
and all the other performers are too slow. If we
are watching Sharon Stone, we feel—often to
our joy—that no one else on screen is doing
anything.
Every writer has her own definition of writing.
Easy to say this, but in fact it takes years to
encounter the flexible echo that is a written
word. I thought for a long time that I could
control writing, that I could control and thereby
make my own writing perfect. But in fact one
comes to continually encounter writing; one
encounters, not complete meaning, an object
one could deploy, but rather a space in which
meaning could occur, the weird zone of the
subjunctive, a gap. Meaning will occur but the
writer cannot perfectly control this meaning,
only the conditions in or under which this
meaning may happen. The time before writing
and the time of writing are essentially the same.
(One approaches.) The only difference is, after
one has written.
In Basic Instinct everything has already been
written; this is the source of our interest in the
plot. If novelist Catherine Tramell lives up to her
reputation, she has not only authored the murder
of her parents, she has authored the conditions
which led to the series of murders perpetrated,
the screenplay would have us believe, by Jean
Tripplehorn, her double/rival/former lover. In
this sense the world in which cop Nicky/Michael
Douglas operates has long been a road that
leads to Catherine. His whole life in the field of
enforcement has been readying him to encounter
her. Has she even authored, in some sense, the
unforced murder of tourists Nicky committed
years ago? It recurs in her newest book, in
which Nicky/“Shooter” also “falls for the wrong
woman.” “What happens?” “She kills him.” But
it will only be further proof of the power of
I read somewhere that when Joe Eszterhas was
ready to sell Basic Instinct he shopped around a
script that was messy and heavily marked, what
looked like a work in progress—though it was
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fiction if in “real life” (i.e., the “real life” of the
film) Catherine Tramell does not murder Nick.
For one of the most satisfying aspects of Basic
Instinct is Catherine’s strange vulnerability. Her
friends die so frequently—as she herself observes,
grieving the loss of her possessive girlfriend Roxy,
“Everyone I care about dies!”—that she is both
often in mourning and often under threat of
legal penalty. And while she toys with the police,
famously inviting them (and us) to examine
her blond pudenda, she cannot so easily escape
the presence of death. Figuring in both her life
and her novels with a nearly campy frequency,
death is either the central term in Catherine’s
philosophical system or it is the character to end
all characters. As the rising body count attests,
death takes lives but will not take reliable human
form. Though both Catherine and the larger film
claim to want to portray humanity’s baser and/
or “basic” instinct, i.e., to kill—and be killed—
what is more concertedly at stake is the problem
of giving death some sort of perceptible form,
since it stalwartly refuses to retain such a form or
otherwise explain itself. Presumably Catherine’s
novels are designed to address this difficulty,
though most of what we know of them consists
of hearsay among cops and other experts in the
workings of the criminal mind or brief shots
of lurid cover art. We often have the feeling,
as we are watching Basic Instinct, that we are
being asked to like, even to root for, something
dangerous and possibly destructive, something
that we really should not like or want to win out
in the end. However, we never learn whether this
thing is evil or desire or death itself, or simply a
lie told by a woman.
incompleteness of her project of depiction, of her
career as an artist. Does Catherine lie? It seems
very likely that Catherine would not hesitate to
lie, but throughout the film we’re made to feel
that she never does lie, that she does not need to
lie, and so perhaps it is better to ask if Catherine
tells the truth. Does Catherine tell the truth?
Catherine writes. (Catherine may have written
this screenplay herself, for all we know, we find
ourselves thinking.)
Sliver, meanwhile, is a characterless film. Where
Basic Instinct is noir, Sliver is a movie about New
York real estate and how one makes money in
the absence of a film industry. The sex scenes
are extended CK underwear or cologne advertisements, interweaving carefully choreographed
shadow play with near-stills of gripped hands
and facial ecstasy.
Carly Norris is not a writer. Carly Norris is a
powerful editor. She has her own office and
toadyish wing-woman. Carly reads. And she is
a more intelligent reader than most. And this,
Sliver wants us to understand, is why she does
not die, even if she does suffer. Carly is an editor
of tell-alls. She understands prurience and crime.
