Aaarg.org Is Dead, Long Live Capital(isms) + Danto Responds to Queries on Art + NY Times on Black Straight Women's Marriage Prospects + 77 Banks Gone Under: Did You Know That?

For five years or so, an unheralded P2P site featuring a massive intellectual trove existed, mostly under the radar, and now it's dead. Aaaarg.org was an open-source, virtual library, one of the few places online where you could find a vast array of intellectual material usually on lockdown by publishers, private institutions, anyone. (It was linked to The Public School, a truly public, free-form, anti-institutional collective, initiated by the Telic Arts Exchange in Los Angeles in 2008, that has created and offered classes, at low cost, on a variety of utterly relevant topics, by anyone, in LA and 6 other cities (Helsinki, Brussels, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Juan). The Public School is still alive.)

Organized by participants and loosely overseen by Sean Dockery, aaarg's archive included work by almost every major theorist past and present and many not so well known, and "courses" or lists (think "Posthumanism," "Queer Technologies," "Bodies and Time," etc., ), also self-organized, which people could study to learn about...well, a great number of things in the realm of the humanities and social sciences. It did encounter legal threats, from Verso, OMA Rem Koolhaas, Columbia University Press, and Macmillan, the most recent press to issue it a cease-and-desist letter, tellingly enough, not long after Macmillan had worked out a deal with Apple for the iPad. Originally it communicated via email, but that shifted to a Twitter feed that went kaput as of May 27, 2010.

My own experience with Aaarg was limited, but I do want to note one remarkable thing that happened as a result of the site: for several years now, I've been trying to reach the Italian conceptual artist Cesare Pietroiusti. I first came across his work, particular Non-functional Thoughts, while surfing through MIT's news feeds. (I'm known to do such things.) He had been a guest there back in 2004, I believe. I found the gallery that had originally published Pietroiusti's work, and contacted them, but had no luck whatsoever getting ahold of the book. So I posted on Aaarg to see if anyone knew how to acquire the book or reach Pietroiusti, because it wasn't in any library I had access to, it wasn't available on Amazon or any other online book-seller, and I didn't know anyone who could lend me a copy. Lo and behold, after posting this request several times, a certain someone replied that he would try to upload the book, but never did. And this someone wrote me some months later and said that not only would I be able to find Non-functional Thoughts online (cf. above), but that if I sent my address, I would receive more Pietroiusti materials--because it was Pietroiusti himself! I loved this; he not only did send me his work (several books, including 100 things that certainly are not art; a CD), but also two original conceptual pieces, one of which I gave out, via raffle, to my students on the last day of classes! The work requires that if you're its owner, you must give it to whoever requests it, so whom better to have it than my student artists? Perhaps this might have happened via email or this blog or Facebook or some other means, but I appreciated how things unfolded via and as a result of this peer-to-peer site.

What I keep thinking about is the how the desire for proprietary control, control in the form of copyight, of intellectual property, that these publishers are demonstrating, which I grasp rests on a particular economic viewpoint that in part does benefit the authors of some of these works, contrasts not only with the work of The Public School and similar networks, but also with the push for free access to intellectual material and capital--classes, syllabi and so forth--by a number of very wealthy and powerful private universities, including two of the leading ones in the world, the aforementioned MIT* and Stanford. As anyone who has access to iTunes knows, for example, both of these schools, which cost about $50,000 to attend as undergraduates nowadays, make a wide array of their material free (you must, however, sign up for Apple), and MIT in particular has pushed for open-sourcing its syllabi for some time. (Other institutions also make their course materials, classes, and so forth available, but nowhere to the extent of MIT and Stanford). I think that making this material available is an excellent idea, but I also realize that the economics of it, the questions of property rights (especially in this country), control and access, are fraught. While being able to watch online classes on computer science, or chemistry, or the philosophy of mind, or sexuality, gender and performance in the contemporary global context, benefits potentially millions of people who will never be able to attend Stanford, and benefits Stanford too, what about the students who are paying a premium to attend (though they do get a substantially value-added experience, including direct access to the professor, the possibility of collaborative work and face-to-face conversations with each other, classroom time, access to world-class facilities, etc.), what about the contracting nature of humanities and social sciences academe, its march towards commercialism, and the prospects for those scholars who would benefit greatly from being able to teach, with pay, these courses elsewhere? Also, I think about the complex issues of intellectual work, its status as labor and property, and its control and dissemination: who ultimately has the say on what happens to it?

Nevertheless, I mourn the (temporary?) disappearance of Aaarg, and look forward to its (phantasmal) return--in some other guise.



===

In today's New York Times, the distingushed philosopher and critic Arthur Danto has responded to several queries, under the title "On Art, Action and Meaning," concerning his discussion of Marina Abramovic's The Artist Is Present, which ended just a few days ago at MoMa, and which I've talked about more than once on this blog.  I recommend reading what he has to say, though I found it too reductive, and strangely it left out Kant, who is--and this is not just my reading of the history and philosophy of art--utterly central to all Western art, and the understanding of this art, since the Enlightenment. He also says that philosophers aren't interested in art, which probably should have been reframed as, the Anglo-American academic philosophy profession isn't, because many of the best known philosophers, especially in the Continental tradition, have written extensively about art, sometimes devoting whole books (cf. Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Collingwood, Adorno, etc.) on the topic. Lastly I was quite surprised that he holds fast, in the face of nearly 50 years now of art-making that troubles the notion of the autonomy of the artist, to the idea of Abramovic alone as the "artist," especially given his extensive writings on the conceptual and performance art of the 1960s and 1970s, and on Andy Warhol. It's invigorating, nevertheless, to witness such an august figure not simply ignore, but actually take the time to respond, however so, to readers and spectators who still had questions and criticism of his view of a given artwork.

Addendum: If you're in Washington, there's an Yves Klein show (1928-1962) show at the Hirshhorn Museum you might not want to miss!

===

Okay, this is my final New York Times-related post of the day, but last night I saw the following article by Sam Roberts and threw up my hands:  "Black Women See Fewer Black Men at the Altar." I won't even catalogue the problems with this piece, which rehearses arguments, tropes and perspectives so tired they want to just park themselves by the side of the road and die, but I will say that I loved the incoherent opening of the first comment, which began:

"I'm biracial (Black and White), the product of a genuine marriage between German born woman and a Bahamian/Native American man...." 

