VerySmallKitchen is part of eShelf, a new project curated by Rahel Zoller and X Marks the Bökship which describes itself as follows:

eShelf is a collection of artists’ online publishing activities and a series of events introducing digital publishing projects, initiatives and resources.

At eShelf, online publishing activities will be collected and compiled into an A – Z online index. There will also be a series of live events hosted at X Marks the Bökship, where publishers can introduce their projects to other publishers and individuals working across similar platforms.

The aims are to:

Introduce a selection of online independent publishing activities

Show examples of creative and experimental uses of online publishing

Bring together publishers working across similar digital platforms

Offer advice and resources available to artists and independent publishers

The project’s first live component has been two nights at the Bökship, one on May 2nd for the publications A-N, and the rest of the alphabet  on 9th May 2012.

Tine Melzer, Language Games, project for VerySmallKitchen, 2011

For this event eShelf circulated the following set of questions, that also serve as a useful primer for interrogating a broad range of online projects:

What is the name of your online publication / activity? Can you give a brief description of it? How long has it been going for? How long are you planning to continue for? Why did you decide to go online? Did your project previously exist in another format or is it intended to in another format in the future? How often do you publish? Is it easier or harder than having a print based publication? Do you use eShops to help with your distribution? Do people want to pay for what you are doing? Who is your audience? Are you more aware of them being online? Is there an audience for print on demand publications? How do you promote yourself? Were you influenced by a similar publishing activity and who else is working in a similar way to you? What software / hardware do you use? Do you work with designers / programmers / tech kids to develop the project? What are the costs involved? What things need to be developed to make what you are doing easier? Do you look at other online publications? Can you suggest other projects for the eShelf?

//

In thinking through VerySmallKitchen in the context of eShelf I present four separate takes:

(1) a scrolling talk-back through recent posts; (2) a non-mesostic nonetheless; (3) a bibliography; (4) VerySmallKitchen as (fictional) character and container.

TAKE 1

…  the most straightforward way to get a sense of VerySmallKitchen – one consistent with its blog format – is to scroll back through its archives. So we start with this post from Ohad Ben Shimon, the last of a six month residency on the blog which has involved a series of writings, dialogues, images, and video works. Then we have this review of The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard. This new publication from the Library of America is the first time Brainard’s work has been easily available, and I wanted to insert this book into the kinds of contemporary practice on VerySmallKitchen. As well as a review making some of those connections explicit, I also re-printed Brainard’s  Wednesday, July 7th 1971 (A Greyhound Bus Trip)…

…Then we get a series of posts which present texts written and first performed for the VerySmallKitchen Evergreen night here at X Marks the Bökship: Leaves, a chapbook by SJ Fowler, as well as texts by Claire Potter and seekers of lice, followed by some new writing by Cia Rinne, a Berlin based writer and artist. I originally contacted Cia after reading her interview with Steven Fowler in 3AM magazine, interested in her separate practices as a minimalist, visual, conceptual poet and as a campaigning documentary maker working with Roma gypsies. So these pieces, whilst belonging to the first practice, were selected after that editorial dialogue, thinking how those two practices connect as well as differ…

Márton Koppány, Hungarian Vispo, 2012

…After this we have some projects by Ariel Goldberg, a writer and performance artist in San Francisco, and EDITORIAL, a PDF chapbook by nick-e melville. This was another part of the Evergreen night, and also began as an installation for I AM NOT A POET, an event co-curated by VerySmallKitchen and Mirja Koponen in Edinburgh in August 2011. This is followed by a week long correspondence between Ariel Goldberg and Ohad Ben Shimon, which was published as another one of Ohad’s residency posts. So I think what emerges here is this sense of unfolding dialogues, connections, seeing where projects and discussions go, in different locations, media and over time…

Ariel Goldberg, Part of the epistolary novel, and performance “The Photographer,” March, 2012