Because the film is so focused on emotional suffering (mostly verbal threats rather than physical
ones), its sex scenes require much of Sharon
Stone’s face. There is a divorce somewhere in the
background, a minor source of anguish. Carly
was married but it was a waste of her time. (Her
nose wrinkles in disappointment.) For purposes
of plot, Carly meets her temporary match in
a sinister Adonis obsessed with surveillance.
Portrayed by plush-chested Billy Baldwin, this
voyeur, like Carly, is a connoisseur of prurience
and crime. At Sliver’s denouement, Carly
clumsily gains control of her lover’s elaborate
video surveillance apparatus—which is also
subject to constant editorial revision by means
of a remote control. She destroys it and tells him
(he is beside himself ) to “get a life,” advice she
would presumably also give herself. For there is
a price to be paid for possession of the kind of
And then there is Stone’s face. The responses and
emotions it conveys throughout Basic Instinct
have a curious form, since, as we all know,
Catherine Tramell is a giant walking clue. Is
Catherine lying? We know that all Catherine’s
life is devoted to the literary depiction of
something that cannot be given definitive form,
i.e., the agony of death. What does Catherine
show when she responds, when she protests,
reacts? She shows, naturally, the fundamental
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knowledge that allows one to evade death in this
screenplay. The editor reads insatiably, passionately, nearly miserably, and to the exclusion of
much else. Someone capable of happiness in
the world of Sliver would, perhaps, simply have
succumbed.
blithely scrapes away the concealing palimpsest
of Sliver’s mediocre plot at the points of its
most gruesome and/or salacious activity, yet she
ignores broad swathes of her daily existence. The
film seems to want us to believe that internally
Carly is either a kind of permanent wound or,
what is more likely, simply empty, null, beige,
and therefore voracious for content.
On the matter of survival, there is a joke early
on. A starchy Manhattan real estate agent shows
Carly the bedroom of what will become her
condo. “It’s a nice room for—,” the real estate
agent pauses, afraid the next word that will be
heard will be “fucking,” no matter what she in
fact says. The agent concludes, “Reading.” “Yes,”
Carly smiles politely. Her response is basically
warm, “It is a nice room for reading.” The agent
has named the very activity in which Carly takes
the greatest and most risky kind of pleasure.
In reading, Carly recognizes and identifies the
objects of her fear. She is a highly literate thrill
seeker, someone who enjoys terrifying herself
with glimpses of psychological horror. And as a
professional reader, Carly has come to be able
to control what she sees not just in written texts
but also in the phenomenal world. She is able to
redact, to block things out, and also to aim her
(literally) probing gaze with enviable precision.
She moves around Manhattan, in and out of the
“I don’t want to get hurt,” Carly Norris maintains. “You’ll see,” she says, meaning, I don’t want
you to see [me]. “You’ll see,” contains the kernel
of an impossible wish, an idea expanded in all of
Sharon Stone’s elastic, ingenious facial gestures
and erotic grimaces throughout the film: Know
more than I tell you, know my soul without
seeing it, know my thought without hearing
it; see nothing, read nothing, learn nothing,
know nothing—yet know me. I am your reader.
I am present and available. I am attentive,
delving, and continuously interested. I look very
interested, very stirred by my own interest, yet
beyond this interest, this work I do, I lack any
permanent—and, therefore, reliable—perceptible quality. What you see in my face is merely
my profession. My face is a work, a text; not
a feeling. My face is work, which is something
distinct from a lie.
world of her job and the world of her new
condo, in this fashion, uncovering hidden ills,
cruelties, missteps. She likes to watch. She
renders herself safe by means of myopia. She
Basic Instinct and Sliver are, despite their long,
slow nods toward pulp and genre, fairly literary
films. In writing this, I don’t mean that these
are films about literature’s “great themes,” that
25
these films treat humanism’s eternal cherished
questions. They aren’t even very effective at
describing human psychology. Rather, these are
films about literature’s two most basic activities
or components, looking and guessing—which
is another way of saying that they are films
about reading and writing. These two films
enact a kind of minimalist phenomenology of
the literary surface: They describe the looks and
guesses, the uncertainties and misapprehensions,
the strangely plastic substance that is meaning—
where- and whenever meaning is associated with
a literary work.
