The Deadly Jester

Adam Kirsch on Žižek's In Defence of Lost Causes and Violence:

In this way, Zizek's allegedly progressive thought leads directly into a pit of moral and intellectual squalor. In his New York Times piece against torture, Zizek worried that the normalization of torture as an instrument of state was the first step in "a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone." This is a good description of Zizek's own work. Under the cover of comedy and hyperbole, in between allusions to movies and video games, he is engaged in the rehabilitation of many of the most evil ideas of the last century. He is trying to undo the achievement of all the postwar thinkers who taught us to regard totalitarianism, revolutionary terror, utopian violence, and anti-Semitism as inadmissible in serious political discourse. Is Zizek's audience too busy laughing at him to hear him? I hope so, because the idea that they can hear him without recoiling from him is too dismal, and frightening, to contemplate.

Strong words. via Silliman

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Johanna Linsley

Remember the above name: Linsley (the woman in blue in the picture below) writes on her website that:

Expressed primarily in performance, my practice is broadly concerned with situations and locations wherein organized and emotional systems engage. I’m currently thinking about: classrooms; offices; utopian social experiments; public transportation; shopping, generally; cities, generally; the movement of capital in New York in the 21st century, specifically; violence; the documentary form; and furniture design. Formally, I’m drawn to structured environments that give way to intuitive and/or associative processes; Oulipo and DIY bricolage both inform my thinking.

Documentation of many of her works can be found on her website under the categories works and collaborations. One of my favorites Union Docs is one such collaborative project. It is a project that excites me and a project that I believe inhabits and exhibits a sustainable, viable, and politically intelligent position, that is both necessary and clearly within reach. 

Without funding Johanna helped to turn her own home, a home that she shared with some flat mates, into Union Docs, a project she describes as:

[...] A 501 (c) 3 non-profit documentary arts collaborative and presentation space. Currently, our primary program is The Documentary Bodega Series, featuring new and challenging documentary film and audio works every Sunday evening in our Brooklyn screening room. The series is produced by the Resident Curators of UDRP, the UnionDocs Residency Program for Documentary & Media Studies. We also produce a podcast and blog, featuring short media pieces inspired by discussions at the Documentary Bodega and beyond.

If anyone is heading to New York I recommend checking it out. Having been in England for a year, undertaking a PhD at Queen Mary, her newest news is a blog, where you can read her compelling future thought chatter on Pit Bulls, Sinclair, and the inverted parallels of an ethically just rhetorical/art practice. Finally, in Linsley we have an artist who shows that collaborative art, performance based practice, and indeed their fine documentation in a digital medium, can investigate and cross challenging conceptual and political ground, in ways that truly exceed the gimmick, the parodic, and the exotic gestural positions that some performance art can slide disappointingly into. Here Linsley shows there is thought making performance making thought. Like I said remember the name.

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experiment-o Issue 1

experiment-o issue 1

AngelHousePress is pleased to announce the launch of experiment-o, an annual online pdf magazine that celebrates the art of risk.

Unlikely to find everything in this PDF to your taste, but likely to find something to your taste.

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Blackbox

William James Austin:

The fall Blackbox gallery is now open for submissions. The submission period will last approximately two weeks. Please be certain to read and follow the submission guidelines on the Blackbox page.

via Buffalo listserv

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Sundays at the Oto: December

Sunday 21st December, 3-5pm

• Frances Kruk
• Jow Lindsay
• Jonathan Styles

18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, E8 3DL Admission £4

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The Reality Street Book of Sonnets: Second Launch

Thursday 4th December, 7pm

• Tim Atkins
• Sean Bonney
• Laurie Duggan
• Ken Edwards
• John Gibbens
• Harry Gilonis
• Jeff Hilson
• Peter Jaeger
• Elizabeth James
• Keith Jebb
• Richard Makin
• Chris McCabe
• Sophie Robinson
• Gavin Selerie
• Simon Smith

Lecture Theatre, Room 4, Duchesne Building, Roehampton University, Roehampton Lane, SW15 5PU Admission is free.