Photo: Ohad Ben Shimon

… If we scroll down further we have a preview of an article by Roger Luckhurst from the new issue of Corridor8, which is now published in print. One of the key historical inspirations for VerySmallKitchen has been the editorial work of Richard Kostelanetz in anthologies such as Essaying Essays and Scenarios. So when the UK art periodicals Corridor8 and soanyway.org both published special issues showcasing current artists in relation to RK’s work, I wanted to distribute and promote that on VerySmallKitchen, as well as organise a discussion that took place on March 10 2012 at The Wild Pansy Press Portable Reading Room at the Leeds City Art Gallery, which this post was also an announcement for…

… then going back into March 2011 we have more of Ohad’s residency, which inparticular explored the diary form, self-images and representation of the artist’s lifestyle,
often writing as a further part of other exhibitions and residencies themselves concerned with a live recording of thought and response…

Neil Chapman, from Memo Seven, project for VerySmallKitchen, 2011

… moving on, here, is a gathering of materials around the typewriter in art practice . One of the forms of research the blog has encouraged has been these gatherings of sources, notes, and quotations. Alongside this project was a post on Marianne Holm Hansen’s FOR THE RECORD, a series of images and a dialogue that came out of a conversation in a coffee shop…

Marianne Holm Hansen, typings from FOR THE RECORD

Finally, for this sampling, we have a set of materials around  A PIGEON, A KITCHEN AND AN ANNEXE: SITES OF ALTERNATIVE PUBLISHING, a show VerySmallKitchen took part in at Five Years gallery curated by Ladies of the Press, which explored past, current and future VerySmallKitchen projects within the present of the exhibition.

Paolo Javier and Alex Tarampi, from OBB (forthcoming,VerySmallKitchen, 2012)

This project by Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon was part of the exhibition and is very conscious of its movement between installation, performance and web forms… and here, finally finally for now, is a dialogue with Marit Muenzberg on publishing, which we conducted alongside our jointly published  hard copy book Uh Duh by Sarah Jacobs….

For an overview of projects in 2011 see here. See publications here.

TAKE 2: A NON-MESOSTIC NONETHELESS

V:Finding it long and incomprehensible I delete an About statement on the VerySmallKitchen blog and replace it with “connections of reading, writing, language and art practice, inside and outside the VerySmallKitchen.”

E:This foregrounds senses of container and character, being both specific and open-ended, proposing a space whilst not fully aware of either its contents or its architecture.

R:The blog emerges through invitation and its consequences: (1) To people I have worked with, sometimes related to a previous event, and/or sustaining a dialogue begun elsewhere; (2) the invitation itself is the introduction.

Y:Or someone sends me work, and I am the respondent to an invitation. All this mediated through the limitations and possibilities of a wordpress template.

S:There’s something about art and writing, its display and publication, that I seem to find obfuscating. My notes for what I want VerySmallKitchen to do are full of phrases like “presents the work itself.”

Sandra Huber, Sleep/ Writing/ Rooms, VSK Project, 2011

M:The right relationship – delete “balance” – of work, ideas, process, context, scene, project, theory, conversation, space, again and again, away from noun in the direction of noun, then away…

A:Who doesn’t want to read work in this way. Who doesn’t want to show work in this way. Presenting avant-garde writing as web norm, like porn or trolls. An old friend gets back in touch and asks in an email:

Are you VerySmallKitchen? No idea what you’re talking about but it looks great.

L:VerySmallKitchen operates on my reading habits. It successfully cultivates a practice of reading widely and closely in specific fields, whilst removing the need to consume others cultural agendas as primary. Or: I read less mainstream art magazines lately.

L:VerySmallKitchen becomes a way of cultivating affinity, articulating specific models of practice that underly and connect related projects, such as AND Publishing, X Marks the Bökship, Intercapillary Space, and the  Maintenant reading series and interview project…

K:In the VerySmallKitchen I understand why Ian Hamilton Finlay called his garden Little Sparta, barricaded himself in, and declared war on the Scottish arts council…

I:Which (K) is an attempt to articulate how personal and emotional are our individual definitions and activities of “publishing.”

T:That, really, I am saying “football” and you are saying “oxyrynchus.” Although there are other times when I am saying “oxyrynchus” and you are saying “football.”