Medium Light Soluble
Seven Items
Medium Light Soluble was filmed in one take on
an iPad while Slumber Party played on the stereo
in my former apartment. Claire Donato held the
camera while I opened and inspected the letter
from OPR. Several weeks later, I recorded audio
of an improvisatory gleaning of language from
the letter. I added the secondary audio track
via iMovie, keeping original audio as ambience
(stereo sound, rustling paper, breathing). I had in
mind a scene from Richard Linklater’s Slacker, in
which a few twenty-somethings wander through
an abandoned apartment reading a fractured
narrative from postcards presumably left by a
former inhabitant. My interest in overlapping
time/space in audio-visual format, along with a
desire to amplify each muted element, is perhaps
apparent.
Seven Items is a visual reflection of a found shopping
list. Written in a flow of cursive, and printing, on
a small scrap of paper, the list presents itself as
arbitrary and effortless: was there and end result in
mind when it was composed? It is the skeleton of
dinner on trial before dinner. Seven Items responds
to this piece of ephemera with a visual shopping
list— a list of images randomly grouped together,
and selected for aesthetic desire, to expose, and
parade the autonomous ingredients without ever
seeing them collectively contribute to an end result.
The process then becomes the celebrated focus, as
does the mystery of the correspondence between
the items selected.
Jeff T. Johnson
It is hard to say whether it is a stroke of luck
that Sharon Stone was cast as she was. “Who
or what will recognize these faces, this amazing
face in motion?” someone—perhaps Eszterhas
himself—always seems to be asking, whenever
Sharon Stone appears. One feels as if Eszterhas
could be standing by, just outside the shot,
proclaiming, “This dialogue is for shit. But did
you see Sharon’s face?!” Indeed, it is doubtful
that anyone else could have created the face that
Stone creates in these two films, yet there was
little enough in her previous CV to suggest that
she was capable of this. I don’t even know if I
want to call this work—if I really think of this
face as “accomplishing something.” Maybe it is
more accurate to say that this created face is an
undoing, an opening to the italicized possibility
of doing or completing, a sort of subjunctive
fissure, through which we make our way into
an uncertain realm, neither fully comprehended
nor thought. Images are very good at teaching
us about such gaps, even as they do the allegedly
simple task of describing the physical world,
after a more or less objective fashion. Images, like
lies, are very good at pointing us in the direction
of voids. And images in motion (film, video,
digitally animated stills, etc.) can be a source of
pleasure precisely because they lack the spatial
and temporal continuity of the physical world.
They may also in some vague way remind us of
the pleasurable incommensurateness of written
language, in its own relation to physicality.
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Justin Gradin
27
Insetto Stecco
Sylvia Hardy
Dear Insetto Stecco,
I went out looking for you but could not find
you.
Not but against the stucco of the Italian
YouTube.
When looking for you in California,
amongst the pressure treated wood of the desert
trails,
I had high hopes.
Even if you were there sunken into the Creosote
bush,
Perhaps my eyes have misplaced their still sight.
Keep swaying
~slh
Sylvia Hardy
Insetto Stecco
2015
HD Video
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Ida Western Exile
Courtney Stephens
Ida Western Exile explores risk, Western landscapes, and the performance of solitude. The film was shot at
Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch in Northern New Mexico, the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe,
and in Hong Kong commuter trains.
The film is named for Georgia’s virtually unknown sister Ida; a talented painter who remained uncelebrated
— also unmarried — throughout her life, and whom Georgia once called “a waste.” Our modern Ida
negotiates risk with the help of a global support team, while freight trains loaded with Chinese goods
race across a New Mexico landscape that once represented creative exile. In phone calls with places like
Expedia, Kraft, and a Doomsday Preppers Emporium, she compulsively gathers information for a future
move (or an internet-fueled fantasy) and stumbles into oblique personal connections.
