.
Some of the short stories I've written are so much more experimental than any of my novels. And I keep trying to figure out how to turn that more experimental energy into an entire book. How to sustain it.
For example: The Mud, The Vote and The Book
Or: Reverse Portrait
Or: Trophies Are the First to Go
Or even something like: In love with the movement of the world
Why don't I seem to be able to conceive of an entire novel along the same lines?
.
July 5, 2021
June 29, 2021
Lauren Berlant Quote 3
.
I think there’s a lot of mess in solidarity, because the point of solidarity is a concept—an emotion. You don’t have to like the people you have solidarity with; you just get to be on the same team, and have the project of making the world better. But one of the things that we debate when we’re trying to do that is: Do we want the same world? We agree that we don’t want the world that exists, but do we want the same world? And a lot of politics, a lot of the humorlessness of the political, comes when you realize that the people who share your critique don’t share your desire.
From Pleasure Won: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant
.
I think there’s a lot of mess in solidarity, because the point of solidarity is a concept—an emotion. You don’t have to like the people you have solidarity with; you just get to be on the same team, and have the project of making the world better. But one of the things that we debate when we’re trying to do that is: Do we want the same world? We agree that we don’t want the world that exists, but do we want the same world? And a lot of politics, a lot of the humorlessness of the political, comes when you realize that the people who share your critique don’t share your desire.
From Pleasure Won: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant
.
June 28, 2021
Lauren Berlant Quote 2
.
Emotion doesn’t produce clarity but destabilizes you, messes you up, and makes you epistemologically incoherent—you don’t know what you think, you think a lot of different kinds of things, you feel a lot of different kinds of things, and you make the sense of it all that you can. The pressure on emotion to reveal truth produces all sorts of misrecognition of what one’s own motives are, and the world’s. People feel relations of identification and revenge that they don’t admire, and attachments and aversions to things that they wouldn’t necessarily want people to know that they have.
It’s part of my queer optimism to say that people are affectively and emotionally incoherent. This suggests that we can produce new ways of imagining what it means to be attached and to build lives and worlds from what there already is—a heap of conventionally prioritized but incoherent affective concepts of the world that we carry around. We are just at the beginning of understanding emotion politically.
From: THE BROKEN CIRCUIT: AN INTERVIEW WITH LAUREN BERLANT
.
Emotion doesn’t produce clarity but destabilizes you, messes you up, and makes you epistemologically incoherent—you don’t know what you think, you think a lot of different kinds of things, you feel a lot of different kinds of things, and you make the sense of it all that you can. The pressure on emotion to reveal truth produces all sorts of misrecognition of what one’s own motives are, and the world’s. People feel relations of identification and revenge that they don’t admire, and attachments and aversions to things that they wouldn’t necessarily want people to know that they have.
It’s part of my queer optimism to say that people are affectively and emotionally incoherent. This suggests that we can produce new ways of imagining what it means to be attached and to build lives and worlds from what there already is—a heap of conventionally prioritized but incoherent affective concepts of the world that we carry around. We are just at the beginning of understanding emotion politically.
From: THE BROKEN CIRCUIT: AN INTERVIEW WITH LAUREN BERLANT
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June 26, 2021
Two Kate Valk Quotes
.
I wanted to have a place to go every day and make things. It’s a precarious lifestyle. There’s not a lot of security in it. But there’s certainly great work. That’s still what I think. I’ve been lucky enough to stay in touch with that intuition. Even to this day, when I go to The Garage, I feel that. It’s a group situation, it’s not Liz—I mean, of course it’s Liz, she’s the visionary. But there’s this third thing. There’s me. There’s the people I work with. And then there’s this third thing we’re all working toward.
*
If you’re on stage and something goes wrong, it’s a golden opportunity to be present. No one comes to the theater to see it done right. You go for transcendence. When something goes wrong, that means the room is open and there’s room for everybody. It just happened, it’s out of everybody’s control. So if you can watch somebody be in the moment, be present, deal with that, it’s the golden opportunity.
*
From the interview: Power & Punk: New York's Avant Garde Lifers: Kate Valk with Sara Farrington
.
I wanted to have a place to go every day and make things. It’s a precarious lifestyle. There’s not a lot of security in it. But there’s certainly great work. That’s still what I think. I’ve been lucky enough to stay in touch with that intuition. Even to this day, when I go to The Garage, I feel that. It’s a group situation, it’s not Liz—I mean, of course it’s Liz, she’s the visionary. But there’s this third thing. There’s me. There’s the people I work with. And then there’s this third thing we’re all working toward.
*
If you’re on stage and something goes wrong, it’s a golden opportunity to be present. No one comes to the theater to see it done right. You go for transcendence. When something goes wrong, that means the room is open and there’s room for everybody. It just happened, it’s out of everybody’s control. So if you can watch somebody be in the moment, be present, deal with that, it’s the golden opportunity.
*
From the interview: Power & Punk: New York's Avant Garde Lifers: Kate Valk with Sara Farrington
.
June 10, 2021
Bridget Collins Quote
.
And for anyone who writes, or acts, or dances, or sculpts, or paints—for anyone who is drawn to make anything, ever—there’s another side to the story. Because we know that the cost of not making things is higher. It doesn’t matter what we make—whether we’re playing the grand jeu, or writing epic poetry, or putting up bookshelves—but we need to do it, and we need to care. The times I’ve felt closest to despair weren’t when I was throwing myself into writing (even though I sometimes let everything else slip, including sleep and personal hygiene), but when I couldn’t work at all. Whether it’s because you don’t have time, or you don’t believe in yourself, or because you’re a perfectionist—for whatever reason—sitting on your hands forever isn’t just a waste. It will make you unhappy. I believe that creation nourishes and heals us, that on some level it’s what we’re meant to do, all of us. Yes, it might transform us, but that’s the point.
And that in turn makes me wonder whether, really, it’s the mystique of art that has such destructive power. Not the act of creation, but the baggage that surrounds it: not only the self-fulfilling prophecy of the great artist who goes mad, but the competitiveness, the arrogance, and the fear. If your entire sense of self-worth is bound up in your novel—if you are so afraid of failure that you can only work once you’re good and drunk—if you would literally commit murder to beat your classmate in the final exams… It looks, at a glance, like you care too much about what you’re making; but in fact you’re staring beyond it, already fixing your eyes on the mirage of success or failure. You’re preoccupied, not with what you can control, but what you can’t; and that way madness lies.
- Bridget Collins, “I Wanted to Be on Fire.” On the Connection Between Art and Self-Destruction
.
And for anyone who writes, or acts, or dances, or sculpts, or paints—for anyone who is drawn to make anything, ever—there’s another side to the story. Because we know that the cost of not making things is higher. It doesn’t matter what we make—whether we’re playing the grand jeu, or writing epic poetry, or putting up bookshelves—but we need to do it, and we need to care. The times I’ve felt closest to despair weren’t when I was throwing myself into writing (even though I sometimes let everything else slip, including sleep and personal hygiene), but when I couldn’t work at all. Whether it’s because you don’t have time, or you don’t believe in yourself, or because you’re a perfectionist—for whatever reason—sitting on your hands forever isn’t just a waste. It will make you unhappy. I believe that creation nourishes and heals us, that on some level it’s what we’re meant to do, all of us. Yes, it might transform us, but that’s the point.
And that in turn makes me wonder whether, really, it’s the mystique of art that has such destructive power. Not the act of creation, but the baggage that surrounds it: not only the self-fulfilling prophecy of the great artist who goes mad, but the competitiveness, the arrogance, and the fear. If your entire sense of self-worth is bound up in your novel—if you are so afraid of failure that you can only work once you’re good and drunk—if you would literally commit murder to beat your classmate in the final exams… It looks, at a glance, like you care too much about what you’re making; but in fact you’re staring beyond it, already fixing your eyes on the mirage of success or failure. You’re preoccupied, not with what you can control, but what you can’t; and that way madness lies.
- Bridget Collins, “I Wanted to Be on Fire.” On the Connection Between Art and Self-Destruction
.
June 9, 2021
Jean-Luc Godard/Robert Bresson Dialogue
.
Jean-Luc Godard: Why were you so committed to sunlight?
Robert Bresson: It’s very simple, really. I have seen too many films where it’s gray or dark outside — which can create a very beautiful effect, of course — but then the next shot suddenly shifts into a sunny room. I’ve always found that unacceptable. But it happens so often when we move between interiors and exteriors because there’s always additional lighting inside, artificial light, and when we go outside this disappears. Which causes a completely false disconnect. Now, you are aware — and surely you’re like me in this respect — that I’m obsessed with the real. Down to the smallest detail. Fake lighting is as treacherous as fake dialogue, fake gestures. Which is where my concern for an equilibrium of light comes from, so that when we enter a house there will be less sunlight than there was outside. Am I being clear?