C:I’ve been excited to read a study of expanded paperbacks that, in The Medium is the Massage and I Seem To Be A Verb,  found a dynamic, text-image, film inspired form for the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. I think a VerySmallKitchen should work in this way…

H:VerySmallKichen is also non-virtual exhibitions, readings, and discussions but the blog is where its mix of work and idea, of individual writer in relation to contemporary and historical contexts (including the blogs own resources and structures), can be most effectively attained.

E:For each short lived magazine or blog, there are others – such as Coracle – that become life long projects. To commit to a project is to move away from other models of doing things, towards a clearer sense of yourself as model and critique.

N:The VerySmallKitchen begins when a space of practice is sensed. This can be understood as a landscape or an architecture, but the only guide to that larger structure is individual writings and art works that demonstrate and propose.

TAKE 3: A BIBLIOGRAPHY

An Endless Supply, Curwen Sans type specimen (An Endless Supply, 2012).

Paul Buck, a public intimacy (a life through scrapbooks) (Book Works, 2011)

Bulletins of The Serving Library #2 (Dexter Sinister, Fall 2011).

Jeffrey T.Schnapp and Adam Michaels, The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/ Agel/ Fiore and the Experimental Paperback (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012).

Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (Columbia University Press, 2011).

Christian Hawkey, Ventrakl (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). See also the wider editorial project of the DOSSIER series in which this title appears.

Pierre Joris ed and trans. Exile Is My Trade: A Habib Tengour Reader  (Black Widow Press, 2012).

TAKE 4: CHARACTER AND CONTAINER

A number of writings, by myself and others, offer further perspective on VerySmallKitchen as (fictional) character and container, how this might unfold editorial method and the workings of invitation:

(1)SOME OF THE HARDEST PLACES TO MAKE BOTH EFFICIENT AND BEAUTIFUL, a project for the Swedish webzine Valeveil, which includes:

…talk about a traffic flow nightmare!
The fridge is big
and the stove is in the wrong place so you have …

…talk about a traffic flow nightmare!

Most of these kitchens
are not really small. … Ahh….. in my area,
these are

really small kitchens!

my kitchen is very small, but that doesn’t mean …

very little kitchen best small kitchen very small
ants kitchen
                very small kitchen ideas

(B)A text by Ladies of the Press on the figural (jam-) notion of a Very Small Kitchen:

Necessity for selection, cannot have 100s of jars of jam if you have one shelf and one table, one chair one spoon, plate, cup and so on.  This is what you might end up with if you use Haiku as inspiration for interior design. Economy of means. And intimacy. How many of us can actually fit into a very small kitchen at any one time? It says something about the type of relations that contingently have to happen in a very small kitchen. And activities. Like cooking, eating, and talking.

(C)

//

So far the eShelf alphabet is:

ANDPublic

Booksonline

Close-UP

DraculaV

Edgewareroad.org

Fillip

Ghost Knigi

How to Sleep Faster

if:book uk

Je Suis une Bande de Jeunes

Kinetic

Lozen up

The Metapress

New Models for Publishing

Or-bits

Preston is my Paris

Publication Studio

A new project is added each day.

//

Tamarin Norwood, These Are Not Poems, installed at I AM NOT A POET, 2011

NOTE: This post was written as an announcement for the night at X Marks the Bökship on 9th May 2012. It is also VerySmallKitchen’s preparation and script/score for the presentation itself, where, as with other eShelf projects, a talk is accompanied by the websites projection on the wall of the Bökship…

Now visit the eShelf.

“One finds again and again the presence of another world, like a solid ocean bottom from which the restless waves of the ordinary world have drawn back; and in the image of this world there is neither measure nor precision, neither purpose nor cause: good and evil simply fall away, without any pretense of superiority, and in place of all these relations enters a secret rising and ebbing of our being with that of things and other people.”