30
31
32
33
Ida Western Exile
Ida: Thank you.
Georgia O’Keeffe: I thought someone could tell
me how to paint a landscape, but I never found
that person, I had to just settle down and try.
You look at it and it’s almost painted for you you
think, until you try. As soon as I saw it that was
my country. It’s something that’s in the air - it’s
just different. The sky is different the stars are
different the wind is different. I shouldn’t say too
much about this because other people might get
interested and I don’t want them interested.
ringing
ringing
Prepper’s Vault: - some kind of weapons to
obviously defend yourself against anything that’s
possible you know. I’d probably recommend at
least having something like a machete cause you
can use that for many things. Kind of a little bit
of training that would teach you how to defend
yourself with knives, sciss - hands. You want to
have at least three months worth of food. I’d
usually say six months cause that would get you
through a winter time.
Starkist: Good morning and thank you for
calling Starkist, my name is Rene –this is Rene
speaking, how may I help you?
Ida: If you could tell me anything about, in
terms of, how many cans of tuna eating a day
would I need to be concerned about the Mercury
levels and also…I’ve read about BAP or BPA-
Amtrak: Say train status. Say schedule. Say
reservations.
Quaker Oats: One moment.
hold music
Amtrak: You can also say, it’s something else.
Para continuar en Espanol…
ringing
Ida: Something else.
Ida: Hi yes, I have a question for you. I notice
that your zombie killer machete is no longer
available on your site, and I was wondering if
you had a, um, a similar product you would
recommend. This would be for self-defense.
Amtrak: Please hold.
Preppers Vault: Ok.
Ida: Um, I’m planning a move and-
Knife Center: O-k, zombie killer hold on.
Preppers Vault: Uh-huh-
hold music
Ida: I’m alone – and I’m wondering what you’d
recommend to a woman on her own in a rather
isolated part of the country. Sort of a safety and
risk question.
Kraft: Sign up for free today and start getting
delicious ideas delivered.
hold music
ringing
Starkist: Thank you very much for holding and,
you know, we’re glad that you do like the tuna.
So, the trace levels of methylmercury found is
canned tuna are far below one point zero parts
per million.
(heavy breathing)
Ida: -about travel within the conti – continental
US.
Expedia: Yeah, let me go ahead and help you
with that one.
34
Ida: One point…ok…that sounds very low.
35
Prepper’s Vault: You want to be able to have a
very good first aid kit because you’re gonna have
to obviously take care of yourself and if you’re
gonna be alone then you have no one to take you
anywhere. So you’re gonna at least have to take
care of yourself for at least eight to ten hours if
not, you know, days.
choose to become a member and I don’t have
next of kin or family or even close friends, um,
who can report my, my passing.
Amazon: Five, zero, one, nine three five zero one.
Ida: Wow. Well, I, I went when I was a little
girl I went to Disneyland just one time. But
I remember it like a fairytale. It was really…
amazing. Um.
Ida: -yeah
Ida: Right. Are you familiar with that area?
Amazon: Whoa.
Alcor: -and then they will call us since you have
Amazon: Um, not much ma’am. Actually no
ma’am. I, I’m from the Philippines.
Ida: I hope it-
Alcor: Um, medical personnel are trained to look
for that-
Ida: Ugh, I’m feeling overwhelmed, it’s scary.
Prepper’s Vault: Right, you know, what you’re
really looking at is you have a place - shelter to
live in and that’s great.
Ida: (whispering) I see.
Alcor: -your ID bracelet on.
Ida: Ok, my other question was, um, you know
when you have to fast colonoscopy and the
doctor recommends Jello but not the red Jello?
Ida: I see.
Alcor: You tell us at what point you just want us
to say “no, there’s - nothing’s gonna happen. No
brain matter left, do not proceed.” For people
who really, really, really believe pick- uh- no
matter what’s been done to me you find whatever
organs you can find and freeze it. Um. They
believe a lot in technolog- what do you call it uh
– oh, cloning technology for in the future.
ringing
Pfizer: -but that statement has not been
evaluated by the FDA.