Uh, in addition the shaky comment about a "genuine marriage" (what's an ungenuine one, or that be a disingenuous one?), this person's ancestral background sounds like it involves multiplicity...okay, I know, I know, we remain entranced by our binaries, and "biracial" is a term that many people hold dear to their hearts.  Something must always cancel out something else, and the principle of both/and is a terrifying chimera....

But then, thankfully, there are always wits like this one:

Darn, this is sure going to make it hard for the tea partiers to know whom to take the country back from.

Believe you me, they have a pretty good idea.

===

We are not by any means as bad off as during the Great Depression, but the Great Recession lingers on, despite the government's regular assurances that we're in a "recovery." In fact, the same New York Times online edition noted above blithely reports today on $5000 bespoke suits and $4 million condos--Happy Days Are Here Again! Despite this optimism or blindness, unemployment rate isn't budging much, we aren't creating enough new private sector jobs, foreclosures of residential and commercial real estate are burgeoning, and the policies espoused by this Congress, the administration and economic policy makers appear to be still more concerned with wealthy investors and Wall Street, and cruelly indifferent to the struggles and suffering of millions of Americans.

One thing I rarely see reported in the mainstream media is the massive number of bank failures that are still occurring.  If you were to guess how many banks have failed since January, what number would you propose, at this time when we're in a "recovery"? If you guessed 77, that would be right: according to the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation's Failed Bank List, 77 banks have gone under since January 2010, or exactly 11 per month. This is evidence that the problem facing our financial system isn't just the "too-big-to-fail" banks, or deregulation, or securitization, or the failed right-wing laissez-faire, market-obsessed global policies that have brought us to this brink, nor even the problematic libertarian and neoliberal policies currently be implemented to address our economic problems, but at a very basic level, a severe weakness in terms of capitalization in many small and mid-sized American banks. Last year, 140 banks failed.  According to the FDIC chart, at this point last year 73 banks had failed, so the rate is slightly higher, but we're far beyond 2008, when only 25 banks failed.

I bring this up because I still don't think we're getting a complete or honest picture of where this economy is from the people in charge of it. I'm not arguing that it would be easy, or even possible, at least fully, to describe where we're at, but it's also clear that the government, the Federal Reserve, the bankers, corporations in general, and, worst of all for the American public, the mainstream media, are not being square about the true economic trough we're in or how little the current policies in place are addressing what's wrong.

The FDIC was a creation of the New Deal, and it has served the country invaluably since its creation, and it was the result of the spectacular wave of bank failures that engulfed the country by 1932, when around 10,000 banks had failed since the go-go 1920s. I may be a hopeless utopian and rationalist here, but I continue to believe that if we were better informed about even the basics of what's going on in this country, we would be better prepared as citizens to push our representatives--the Congress--to do what would be best for us as a whole, rather than just for those few citizens that happen to be, well, powerful corporations.

Classes (Nearly) Over + 2010 FIFA World Cup

Classes have (nearly) come to an end. Or rather, this is the final official week of classes in the College, though I still have one more class to teach next week, during reading week. (We'll be discussing the final three student novellas in workshop.) Now that it's over, I can shout from the blogtops Conceptual Art/Writing class exhilarated me; I feel incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to teach the class, and to have been able to do so with students who were willing to step out, as it became clear, on what sometimes initially appeared to be shifting ice. By which I mean, to be looking at, thinking about and creating work--and whose exemplars--that remain under tremendous contention.  The class served as an intellectual transfusion for me, as it required me to think through a genealogy that was indistinct, but discernible, and put it together, in coherent fashion, for the class, while also making clear that this was only one reading of the history of this constellation of art forms. (It helped too that we have the graduate level Poetry and Poetics Working Group, because its conversations informed those in my class.) Now that I've done it, I feel I have a much clearer and deeper sense of conceptual art's history, its origins and antecedents, and its relation to and phantasmal presence in other canonical and non-canonical artforms. As I was saying to a friend, I feel capable now of reading backwards, before the coining of "conceptual art," to see conceptual practices in many different places and forms. (This was also the first time that I've taught the work of figures such as Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Goldsmith, Rob Fitterman, Mendi + Keith Obadike, and many others.) The students all created 6-8 projects, grounded in language and its possibilities, and it was a delight to read them, and imagine how the ones containing the possibility of performance might be realized. One student proposed realizing them--performing some of them--during the assigned exam period, so we'll see how that turns out. At any rate, the class, like the other one I'm teaching, represents one of the most enjoyable aspects of teaching, which is transmitting knowledge to students, watching them learn, grow intellectually and create knowledge, and learning from them in the process.  And who knows, down the road another Yoko Ono or Marcel Duchamp might emerge from this experience.
+++

The 2010 FIFA World Cup begins in two weeks, on June 11, running till July 11, in South Africa. This is the most watched sporting event in the world, and this is the first time it'll be held in Africa, with the host country leading a group of 32 national teams, including prior winners England (1966), France (1998), Italy (1934, 1938, 1982, 2006), Germany (1954, 1974, 1990), Brazil (1958, 1962, 1970, 1994, 2002), Uruguay (1930, 1950), and Argentina (1978, 1986), and stalwarts such as Netherlands, Japan, Portugal, Mexico, Denmark, Cameroon, South Korea, and, interestingly enough, North Korea. Though the opening matches, pairing South Africa and Mexico, and Uruguay and France, will be held in Johannesburg and Cape Town respectively, subsequent matches will be held all over the country, culminating in the third place match at Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium in Port Elizabeth, and the championship match at Soccer City in Johannesburg.



The 1994 host of the tournament, the United States, will also field a participating team this year, having made it through the qualifying rounds for the North/Central American region to finish first, with 20 points, just ahead of Mexico's 19. The US ended up in the Tournament's Group C, which also includes one of the tournament's best teams, England, but also Algeria, which barely edged into first place in its Africa Group 6 matches, over Gambia and Senegal, and Slovenia, which finished second to Slovakia in its European Group 3. Getting by England (ranked 8th in the FIFA World Rankings) will be the US's (ranked 14th) major challenge, and few online commentators I've read give the US team much--any--chance of achieving this. Yet the US team had one of its best summers in 2009; in the Confederations Cup, the US ended up in Group B, with Brazil, Egypt and Italy, yet after losing to Italy (3-1) and Brazil (3-0), the US came back to finish second in its group, and reached the semifinal on tie-breaking goals, surpassing Italy. In the semifinals the US beat Spain, then atop the FIFA World rankings, 2-0, losing to Brazil in the final 3-2, though they were up 2-0 at half-time, and had the game in hand.  They must capitalize on any leads in South Africa, and do everything they can to keep the ball out of their defensive area, which is where they're far and away weakest.

