Past, Present, Future, Etc. / Excerpt #3

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So much of my life, like so many artists in the early 21st century, circles around projects. When asked what I’m working on, invariably I’m always working on something I am only able to refer to as a ‘project.’ I have always known one of the things I like about projects is that they end. If you are in a band, and you don’t want to be in the band anymore, the band has to break up, but a project simply runs its course. A project is agreeing to work on a certain set of questions for a certain period of time. I have often wondered if a project is the opposite of activism. With activism you need to keep fighting forever, since injustice is never solved, it must be fought against endlessly. A project ends, while activism must keep going. Of course, each project is followed by another project, the next one. In this sense a project is mainly a way of compartmentalizing time. A project will usually take a couple of months, a longer project might take a few years, but activism is measured in generations. For activism to truly shift society, each generation needs to pick up the struggle and then keep pushing. This is clearly impossible without some larger, active sense of cultural memory.

I wish I were a better activist. The problem is I’m too defeatist. Whatever I undertake, I always have the overwhelming feeling it will fail. The one exception to this defeatism is art. In art, paradoxically, I can often trick myself into thinking that failure is a kind of success. A ‘perfect’ work of art feels dead and sterile to me. Also works that strive towards perfection. For me, in art, it is only failure, imperfection, vulnerability that opens things up, makes them human, leaves room for the viewer or reader to enter the machine. I try to remind myself that activism too is about failure, is always incomplete. Sometimes I wonder if the only problem is that I like art, at times it still gives me energy, but I’m not particularly sure if I like the world. So much activism has a better world as its goal, so if you don’t like the world activism might reflect this desire to see it fundamentally change. What else do you have to believe, before you can believe that something is worth saving?



[Previous excepts: #-1, #0, #1, #2.]



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Jacob Wren / One Page Bio

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Jacob Wren is a writer and maker of eccentric performances. His interdisciplinary practice produces striking combinations of performance, visual art, literature, theory and music. His performances, made collaboratively with other artists, engage with the struggle to ‘be oneself’ in a performance situation, with what it means to stand in front of an audience and speak honestly about the things one finds important, at the same time never afraid to show how vulnerable and nervous one might naturally feel in such a situation.

As co-artistic director of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created the performances: En français comme en anglais, it's easy to criticize (1998), Unrehearsed Beauty / Le Génie des autres (2002), La famille se crée en copulant (2005), the HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY series including Individualism Was A Mistake (2008) and The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information (2011) and Every Song I’ve Ever Written (2013). PME-ART was nominated for the 27th Conseil des arts de Montréal Grand Prix in the category of New Artistic Practices.

He has also collaborated with Nadia Ross and her company STO Union. Together they co-wrote and co-directed Recent Experiences (2000) and Revolutions in Therapy (2004).

His books include: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation and Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed. The first two of these have been published in French translation by Le Quartanier.

In a visual art context he has created works such as Five Important Books (in collaboration with Shannon Cochrane) and Hospitality 2: Gradually This Overview (PME-ART), works that focus on how to use the gallery space in an unconventional, always performative, manner.

International collaborations include: a stage adaptation of the 1954 Wolfgang Koeppen novel Der Tod in Rom (Sophiensaele, Berlin, 2007), An Anthology of Optimism (co-created with Pieter De Buysser / Campo, Ghent, 2008), Big Brother Where Art Thou? (a project entirely on Facebook co-created with Lene Berg / OFFTA / PME-ART, 2011) and No Double Life For The Wicked (co-created with Tori Kudo / The Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan, 2012.)

He has performed in Aberystwyth, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Belfast, Bergen, Berlin, Bonn, Brighton, Brussels, Calgary, Cardiff, Cognac, Copenhagen, Créteil, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Eindhoven, Frankfurt, Geneva, Ghent, Glasgow, Groningen, The Hague, Halifax, Hamburg, Helsinki, Hong Kong, Kingston, Kortrijk, Krakow, Linz, Lisbon, London, Los Angeles, Maastricht, Madrid, Malmö, Manchester, Mannheim, Maubeuge, Melbourne, Montréal, Münster, New York, Nottingham, Oslo, Ottawa, Paris, Peterborough, Polverigi, Prague, Québec City, Rakvere, Riga, Rotterdam, Rouen, Saint-Jean Port-Joli, Salamanca, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Tallinn, Taipei, Tielt, Toronto, Tokyo, Trondheim, Vienna, Vilnius, Yokohama, Zagreb and Zurich.