Kraft: Yeah.
Ida: Right, I understand you’re not - you can’t
give medical advice. Ok. Ok! I know you can’t
say for sure but you recommend.
Quaker Oats: Exactly.
Ida: For flavor-wise. Ok, I understand.
Ida: The machete the, the, the one that was
discontinued has a nine inch blade. What is the
bladeKnife Center: Right yeah I don’t have anything
that big.
Ida: And, so we don’t know, of course what, we’re
gonna, what, what, world we’re going to wake up
into. Um. But I guess, I think, for myself it’s my
hope that it’s gonna be better than this one.
Ida: I think that my biggest fear is about having
nobody to, to, to-
Amazon: Oh that’s one of my wish ma’am.
Knife Center: Gotcha, I understand.
Kraft: Right now actually it’s about, what is it
during the day – about eighty?
Ida: Oh wow, yeah.
36
Amazon: I really do, ma’am I really do hope.
And, uh, there’s nothing impossible when you
dream of something and achieve something,
right?
Ida: That’s exactly, right, yeah, I think that’s true.
Ida: -is?
Ida: Hm. Have you been to the United States?
hold music
Ida: I hope it comes true for you.
Expedia: You should have a little vacation here-
music
Ida: Yeah, no next of kin. Because at this point
I’m alone.
Amazon: -uh-
Ida: Oh you’re from the Philippines, ok.
Phillipines seems like a long, long way away
for, for me. I mean, I’m afraid to fly. Sometimes
though, I think about, you know, I just want to
disappear. I just want to go somewhere where
nobody knows me, um.
Ida: Right.
Ida: Nothing like that. I picture myself standing
there in an open space, you know, and needing
to defend myself and I want to have something
that’s large enough. Um, so-
Ida: What happens if, um, I don’t have – if I
Ida: Oh so it gets cool in the evening.
Amazon: There’s a lot of, uh, there’s, uh, a lot of,
uh, good places here. In the Phillipines. There’s a
lot of, uh, good places here in the Philipines. You
should come to this, uh, this country ma’am.
Alcor: To-
ringing
laughter
Kraft: During the night it’ll go down to about
fifty, sixty.
Amazon: yes.
Ida: Yeah.
Amazon: So, uh.
Ida: So maybe I should go to the Phillipines,
nobody would know me there.
Expedia: Yeah, you know. People experiencing,
experiencing some different problems, they need
to be alone.
Ida: Really?
Amazon: -because, uh, yes.
Ida: Exactly.
shared laughter
Expedia: Something like that.
Amazon: (inaudible) uh, one of my dream is
going to the Disneyland.
Ida: Exaclty. I want to start over.
Ida: Oh, Disneyland.
Expedia: You know, I’m traveling when I’m sad.
Amazon: That’s my childhood dream.
Ida: Yeah? (pause) Thank you.
Ida: Yes!
Expedia: You’re welcome. Thank you for calling
Expedia bye for now.
Amazon: -until now.
hold music
37
Bios
or a bird with a long tongue? She is interested in
the capacity of an image to hover on the edge of
recognition, asking us see not only what we can
but what we want. Website: www.annaccmoser.
com/.
Ada Smailbegović is an Assistant Professor
of English at Brown University. Her writing
explores relations between poetics, non-human
forms of materiality, and histories of description.
She is a co-founder of The Organism for Poetic
Research. Critical and poetic work includes
Avowal of What Is Here (JackPine Press 2009),
Of the Dense and Rare (Triple Canopy 2013),
“Cloud Writing” (Art in the Anthropocene
2015) and a forthcoming article on animal
architecture and the affective ethology of Monk
Parakeets (Angelaki 2015).
Arvo Leo lives in Hamburg, Germany.
Courtney Stephens is a filmmaker and writer
based in Los Angeles. Her films and videos have
screened internationally and she has lectured at
the Royal Geographical Society and elsewhere on
film and female travel. Her writing has appeared
in New Inquiry, Cabinet, Two Serious Ladies,
and Modern Painters, and she programs a weekly
screening series in LA called “Veggie Cloud.”