The 23-person World Cup squad, recently finalized by coach Bob Bradley, comprises a number of veterans from the 2008 campaign, in Germany: star goalie and Everton (English Premier League) mainstay Tim Howard, forwards Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey (above left), midfielders DaMarcus Beasley and Michael Bradley, and defenders Oguchi Onyewu (at right) and Steve Cherundolo. Newcomers include Jozy Altidore (the 20-year-old sensation who scored a hat trick against Trinidad and Tobago in a qualifying game), Robbie Findley (top of article, right), José Francisco Torres, Ricardo Clark, Maurice Edu, and surprise picks Edson Buddle and Herculez Gomez. In a little remarked change, nearly 1/3rd of the US team are black, and 1/2 of the team are either black or latino, a first for the US.  The forward and midfield core are especially strong, and can hang with some of the best teams (except perhaps Brazil, Spain, and Portugal), but the US's defense remains an issue. Unaggressive play and defensive mistakes have doom the US, as does the absence of players competing in the world's top leagues, but the latter has gradually changed, and the US's own major league, the MLS, has gotten stronger with each passing year. If the defensive corps can keep mistakes to a minimum, they do stand a chance with Donovan, Bradley, Altidore, Findley, and Dempsey going hard.

It'll be interesting to see if host country South Africa gets a boost, as has often happened; France (1998), Argentina (1978), Germany (1974, as West Germany), England (1966), and Uruguay (1938) have won the tournament when hosting it, and most recently, Germany finished 3rd in 2006 and South Korea finished 4th in 2002 when serving as hosts.  Moreover, the multibillion-dollar new stadiums and infrastructure the South African government has built have been controversial in a country still suffering from severe gaps in income equality, and the threats of terrorism, violence and crime are also pressing. Just recently, on May 25, the Colombian team, which had not qualified for the tournament, were robbed in their 5-star Johannesburg hotel of about $2600 in money and other personal goods. South Africa has repeated assured visitors that it has security and safety issues under control. Let us sincerely hope they do.

I will be certainly be watching closely and rooting avidly for the US and other teams, including Brazil. My prediction for the finals: Brazil 3, Portugal 2.

Marina Abramovic @ MoMa

A few weeks back I posted about Marina Abramovic's (1946-) doppelgänger, Brooklyn-based artist Anya Liftig, and since Abramovic's Museum of Modern Art show, "The Artist Is Present," began last month (March 14), I've been intending to catch it, and after one of my conceptual art/writing students described her experiences at the show, I vowed not to miss it. Though the nude artists reeneacting Abramovic's prior performances and the spectators misbehaving while interacting with to them have garnered the most attention, the centerpiece of the show is Abramovic's reprise of her durational performance piece on MoMa's second floor, "The Artist Is Present," in which she sits, motionless except for eyeblinks, facing any museum patron who wants to sit across the table from her.  She has performed this piece every day since the exhibit began, and will continue it through the end of the show, on May 31.

In the post I'd referenced above, Liftig dressed up as Abramovic, down to the single braid falling over her shoulder and proceeded to mirror her, sitting across from her motionlessly for the entire day, leaving only when the guard's ushered her out at the museum's closing. She labeled her corps-à-corps with Abramovic "The Anxiety of Influence," after Harold Bloom's famous study and theory.  I was curious to see if someone else would try Liftig's approach while I was at the museum, but no such luck. Nevertheless, when I arrived at the exhibit, amidst a large crowd drawn not only by the Abramovic show but by concurrent shows focusing on Tim Burton (sold out), Picasso (a crowd pleasure), and William Kentridge (which I also viewed), a young woman was sitting facing Abramovic intently, almost as if throwing down the gantlet, and I watched Abramovic and her for a while, trying to register any response on Abramovic's part while also trying to discern the ferocity I perceived on the young woman's face, in her posture, in her affect. It was almost as if she were viewing the performance as a form of mild combat, and her rigidity and stillness did not ebb in the slightest for the entire time that I watched them; Abramovic, for her part, slumped a bit forward, moving only her eyes, present in body and mind, a presence writing herself into the consciousness of everyone there. I was, almost in spite of myself, riveted by them.

There wasn't a long line, so I could have gotten in it and possibly faced Abramovic, but I wasn't sure I was ready to do so--if you do face her, you consent to being both photographed and filmed by the museum and her--and I wanted to see the rest of her exhibit, on the 6th floor, so I asked the guard how long the young woman had been sitting there, and he told me with weariness that she'd been there for about 20 minutes. I'd taken a few photos, which were verboten, and the guard saw me about to take yet another and stopped me, so I showed him that I could draw on the phone, and he carefully watched me for a while as I did a quick sketch of Abramovic, which I posted below, then headed upstairs.  It was definitely worth it.



While the nude performances unsurprisingly have drawn a lot of attention and sparked some misbehavior on patrons' part (when are most people, especially men in this society, socialized to act maturely around nudity, especially nudes of the opposite sex, except perhaps in a locker room?) and are eye-catching at the very least, what I found even more compelling was the historical trajectory of Abramovic's solo body-centered performances, with a fused personal-political edge, in 1970s Belgrade. The earliest series, called "Rhythm," culminated in Rhythm 0, reminiscent in some ways of Yoko Ono's Cut Away and similar Fluxus actions of the 1960s: taking "full responsibility" for her passivity, she stocked the gallery with 72 items, including knives, a hammer, a saw, a pistol and bullet, a whip, blue paint, and so forth (I actually wrote down all the materials listed), and empowered the audience to utilize any of these implements on her. While it appears several men did undress her or adorn her with paint, one, horrifyingly, loaded the bullet into the pistol, placed the gun in Abramovic's hand and then lifted it to her head, before setting it back down. I read this in part as a demonstration of the humanity and rationality underlying the alternately liberal and brutal political, economic and social system in which she was living, as well as a commentary on social and gendered power, participatory art and chance, but also as a kind of limit test for the sort of conceptual, aleatory and performance art that she had been engaged in up to this point.  When I think contemporary public discourse in the US, I shudder to consider an artist attempting this today.