Robert Musil, Toward A New Aesthetic, 1925

“This is the territory of the writer, the realm in which his reason reigns. While his counterpart seeks the solid and fixed, and is content when he can establish for his computations as many equations as he finds unknown, there is in the writer’s territory, from the start, no end of unknowns, of equations and of possible solutions. The task is to discover ever new solutions, connections, constellations, variables, to set up prototypes of an order of events, appealing models of how one can be human, to invent the inner person.”

Robert Musil, Sketch of What The Writer Knows, 1918

24.4.2012

It’s another monochrome day in the Hague.

The white lilies near my window have yet to decide if to blossom or to wither.

The glass table I’m writing on is peacefully chaotic and cold.

The French radio is playing some songs in Portugese.

This is planned to be my last diary entry/post as part of what turned out to be a half year residency at Very Small Kitchen.

What have I done? What have I written about? Where was I all this time?

I’m assuming it had to do something with writing and something with art.

But what is this something? This I do not have an answer for.

What do I know now that I didn’t know before?

Well, I have a better sense of the power of the word, the desire that writing fuels upon, its singular force, its passion and its limitations.

But one should not turn to nostalgia when one concludes. The dictionary definition of conclusion states that a conclusion is when a statement or question comes to an answer or when an idea or thought is settled. The etymological origin is taken from the latin conclusio which also means blokade and/or siege. Siege also means a seat: The place where one has his seat; a home, residence, domain, empire.

Ohad Ben Shimon untitled 2012

So con-clusion might also be thought of as a space where one has a seat – a chair.

I am sitting on a chair now. I always sit on a chair when I write. I almost never tried writing while standing up or running. It might be a nice exercise but something tells me that the chair has served me as an appropriate vehicle to transport without actually moving anywhere.

Something in putting your ass on a flat surface gives rise to focus and concentration. Waking up, brushing your teeth, drinking coffee, sitting down, etc. It belongs to the world of order. And it is no coincidence that siege also refers to the anus or rectum. Order. Domination. Control.

So to conclude this residency I would like to take the opportunity to thank my chair, that has served me throughout the last half year. It can now serve as both the tool (object) and the subject of this last post – the conclusion – the seat – the chair, and by both being the subject and object of this post emancipate me and lift the dualistic burden or blockade off my shoulders or ass and let me do whatever I feel like doing at this moment which is to shake that ass.

“As is
you’re bearing

a common
Truth

Commonly known
as desire

No need
to dress

it up
as beauty

No need
to distort

what’s not
standard

to be
understandable.

Pick your
nose

eyes ears
tongue

sex and
brain

to show
the populace

Take your
chances

on
your accuracy

Listen to
yourself

talk to
yourself

and others
will also

gladly
relieved

of the burden-
their own

thought
and grief.

What began
as desire

will end
wiser.”

Allen Ginsberg, Written in My Dream by W.C Williams, 1984

AN EXCHANGE

The following is edited from emails between Ohad Ben Shimon and VerySmallKitchen 24-27th April 2012.

OHAD: I’m thinking we should omit the first quote, what do you say? It’s quite essential to Musil’s thinking but I’m not sure it works good with the general flow. I thought it might be nice to post it with a link which is a video work of mine from 2009. Not sure yet I want to use it. Let me know what you think. I also like the idea of a video link of Beyonce and 50 Cent doing shake that ass/naughty girl. Not sure about that.

VERYSMALLKITCHEN: There’s something good about the Musil pair – how it emphasizes that returning to, repeating, in new arrangements/ formations of words, the attempt to define the “another world” and/or the “territory of the writer.”

Reading your text I’m thinking about what Blanchot says about the writer as the figure removed from the world of action into the world of literature which then, at the works completion, excludes the writer who ends up in “essential solitude.” About this, too, from the new The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard:

        You know, it’s really funny this kind of writing. This “trying to be honest” kind of writing. For several years now I’ve been doing it, and getting better and better at it. Getting closer and closer to a point (a place) in my head I call the truth.
        But now I’m beginning to doubt that very point (That very place).
        I mean, what I’ve been working towards just isn’t there anymore (Zap.)
        Do you know what I mean?
        I mean, the closer I get to the truth the less I know what the truth is.
        Wish I could make myself more clear but ——– right now I can’t.” (313)