Alison Davis is an animator based in Winnipeg,
Canada. While she always produces work frameby-frame, her animated shorts range far and wide
in both subject and technique. From personal
experience to fantastical worlds, narrative to
experimental, digitally refined to entirely hand
drawn, her works explore the vast imaginative
and visual possibilities of animation as a
medium. Davis holds a BFA in Film Animation
from Concordia University in Montreal, and has
had the good fortune of screening her films and
videos at festivals and events across Canada and
around the world.
Derek Woods is a writer who lives in Houston,
TX and in British Columbia. He is working on
a doctorate about literature and the history of
ecology.
Jeff T. Johnson is a digital artist and critic whose
ARCHIVERSE project—an open-field concrete
poem composed in AutoCAD—is documented
at The Organism for Poetic Research web
portal. Poetry has recently appeared in PEN
America, coconut, BORT, and Forklift, Ohio.
Critical writing is forthcoming or has appeared
in Jacket2, On Contemporary Practice, Sink
Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is the
former Editor-in-Chief of LIT and is at work on
Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics. He is
currently a Visiting Instructor at Pratt Institute.
For more information, visit jefftjohnson.com.
After receiving her BFA from Carnegie Mellon
University, Amie Robinson studied art in Berlin,
and then earned an MFA from the University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has exhibited
drawings and animations at museums and
galleries in Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Miami
and New York. She lives and in Brooklyn, and
teaches art to students on the autism spectrum.
John Melillo is a writer, performer, and wavecollector, usually under the name Algae &
Tentacles. He lives in Tucson, AZ. He meditates
on waves at teahupooworks.tumblr.com.
Anna Moser writes and makes art in New York
City, where she is a doctoral candidate in English
at NYU. Her recent visual work examines
questions of resemblance and objecthood
through formal gestures that often reference
linguistic problems: redaction, annotation,
semantic fragmentation, and nonsense. Is this
greenness a garden or a lawn chair? Is it a cave
Josiah Cuneo is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker
and composer. In 2014 Roulette hosted the
premier of Cuneo’s multimedia performance
Scenes, four short films accompanied by a
performance of original chamber music by
string trio Dissemble. Cuneo’s films focus on the
38
interplay of music and dance to explore themes
of daily ritual, daydreams and the fluidity of
memory. Josiah Cuneo’s work has been featured
at Roulette, New York; Exit Art, New York;
Gallery Satori, New York; Issue Project Room,
New York; Phantom Brain Exchange, Montague,
MA; and Hampden Gallery, Amherst, MA.
Rachael M. Wilson is a writer based in New
York. She is a co-founder of the Organism
for Poetic Research and a Ph.D. candidate in
English at New York University, where she
studies postwar poetry and collaborative artists’
books. Her work has been published in the
Brooklyn Rail, Free Spirit News and in the
Reanimation Library’s Word Processor series.
She also co-authors an occasional arts anti-blog,
Most Perfect World.
Julian Hou is an artist based in Vancouver.
He holds a BFA from Simon Fraser University
and an M.Arch from the University of British
Columbia. He recently curated the exhibition
Corruption of Time’s Dust (2014) at 221a, and
held a solo exhibition Window Bended Harmony
(2014) at CSA Project space. Other group
exhibitions include Occasional Furniture at the
Apartment Gallery (2015), Vancouver and
upcoming exhibition Through a Window at SFU
Galleries. He has recently published reviews in
Capilano Review and the Art Book Review.
Sylvia Hardy is a Missouri artist based in New
York City. In the past few years she has exhibited
at Sydhavn Station, Copenhagen, Denmark;
Spazio Morris, Milan, Italy; and collaborated
with Ada Smailbegović in Of the Dense and Rare
published by Triple Canopy.
Tamara Henderson, (born in 1982 Sackville,
NB Canada), is based in Vancouver, Canada.