The show then shifted to her later projects with her partner at the time, Ulay (Uwe Lay Siepen, 1943-), with whom she performed some of her most famous pieces, including early versions of what would become "The Artist Is Present."  Some performances involved extending ideas to their logical or illogical end, as when the two stood back to back between two pillars and rush forward until they banged into the barriers, then walked backwards, or a durational performance in which the two screamed at each other, or sucked breaths from each other, or slapped each other; in all cases, both Abramovic's and Ulay's bodies served as the ground and primary medium of art, and again, the personal and public fused, as they had a relationship during this period that lasted until around 1988, when they embarked on their final joint performance, approaching each other from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, and then formally bidding each other goodbye when they met at the midpoint.

After this Abramovic returned to solo performances, but also has staged events involved others, created sculptures, made videos, and continued along the path she marked out in her early work, though since the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequently of Yugoslavia, the political valence has shifted, I'd, towards a critique of the personal itself and of the myth, practices and possibilities of conceptual and performance art. One of her most famous US events occurred in November 2005, when over the span of a week she staged Seven Easy Pieces, a re-enactment of seven noteworthy performance pieces, by artists such as Bruce Nauman (Body Pressure, 1974), Vito Acconci (Seedbed, 1972), Valie Export (Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969), Gina Pane (1973), Joseph Beuys (How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965), and herself (Lips of Thomas, 1975), from the heyday of conceptual and performance art, on and beneath a large round stage, at the Guggenheim Museum. (I remember when this piece was performed, but I was in Chicago and didn't get to see it.) To these she added one new piece, Entering the Other Side, 2005. The Lips of Thomas was and remains particularly notorious because it involved Abramovic not only carving the Yugoslavian star into her stomach with a razor blade, but then lying on a bed of ice, while a heatlamp increased blood flow from her open wound. At the initial performance, audiene members pulled the ice blocks from beneath her, but, from what I gather, did not do so in New York. The 6th floor exhibit documented all these performances in depth, and includes several reenactments of individual and duo pieces. These include the nude human walkway--which I did pass through, rather clumsily--and the woman on a bike seat, though unlike in Abramovic's earlier version, these performers were suspended high above the audience. The woman who was performing it when I initially entered the room seemed almost to be tearing up; after noticing this, and her intent gaze back at an elderly man who appeared to be transfixed by her, I had to walk away. Yet another piece, originally performed by Abramovic and now enacted by someone else, involved the woman lying nude beneath a human skeleton, her breathing animating it. As I stood watching her, a man was taking pictures (forbidden), and she looked back intensely, though eventually a guard did tell him to stop.  With both these nudes, the power dynamics I saw on display disturbed me a bit, and I wondered if I would have felt the same way had men been perched nude up on the wall or lying beneath the skeleton. (Perhaps they were; I missed them.) Before I left, I made a point of taking part in at least one more interactive piece, Abramovic's wall sculpture, The Green Dragon Lying (1989), a slab of marble and a quartz pillow spectators are invited to lie on, until they feel the spiritual effects Abramovic suggests the piece conveys. I lay on it for about 2 minutes, as a large crowd gathered in front of the video of Lips of Thomas, which featured Abramovic flogging herself, and rested there for a while. I thought I perceived someone photographing me, so perhaps a photo of yours truly is now part of someone's archive.

Before I left, I passed through the William Kentridge exhibit, but I was almost too exhausted--in a good way--by Abramovic's tableaux (some vivants) and documentation to really imbibe Kentridge's compellingly complex artworks. I did study some of the mixed media paintings, drawings, prints, and etchings, though, and was able to appreciate in a way that no photograph of his work can convey the layers of material and media constituting each. I read this layering, its richness and invisibility except upon close viewing, and his restrained color palate (mostly blacks, whites and grays) as obvious but productive metaphors for the longstanding realities of his native country, South Africa. I would like to go back and see his exhibit again before it closes.  Below are some photos I took of the 2nd floor performance.


"The Artist Is Present" from an upper floor

Abramovic and participant, "The Artist Is Present"

"The Artist Is Present"

Abramovic

Abramovic and participant

Spectators at "The Artist Is Present," and the entryway (the white line on the floor served as a visual cordon)

Tim Burton balloon sculpture and patrons, first floor, MoMa


Woman sketching Abramovic's "The Artist Is Present"


Participatory art: a museum attendee lying on "Green Dragon Lying"

1st Day of Classes + Abramovic's Doppelgänger + Right Wing Liars & Code Pink

Returning to teaching after a short break is always easier than after a long(er) one. I'll say no more about my classes for now except that my performance of John Cage's 4'33", which I improvised on/using my computer (projecting the keyboard onto the hanging screen), and followed by giving students a double-sided copy featuring the first two versions of the score (cf. below) on one side and Cage's original commentary about the piece, along with a series of questions I sought to have the students answer at that moment and without a lot of thought, appeared to go over well. It also was the first musical performance I've given since adolescence (band).

What a quarter this ought to be.

* * *

Speaking of conceptual art performances, I would have paid double to see this particular Marina Abramovic performance at the Met: what began this past Saturday, March 27, 2010, as another day of Abramovic's reprise of her marathon sitting-still-in-silence performance, "The Artist Is Present," turned into something quite different, when a young woman wearing her hair in a black knot over her shoulder, just like Abramovic, and dressed in a long blue caftan, like Abramovic, took her place across from Abramovic and, to the bemusement, awe, consternation, and surprise of other attendees, proceeded to mirror Abramovic's performance with a remarkable one of her own. She did not speak, she did not move, she did not nod off or rise to use the bathroom or anything else: for the rest of the day, she matched Abramovic's presence with her own, leaving only when the gallery closed and guards politely ushered her out.



The performer: Brooklyn-based artist Anya Liftig. The performance? "The Anxiety of Influence," a title she took from the eponymous book by critic Harold Bloom. Why did she do it? She explains her rationale and her motives to Tatiana Berg at Bomblog.  A quote:

I did feel like a transgressor but I love the subtle art of subversion—playing with ideas from the inside out. As I was sitting there, I felt like that was one of the strongest elements of Marina’s piece. She is attempting to “interact” with the audience, but really, the endeavor for empathy is one of implicit sadness, as we connect and miss one another. It is not meant to be read at face value. It also brings up the role of the artist, how they connect on an individual, emotional level with others when they are constantly being observed and commented upon by the masses held at bay by the guards.