Jean-Luc Godard: Yes, yes. Very clear.
Robert Bresson: There’s another reason that may be more correct, more profound. You know that I lean toward the side — not intentionally, mind you — of simplification. And let me clarify right away: I believe that simplification is something one must never seek. If you’ve worked hard enough, simplification should arrive of its own accord. But you must not look for simplification, or simplicity, too soon, for that’s what leads to bad painting, bad literature, bad poetry… . So I lean toward simplification — and I barely realize it — but this simplification requires, from the point of view of the photographic shot, a certain force, a certain vigor. If I simplify my plot and at the same time my image fails (because the contours aren’t well enough defined, the contrast isn’t strong enough), I risk falling into mere sequence. I, like you, believe that the camera is a dangerous thing; meaning it’s too easy, too convenient, we have to almost forgive ourselves for it: but we have to know how to use it.
Jean-Luc Godard: Yes, you have to, if I can say it like this, desecrate the technology of the camera, push it to its … But for me, I do that differently as I’m more, let’s say, impulsive. In any case, you can’t take it for what it is. Like the fact that you wanted sunshine so that the shot wouldn’t collapse. You forced it that way, to keep its dignity, its rigor … which three-quarters of the rest don’t do.
Robert Bresson: That’s to say that you have to know exactly what you want in terms of aesthetics, and do what you need to do to realize it. The image you have in your mind, you have to see it in advance, literally see it on the screen (understanding that there will be a distinction, even a total difference between what you see and what you end up with), and this image. You have to make it exactly the way you desire it, the way you see it when you close your eyes.
Jean-Luc Godard: You’ve been called the cineaste of ellipses. I imagine that for people who watch your films with this idea in mind, you’ve outdone yourself with Balthazar. I’ll give you an example: In the scene with the two car accidents (if we can say two, since we see only one of them), do you feel as if you’re creating an ellipsis by showing just the first one? I don’t think you thought of this as withholding a shot, but as placing one shot after another shot. Is this true?
Robert Bresson: Concerning the two skidding cars, I think because we’ve already seen the first, it’s pointless to show the second. I prefer to let people imagine it. If I had made people imagine the first one, then there would have been something lacking. And I like seeing it: I find it pretty, a car spinning around on the road. But after that, I’d rather make the next image out of sound. Any chance I can replace an image with a sound, I do. And I do it more and more.
Jean-Luc Godard: And if you were able to replace all of the images with sounds? I mean … I’m thinking about a kind of inversion of the functions of image and sound. We could have images, sure, but it would be the sound that would be the important element.
Robert Bresson: As far as that goes, it’s true that the ear is much more creative than the eye. The eye is lazy. The ear, on the contrary, is inventive: it’s much more attentive, whereas the eye is content to receive, other than in exceptional cases when it, too, invents, but through fantasy. The ear is, in some sense, far more evocative and profound. The whistle of a train, for example, can call to mind the image of an entire station: sometimes of a precise station you know, sometimes of the atmosphere of a station, or of tracks with a stopped train. The possible evocations are innumerable. What’s good about this, this function of sound, is that it leaves the viewer free. And that’s what we must strive toward: leaving viewers as free as possible. And at the same time, you have to make them learn to love this freedom. You have to make them love the way you render things. That is, show them things in the order and in the way in which you want them seen and felt; make others see those things, by presenting them in the way you see them and feel them yourself; and do all of this while leaving them great liberty, while making them free. Now, sound evokes this freedom in greater measure than does imagery.
…
Robert Bresson: Yes, but I should first tell you how I see myself in relation to what’s being made. Just yesterday someone asked me (it’s a reproach that’s made of me sometimes, perhaps without meaning to be one but nevertheless …): “Why don’t you ever go see films?” And it’s true: I don’t go to see them. It’s because they frighten me. That’s the only reason. Because I sense I’m moving away from them, from contemporary films, more and more each day. And this frightens me because I see that these films are being embraced by the public, and I don’t foresee that happening with my films. So I’m afraid. Afraid to propose something to a public with a sensibility for another thing, a public that will be insensitive to what I’m doing. But also, it’s good for me see a contemporary film from time to time. To see just how big the difference is. So I’m realizing that without meaning to, I’ve distanced myself more and more from a kind of cinema I feel is moving in the wrong direction — that’s settling deeper into music-hall, into filmed theater, that’s losing its interest (not only its interest, but its power) — and heading for catastrophe. It isn’t that the films are too expensive, or that television poses a threat, but simply that that kind of cinema isn’t an art, though it pretends to be one; it’s a false art, trying to express itself using the form of another art. There’s nothing worse or more ineffectual than that kind of art. As for what I’m trying to do myself, with these images and sounds, of course I feel I’m right and they’re wrong. But I also get the sense that I have access to too many means, which I try to pare down, reduce (for what also kills cinema is the profusion of means, the abundance; abundance can never bring anything to art). That moreover, I’m in possession of extraordinary means all my own.
Jean-Luc Godard: You were speaking a moment ago of actors …
Robert Bresson: There’s an unbridgeable gap between an actor — even one who is trying to forget himself, to not control himself — and a person who has no experience being on film, no experience with the theater, a person used as brute material, who doesn’t know what he is and who ends up giving what he never intended to give to anyone. The way you capture emotion is through practicing scales, through playing in the most regular, mechanical way. Not by trying to force emotion, the way a virtuoso does. That’s what I’m trying to say: an actor is a virtuoso. Instead of giving you the exact thing that you can feel, actors force their emotion on top of it, as if to tell you, “Here’s how you should feel things!”
Jean-Luc Godard: It’s as if a painter hired an actor instead of a model. As if he said to himself: instead of using this washerwoman, let’s hire a great actress who will pose much better than this woman. It that sense, I completely understand you.
- from Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983
.
Jean-Luc Godard: Why were you so committed to sunlight?
Robert Bresson: It’s very simple, really. I have seen too many films where it’s gray or dark outside — which can create a very beautiful effect, of course — but then the next shot suddenly shifts into a sunny room. I’ve always found that unacceptable. But it happens so often when we move between interiors and exteriors because there’s always additional lighting inside, artificial light, and when we go outside this disappears. Which causes a completely false disconnect. Now, you are aware — and surely you’re like me in this respect — that I’m obsessed with the real. Down to the smallest detail. Fake lighting is as treacherous as fake dialogue, fake gestures. Which is where my concern for an equilibrium of light comes from, so that when we enter a house there will be less sunlight than there was outside. Am I being clear?
Jean-Luc Godard: Yes, yes. Very clear.
Robert Bresson: There’s another reason that may be more correct, more profound. You know that I lean toward the side — not intentionally, mind you — of simplification. And let me clarify right away: I believe that simplification is something one must never seek. If you’ve worked hard enough, simplification should arrive of its own accord. But you must not look for simplification, or simplicity, too soon, for that’s what leads to bad painting, bad literature, bad poetry… . So I lean toward simplification — and I barely realize it — but this simplification requires, from the point of view of the photographic shot, a certain force, a certain vigor. If I simplify my plot and at the same time my image fails (because the contours aren’t well enough defined, the contrast isn’t strong enough), I risk falling into mere sequence. I, like you, believe that the camera is a dangerous thing; meaning it’s too easy, too convenient, we have to almost forgive ourselves for it: but we have to know how to use it.
Jean-Luc Godard: Yes, you have to, if I can say it like this, desecrate the technology of the camera, push it to its … But for me, I do that differently as I’m more, let’s say, impulsive. In any case, you can’t take it for what it is. Like the fact that you wanted sunshine so that the shot wouldn’t collapse. You forced it that way, to keep its dignity, its rigor … which three-quarters of the rest don’t do.
Robert Bresson: That’s to say that you have to know exactly what you want in terms of aesthetics, and do what you need to do to realize it. The image you have in your mind, you have to see it in advance, literally see it on the screen (understanding that there will be a distinction, even a total difference between what you see and what you end up with), and this image. You have to make it exactly the way you desire it, the way you see it when you close your eyes.
Jean-Luc Godard: You’ve been called the cineaste of ellipses. I imagine that for people who watch your films with this idea in mind, you’ve outdone yourself with Balthazar. I’ll give you an example: In the scene with the two car accidents (if we can say two, since we see only one of them), do you feel as if you’re creating an ellipsis by showing just the first one? I don’t think you thought of this as withholding a shot, but as placing one shot after another shot. Is this true?