He frequently writes about contemporary art.



Links:
www.pme-art.ca
www.radicalcut.blogspot.com
www.everysongiveeverwritten.com
www.goodreads.com/author/show/1841571.Jacob_Wren
www.lequartanier.com/auteurs/wren.htm



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Email from Kathrin Tiedemann

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I found these two sentences in Ricardo Piglia's "Short Forms" in a chapter with the title "Borges' Last Story" about how reading is the art to construct a personal memory from experiences and memories that are not yours. Scenes from books you read will be recalled as private memories. That way life and literature become something inseparable, an unforgettable experience that will be remembered like a melody. - I love this thought so much. It reminded me of how much I have always been a reader and that if I don't read enough I feel cut off from my memory.

If reading is the art to construct a personal memory I wonder how in comparison "watching a performance" could be defined?



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Tilda Swinton Quote

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Loneliness is the deal. Loneliness is the last great taboo. If we don’t accept loneliness, then capitalism wins hands down. Because capitalism is all about trying to convince people that you can distract yourself, that you can make it better. And it ain’t true.

- Tilda Swinton (from this interview in The Guardian.)
 


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Past, Present, Future, Etc. / Excerpt #2

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Each of my previous books took me approximately four years to write, but I didn’t decide beforehand they would take four years. I started at the beginning and wrote until they were done. In retrospect, the fact that each took about the same length of time seems to have led me to the conclusion that it takes me four years to write a book. Yet this length of time is so arbitrary, rapidly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I put my mind to it I could most likely complete a book in a year (I have always written quickly), but I have already decided it takes four so, unconsciously, I stretch it out. What if I were to stretch it out even more?

It is this question of ‘deciding beforehand’ that pushes my mind into so many flavors of chaos. Pop psychology would nail me with fear of commitment. I am at the beginning, full of uncertainty: is writing this book for ten years even a good idea? will it lead toward breakthrough or mediocrity? will I stick with it? am I only over-indulging my most self-indulgent writerly traits? What does it mean to decide beforehand, what exactly am I deciding?

I believe, for most of the history of literature, a writer had every reason to believe it was possible that people would continue to read their books long after they were dead. Today you would be somewhat delusional to assume this with any confidence. It of course may happen, just as anything might happen, but it’s a bit of a long shot. There are so many writers, so many books, so little built to last. We live in a time when the future itself is a long shot, when human extinction, due to environmental collapse, feels like one of many very real dystopic possibilities. There is little well-reasoned confidence that the future will be better than the present, much evidence it will be worse. Of course, the world will still be here in ten years, but these ten years might also be an analogy for 50, 100, 300, 500 years into the future. What would it mean to write a book that you wanted people to read in 300 years? (I suspect it would be only a hairs-breadth away from writing a book you wanted people to read right now.) Today, a feeling of complicit ‘no future’ increases at a steady clip, yet perhaps this opens the possibility for something else. What comes after the future?

It is arguable whether or not it is possible to disentangle the idea of progress from the realities of industrial capitalism. Progress is the idea that things will continue to grow, to improve, etc. As has often been mentioned, we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. If we remove the idea of progress from our thinking, how does the future change? In some sense it almost disappears. There is no question that everything repeats, in cycles, over years and over centuries, and yet the idea of progress implicitly averts its gaze from this fact. When something repeats, it is never exactly the same: there is an element of how it was before and an element of difference. Progress focuses on the difference, tradition encourages the similarity. But I find myself imagining something else, more like alchemy, that mixes past and future as if turning lead into gold. It is not my plan to spend ten years writing down my random thoughts, keeping my fingers crossed they might be at least slightly profound. It is my plan, at some point over the next ten years, to start making stuff up, elements of fiction, stories that didn’t happen and didn’t happen to me. I still don’t know why this might be necessary. Is fiction only an insecurity around fact? Or around thought?



[You can read the previous excerpt here.]