(I'll let Liftig speak for herself, but this reminds me of Yoko Ono's famous "Cut Piece," to give one example, and the marvelous unpredictability of performance, particularly of the conceptual sort, and the role, with all its attendant possibilities and dangers, that other participants can play.)

* * *

As for playing games with serious, grave consequences, and the disinformation campaign that currently plagues our political discourse, here's at least part of the reason why (the "mainstream" media are also a huge part of the problem):



(h/t via Digby)

As to confronting liars and criminals, Code Pink took some direct action this weekend, confronting fascistic propagandist Karl Rove as he attempted to spew his mendacities, now packaged as a "memoir," in southern California. Guess what? He fled.



(h/t via Crooks and Liars)

Tan Lin's Chalk Playground, LitTwitChalk

Performa 09, the biennial performance festival, has been taking place since the beginning of the month, and having missed the entire program in previous years, I've wanted to catch at least a few of the events, which include performances by the likes of Mike Kelly, Joan La Barbara, Adam Pendleton, Pauline Oliveros, Arto Lindsay, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster & Ari, and many others, so yesterday, despite the rain (from the nor'easter), I ventured over to the Lower East Side to catch, and participate, in artist and poet Tan Lin's Chalk Playground, LitTwitChalk.

The event took place in and on the concrete playground of PS 2, on Madison Street just off Allen Street, on the edge of Chinatown and in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, and involved a live street-chalking exercise, followed by Tan's and others' chalking of a Futurist manifesto, a Chinese manifesto, and a collaborative, and real-time poetry “line” installation piece and drawings by a wide array of writers. Since I'm rarely in this part of Manhattan, I found getting there like navigating a maze, which included a sidetrip of one stop into Brooklyn before I switched trains and reemerged from the subway essentially right where the PATH had let me out, just one block north of Ground Zero and the WTC site. My iPhone's enhanced GPS mapping system proved very handy (the pulsating dot that moves as you walk is entrancing too), and I eventually found the site, though the rain had begun to drench the pavement, though not the chalkwork, and a number of participants were still there, including Tan.

On the Performa site, Tan listed, among others, Felix Alarcon, Bruce Andrews, Anselm Berrigan, Jimbo Blachly, Lee Ann Brown, Ethan Bumas, Greta Bumas, Emilie Clark, Yina Chun, Kareem Estefan, Robert Fitterman, Sarah Gambito, Kenneth Goldsmith, Paolo Javier, De-Quan Jenkins, Ahn Lin, Joseph Legaspi, Saqub Naeem, Jason Perry, Elizabeth Sanchez, Brittany Sanders, Katherine Sanders, Olivia Shao, Phillippa Shao, Lytle Shaw, Jennifer Tsuei, Charles Yarbrough, and Helena Zhang. I saw of few of these writers and artists, as well as Gordon Tapper, above whose extended, multicolored line I, at Tan's invitation, chalked in one. (See video below).

I plan to revisit the site later this week, just to see how the chalking has held up. After several days of rain, and later tires and children's feet, it probably will be a blurry mess, but the collaborative, outdoor aspects of it, as well as its ephemeral nature, made it a lot of fun, and a great deal of the statements were thoughtful and provocative. I hope Tan does this again, on heavily trafficked sidewalks in parts of the city where the messages may spark immediate thought and commentary among passersby.

Some photos:

Tan Lin observing some of the handiwork

Little artists participating in the event

Participants chatting (Bruce Andrews in all black)

Lin videorecording some of the work (Pierre Joris in the trenchcoat and beret)

My first line

YouTube video I made of the first line I chalked (very short)

A video of one of the collaboratively chalked pieces (very short)

Sarah Schulman's Book Event

October is almost over, and it feels like it has raced by. It's been wonderful and at times disorienting to be back east for the entire month; usually I'm well immersed into the dizzying hive of the fall quarter, but so far I've had a chance to think and read and write (and yes, write letters of recommendation!) and go to conferences, with breathers in between every activity, and it feels almost unreal. But wonderful nevertheless.

Since I've been in town I've had an opportunity not only to see people I haven't run into in a while, but meet folks I've known of or even have corresponded with over the years but never met face to face. Such was the case earlier today when I attended a book launch party for author Sarah Schulman, someone I admire tremendously and one of my literary heros/sheros. In addition to writing novels, plays, and a variety of nonfiction work, Sarah has been relentless in her activism over the years, particularly around issues affecting women, queer people, people of color, and working-class and poor people. She doesn't just pay lip service to these issues, she writes and fights, to use Ishmael Reed's phrase. This year the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at CUNY named her to deliver the prestigious 18th annual David R. Kessler lecture, which she'll do on November 12. Its title is "Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences." She joins an illustrious group of previous eminents that includes Samuel R. Delany, Barbara Smith, Adrienne Rich, Cherrie Moraga, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, John D'Emilio, Edmund White, Isaac Julie, Judith Butler, Douglas Crimp, and Joan Nestle.

Sarah's new novel, The Mere Future (one of my September 2009 book picks, I believe) captures her critical and activist approach, in speculative, fictional form; despite its unassuming title, the novel perceptively and incisively extrapolates from present-day New York, with its luxe-mania and unhelpful bromides and megabillionaire mayor, into a dystopic Big Apple (and US), now run by proverbial "others" and which appears to be functioning utopically, at least on the surface, but which her protagonists soon discover is as rotten as the pilings underneath the FDR Drive. I'll write more about the novel when I've had a little time to think about it more, but it was great to see Sarah yesterday, and also to run into some fellow wordsmiths I hadn't seen in a while, like Doug Jones. I also met Jack Waters and Peter Cramer; I used to receive their emails for Allied Productions, Inc., and even caught some of their work years ago (they co-ran ABC No Rio back in the mid 1980s), but had never met either of them. Until yesterday. So that was great too. Please pick up Sarah's book and if you're around NYC in November, catch her Kessler lecture.