Robert Bresson: Concerning the two skidding cars, I think because we’ve already seen the first, it’s pointless to show the second. I prefer to let people imagine it. If I had made people imagine the first one, then there would have been something lacking. And I like seeing it: I find it pretty, a car spinning around on the road. But after that, I’d rather make the next image out of sound. Any chance I can replace an image with a sound, I do. And I do it more and more.
Jean-Luc Godard: And if you were able to replace all of the images with sounds? I mean … I’m thinking about a kind of inversion of the functions of image and sound. We could have images, sure, but it would be the sound that would be the important element.
Robert Bresson: As far as that goes, it’s true that the ear is much more creative than the eye. The eye is lazy. The ear, on the contrary, is inventive: it’s much more attentive, whereas the eye is content to receive, other than in exceptional cases when it, too, invents, but through fantasy. The ear is, in some sense, far more evocative and profound. The whistle of a train, for example, can call to mind the image of an entire station: sometimes of a precise station you know, sometimes of the atmosphere of a station, or of tracks with a stopped train. The possible evocations are innumerable. What’s good about this, this function of sound, is that it leaves the viewer free. And that’s what we must strive toward: leaving viewers as free as possible. And at the same time, you have to make them learn to love this freedom. You have to make them love the way you render things. That is, show them things in the order and in the way in which you want them seen and felt; make others see those things, by presenting them in the way you see them and feel them yourself; and do all of this while leaving them great liberty, while making them free. Now, sound evokes this freedom in greater measure than does imagery.
…
Robert Bresson: Yes, but I should first tell you how I see myself in relation to what’s being made. Just yesterday someone asked me (it’s a reproach that’s made of me sometimes, perhaps without meaning to be one but nevertheless …): “Why don’t you ever go see films?” And it’s true: I don’t go to see them. It’s because they frighten me. That’s the only reason. Because I sense I’m moving away from them, from contemporary films, more and more each day. And this frightens me because I see that these films are being embraced by the public, and I don’t foresee that happening with my films. So I’m afraid. Afraid to propose something to a public with a sensibility for another thing, a public that will be insensitive to what I’m doing. But also, it’s good for me see a contemporary film from time to time. To see just how big the difference is. So I’m realizing that without meaning to, I’ve distanced myself more and more from a kind of cinema I feel is moving in the wrong direction — that’s settling deeper into music-hall, into filmed theater, that’s losing its interest (not only its interest, but its power) — and heading for catastrophe. It isn’t that the films are too expensive, or that television poses a threat, but simply that that kind of cinema isn’t an art, though it pretends to be one; it’s a false art, trying to express itself using the form of another art. There’s nothing worse or more ineffectual than that kind of art. As for what I’m trying to do myself, with these images and sounds, of course I feel I’m right and they’re wrong. But I also get the sense that I have access to too many means, which I try to pare down, reduce (for what also kills cinema is the profusion of means, the abundance; abundance can never bring anything to art). That moreover, I’m in possession of extraordinary means all my own.
Jean-Luc Godard: You were speaking a moment ago of actors …
Robert Bresson: There’s an unbridgeable gap between an actor — even one who is trying to forget himself, to not control himself — and a person who has no experience being on film, no experience with the theater, a person used as brute material, who doesn’t know what he is and who ends up giving what he never intended to give to anyone. The way you capture emotion is through practicing scales, through playing in the most regular, mechanical way. Not by trying to force emotion, the way a virtuoso does. That’s what I’m trying to say: an actor is a virtuoso. Instead of giving you the exact thing that you can feel, actors force their emotion on top of it, as if to tell you, “Here’s how you should feel things!”
Jean-Luc Godard: It’s as if a painter hired an actor instead of a model. As if he said to himself: instead of using this washerwoman, let’s hire a great actress who will pose much better than this woman. It that sense, I completely understand you.
- from Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983
.
June 7, 2021
we're celebrating our twentieth anniversary again
.
As many of you already know, back in 2018 PME-ART celebrated its twentieth anniversary with a book and a performance.
Now, a few years later, it seems we're celebrating our twentieth anniversary again, one last time, to mark Daniel Canty's French translation of the book, now entitled Un sentiment d’authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART.
To do so, we've invited a few past and present collaborators to read from the book and share a few of their own thoughts on the matter: Martin Bélanger + Marie Claire Forté + Nadège Grebmeier Forget + Kamissa Ma Koïta + Elena Stoodley.
(I'm extremely curious what they'll each have to say but, since I don't really understand French, it's possible I might never know. In order to celebrate the French translation of the book the event will be entirely in French.)
(Also, I promise that after this event we'll stop celebrating our twentieth anniversary.)
Find out more here: Mardi 8 juin, 17 h, Virtuel: Un sentiment d’authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART
.
As many of you already know, back in 2018 PME-ART celebrated its twentieth anniversary with a book and a performance.
Now, a few years later, it seems we're celebrating our twentieth anniversary again, one last time, to mark Daniel Canty's French translation of the book, now entitled Un sentiment d’authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART.
To do so, we've invited a few past and present collaborators to read from the book and share a few of their own thoughts on the matter: Martin Bélanger + Marie Claire Forté + Nadège Grebmeier Forget + Kamissa Ma Koïta + Elena Stoodley.
(I'm extremely curious what they'll each have to say but, since I don't really understand French, it's possible I might never know. In order to celebrate the French translation of the book the event will be entirely in French.)
(Also, I promise that after this event we'll stop celebrating our twentieth anniversary.)
Find out more here: Mardi 8 juin, 17 h, Virtuel: Un sentiment d’authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART
.
April 29, 2021
Four PME-ART events in May/June 2021
.
Mercredi 12 mai, 17 h, Virtuel:
Un second sentiment d’authenticité: Authenticity Is a Feeling à l’épreuve de la traduction avec Daniel Canty et Jessie Mill
Conversation conviviale
Regardez-le ici : Première partie, Deuxième partie
Monday, May 17th & Tuesday, May 18th at 5pm:
A User's Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling
La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines
20 ans de création et d’histoires par Yanik Comeau
Une question de risques par Guylaine Massoutre
Friday, June 4th at 10am:
En réponse à Vulnérables Paradoxes
With the participation of Aisha Sasha John + Burcu Emeç + Dayna Danger + Elena Stoodley + Kama La Mackerel + Kamissa Ma Koïta + Lara Kramer + Mai thi Bach Ngoc Nguyen + Malik Nashad Sharpe + Marilou Craft + Milton Lim + nènè myriam konaté + Po B. K. Lomami + Sonia Hughes
Online at the Facebook page of PME-ART
In collaboration with OFFTA / LA SERRE – arts vivants
Watch the video of the launch
Download: In Response to Vulnerable Paradoxes
Facebook Event
Mardi 8 juin, 17 h, Virtuel:
Un sentiment d’authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART
Présentation Jessie Mill / Lecture-performance Martin Bélanger + Marie Claire Forté + Nadège Grebmeier Forget + Kamissa Ma Koïta + Elena Stoodley
En collaboration avec Terrains de jeu du FTA
Regardez-le ici : Un sentiment d’authenticité
Facebook Event
Download: In Response to Vulnerbale Paradoxes
Sur commande ici: Un sentiment d'authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART
Order: Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART
Bonus: video of short reading plus my answers two short questions about Authenticity is a Feeling to celebrate the French translation.
And feel free to check out the PME-ART website here.
Image: Daniel Canty
Image: FTA
Mercredi 12 mai, 17 h, Virtuel:
Un second sentiment d’authenticité: Authenticity Is a Feeling à l’épreuve de la traduction avec Daniel Canty et Jessie Mill
Conversation conviviale
Regardez-le ici : Première partie, Deuxième partie
Monday, May 17th & Tuesday, May 18th at 5pm:
A User's Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling
La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines
20 ans de création et d’histoires par Yanik Comeau
Une question de risques par Guylaine Massoutre
Friday, June 4th at 10am:
En réponse à Vulnérables Paradoxes
With the participation of Aisha Sasha John + Burcu Emeç + Dayna Danger + Elena Stoodley + Kama La Mackerel + Kamissa Ma Koïta + Lara Kramer + Mai thi Bach Ngoc Nguyen + Malik Nashad Sharpe + Marilou Craft + Milton Lim + nènè myriam konaté + Po B. K. Lomami + Sonia Hughes
Online at the Facebook page of PME-ART
In collaboration with OFFTA / LA SERRE – arts vivants
Watch the video of the launch
Download: In Response to Vulnerable Paradoxes
Facebook Event
Mardi 8 juin, 17 h, Virtuel:
Un sentiment d’authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART
Présentation Jessie Mill / Lecture-performance Martin Bélanger + Marie Claire Forté + Nadège Grebmeier Forget + Kamissa Ma Koïta + Elena Stoodley
En collaboration avec Terrains de jeu du FTA
Regardez-le ici : Un sentiment d’authenticité
Facebook Event
Download: In Response to Vulnerbale Paradoxes
Sur commande ici: Un sentiment d'authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART
Order: Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART
Bonus: video of short reading plus my answers two short questions about Authenticity is a Feeling to celebrate the French translation.