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The Mailart and the Dr. Zoidberg Snowflakes

Geof Huth:

At the beginning of this month, I sent out from Silver Spring, Maryland, a set of mailart cards to a group of people, one of whom was the mailartist Ficus strangulensis. Once this card was in Fike’s clutches, he scanned it and ran parts of it through a kaleidoscoping software system to create wonderful little snowflakes out of my word and wrawing. I’m not sure exactly what Fike did, since his entire explanation was that he “messed with” the images he scanned, but the multi-reflecting parts are quite entrancing. This first attempt maintains much of the feel of my writing, but changes my work into a self-reflecting piece of renewed power. I keep looking at the central figure in this piece and seeing a curvaceous female squid, maybe a possible mate for Dr Zoidberg.

Sounds similar to some conversations I've been having recently with a poet hard at work on something that needs to be seen like a Victoria Sponge, not as a Madeira cake.

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Salt Christmas Party

Friday 12th December, 6.30-9.30pm (readings at 7.30pm and 8.30pm) The Horse Hospital, Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1HX (Map)

• Poetry/Short Story readings by Julia Bird, Jane Holland, Sue Hubbard and Mark Waldron
• Salt Book Stall
• Pay Bar
• Secret Santa

RSVP sales [at] saltpublishing [dot] com or go to the Facebook event.

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The Decline of the Bouquinistes

The Guardian:

They salvaged books from raids on aristocrats' libraries during the French revolution and hid resistance material during the Nazi occupation. Paris's bouquinistes - the hundreds of booksellers whose open-air stalls along the river Seine carry Unesco world heritage status - have survived four centuries of censorship, floods and political upheaval. But now they are under threat from a new enemy: cheap, plastic Eiffel towers. Bouquinistes' sales have dived as their carefully collected stocks of rare and out-of-print books face competition from online dealers and a change in Parisians' reading and shopping habits. Many now sell tourist trinkets to stay afloat, cramming their stalls with souvenirs.

I was in Paris a few months ago and these stalls caught my eye after a boat trip down the Seine (don't knock it until you've tried it). Plastic Eiffel Towers are rife in Paris, probably the most common item on show after the cigarette. I don't know what it is about them - hundreds of amateur salesmen with bin bags full of the fucking things accost you and force huge metal loops of Eiffel Tower keyrings into your mush, begging for a sale. All well and good until it starts encroaching on the culture of the city. The demarcation of the city as a focal point for art, Paris being a good example, can be understood through the flourishing of minority interests within its landscape, where culture and creative innovation can garner an audience large enough to sustain itself. When that is repressed, the city dies and becomes a big boat without an ocean to sail on.

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The 10,000 Year-Old Warning Sign

Yucca Mountain, located 80 miles from Las Vegas, is the planned location for the storage of the majority of America's nuclear waste over the next century. The material deposited in the mountain has a half life sufficient enough to render it deadly for the next 10,000 years. As a result, a team has been put in place to come up with a system of warning signage to ward off any potential ignoramuses from the area for the next ten millennia. To put 10,000 years in perspective, the earliest 'writing' found dates from around 5,000 years ago. Here are some notes on what they have come up with so far. My favourite passage:

If the WIPP is ever operational, the site may pose a greater hazard than is officially acknowledged. Yet the problems involved in marking the site to deter inadvertent intrusion for the next 10,000 years are enormous. Even if knowledge exists that would allow translation of the message on the markers, there might be little motivation to solicit such knowledge. Pictorial messages, however, are unreliable and may even convey the opposite of what is intended. This panel member therefore recommends that the markers and the structures associated with them be conceived along truly gargantuan lines.

If in doubt, make it as big as you can and hope its bigness will convey something other than bigness. The mechanics of language are such that even in half a millennia something as beautifully composed as Milton or Shakespeare becomes challenging to understand, and moving further back to the time of Chaucer, and then Beowulf, things start to get plain difficult. That's just in the English language, which itself has only been a recognised language for a fraction of the timescale being worked on here. The idea of a 'universal symbol of danger' raises all sorts of questions which I don't believe can be answered now. We're simply too young.

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