Sarah signing my copy of The Mere Future

Jack Waters and Dominic

Charles Rice-Gonzalez, whose first novel will be out next spring (2010) from Alyson

Doug Jones

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Despite Ronaldo mentioning it after his reading on Thursday, I misread an online note and thus missed the final day of William Pope.l's recreation of Allen Kaprow's seminal and oft-staged "Yard," an interactive tire sculpture that permits adults to become children and gleeful explorers again, at the Hauser & Wirth Gallery uptown.

In fact I've never seen Pope.l perform any of his pieces live, but I have been a fan of his for some time. (Interestingly I cannot recall if I've ever mentioned him on J's Theater, or just thought of him as I've expounded on someone else.) Here's a link to two YouTube videos which are about as close as I'll be getting to a real Pope.l performance for the near future. Enjoy.



And here's "jameskalm" participating in the interactive creation:

French Essay/l'essai français + Art & Project Bulletin @ MoMa

Recently I finished and sent off a draft of an essay I'd been working on for a good portion of the summer. I don't actually write that many essays, especially because I find the process very time-consuming and difficult, no matter how rewarding the final product, but what was significant and different this time was that the Canadian journal I wrote it for publishes in French only, and so after I was asked to submit something, based perhaps on my praise of and fascination with Taïa, I decided and then agreed to write it in French rather than in English, to be translated by me or someone else later on. It was, to put it simply, a challenge, or rather a series of them, and that, I think, more than anything else, made me determined to complete it.

The first involved reading and taking notes on the book, Abdellah Taïa's Une mélancolie arabe (Seuil 2009, Taïa at left, from thehumpdaycrew.blogspot.com), which hasn't been translated into English yet. (One of his earlier books, L'armée du salut is now available in English as Salvation Army. If I had the time, I'd be willing to attempt it.) Taïa's French fortunately is fairly straightforward and contains little slang, so getting through the book wasn't hard. Moreover, the novel, though sometimes exasperating in its protagonist's sentimentality and self-dramaticization, was nevertheless engagingly provocative and broached a lot of issues that would serve further discussion. The second involved constructing an argument in relation to the journal issue's theme, which was the Théâtre de la Cruauté, which I read as referring directly back to the original version proposed by French visionary playwright and activist Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). I'd read a little of Artaud's work before, and enough about him, primarily I believe via Susan Sontag, and I knew something about his successors, such as Peter Brooke, to have a general idea of what his two manifestos on the Theater of Cruelty were saying, but I figured I ought to read the actual texts themselves, in basic scholarly fashion, before I began trying to tease out a relationship between Taïa's novel and Artaud's ideas. I did so, first in French and then in English, to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding them, and what struck me as always was the slippage in meaning between the original and the translation, though the gist remains. In Artaud's case, I think the gist is what's most important, since he was trying to get away from texts in and of themselves, towards a more experimental, gestural and visual theatrical experience, one in which a deeper metaphysics, and thus, he believed, an authenticity, might be accessed.

I saw several routes into this connection between Taïa's novel and Artaud's (at right, Guardian UK, Getty/Martinie/Roger Viollet) theories, and worked through them, particularly around the frequent deaths and almost-deaths that occur in Taïa's book, every major crisis portending or transforming into a confrontation with la mort, and their links to la cruauté as Artaud defines it. But it wasn't until I came across some commentary by the critic Peter Sloterdijk that I was able to formulate a way of reading Taïa's work, via's Immanuel Kant's 3rd critique readings of the sublime (though Sloterdijk reroutes the Kantian reading, as Jacques Rancière does, via Jean-François Lyotard), to suggest a melancholic ethics of becoming that the protagonist was engaging in. Then there was the third challenge, which was the most difficult of all: writing an essay in French. I have to make clear that I haven't written anything beyond letters or email in French since I was in high school. In fact, the last time may have been one of those French essay contests that the local Alliance Française sponsored, and I believe I wrote one describing Marseille, a city I have still never set foot in. The gulf between a high school essay and one written for an adult journal, however, is vast, so I did take the added step of reading some contemporary French journal and magazine essays, in order to get a grasp of essayistic idioms, and I realized that it was going to be an uphill climb. For just as it is often a struggle for most native English speakers who find themselves at someone's college to write a coherent and convincing essay on a given topic in English itself, so it is in French, especially for someone who is not a native French speaker and who in fact when encountering French mainly is translating it into English. What I especially strove to do was think in French, as much as possible, so as to be able to put those thoughts, in idiomatic French syntax, on the page.

A challenge that arose out of this one was vocabulary, and in particular, the difficulty of selecting certain words that had differing shades of meaning in the two languages, or that did not exist at all in French. To give one example, French has two words for knowledge, la connaissance (from connaître, to know someone, to be familiar with, from the Latin cognoscere, to know, akin by root to English to know, but also the noun, ken, a vista) and le savoir (from savoir, to know something, know how, from the Latin sapere, to taste of, have the scent of, be wise, discern, akin to the English words "savor" and "savory," both of French (Norman) provenance) At several points, I had to decide that it was la connaissance, based in part of la reconnaissance (recognition) that the protagonist Abdellah had gained, rather than le savoir, even though my initial tendency was often to choose the latter term, in part because of past readings of Michel Foucault (such as his 1988 interview, titled "Le Gai Savoir," for example, with its ironic, double-entendre riff on Nietzsche). Abdellah's knowledge is a knowledge of himself, rather than a learning or a knowing how, though when the latter is salient, I use the latter term.

Then there are English words for which there are no direct French equivalents (and vice-versa, of course, such as double-entendre, which English imported wholesale). French, from what I could tell, does not have an exact term for awe, one of the emotions produced by the sublime (or the Kantian sublimes to be exact). French has words that combine fear and reverence (la crainte, fear, apprehension from the verb craindre, to fear, be apprehensive about, being one), and astonishment (l'étonnement, astonishment, surprise, quite close to English), but not one that captures the melding of the two. So I used a compound term, la crainte mêlé d'admiration, which doesn't exactly capture the condensed power of "awe," but approaches it. But then it wasn't so much the response generated by the sublime as the recognition in life of sublimity creating a deeper sense of our mortality and the consequent sense of the aesthetic and the ethical that I was after, so the exact translation was less important, perhaps, especially since the sublime is le sublime and the ethical and ethics are both l'éthique in French.