Perhaps your video dramatises what Brainard asks: as a work and a practice as a whole unfolds: what do you get closer to? And what are you thinking about the Beyonce and 50 Cent? I like its provocation, erupting into this select gathering of Musil, Ginsberg and Williams but-

OHAD: Lets skip Beyonce. It was just a dancing feeling I was in at that time. Maybe you get closer to an image. an image of your self but also an image as such.

a clear image. a crystallization of a sort. see through the clouds, the hard times, the chaos, the struggle, the life of an artist. you find out that it’s a lot about a certain image of an artist but beyond or underlining this image or myth of the artist there is something pure, something child-like something magnificent that should be cherished and I don’t care anymore about what the fuck society or my parents or whoever else thinks an artist is. an artist, and art is the essence of life. anybody can tell me differently but fuck that.

there is always this self doubt… especially in jewish traditions…do not make a sculpture..do not make an image, etc. the 10 commandments. fuck that.

you command yourself daily to sit at that fucking chair and do the job. i do not know many people who do that with such belief besides the pope and that is where art meets religion. but it just meets. it goes on to a new and yet unknown territories. and this is the quest. this is the journey. if you are a writer or painter or sculpture or whatever this is your quest. going there. to that place. figuring out. finding out what its about. focus is essential. and in a way solitude might be a consequence but you don’t choose for solitude. you chose for something bigger than yourself. you chose for life. and for the good in life.

i see the points alongside this quest in mathematical terms as i explained in my previous exhibition at 1646 in the hague. they are derivatives. you derive certain things along this time line that is called life or the process of art you are busy with and those derivatives are meaningful. somehow its like you are packing your bag along your quest and not from the get go. and these derivatives can and will serve you and others along the way.

the way is forward. art is essential and people are good and bad and both. so as i said just shake that ass.

*

This is the final post of Ohad Ben Shimon’s VerySmallKitchen residency. See also post one, two, three, four, five, and a correspondence with Ariel Goldberg.

More about Ohad’s work is here.

VerySmallKitchen writes: Ron Padgett has edited a beautiful edition of THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF JOE BRAINARD, recently published by Library of America. It includes the full text of I Remember as well as facsimiles of several small press chapbooks, including Bolinas Journal and The Cigarette Book (his work as visual artist was the subject of Joe Brainard: A Retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2001).

The Collected Writings  begins with I Remember, which, for a long time – courtesy of Granary Books - has been the only text of Brainard’s in print. Poet Tim Dlugos could joke – as early as 1977, in one of two interviews included here- “You’re remembered for I Remember… (Both Laugh).” Its 138 pages start off:

I remember the first time I got a letter that said “After Five Days Return To” on the envelope, and I thought that after I had kept the letter for five days I was supposed to return it to the sender.

I remember the kick I used to get going through my parents’ drawers looking for rubbers. (Peacock.)

I remember when polio was the worst thing in the world.

I remember pink dress shirts. And bola ties.(5)

I Remember combines two types of writing found throughout this book: the diaries, written for publication and often arranged by place or time – as in Bolinas Journal, “Washington D.C. Journal 1972″ and “Diary 1969″ – alongside short prose pieces on a particular subject or object.

These later pieces are not necessarily removed from the ongoing process of diary-making-for-publication, showing Brainard’s intelligence and humour moving through various minimal forms of writing and sequencing, such as the constraint and consequences of writing sentences that begin “I remember…” As Brainard tells Dlugos, this invokes a particular sort of “I” and memoir:

Well, I have a terrible memory, for one thing. I can’t remember anything. But then I began to realize that beyond that point there is another level of knowledge that could be triggered off. It wasn’t really useful knowledge unless it was triggered off; then I sort of used up that and there kept being more and different layers of things that were hidden. It isn’t really there spontaneously. So I got into that. I  was unaware of it, for one thing, that all that was retained.  (499)

See also: “Twenty-three Mini-Essays” and “Towards a Better Life (Eleven Exercises)” alongside often less than a page length works on “Thirty” or “Sex,” “Ron Padgett” or “A Depressing Thought.”