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Macedonio Fernández Quote

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It’s very subtle and patient work, getting quit of the self, disrupting interiors and identities. In all my writing I’ve only achieved eight or ten minutes in which two or three lines disrupted the stability, the unity of someone, even at times, I believe, disrupting the self-sameness of the reader. Nevertheless, I still believe that Literature does not exist, because it hasn’t dedicated itself solely to the Effect of dis-identification, the only thing that would justify its existence…

- Macedonio Fernández, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel)



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Past, Present, Future, Etc. (a third fragile attempt at an opening for a new book)

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Year One


I read this quote from Chantal Akerman. She is speaking about Jean Luc Godard:

You can see him excluding himself from the world in an almost autistic manner. For people like me, who started doing film because of him, it is a terrible fright. And the fact that the long evolution that Godard has been through can lead to this, almost brings me to despair. He was kind of a pioneer, an inventor who didn’t care much about anybody or anything. And that a man at this stage of his life isolates himself, should also be a lesson for us other filmmakers.

And I wondered if the same thing was happening to me.

Two months from today I turn 42. I have had many small successes along the way. Like Godard, some of my strongest success came right at the beginning, when I was just starting out. Nonetheless, to compare myself to him is pure hubris. I have often felt, if my first works would have appeared in 1968 in Europe rather than in 1988 in Canada, I might have had something similar to his level of influence and success. This is also pure hubris. Apparently I like hubris. This is something I just learned about myself, in the act of writing it down.

My plan is that this book will take ten years to write. That I will finish it in my early fifties. (Perhaps I would also prefer not to live that long, but that is another question altogether.) I want to stretch it out, to kill time, to spend my time on this book rather than on nothing.

I have often led an artistic double life. Half my life spent writing books, the other half making performances (which I find difficult to describe. They are some from of anti-theatre, based around the idea of ‘being yourself’ in a performance situation, most often made in collaboration with a group of other artists but with me, at least partly, in charge. When we do them in art galleries or museums it seems they are better received than when we do them in theatres.) In my books I never mention the performances, since I write these books to escape theatre. However, in the next ten years, writing this, I would like to take down this wall. How to write, and think, about my life as if it were all of a piece? How to be honest without destroying the few people who partly remain in my life?

I have been thinking so much about blurring reality and fiction. I feel it is important to do so, that it is our zeitgeist, but am never precisely sure why. Why is it important to blur reality and fiction? It has something to do with a lack of reality in our lives. Gilles Deleuze writes:

The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events that happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film. 

In using these quotes it is as if I were trying to bring a piece, a moment, of outside reality into this book. It is still writing, still words on a page, yet it came from somewhere else, not from me. Deleuze is better known than Akerman, while both names are considerably more known than my own. Or, at least, that is the case now, as I begin this book. Is there any chance that ten years from now, or more, when or if the book finally appears, this might no longer be the case?

The world doesn’t feel real, art doesn’t feel real enough. Something is missing. There is that line from The Communist Manifesto: “everything solid melts into air.” What I write here might not feel any more or less real, but the ten years I spend writing it will hopefully enact it’s own kind of reality. In the universal scheme of things, ten years is a relatively short period of time. However, within the span of my life so far, working on a single project for ten years will be the longest single task I have undertaken.

As I write this, cinema is a little over 100 years old and its relevance already seems to be fading. But perhaps this is only a lull, and some time in the near or distant future cinema will begin its second (or third or forth) life. Writing books, I have often felt that cinema has won, while literature has lost. That reading can never compete with the mesmerizing, dream-state of the screen. But I mean this only for others. For me, I have always preferred to read. In fact, more and more, I find watching movies or television almost unbearable. How can I feel such a strong desire to be contemporary, while simultaneously being so much at odds with my time.

To bring ‘reality’ into a cinematic work is somehow more direct, more straightforward, then attempting to bring reality into a work of literature. You point the camera at a tree, film it, the tree is reality and that reality, at least partly, is now in your film. This might sound stupid, but I’ve always felt this simple fact has so much to do with the energy and allure of film. When I stare at a tree and attempt to describe it in words (something I have no talent for whatsoever), the tree is already filtered both through my own particular subjectivity and through language.

I have always been fascinated by the use of voiceovers in cinema. I feel within them there is a slight anxiety that the image is not enough, that the moving image requires words to add context or generate narrative. The use of background music gives me a similar feeling. Of course, like theatre before it, cinema is an art form that can eat everything: music, stories, pictures, action, the past, present and future. Very simply, I don’t like watching films because I feel I am being manipulated, and that I am far too susceptible to it. I also feel manipulated by books, but never as intensely. It is so much easier to put a book down.