All of which is to say that I have finished the French essay (or at least a draft), sent it off to the editor, and now have a deepened appreciation for anyone who does this sort of thing regularly, as well as for Taïa's book and the French language. When the essay is published, if there's a link, I'll provide it, so that you can read it yourself. And perhaps I'll send it to Abdellah Taïa as well.

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While I didn't manage to get to the pricey Museum of Modern Art before the In & Out of Amsterdam conceptual art show was there--the Monday I and a friend had planned to go, MoMa was closed, so we ended up at the Met--I did finally get up there, on Columbus/Peoples of the Americas Day, no less, and saw the tinier, residual Art & Project Bulletin show. The exhibit presents the Art & Project Gallery Bulletin's entire 156-issue run, stretching from 1968 to 1989, as well as artworks by the European, American and Japanese artists who'd appeared in its pages and within, without or on the gallery's walls, literally or figuratively. Some, like the controversial performance artist-photographers Gilbert and George (above right, Sydney Morning Herald) are now quite well known, though I hadn't realized how they'd begun their careers, staging live durational performances as human statues and causing a sensation as a result. Others, like Robert Barry, are less well known but should be central to any discussion of contemporary art practice, which draws heavily from the conceptual well. What the show makes clear is that Art & Project's founders, Dutch artists Gert van Beijeren and Adriaan van Ravesteijn, created a vital nexus in the translantic conceptual art movement, putting Amsterdam on the map alongside New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, and other important sites in the development of an important vein of artmaking that remains central to contemporary practice.

I should add that reading the In & Out of Amsterdam show catalogue, which picked up after the show, I learned that the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, that city's major venue for 20th century art and one of my favorites, was a key institutional site in the trans-Atlantic late 1960s conceptual revolution, much as MoMa, in its earlier years, had been for a much earlier generation of artists. I also hadn't known that it was MoMa's legendary black curator, Kynaston McShine (what a name!), whose 1970 "Information" show introduced conceptual art as a major contemporary trend, and later curated shows on Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell, and Andy Warhol, among others. He is still there, now as Chief Curator at Large, and co-curated the 2007 40-year-retrospective show of sculptor Richard Serra's work. Some photos and a video.


The explanatory plaque

The bulletins on display

A Daniel Buren striped strip--seeing this made me smile with glee. Buren once covered large sections of the interior of the uptown Guggenheim Museum with these, and also placed them all about Paris, London, and other sites. This is the first time I'd ever seen one up close.

Lawrence Weiner piece

David Robilliard drawings (the ones on the right show Gilbert and George)

And a video of David Askevold's "Catapult" (1970), Super8 film transferred to video

And, as I said, I passed the parade, so here's a photo:

Blogging Good For You + Houlihan, Harvey & Poetry as/or Conceptual Art

Blogging may be good for your health, or so say researchers. I suppose so, but I would place it under the larger rubric of (semi-)creative forms of self-expression, which are, I've read in many places, psychologically good for you. Blogging is an expressive media that also happens to be public. (Are there still blogs that can only be read by the blogger?) I do know that in past years, before my university duties and responsibilities began to increase to the point that my ability to type even perfunctory entries here decreased to silence, I found even toss-off blog posts quite therapeutic and very enjoyable. In many cases, it's the only place I can, well, download the crap that's in my head (other than dropping it on C or friends whom I unfortunately see only infrequently these days.) Adrian Piper floating across the surface of my consciousness? (She really is, I kid you not.) Blog it. A translation I attempted? Blog it. My visit to the Santo Domingo Book Fair, which was both thrilling and terrifying, because I did not have Señor Montgomery, who can rattle off Spanish adroitly enough to make a real estate agent take pause, by my side, so I had to get by on my own, twice--and was able to manage okay? Blog it. Every so often I will be Googling something...not usual, let's put it that way, and J's Theater will turn up. Not a pat on the back, but just to say that I do like that some of what happens here, or used to happen here, will be available to the wider world. Certainly the idea of conversation, one of my great dreams in life--not the dream of an "audience," in Theresa Cha's terms, or a "common language," in Adrienne Rich's, though both are quite important but quite unlikely, at least in the standard terms both are often posed--but of a conversation, which is what I envisioned the literary world to be like, university life to be like, life to be like, though all have turned out to be really something quite different, at least has the possibility of occurring here. There are no hierarchies, everybody, including the creepy ad-bots who occasionally figure out how to sign in, even have their turn. I haven't had any hardcore ranters, like the pro-Bush zombie who posted several years ago, though, in a long time.

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I would love to meet Joan Houlihan over coffee. (Does she really exist, or is there a committee that writes in her name?) I imagine we wouldn't agree on much, but she does have a way with her reviews. I read this one on Matthea Harvey's recent book, Modern Life (Graywolf, 2007), and it got me to thinking about something I've been rolling around in my head for a while, so here are a few simplistic and not very coherent thoughts which I hope someone will respond to.

Houlihan critiques Harvey's book as a work of "poetry," and finds it wanting. While she notes that it does possess, in formal, modal, technical, rhetorical, figurative and discursive terms, key aspects of what we would define as poetry--though it is falls into none of the traditional poetic genres, which is to say, it is neither lyrical, narrative, epic, comic, etc.--the individual poems and the book as whole lack what I read Houlihan suggests as sufficient tonal variation and a concomitant trajectory, a movement towards something, a telos that, even if not reached, might somehow endow the poems with that poetic purposiveness (even if, in Kantian fashion, without purpose), that critics and readers of poetry, as well as poets themselves, expect of poems. Even in the wake of Language Poetry's several generations of poetic practice, where the expectations of trad poetry were called into question on political, ideological, and theoretical grounds, and in so many cases, for good reasons, those expectations have not dissipated, at least not fully, and certainly not for a critic like Houlihan--or for a great many poetry critics, teachers, poets, and students.