And feel free to check out the PME-ART website here.
Image: Leontien Paula Allemeersch
Image: Fabien Marcil
Image: Kamissa Ma Koïta
Image: Fabien Marcil
April 20, 2021
Cornel West Quote
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I’m going to close with the notion of “utopian interruptions.” What I’m talking about is always tied to failure. It’s no accident that the figures that I invoke – Beckett has an aesthetic for failure, doesn’t he? So does Chekhov. So does Kafka. That wonderful letter that Benjamin writes to Gershom Scholem, July 1938: “You’ll never understand the purity and the beauty of Kafka if you don’t view him as a failure.” Of course, if it wasn’t for Max Brod, we wouldn’t even have the text. Kafka believed he was a failure through and through.
Or, as Beckett says in his last piece of prose fiction Worstwood Ho, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Like Sheldon Wolin’s fugitive democracy, prophetic religion is a fugitive affair – an empathetic and imaginative power that confronts hegemonic powers always operating. Prophetic religion is a profoundly tragicomic affair.
The dominant forms of religion are well-adjusted to greed and fear and bigotry. Hence well-adjusted to the indifference of the status quo toward poor and working people. Prophetic religion is an individual and collective performative praxis of maladjustment to greed, fear, and bigotry. For prophetic religion the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. Yet it is always tied to some failure – always. There are moments, like the 1960s in capitalist civilization or the 1980s in communist civilization that prophetic awakening takes place. It doesn’t last too long, because the powers-that-be are not just mighty, but they’re very clever and they dilute and incorporate in very seductive ways – or sometimes they just kill you!
– Cornel West, Prophetic Religion and the Future of Capitalist Civilization
[From the book The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere.]
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I’m going to close with the notion of “utopian interruptions.” What I’m talking about is always tied to failure. It’s no accident that the figures that I invoke – Beckett has an aesthetic for failure, doesn’t he? So does Chekhov. So does Kafka. That wonderful letter that Benjamin writes to Gershom Scholem, July 1938: “You’ll never understand the purity and the beauty of Kafka if you don’t view him as a failure.” Of course, if it wasn’t for Max Brod, we wouldn’t even have the text. Kafka believed he was a failure through and through.
Or, as Beckett says in his last piece of prose fiction Worstwood Ho, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Like Sheldon Wolin’s fugitive democracy, prophetic religion is a fugitive affair – an empathetic and imaginative power that confronts hegemonic powers always operating. Prophetic religion is a profoundly tragicomic affair.
The dominant forms of religion are well-adjusted to greed and fear and bigotry. Hence well-adjusted to the indifference of the status quo toward poor and working people. Prophetic religion is an individual and collective performative praxis of maladjustment to greed, fear, and bigotry. For prophetic religion the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. Yet it is always tied to some failure – always. There are moments, like the 1960s in capitalist civilization or the 1980s in communist civilization that prophetic awakening takes place. It doesn’t last too long, because the powers-that-be are not just mighty, but they’re very clever and they dilute and incorporate in very seductive ways – or sometimes they just kill you!
– Cornel West, Prophetic Religion and the Future of Capitalist Civilization
[From the book The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere.]
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April 6, 2021
POSTPONED*** I Can't Stand the Idea of Putting Words in Someone Else's Mouth
I Can't Stand the Idea of Putting Words in Someone Else's Mouth
POSTPONED*** The roundtable performance I CAN'T STAND THE IDEA OF PUTTING WORDS IN SOMEONE ELSE'S MOUTH between Jacob Wren, Luis Carlos Sotelo Castro, nènè myriam konaté, Rajni Shah and Veronica Mockler that was originally scheduled for today (April 14th) at 4 p.m. has been postponed. A new date for the performance will be announced shortly.
We are very sorry for the inconvenience and hope that you can join us at this later date.
This roster of artists, writers and researchers comes together to consider the practice of 'unscripted' listening and speaking. At once an ontological workout and a probing of recent performance work, the table will tackle questions such as: What is listening from a place of not knowing? What is the relevance of 'unscripted' speech today? For these practitioners, embodying the 'unscripted' is a necessary state of struggle for it resists the productivity of colonial interaction.
Sign up here.
Facebook event.
Poster by Dublin-based graphic designer Conor Lumsden.
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April 4, 2021
fortune cookie
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I’ve been wondering a lot lately about whether or not - at some point in the not too distant future - I should leave PME-ART. And then the other day I got a fortune cookie which said “Depart not from the path which fate has assigned you.”
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I’ve been wondering a lot lately about whether or not - at some point in the not too distant future - I should leave PME-ART. And then the other day I got a fortune cookie which said “Depart not from the path which fate has assigned you.”
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April 2, 2021
Reverse Portrait
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[This text was originally published in the Kim Waldron book Another Woman _ Another Woman.]
A woman has a portrait in her attic. As she gets older the picture gets younger. Not her image in the picture but the picture itself. There are no other words to explain this. You look at the picture and somehow you know you are looking at a different, a reverse, understanding of time. The wooden frame gets younger, the pigment, the brushstrokes, the idea to even make the work in the first place. Up there in the attic, where almost no one ever goes, the self-portrait carelessly leans against a wall getting younger. Meanwhile the woman continues living her life. Her life is the important part of this story, though it will be difficult to tell the story in a way that makes this at all times clear. The problem is: she knows about the picture in the attic and so do we. It would be an exaggeration to say she thinks about it constantly, but she does think about it, from time to time, more than from time to time. For her, this picture represents something like her “ideals,” it is her ideals that are getting younger, but for us, at least so far, it represents almost nothing. It is a MacGuffin, a red herring, a picture that is getting older, but everything is getting older, every minute of every day. No, already I’ve gotten myself confused. The picture is not getting older, as you already know the picture is actually getting younger. That is the counter-intuitive, the magical, part of this story. The part that makes no sense.
Have I mentioned yet that there are many pictures of the woman, existing out there somewhere in the world, paintings (well, mainly just the one painting in the attic), photographs, drawings, illustrations. She even appears in images she apparently doesn’t appear in, in the background, or just a sliver of her at the edge of the frame. These images have been made for a wide variety of purposes. For example, one is an image that was part of a planned advertising campaign. However, when the company saw the image they vetoed it. They thought of their product, and they thought of the image, and came to the kneejerk conclusion that one would not be able to sell the other. (They did not mean that the product would not be able to sell the image, though that was probably true as well.) This unused advertising image was placed not in an attic but in a filing cabinet. Let me try to get back to the woman’s life, which we still know relatively little about. The part of this story that is most important is the part we so far know least about. As I have already mentioned, the part that is most important is this woman’s life.
One day the woman decides to attempt an experiment. She goes up into the attic with a large format camera and photographs the portrait. It is a woman photographing a portrait of herself, as the portrait is getting younger, to find out if she can photographically capture this magical painted reversal of age. As she does so, she realizes that for much of history portraits were created from paint, then for much of more recent history portraits were captured on photographic film, while now portraits are captured digitally and often called selfies. (We already know the proportional gender of the historical painters in relation to the proportional gender of the historical subjects. This is a contemporary story and things have not changed nearly as much as they should.) She was not a painter, so she asked herself: what would it feel like to paint another persons portrait? Or to paint her own? To consciously or unconsciously mix your own personality with the personality and image of the sitter? Or with the personality and image in the mirror? She had the photographs she took of the painting in the attic developed and had to admit she found the results rather unspectacular. It just looked like a normal painting, there was no evidence that it was getting younger before her (or the cameras) eyes. Just as in a normal photograph of a normal person there is no evidence that they are getting older before our eyes. The process moves too slowly. (Is it worth noting that the eye of a camera is called a lens?)