She has an MFA and has studied at the Nova
Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax
Nova Scotia, Stadelschule in Frankfurt, and
Royal Art Institute in Stockholm. Her recent
solo exhibitions include: ‘Charmers Scripture’
Rodeo London, ‘Speaking in Scales’ at Andrew
Kreps Gallery, New York, USA, ‘Resorting’ as
part of ‘Live’ at Frieze, ‘Sans Tete Au Monde’ at
Kunsthall. Upcoming shows include Consider
the Belvedere at ICA in Philadelphia. Henderson
is represented by Rodeo, London and Istanbul.
Justin Gradin is a multimedia artist, writer,
and musician. As an artist and musician he has
shown and performed across North America,
the Netherlands and Japan. For two years Justin
was also the music editor for the print magazine
Color, a magazine that featured art, music, subculture, and skateboarding. In addition to Color,
Gradin has had seven art books and dozens of
‘zines self-published. Justin has also been active
in the community, starting and operating several
artist and performance spaces from L.A.’s Mime
School to Vancouver BC’s Emergency Room.
Currently he releases records and publications
on his Grotesque Modern label, two of which
are sound art records in collaboration with artist
Justin Patterson (of the Arbour Lake Sghool). At
present, Justin works and lives in East Vancouver,
and is the art director for the band White Lung.
Tiziana La Melia is an artist and writer who
lives and works in Vancouver. She is currently
editing a collection of poetry with Publication
Studio Vancouver, and a chapbook with
Perro Verlag Press. She recently mounted
the exhibition Innocence at Home at CSA
(Vancouver). Forthcoming group exhibitions
include Stopping the Sun in its Course at
Francois Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles) and
Through a Window, at SFU/Audain Gallery
(Vancouver).
Lucy Ives is the author of four books of poetry
and prose, including the novel nineties, which
will return to print as a mass-market paperback
in June 2015. She is the editor of Triple Canopy
and teaches writing at Pratt.
Yves Sheriff’s practice is mostly related to the
question of process making, in various forms
of visual projects that integrate sound, archives,
39
Acknowledgments
video and mouvement. Through the past 15
years, his work includes collaborations with
artists and collectives such as Champ Libre, In
Situ, Mårten Spånberg and Steve Piccolo. Yves
has founded in 2011 The 3rd Floor Projects,
an on-going choreographic laboratory based
on questioning the creation process through
a critical reading around representational art
forms. He is based in Montreal where he works
also as a clown specialist for a major circus
company.
Special thanks to Katya Yakubov and Daniel
Hess, our collaborators at The Picture Show.
Thanks to Lanny Jordan Jackson, David Hobbs,
Tim Anderson, Anna Moser, MC Hyland, Kim
Adams, Kristen Tapson Widenhoefer, Shiv
Kotecha, Lytle Shaw, Rebecca Davis, Kendra
Sullivan, Kimiko Hahn, Sampson Starkweather,
Heather Davis, Rachel Levitsky, Krystal
Languell, Andrew Beccone, Alisha Wessler,
Aleksandar BoŠković, James Woodward, Ian
Sampson, Andrianna Campbell, Nathaniel
Otting, Steven Zultanski, Alan Felsenthal,
Garth Swanson, Caitlin Hurst, Matt Moss,
Ben Phillips, Jordan Behr, Lola Milholland,
Kaisa Holt, Ami Taylor, Arlene Raab, Wendy’s
Subway, the NYU English Department, to all
who responded to the letter and who otherwise
helped bring LSM to fruition.
Zak Margolis is a filmmaker and animator from
Portland, Oregon. He’s been especially excited
by his different collaborations over the last year.
Early last year he worked on the animation for
a live one woman musical called “A Kaddish for
Bernie Madoff” by Alicia Jo Rabins. Later in
2014, he worked with Christopher Rabilwongse
on a porno/puppet film called “Garden Party.”
(Look it up! It’s guaranteed to delight!) And most
recently, he worked with the Organism for Poetic
Research on a short film called “Origin of the
True Cinema.” He likes hiking and beer.
Colophon
This publication is printed on Cougar paper at
the Rolling Press in Brooklyn, New York.
The text is set in Adobe Garamond Pro and
Avenir.
This is book
of 100.
40
inside back cover
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