Nevertheless, she says that Harvey's book, even if it fails her test as a work of poetry, could be read as a work of "conceptual art." And it is this suggestion that particularly fascinates me, because, I noted to Chris Stackhouse some time ago, apropos of Kenneth Goldsmith's work, that while it may fail (or fail to qualify, under certain critics' views, including even Goldsmith himself) as poetry--Houlihan cites Goldsmith as an exemplar of what she's designating as the ne plus ultra of this type of contemporary "poetry"--it struck me then as now that, instead of defending his work as poetry, he should simply call it conceptual art, or place it within that broader rubric, and be done with it. Cover all bases at once, and proudly stand beside, say, Vito Acconci or Lawrence Weiner. Are they not also poets, or rather, what happens if we think of them in this way? (I feel the same way about the poetic production of, say, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra, but I'll leave that to Aldon Nielsen, Nahum Chandler, and Fred Moten, among others, to argue.) There are all sorts of issues and questions that arise, of course, if one decides to do this, and Goldsmith was blogging on the Poetry Foundation's website for a while, perhaps getting paid to do so or not, but ultimately, as Goldsmith described his work himself, it appeared to be more a conceptual project--which does not cancel it out as poetry, since all poetry, and all art, can at some level be classified as proceeding from a concept or concepts, even if a posteriori--than poetry, though under broad definitions (institutionally legimated ones, since Goldsmith writes and teaches at various prestigious institutions, I'm told) it certainly qualifies.

This got me thinking about my class discussion several weeks ago of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's remarkable Dictée, and my appeal to the class to consider it not only as a work that crossed and eluded genres, as a text of American literature (as well as many others), but also as a conceptual project. A successful one that could also, I feel, be read as a work of poetry, or even fiction or (auto)biography, if such terms are necessary. Cha (1951-1982) was a practicing conceptual artist who came of age and studied with a number of major figures at Berkeley and in Paris in the early 1970s. Sculpture, film studies, conceptual art practice, and the range of structuralist and post-structuralist theoretical interventions all factor into her rich but brief artistic career, out of which Dictée appears. This particular work, I feel, arises out of conceptual play, out of concepts that Cha was puzzling over, trying to understand and resolve, playing with, throughout her career, and in this particular text, they cohere in a marvelous way such that the reader cannot but be struck by the way that conceptual exploration unfolds, blossoms, into narrative that isn't developmental, but associative, that, in post-modernist fashion, results in an artifact whose very form and content resist closure, and press endlessly towards process, towards ideas whose formulation, whose understanding, whose coherence requires the active participation of the reader/viewer. The concepts behind Dictée, however, are quite evident. Yet it works as both a conceptual art project, and as a work of, among other things, poetry.

This line of thought calls forth a wide array of works that, especially in the history of modernism and modernist literature (and thus post-modernism and post-modernist literature), both tidily fall into place as acclaimed (or ignored, say) works of poetry, but also could be reread as conceptual art projects. So for example, what if we consider Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, a work that I first encountered as a student in Joel Porte's class back in 1983 or 1984, with utter bewilderment and fascination, a work that recall reading and rereading over and over until I was in a spell, which made me want to understand not only what the texts meant and the intent and motivations (those bad words in English studies) behind it, but its governing concept or concepts (which Harryette Mullen rethinks and transforms so powerfully in Trimmings), and which, when I taught it this year, had a similar effect (including terror) in (many of) my students? Isn't Tender Buttons, in addition to being a landmark work of poetic production, also a conceptual art project, and overtly so? And what happens if we read the work in this way? Are we really going against Stein's grain? Because since her conceptual framework entails a writing of the object that entails and requires engagement along the lines of Cubism--simultaneity, fragment, juxtaposition, rupture of field and ground, abstraction, etc.--and derives meaning from this conceptualization, and from the conceptualization of poetry as a modernist, anti-patriarchal practice, among others, in fact, really takes on meaning in light of this conceptual understanding, isn't it almost necessary to start from the standpoint of Tender Buttons as poetry and conceptual art, especially if none of the biographical and historical underpinnings of the work are immediately known to us, and if we do not have other theoretical prisms, such as feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalytic theory, deconstruction, etc., all of which are important to understanding the work, at hand? The concepts in Tender Buttons are immediately in play. Certainly one can use all the tools of poetry to read and grasp a great deal of this work, and yet in some key ways, they fail the reader. This is what Houlihan, I think, is arguing about Harvey's work. But when we also view Tender Buttons as a conceptual artwork--or perhaps if the limitations of conceptual art are too great, something along these lines--then we have yet another way of reading and understanding what might to some critics fall outside the boundaries of what is understood, at least in common parlance, to be poetry.

I take it that Houlihan does not find this additional category useful within the context of poetry criticism or the constitutive body of poetic practice today. It is literally something else. And should be recognized as such. But to me it seems to be a very useful way of thinking about certain works, certain poets and poetries, certain geneologies, that fall outside the official confines that the poetry hierarchies consecrate and canonize. Stein is in the canon; but what about a writer like Russell Atkins, whose entire poetic project, especially his daring work of the 1950s and 1960s, is deeply conceptual? Nielsen has written about Atkins, so he is not really outside the lines, but he, like Norman Pritchard, for example, can also be understood productively, I think, if the notion of the concept and the conceptual is brought to bear. I guess I should not understate the questions such a categorical shift or reassignment, or trans-status, represents and presses. What are they? What happens when one thinks in terms of both/and as opposed to either/or, especially with regard to distinct genres and art forms? How does it help the artist? Or does it? Does she end up between the cracks, in the interstices, in an overlooked, if productive, third space. Who is empowered to read, to criticize, to legitimate?

One issue that Houlihan does not broach per se is that in some contemporary poetic works, the "concept" or conceptualizations are so effective hidden, interwoven, buried, nested, the source texts so carefully veiled or hooded, the various intertexts so subtly put into play, that unlike most art world conceptual art--think of the artists I mention above, or, say, Daniel Buren, for example, or William Pope.L (above right, U. Michigan School of Art and Design), or Marina Abramovic, or even writers whose works (or at least some of them) could be reclassified as also being overtly conceptual, such as Wilson Harris, Diamela Eltit, John Ashbery, Werewere Liking, Alexander Kluge--the concept or concepts in play are hard to grasp, except without considerable effort. Houlihan, it appears, may be interested in that effort, but it appears that she wished Harvey had made taken more of a step towards some of the conventions of "poetry" that might afford critics and readers like her greater means of understanding, exploring, enjoying the work. Or perhaps the concept or concepts could have been more overtly foregrounded. What do you think?

Wura Natasha Ogunji's "infinite return (bird on the sun)"

A back post. I'd been thinking of posting a link to this video before, but since I've posted a link to Pënz, why not post it now? Wura Natasha Ogunji, performing "infinite return (bird on the sun)."



Enjoy!