The woman knows that there are many images of her that exist somewhere out there in the world. She has seen many of them. She has also created many of them. Some of these images have even been sold for a small profit. Once she received an email from someone who owned an image of her, someone she had never met. “You don’t know me,” the email began, “but in some strange way I feel that I know you. Every day, as I drink my morning coffee, I can look to the far end of the dining room where a picture of you hangs on my wall. Maybe you already know this and maybe you don’t, I’m not quite sure.” She did not already know this. The email continued: “I know it is not actually you looking at me, out from that image, across the entire length of the room. It is not you, but I feel somehow judged by that gaze and therefore, in some sense, I feel I am being judged by you. It goes without saying that I am most likely only being judged by my own guilty conscience. You might have already guessed the particular reason for this feeling of being judged. It has to do with wealth, with my ability to purchase your image alongside many other remarkable works of art. The amount of money this work cost is almost nothing to me, pocket change. The reason you might not know that I drink my coffee every morning under the judgmental gaze of your image is because I purchased it on the secondary market. That is why I know, of the amount I paid for it, none of the money went directly to you. In my life, especially as I get older, I feel guilty or regretful about many things, and for some reason this is one of them. Therefore you will find attached, if you choose to accept it, a money order for the exact amount I originally paid for your work. As I said, for me it is nothing, but I suspect for you it will be a substantial sum. I see no reason you should not accept.” She stopped reading, transferred the money order into her account (what the email said was true, for her it was a substantial amount), and shut down her computer. She did not reply to the email, on that day or any other. She could not afford to refuse the money but she certainly did not want to thank him for it. She never heard from him again. In her ideal world, he would assist her financially while continuing to feel guilt. Maybe this guilt would lead him toward other good deeds in the future. She could only hope.
In the attic the painting continues its journey toward youth. (For a moment she wonders: does the painting know it’s getting younger. But how could it know.) Every few months she heads up to the attic for a visit. She sits across from the painting and, on this particular day, she even finds herself talking to it. This conversation is private, just between her and the painting, so I will not recount it here. Of course she does all the talking, the painting does not respond. Or it only responds by getting younger at an imperceptible rate, though at times she almost feels as if she can sense it changing before her eyes. In the attic there are many other objects that have been brought there because they were no longer needed in the rest of the house. I will not list them all. I will focus only on one particular item: a polaroid camera that no longer works. At one time it was a novelty to be able to take a picture and almost instantly see the results. Now this is obviously no longer the case. She picks up the camera and holds it in her hands. It hasn’t worked for a very long time. She examines it from every angle, rotating it calmly from hand to hand. What was once an exciting new thing is now little more than an item of nostalgia. Strangely, as she examines it, it suddenly goes off, a picture smoothly whirring out the front slot. She puts down the camera and holds the picture in front of her, staring at it, watching as it slowly develops. She is not surprised to see that it’s a picture of her. But not her now. Her from fifteen years ago, the last time she remembers using the camera, the last time she remembers it working. It is strange to see her younger self slowly come into focus within the white frame of the polaroid. Just as it is also strange to look up and see a painted version of her younger self, leaning against the wall. And then she has a strange thought: aren’t all images of our younger selves. Every image, no matter how imagined or arranged, is simultaneously a documentary image from some moment in the past. Even a selfie is an image of us a few seconds ago when it was first taken. She does not want to live in the past. She prefers to live in the present, if such a thing can even be said to exist. She leans the still developing polaroid against the painting and heads downstairs back to her normal life.
Dorian Gray had a picture in his attic to tell a story of corruption. This is not a story of corruption. The picture in the woman’s attic is just another picture, just another image, albeit one with certain magical qualities. It depends how you choose to tell the story. I’ve chosen to tell it badly, perhaps because I’ve chosen to tell it using only words.
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[This text was originally published in the Kim Waldron book Another Woman _ Another Woman.]
A woman has a portrait in her attic. As she gets older the picture gets younger. Not her image in the picture but the picture itself. There are no other words to explain this. You look at the picture and somehow you know you are looking at a different, a reverse, understanding of time. The wooden frame gets younger, the pigment, the brushstrokes, the idea to even make the work in the first place. Up there in the attic, where almost no one ever goes, the self-portrait carelessly leans against a wall getting younger. Meanwhile the woman continues living her life. Her life is the important part of this story, though it will be difficult to tell the story in a way that makes this at all times clear. The problem is: she knows about the picture in the attic and so do we. It would be an exaggeration to say she thinks about it constantly, but she does think about it, from time to time, more than from time to time. For her, this picture represents something like her “ideals,” it is her ideals that are getting younger, but for us, at least so far, it represents almost nothing. It is a MacGuffin, a red herring, a picture that is getting older, but everything is getting older, every minute of every day. No, already I’ve gotten myself confused. The picture is not getting older, as you already know the picture is actually getting younger. That is the counter-intuitive, the magical, part of this story. The part that makes no sense.
Have I mentioned yet that there are many pictures of the woman, existing out there somewhere in the world, paintings (well, mainly just the one painting in the attic), photographs, drawings, illustrations. She even appears in images she apparently doesn’t appear in, in the background, or just a sliver of her at the edge of the frame. These images have been made for a wide variety of purposes. For example, one is an image that was part of a planned advertising campaign. However, when the company saw the image they vetoed it. They thought of their product, and they thought of the image, and came to the kneejerk conclusion that one would not be able to sell the other. (They did not mean that the product would not be able to sell the image, though that was probably true as well.) This unused advertising image was placed not in an attic but in a filing cabinet. Let me try to get back to the woman’s life, which we still know relatively little about. The part of this story that is most important is the part we so far know least about. As I have already mentioned, the part that is most important is this woman’s life.
One day the woman decides to attempt an experiment. She goes up into the attic with a large format camera and photographs the portrait. It is a woman photographing a portrait of herself, as the portrait is getting younger, to find out if she can photographically capture this magical painted reversal of age. As she does so, she realizes that for much of history portraits were created from paint, then for much of more recent history portraits were captured on photographic film, while now portraits are captured digitally and often called selfies. (We already know the proportional gender of the historical painters in relation to the proportional gender of the historical subjects. This is a contemporary story and things have not changed nearly as much as they should.) She was not a painter, so she asked herself: what would it feel like to paint another persons portrait? Or to paint her own? To consciously or unconsciously mix your own personality with the personality and image of the sitter? Or with the personality and image in the mirror? She had the photographs she took of the painting in the attic developed and had to admit she found the results rather unspectacular. It just looked like a normal painting, there was no evidence that it was getting younger before her (or the cameras) eyes. Just as in a normal photograph of a normal person there is no evidence that they are getting older before our eyes. The process moves too slowly. (Is it worth noting that the eye of a camera is called a lens?)
The woman knows that there are many images of her that exist somewhere out there in the world. She has seen many of them. She has also created many of them. Some of these images have even been sold for a small profit. Once she received an email from someone who owned an image of her, someone she had never met. “You don’t know me,” the email began, “but in some strange way I feel that I know you. Every day, as I drink my morning coffee, I can look to the far end of the dining room where a picture of you hangs on my wall. Maybe you already know this and maybe you don’t, I’m not quite sure.” She did not already know this. The email continued: “I know it is not actually you looking at me, out from that image, across the entire length of the room. It is not you, but I feel somehow judged by that gaze and therefore, in some sense, I feel I am being judged by you. It goes without saying that I am most likely only being judged by my own guilty conscience. You might have already guessed the particular reason for this feeling of being judged. It has to do with wealth, with my ability to purchase your image alongside many other remarkable works of art. The amount of money this work cost is almost nothing to me, pocket change. The reason you might not know that I drink my coffee every morning under the judgmental gaze of your image is because I purchased it on the secondary market. That is why I know, of the amount I paid for it, none of the money went directly to you. In my life, especially as I get older, I feel guilty or regretful about many things, and for some reason this is one of them. Therefore you will find attached, if you choose to accept it, a money order for the exact amount I originally paid for your work. As I said, for me it is nothing, but I suspect for you it will be a substantial sum. I see no reason you should not accept.” She stopped reading, transferred the money order into her account (what the email said was true, for her it was a substantial amount), and shut down her computer. She did not reply to the email, on that day or any other. She could not afford to refuse the money but she certainly did not want to thank him for it. She never heard from him again. In her ideal world, he would assist her financially while continuing to feel guilt. Maybe this guilt would lead him toward other good deeds in the future. She could only hope.