Joe Brainard, Bolinas Journal (Big Sky Press, 1971).

If there is a dominant stylistic element connecting both of these modes, it is Brainard’s sentiment that “Writing, for me, is a way of “talking” the way I wish I could talk.” The various forms and styles in The Collected Writings can be seen as an exposition of this statement, mostly through a kind of talking-prose-style, but also texts foregrounding line breaks and lyricism as structural devices, or, as in The Cigarette Book, through hand writing, annotation, illustration and collage…

This writing-talking relationship gets most concentrated in numerous short works in proximity to the demands of aphorism, koan, epigram and witticism, such as “30 One-Liners,” which mines a playful shared ground of profundity and the mundane. To quote four from the middle of this collection:

A SEXY THOUGHT

Male early in the day.

POTATOES

One can only go so far without potatoes in the kitchen.

MOTHER

A mother is something we have all had.

MODERN TIMES

Every four minutes a car comes off the assembly line they say. (415)

Throughout The Collected Writings, a crucial dynamic is an intimate self that is also a self-conscious literary creation, connected to a chronicle of a particular social and artistic scene, through what Brainard calls “this “trying to be honest” kind of writing.” (313)

Joe Brainard in his studio

This is a practical matter of names, places, emotions, conversations, events that become notated in published writing, but Brainard expresses it on a grander scale in a letter to Anne Waldman:

I am way, way up these days over a piece I am still writing called I Remember. I feel very much like God writing the Bible. I mean, I feel like I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written. I also feel that it is about everybody else as much as it is about me. And that pleases me. I mean, I feel like I am everybody. And it’s a nice feeling. It won’t last. But I am enjoying it while I can. (xviii)

Aged thirty seven, Brainard ceases both exhibition of his visual work and writing for publication. As Paul Auster observes in his introduction here, there are many theories around Brainard’s withdrawal from publication and exhibition, including burn out, a sense of personal failure, and an  unwillingness or inability to engage with an increasingly competitive art world, when, for Brainard, writing and art making was principally linked to (Ann Lauterbach’s words) “devoted camaraderie and generative collaboration.”

I wondered, separate from this biographical information, what story emerges from the work itself. I skipped around in my reading of this book and when skipping from beginning to end I was struck by the change in Nothing to Write About Home, a final collection of prose pieces, published by Little Ceasar Press in 1981.

Here a text like “My Friend” seems to extend and fulfill an earlier mode of writing, taking it to near collapse under its own realised attributes. A writing that prepares the ground for something new, which, as far as published writing goes, was a not-doing:

MY FRIEND

There’s this one little bug – so tiny really – say an eighth of an inch long, and as thin as a sliver – with a very simple and symmetrical design finely enameled upon the shell of his body in red and green – as sophisticated as a zinnia bud, or an Art Deco cigarette case – that is just so beautiful – so worthy in my enthusiasm of being glorified into a central window of a major European cathedral – that has been living on a particularly large sunflower leaf for over a week now. I check him out daily. Never really expecting him to still be there, as with each day more so, it does seem to be a lot to expect. But there he still is – (or was this morning) – : my friend. And like a rock by chance encountered, all mine. To microscopically indulge in. To romanticize. (To write about!) Passing on to you what I find to be so very special – a snapshot – to make life more realistic and rememberable, for me too. (481)

For Auster any theory has to take into account how much the subject of Brainard’s writing was youth itself:

Brainard disarms us with the seemingly tossed-off, spontaneous nature of his writing and his stubborn refusal to accede to the pieties of self-importance. We must remember that he was very young when the wildest pieces in this collection were written – still in his twenties – and what these little works capture most fully, it seems to me, is precisely a sense of youth, the laughter of youth, the energy of youth, for in the end they are not really about anything so much as what it means to be young, that hopeful, anarchic time when all horizons are open to us and the future appears to be without limits. (xxv)

Or as Brainard himself had earlier commented of the perceived unfolding of his writing trajectory:

      You know, it’s really funny this kind of writing. This “trying to be honest” kind of writing. For several years now I’ve been doing it, and getting better and better at it. Getting closer and closer to a point (a place) in my head I call the truth.
      But now I’m beginning to doubt that very point (That very place).
      I mean, what I’ve been working towards just isn’t there anymore (Zap.)
      Do you know what I mean?
      I mean, the closer I get to the truth the less I know what the truth is.
      Wish I could make myself more clear but ——– right now I can’t.” (313)

This ambition and, as Auster proposes, non-tragic crisis, are amongst the reasons why Brainard seems so connected to many contemporary practices. Such a list could continue by thinking about the humor of his work; its concern with everyday sociality become publication and performance; the focus on situations of “camaraderie and generative collaboration”; the hopeful, pleasurable mixture of conceptual and conversational tonalities…

Tamarin Norwood, Musica Practica. Photo by Stefan Fuhrmann taken at Late at Tate: Diffusions, 4 February 2011.

Those who come most immediately to mind here are Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch’s  Ten Walks/ Two Talks ( Pop Poetics: Reframing Joe Brainard by Fitch is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive) and, for all the reasons above, the performances and texts of Patrick Coyle and Tamarin Norwood. Perhaps, though, Brainard as legacy in 2012 inhabits the same paradoxical condition Brainard proposed and inhabited when he wrote the short text “No Story”, which reads in its entirety:

I hope you have enjoyed not reading this story as much as I have enjoyed not writing it. (436)

*

VerySmallKitchen is delighted to re-print Joe Brainard’s “Wednesday July 7th, 1971 (A Greyhound Bus Trip)”, published for the first time in The Collected Writings.

Thanks to Max Rubin and Library of America for permission to reprint. The text will be available here until 28/05/12.

*

Wednesday, July 7th 1971

(A Greyhound Bus Trip)

      Long legs do come in useful. Trying to make yourself look like you need a whole seat on a bus. (Greyhound.) Pulling out of the New York City bus terminal at this very moment.

      I’m on my way to Montpelier, Vermont. Then to Calais. To Kenward Elmslie. To beautiful country. To work.

      Just had a Bloody Mary at “The Coach House Bar,” I think it was called, with Bill Elliot (slurp), a boy (a composer) staying at my place while I’m away.

      12:30 now. I arrive in Montpelier at 10:30. Hope I can keep this whole seat to myself all the way.

      It sure does feel good to be going someplace I know I’ll “be” for awhile. (Rest of July and all of August.) And to see Kenward again. That’ll be great. (I hope.)

      Cut the shit, Joe. It will be great. (Two months since we’ve seen each other.)

      Dinner last night with J. J. Mitchell. (Very “J. J. Mitchell.”)

      Going up 10th Avenue. Which somehow just turned into Broadway. Amsterdam Avenue now.

      A totally insane city. (Just got back from six weeks in California.) It scares me (N.Y.C.). But I suppose I love it too.

      I should have had coffee instead of a Bloody Mary.

      I want to really write good today.

      Thinking about Jimmy Schuyler, who just had a breakdown, I’m sorry.

      Harlem.

      The Flying Red Horse.

      Sexy construction worker.

      I wonder if “too much” has anything to do with it. (?) That I can almost understand.

      So strange, always, to be reminded how tentative everything is. (You are.) ((I am.))

      I think I will take that pill. I want to really write. Get carried away. I want to think I’m great. And I want you to think I’m great.

      I want—

      (A real beauty with no shirt on driving a truck)

      —I want (as usual) too much.

      The ashtray says “ashtray” on it.

      Factories.

      Houses.

      Rocks.

      Cars.

      Trees.

      Lots of sky.

      “CONSTRUCTION NEXT 11 MILES.”

      Traveling makes me want to try to figure out what everything is “doing” here. Houses. Cats. Cars. Trees. Me.

      Just think—hundreds of people are living in that apartment building. Surviving. (Good luck.)

      That’s a very long Tropicana orange juice truck.

      Chocolate donuts just came into my head.

      Ted Berrigan.