[You can find two excepts from my previous 'fragile attempt' here and here.]


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Passage from Mopus by Oisín Curran

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William says, While stapling MISSING DOG signs to a telephone pole on Jade St., I saw a little boy toting a saucer of milk. He knelt by a grating in the sidewalk, put down the saucer and walked off a few steps.

Moments later a tiny paw stretched out from the grating, dipped into the saucer then withdrew. Next, the owner of the paw, a tabby kitten, squeezed through the iron grating, intent on the saucer. But no sooner was it out than the little boy grabbed it and kissed it madly as he slipped inside a doorway where a woman waited.

The saucer of milk remained. Around a corner came a big dog. Not mine. It bent to the milk and lapped it up with a single sweep of its tongue, then padded away. I crossed to where the sun burnt the sidewalk.

It was an omen, but of what? I could make neither head nor tail of the signs that troubled my sight that day. From the plaster of a streetside building a pattern of bricks stood out, spelling some message in a script I’d never seen.

In this part of town, laundry was slung between houses. There were little bridges arching over the laundry. Above me two men stood on such a bridge, smoking. One asked the other if he would be attending the meeting tonight. Of course, said his friend. They looked down at me as I passed. One flicked the ash from his cigarette and it fluttered to my feet. I picked up my pace.

At the arena I found a bench and sat, pulled out my book and read that classed among the impossibles are those things that neither are nor were, nevertheless the impossible thing exists, if only as a thought. A thought too has breath, organs, wind comes from its system, thus if an impossibility takes shape in one’s mind, one is exhorted to quell it at once, for it may possess the mind, wishing to have material existence, feeding on one’s capacity to do the impossible. In this way the gods desire themselves into existence, so too buildings and revolutions, ghosts, cars, pickled zebras, toaster ovens and all the excresences of humanity. All classed at one time into the impossibles, now thriving, impeccably empirical, swanning across our landscape, not merely possible but even more real than we are.

At this point I raised my head to gaze across the arena, a fawaway look in my eyes as I pondered the above. In the arena children played in the dust, kicked balls against the stone walls and took whacks at each other.

Someone lurked in a corner of my eye, I turned my head.

On the other end of the bench a woman had seated herself. She was looking at me. I smiled and turned back to my book which was saying that the origin of impossible things is not known, it may be that conscious thought itself is another life form, a type of parasite that inhabits the ether, bores itself inside the receptive skulls of human beings and organizes society into means of production of impossibility.

I stopped reading. Without turning my head I could see that the woman was still looking at me. Not surreptitiously. No, she had turned in her seat and was staring at me. I didn’t dare look back. Who was she? I could feel her gaze on the side of my face. It was not kind. Nor was it unkind, but it prickled my skin.

- Oisín Curran, Mopus



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Nina Power Quote

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But should the Left be coming up with ‘new’ ideas all the time? Politics is not fashion – and, in any case, even fashion is more cyclical rather than endlessly transhistorical. […] Certain fundamental things that the Left seeks to abolish – exploitation, inequality, material poverty, exclusion – are more present than ever and while they may take on ‘novel’ forms, the real newness may simply be quantitative, as more and more people ‘pay’ for a crisis they didn’t create (which is not to buy into the idea that austerity is in any way ‘necessary’, of course).

Perhaps the real problem here is the way in which time itself always serves as the measure for all politics, and all critique of politics, whether it be the bleak future, the heroic past, the desolate present, the utopian tomorrow, the shadowy past or the dawning of a new day. […] If time is a weapon used against people fighting against the speed and brutality of what is happening, we may be forced to use a different image of time – or perhaps an image of a world without time altogether – against those whose only measure seems to be the maximisation of profit in the shortest possible period. The question of whose finitude counts and whose doesn’t – a brutal marker not only of the division between life and death but between the more important distinction between those whose life/death ‘counts’ and those about whom nothing is counted at all – is played out in the only post-religious ‘infinite’ permitted to matter: permanent accumulation. The dedication to amassing at the expense of life itself reveals a terror of time so disturbing that any politics of temporal pessimism/optimism looks insignificant by comparison.

As we defend those who await trial, or write to those in prison, or sit in courts, job centres and universities as futures are crushed all around, time may be all we have left: time in which to abolish their notion of time and replace it […] with a life in which nobody seeks to make time measurable at all, for all time.

- Nina Power, The Pessimism of Time



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