In the attic the painting continues its journey toward youth. (For a moment she wonders: does the painting know it’s getting younger. But how could it know.) Every few months she heads up to the attic for a visit. She sits across from the painting and, on this particular day, she even finds herself talking to it. This conversation is private, just between her and the painting, so I will not recount it here. Of course she does all the talking, the painting does not respond. Or it only responds by getting younger at an imperceptible rate, though at times she almost feels as if she can sense it changing before her eyes. In the attic there are many other objects that have been brought there because they were no longer needed in the rest of the house. I will not list them all. I will focus only on one particular item: a polaroid camera that no longer works. At one time it was a novelty to be able to take a picture and almost instantly see the results. Now this is obviously no longer the case. She picks up the camera and holds it in her hands. It hasn’t worked for a very long time. She examines it from every angle, rotating it calmly from hand to hand. What was once an exciting new thing is now little more than an item of nostalgia. Strangely, as she examines it, it suddenly goes off, a picture smoothly whirring out the front slot. She puts down the camera and holds the picture in front of her, staring at it, watching as it slowly develops. She is not surprised to see that it’s a picture of her. But not her now. Her from fifteen years ago, the last time she remembers using the camera, the last time she remembers it working. It is strange to see her younger self slowly come into focus within the white frame of the polaroid. Just as it is also strange to look up and see a painted version of her younger self, leaning against the wall. And then she has a strange thought: aren’t all images of our younger selves. Every image, no matter how imagined or arranged, is simultaneously a documentary image from some moment in the past. Even a selfie is an image of us a few seconds ago when it was first taken. She does not want to live in the past. She prefers to live in the present, if such a thing can even be said to exist. She leans the still developing polaroid against the painting and heads downstairs back to her normal life.
Dorian Gray had a picture in his attic to tell a story of corruption. This is not a story of corruption. The picture in the woman’s attic is just another picture, just another image, albeit one with certain magical qualities. It depends how you choose to tell the story. I’ve chosen to tell it badly, perhaps because I’ve chosen to tell it using only words.
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March 24, 2021
Reading Bhanu Kapil (from 2015)
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Reading Bhanu Kapil (from 2015):
Day One
Day Two
Day Three
[In honor of the publication of Bhanu Kapil’s book Ban en Banlieue, published by Nightboat Books, the writers Amina Cain, Douglas A. Martin, Sofia Samatar, Kate Zambreno, and Jenny Zhang gathered together in a conversation to talk about the work of the British-Punjabi writer. The conversation was published in three parts.]
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Reading Bhanu Kapil (from 2015):
Day One
Day Two
Day Three
[In honor of the publication of Bhanu Kapil’s book Ban en Banlieue, published by Nightboat Books, the writers Amina Cain, Douglas A. Martin, Sofia Samatar, Kate Zambreno, and Jenny Zhang gathered together in a conversation to talk about the work of the British-Punjabi writer. The conversation was published in three parts.]
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March 21, 2021
Mariame Kaba Quote
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So, maybe I just have a different perspective and I talk to a lot of young organizers - people reach out to me a lot because I’ve been organizing for a long time - I’m always telling them, “Your timeline is not the timeline on which movements occur. Your timeline is incidental. Your timeline is only for yourself to mark your growth and your living.” But that’s a fraction of the living that’s going to be done by the universe and that has already been done by the universe. So, when you understand that you’re really insignificant in the grand scheme of things, you just are, then it’s a freedom, in my opinion, to actually be able to do the work that’s necessary as you see it and to contribute in the ways that you can see fit. So, I think that’s my answer to that.
And self-care is really tricky for me, because I don’t believe in the self in the way that people determine it here in this capitalist society that we live in. I don’t believe in self-care, I believe in collective care, collectivizing our care, and thinking more about how we can help each other. How can we collectivize the care of children so that more people can feel like they can actually have their kids but also live in the world and contribute and participate in various different kinds of ways? How do we do that? How do we collectivize care so that when we’re sick and we’re not feeling ourselves, we’ve got a crew of people that are not just our prayer warriors, but our action warriors who are thinking through with us? Like, I’m not just going to be able to cook this week, and you have a whole bunch of folks there, who are just putting a list together for you and bringing the food every day that week and you’re doing the same for your community, too.
I want that as the focus of how I do things and that really comes from the fact that I grew up the daughter of returned migrants, African-returned migrants. I don’t see the world the way that people do here, I just don’t. I don’t agree with it, I think capitalism is actually continuously alienating us from each other, but also even from ourselves and I just don’t subscribe. And for me, it’s too much with, “Yeah I’m going to go do yoga and then, I’m going to go and do some sit-ups and maybe I’ll like, you know, go to…” You don’t have to go anywhere to care for yourself.
You can just care for yourself and your community in tandem and that can actually be much more healthy for you, by the way. Because all this internalized, internal reflection is not good for people. You have to be able to have… Yes, think about yourself, reflect on your practice, okay, but then you need to test it in the world, you’ve got to be with people. So, that’s important. And I hate people! So, I say that as somebody who actually is really anti-social… I don’t want to socialize in that kind of way but I do want to be social with other folks as it relates to collectivizing care.
- Mariame Kaba
[From the remarkable book We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. But you can also find the interview here.]
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So, maybe I just have a different perspective and I talk to a lot of young organizers - people reach out to me a lot because I’ve been organizing for a long time - I’m always telling them, “Your timeline is not the timeline on which movements occur. Your timeline is incidental. Your timeline is only for yourself to mark your growth and your living.” But that’s a fraction of the living that’s going to be done by the universe and that has already been done by the universe. So, when you understand that you’re really insignificant in the grand scheme of things, you just are, then it’s a freedom, in my opinion, to actually be able to do the work that’s necessary as you see it and to contribute in the ways that you can see fit. So, I think that’s my answer to that.
And self-care is really tricky for me, because I don’t believe in the self in the way that people determine it here in this capitalist society that we live in. I don’t believe in self-care, I believe in collective care, collectivizing our care, and thinking more about how we can help each other. How can we collectivize the care of children so that more people can feel like they can actually have their kids but also live in the world and contribute and participate in various different kinds of ways? How do we do that? How do we collectivize care so that when we’re sick and we’re not feeling ourselves, we’ve got a crew of people that are not just our prayer warriors, but our action warriors who are thinking through with us? Like, I’m not just going to be able to cook this week, and you have a whole bunch of folks there, who are just putting a list together for you and bringing the food every day that week and you’re doing the same for your community, too.
I want that as the focus of how I do things and that really comes from the fact that I grew up the daughter of returned migrants, African-returned migrants. I don’t see the world the way that people do here, I just don’t. I don’t agree with it, I think capitalism is actually continuously alienating us from each other, but also even from ourselves and I just don’t subscribe. And for me, it’s too much with, “Yeah I’m going to go do yoga and then, I’m going to go and do some sit-ups and maybe I’ll like, you know, go to…” You don’t have to go anywhere to care for yourself.
You can just care for yourself and your community in tandem and that can actually be much more healthy for you, by the way. Because all this internalized, internal reflection is not good for people. You have to be able to have… Yes, think about yourself, reflect on your practice, okay, but then you need to test it in the world, you’ve got to be with people. So, that’s important. And I hate people! So, I say that as somebody who actually is really anti-social… I don’t want to socialize in that kind of way but I do want to be social with other folks as it relates to collectivizing care.
- Mariame Kaba
[From the remarkable book We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. But you can also find the interview here.]
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February 24, 2021
The VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award
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The VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award
"For a book published in Canada in 2021 that is a hybrid genre, or straddles two or more genres."
"Creative nonfiction writer, poet, essayist, teacher, manuscript consultant, and editor Betsy Warland’s 14 books are not easily classified or categorized in one genre, yet they have contributed greatly to Canadian literary history and continue to influence emerging authors. Many beloved books do not find a comfortable place on a bookshelf or on a prize list because they are innovative in terms of form, creating/inviting/forcing new ways of being read. Considered uncategorizable, they are overlooked or misread. Named in honour of Betsy Warland, this award celebrates work that disrupts convention about what a book should be, how it should read, what it should sound like, what subject matter is acceptable."
Find out more about it here.
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The VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award
"For a book published in Canada in 2021 that is a hybrid genre, or straddles two or more genres."
"Creative nonfiction writer, poet, essayist, teacher, manuscript consultant, and editor Betsy Warland’s 14 books are not easily classified or categorized in one genre, yet they have contributed greatly to Canadian literary history and continue to influence emerging authors. Many beloved books do not find a comfortable place on a bookshelf or on a prize list because they are innovative in terms of form, creating/inviting/forcing new ways of being read. Considered uncategorizable, they are overlooked or misread. Named in honour of Betsy Warland, this award celebrates work that disrupts convention about what a book should be, how it should read, what it should sound like, what subject matter is acceptable."
Find out more about it here.
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February 18, 2021
Some passages from Writing in Space by Lorraine O’Grady
Some passages from Writing in Space, 1973–2019 by Lorraine O’Grady:
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I wanted to set up a situation where the movement back and forth between the experience of the piece and the process of hearing me talk about it might be disorienting, might create the feeling of anxiously watching your feet as you do an unfamiliar dance.
*
Dancers, for instance, who use multi-media are adding new props, but they are still trained bodies moving in space, no matter how outrageously. That is why they offer more audience satisfaction and are more traditionally successful than artists and writers doing performance. And why they are much less interesting.
*
That first week, I went to the Eighth Street Bookstore to look for books on visual art. The first book that attracted me looked like no other I’d seen before. It was a small-format book, wider than it was high, and had a strange red cover totally filled with print. It was Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object. It was the first art book I ever read, and it totally changed my life. It was an almost artless chronicle catalog of documents and events, and I’m sure Lucy never anticipated that someone would read the book from cover to cover, but I did. By the time I finished that history of the conceptual art movement and all its subgenres – performance art, body art, earth art, and so on – I said to myself, “I can do that, and what’s more, I know I can do it better than most of the people who are doing it.” You see, I was always having those ideas, but I didn’t know what to do with them. I didn’t know they could be art, and until then, I hadn’t been in a position, in an intellectual milieu to discover it. After that, the struggle became focused: to discover what my art was, where it came from in me.
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One of my personal cognitos, a favorite is: “I dance therefore I think.”
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The one advantage art has over other methods of knowledge, and the reason I engage in it rather than some other activity for which my training and intelligence might be suited, is that, except for the theoretical sciences, it is the primary discipline where an exercise of calculated risk can regularly turn up what you had not been looking for.
*
I spent all of the 1980s and the 1990s feeling “God, will it never end? Will they never stop taking up all the room, stop speaking for themselves as though speaking for everyone?” The death of the author? The total construction of subjectivity? Sexual liberation as the prime victory of feminism? For you, perhaps. But for others, there was more.
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History as the single-minded story of the winners is something premodern and modern cultures have in common. But history has, in reality, always been just one story among many – and not always the most interesting, not always the most useful to present. It was just the story that was needed to survive, to justify power, or the one capable of being understood with the mindset then available. I like to see the lost stories recuperated: stories to use, to amuse.
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I wanted to set up a situation where the movement back and forth between the experience of the piece and the process of hearing me talk about it might be disorienting, might create the feeling of anxiously watching your feet as you do an unfamiliar dance.
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Dancers, for instance, who use multi-media are adding new props, but they are still trained bodies moving in space, no matter how outrageously. That is why they offer more audience satisfaction and are more traditionally successful than artists and writers doing performance. And why they are much less interesting.
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That first week, I went to the Eighth Street Bookstore to look for books on visual art. The first book that attracted me looked like no other I’d seen before. It was a small-format book, wider than it was high, and had a strange red cover totally filled with print. It was Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object. It was the first art book I ever read, and it totally changed my life. It was an almost artless chronicle catalog of documents and events, and I’m sure Lucy never anticipated that someone would read the book from cover to cover, but I did. By the time I finished that history of the conceptual art movement and all its subgenres – performance art, body art, earth art, and so on – I said to myself, “I can do that, and what’s more, I know I can do it better than most of the people who are doing it.” You see, I was always having those ideas, but I didn’t know what to do with them. I didn’t know they could be art, and until then, I hadn’t been in a position, in an intellectual milieu to discover it. After that, the struggle became focused: to discover what my art was, where it came from in me.
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One of my personal cognitos, a favorite is: “I dance therefore I think.”
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The one advantage art has over other methods of knowledge, and the reason I engage in it rather than some other activity for which my training and intelligence might be suited, is that, except for the theoretical sciences, it is the primary discipline where an exercise of calculated risk can regularly turn up what you had not been looking for.
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I spent all of the 1980s and the 1990s feeling “God, will it never end? Will they never stop taking up all the room, stop speaking for themselves as though speaking for everyone?” The death of the author? The total construction of subjectivity? Sexual liberation as the prime victory of feminism? For you, perhaps. But for others, there was more.
*
History as the single-minded story of the winners is something premodern and modern cultures have in common. But history has, in reality, always been just one story among many – and not always the most interesting, not always the most useful to present. It was just the story that was needed to survive, to justify power, or the one capable of being understood with the mindset then available. I like to see the lost stories recuperated: stories to use, to amuse.
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February 17, 2021
Chris Finley Quote
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"One of my dear friends, political organizer Lee Ann Wang, theorizes that we need to prepare for things to go wrong as part of political organizing campaigns. None of us is completely right or good, so why do we act like political organizing is a sacred space where only whole, righteous subjects roam? We are all broken and cannot possibly have read everything, so we will be wrong sometimes. We live in rape culture. None of us gets to be free of this even as we work toward critiquing heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. Living among humans and in the world is a true act of courage because, even with those working toward social justice, institutionalization and violence exist. We are all in the world, which is full of violence. This is not an excuse for bad behavior but an acknowledgement of the fact that we can try our best but still fall short of being perfect subjects. The call-out culture has only made the gap between the good and the wrong deeper and wider. We need to celebrate moments of truth a solidarity too."
– Chris Finley, Building Maroon Intellectual Communities
[From the book Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness.]
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"One of my dear friends, political organizer Lee Ann Wang, theorizes that we need to prepare for things to go wrong as part of political organizing campaigns. None of us is completely right or good, so why do we act like political organizing is a sacred space where only whole, righteous subjects roam? We are all broken and cannot possibly have read everything, so we will be wrong sometimes. We live in rape culture. None of us gets to be free of this even as we work toward critiquing heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. Living among humans and in the world is a true act of courage because, even with those working toward social justice, institutionalization and violence exist. We are all in the world, which is full of violence. This is not an excuse for bad behavior but an acknowledgement of the fact that we can try our best but still fall short of being perfect subjects. The call-out culture has only made the gap between the good and the wrong deeper and wider. We need to celebrate moments of truth a solidarity too."
– Chris Finley, Building Maroon Intellectual Communities
[From the book Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness.]
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February 16, 2021
Two Nicolas Galeazzi Quotes
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We started with an interest in the fundamental differences between exchange and sharing. Exchange demands a distribution of goods between different entities, from where they can be brought into barter. This declaration of ownership is the basic principle of the market economy. Currencies make this bartering easier; abstract it from complicated personal relations and that makes accumulation desirable. It doesn’t matter whether the currency is money, gift or reputation: the accumulative motor is immediately set in motion.
Sharing, instead, is an economy of responsibility. Here it is not the goods that are distributed, but the care-taking procedures – and as ownership is obsolete, a fair distribution has to be organized collectively. This economic form of a shared responsibility for the usage of common good is what is usually understood as the basic principle of the commons.
– Nicolas Galeazzi, Commoning the Arts?
*
But this disregards that the historical struggle between the common and the private is obviously the other way round! First and foremost, things are common in the broadest sense, and any human economy has to justify its form of distribution. The claim for private enclosures, and ‘ownership’ is just one possible form of distribution – and we know the consequences of this claim. This applies also to knowledge and creativity. ‘My idea’ is never ‘my idea’, it is always a cultural product built up through a common history on the one side, and a highly renovating contemporary common process of knowledge production on the other.
But the capitalist desire-machine embeds the individual into a system that demands the clear declaration of an individual position, accountable for the effectiveness of its personal individuation. The machine is efficient. It creates desires that an individual can recognize and accept as their own. The individual creates itself along the lines of these desires and becomes exactly what the system needs – a unity that is identifiable and flexible according to the needs of the machine.
– Nicolas Galeazzi, Commoning the Arts?
[From the book Turn Turtle! Reenacting the Institute.]
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We started with an interest in the fundamental differences between exchange and sharing. Exchange demands a distribution of goods between different entities, from where they can be brought into barter. This declaration of ownership is the basic principle of the market economy. Currencies make this bartering easier; abstract it from complicated personal relations and that makes accumulation desirable. It doesn’t matter whether the currency is money, gift or reputation: the accumulative motor is immediately set in motion.
Sharing, instead, is an economy of responsibility. Here it is not the goods that are distributed, but the care-taking procedures – and as ownership is obsolete, a fair distribution has to be organized collectively. This economic form of a shared responsibility for the usage of common good is what is usually understood as the basic principle of the commons.
– Nicolas Galeazzi, Commoning the Arts?
*
But this disregards that the historical struggle between the common and the private is obviously the other way round! First and foremost, things are common in the broadest sense, and any human economy has to justify its form of distribution. The claim for private enclosures, and ‘ownership’ is just one possible form of distribution – and we know the consequences of this claim. This applies also to knowledge and creativity. ‘My idea’ is never ‘my idea’, it is always a cultural product built up through a common history on the one side, and a highly renovating contemporary common process of knowledge production on the other.
But the capitalist desire-machine embeds the individual into a system that demands the clear declaration of an individual position, accountable for the effectiveness of its personal individuation. The machine is efficient. It creates desires that an individual can recognize and accept as their own. The individual creates itself along the lines of these desires and becomes exactly what the system needs – a unity that is identifiable and flexible according to the needs of the machine.
– Nicolas Galeazzi, Commoning the Arts?
[From the book Turn Turtle! Reenacting the Institute.]
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February 2, 2021
"If I told the truth I'd like to live my life again / Walk around my youth in somebody else's skin."
“Favorite three-album run”:
— Laïka (@laikasez) January 29, 2021
OutKast (ATLiens, Aquemini, Stankonia)
Steely Dan (Royal Scam, Aja, Gaucho)
Momus (Circus Maximus, Poison Boyfriend, Tender Pervert)
Coltrane (My Favorite Things, Africa/Brass, Olé Coltrane)
I saw this tweet and it reminded me I've been meaning to write about Momus again. There was something so unlikely about seeing Momus on the same list as OutKast, Steely Dan and John Coltrane. But, also, those first three Momus albums (Circus Maximus, Poison Boyfriend and Tender Pervert), which I listened to obsessively (to an almost insane degree) in my twenties, are probably the reason I'm a lifelong Momus fan. There's always a part of me that believes those three records (along with two other Momus records from the same period: Monsters of Love and The Ultraconformist) basically changed my life.
So, as I've often mentioned over the years, I've been some sort of obsessive Momus fan. But it's really the strangest kind of fandom. The early Momus records meant so much to me. But since then he's made a lot of records and I've found some of them unlistenable, many of them just okay, and a few of them pretty good. (I still sometimes listen to Ocky Milk and Hypnoprism.) During so many of those years I found myself extremely frustrated by his recorded output. I wanted him to be a Maoist intellectual in the music industry, but it seems he wanted to be some sort perplexing cross between the Pet Shop Boys and a Scottish/Japanese version of Serge Gainsbourg. However, also during that time, on almost every record, there were at least one or two songs that did mean something to me. (Well, definitely not on every record. But often enough.) Not sure I could even make a full list, but a few that come to mind: Song in Contravention, Platinum, Christmas on Earth, I Am a Kitten, Giapponese A Roma, Paolo, I Want You, But I Don't Need You, Miles Franklin, Nervous Heartbeat, Datapanik, Gibbous Moon, Precocious Young Miss Calloway, The Thunderclown, Erase. (I especially like the opening lines of Platinum: "If I told the truth I'd like to live my life again / Walk around my youth in somebody else's skin." Which is perhaps the subtext of this entire post.) Over the years this list of individual Momus songs really starts to add up. Many albums I find it hard to listen to all the way through. And many songs I love listening to on repeat.
And now there is something else. Because, for some reason, 2020 was the year I really started listening to Momus again. Perhaps it began when I read his sort-of-autobiography Niche. (And soon I'll also read the new book about him: Famous for Fifteen People.) And, even though I've listened to every single Momus record hundreds of times each, whether I like them or not, I started to feel his 2018-2020 run was the first time since the beginning he's put out three records in a row that I genuinely like: Pantaloon, Akkordion and Vivid. I'm not sure I would completely recommend these records to someone who is not already a Momus fan. Still, three Momus albums in a row that I rather like. Nothing in the past thirty years of his recorded output suggested to me that this was ever going to happen again. Coming back again to things that gave me solace when I was younger is perhaps also due to the pandemic. And Vivid is a record entirely about the pandemic. Which has also been a solace. (As he sings on the Vivid track September: "And when you think you've reached the end / It’s only the beginning of the end.") (But then I think of the opening lines of his very first single Morality is Vanity: "Seven million people died in the great war / A bout of influenza quadrupled that score / Why pimp to posterity? / Why should they admire us? / All the heroes of Valhalla / Weigh less than a virus.") Even with these records it's mainly only certain songs: Good Time Coming, Glacier, The Poet, Grand Guignol, Inside, Oblivion, September, Empty Paris, Optimism. But the songs I like continue to add up over the years. And the songs I don't like as much seem to fall away. (As Momus himself says in this interview in The Quietus: "There's some complete dross on every album, but when I'm good I'm world class.")
All of this has something to do with getting older. Momus is ten years older than I am. I've always felt that, as an artist of any kind, when you get older the most likely thing to happen is that one's artistic work becomes less good over time. You start to repeat yourself and the repetitions bring diminishing returns. Or you try to go in some completely new direction and end up doing something you're not nearly as good at. I'm constantly trying to figure out how I might avoid this rather pessimistic assumption from becoming a self-fulfilling reality. And there is some way Momus is both repeating himself and going in new directions all at the same time. Everything is familiar but you can also feel him so often pushing in new directions. I'm not sure what other sixty-year-old pop musicians continue to be so inventive.
I met Momus in 2016 in Tokyo when he covered some of my songs as part of the project Every Song I've Ever Written. So maybe that also softened me to him somewhat. It was so amazing to hear him cover my teenage songs, which were in some ways imitation Momus songs, and to hear him turn them into real Momus songs. And then the other day I clicked on his new track Coco The Clown in which he sings the lines: "I lack what I lack / but I am what I am / so cut me some slack / I'll cut you some back." And I thought: maybe I should cut him some slack. Perhaps cut myself some as well. And, at the same time, I feel that possibly the only way to keep making good work as an artist over the course of an entire lifetime is to be vigilant with oneself. I'm not sure.
So perhaps a good way to end these rather unfinished thoughts might be with a few lines from the Momus song Brexochasm:
Finally fulfilling my potential
Success arrives belatedly
I’m seeing in the end that mere survival
is serenity…
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January 14, 2021
Un sentiment d'authenticité: ma vie avec PME-ART
UN SENTIMENT D'AUTHENTICITÉ est un livre hybride, sorte de «roman sur PME-ART» qui se situe entre l’autobiographie artistique et le récit, dans lequel Jacob Wren revient sur plus de vingt années de création. Le récit commence lorsque le jeune performeur rencontre Sylvie Lachance et Richard Ducharme, et qu’il déménage de Toronto à Montréal pour concevoir un projet avec eux. C’est alors que s’amorce la passionnante histoire du groupe interdisciplinaire PME-ART.
Dès ses débuts, Wren veut créer un théâtre dédié à l’acte de rester soi-même en situation de performance: cette quête deviendra le fil conducteur de son livre, mais aussi de son art et de sa vie. Avec une intelligence affûtée, qui évite toute complaisance envers lui-même, son milieu et la société, Wren revisite en détail sept des productions les plus marquantes du groupe. Il se dévoile en toute franchise et avoue, entre autres, son incapacité à apprendre le français alors qu’il est codirecteur artistique d’une troupe bilingue. Il aborde aussi les avantages et les difficultés des collaborations intensives, les paradoxes du leadership, les répercussions venant du fait de produire des œuvres inclassables.
Dans une prose parsemée d’anecdotes et d’observations douces-amères, s’approchant de l’oralité, parfois même du stream of consciousness, l’écrivain compose sa «dramaturgie des idées» et nous mène vers d’habiles moments de chute, tantôt drôles, tantôt émouvants. Jacob Wren signe ici un livre à la fois intime et ambitieux, qui vise à transformer la manière dont la performance peut s’écrire et se pratiquer aujourd’hui.
Traduit de l'anglais par Daniel Canty.
Avec des postfaces de Kathrin Tiedemann et de Daniel Canty et 36 photographies en noir et blanc.
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Depuis la fin des années 1980, la pratique artistique de JACOB WREN est une combinaison étonnante de performances créées en collaboration, de littérature et d’arts visuels. L’essentiel de son travail en performance a été réalisé à titre de créateur et de codirecteur artistique de PME-ART. Il a collaboré avec des artistes comme Lene Berg, Pieter de Buysser, Tori Kudo et Nadia Ross sur divers projets internationaux. Ses romans ont été publiés en anglais, en français et en norvégien. Il habite à Montréal.
Son traducteur, DANIEL CANTY, est, comme lui, écrivain et artiste. Il a traduit des livres de poésie de Stephanie Bolster, Benoit Jutras, Erin Moure, Michael Ondaatje et Charles Simic et était le traducteur attitré du poète officiel du Parlement du Canada, Fred Wah, de 2011 à 2013.
Éditions Triptyque | Collection Difforme
En librairie le 20 janvier 2021 | 318 pages | 28,95 $
LIVRE: 978-2-89801-116-0 PDF: 978-2-89801-117-7
📚 Sur commande ici: https://www.leslibraires.ca/livres/un-sentiment-d-authenticite-ma-vie-jacob-wren-9782898011160.html
📌 Plus d'infos ici: http://www.groupenotabene.com/publication/un-sentiment-dauthenticité-ma-vie-avec-pme-art
🎥 Réalisation: Cédric Trahan
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