      “NO U TURNS.”

      I hope Kenward got my message of arrival.

      I hope Joanne won’t think too much about the pearl I lost in the ocean.

      I hope we won’t drive by any hospitals.

      I hope people know I don’t want to glance away, or down, sometimes, when we are talking.

      A lot of those red dunce cap looking things on the road people going the other way are going on.

      Yes, I am going to take that pill. At the first coffee shop.

      “Forge Antiques.” Not a very good name for an antique shop I would think. (——ry.)

      I’m never totally convinced, riding a bus, that I’m on the right bus.

      A sign just said “WRONG WAY.” (White on red / WRONG over WAY.) For people on the other side of the road. If they were going this way.

      The guy in front of me just pushed his seat way back. (Too way back.)

      If that first coffee stop doesn’t come soon I’m going to just take it anyway.

      You know, I’m not really dumb. Just a bit scatterbrained. Smart enough to know it. And smart enough to take advantage of it.

      Do you think this is cheating?

      Or is this just “style,” capitalizing on what you are?

      I don’t know. (I suspect I’d better be careful tho.) I don’t want to turn into a parody of myself. A caricature. (I’m referring to my writing.)

      I know what I ought to do. I ought to learn to type. And increase my vocabulary.

      I think my limitations have worked in my favor so far, but—

      Six guys in a car seem to think there’s something funny about this bus.

      You know I really don’t understand this thing about life being so tough. Here I am, a very lucky person, and still life is tough.

      I hope life isn’t proportionately tougher for those not so lucky.

      We’re so amazing: people. Before long we’ll probably figure out a way to live without air.

      Maybe even without hurt.

      (A vision of turning into vegetables being our fate.)

      You know, I really have no idea what time it is.

      No coffee break yet so I’m just going to take it.

      Did.

      Oh, a bank clock just said 4:04.

      That makes me a little less than one third there.

      We must be entering Hartford. Yes. I think he just said so on his speaker, the bus driver, which totally destroys words. (The speaker.) And something about “Springfield.” And something about “15 minutes.” (A 15-minute coffee stop in Springfield?)

      It seems that there are at least six German kids (18 to 20 years of age I would say) on this bus. And one older couple, also German.

      A bowling alley. (Well, I haven’t seen a bowling alley in a long time.)

      I find myself picking out the nice things I hope the Germans are seeing. Like that big brown barn we just passed.

      Springfield. Plain donut and coffee. Pee. Face wash. Clean glasses. Just informed that I have to change buses at White River Junction.

      I’ve been playing “the truth game” with myself for several years now (in my writing) but there are several areas I avoid talking about. (That I know of.) And no doubt some I don’t know of yet.

      They are: Kenward’s money
                        speed
                        exaggeration

      Kenward’s money. I like it too much. And have gotten to need it too much. And am still embarrassed to admit to taking it.

      Taking it doesn’t embarrass me at all. Seems only natural, as he has lots and I have little. What embarrasses me is admitting to others I take it. I like for people to think I’m totally on my own. (And with no strings.) And, in most ways, I am.

      Speed. I don’t really approve of speed but I need it to do all I want to do. And that’s a lot. So I take it.

      Luckily, I’m vain enough tho that I don’t let myself take too much. And I only take it for work.

      I don’t feel one bit guilty about this. But it does embarrass me to admit it. I guess I like the idea that people think I do all I do just on natural energy. I guess I like to impress people. I guess I want people to think I’m a genius.

      I suppose this is a fault, this need to please. This need to impress. But at the same time I realize that, if I’m to be an extraordinary artist, it’s this very need that will make it possible.

      Exaggeration. I have a tendency to exaggerate. To make things sound better than they are. Once again, I suppose, to please and impress. There’s nothing constructive about this, however, and I don’t like it. (I am improving tho.)

      Now this is something really embarrassing: not being able to make it with pick-ups, one-night stands, and people for the first time. (A recent development.) Just this past year.

      I think I know where the trouble lies tho. Getting too drunk and too stoned. And feeling too self-conscious about my body. (Too insecure.)

      I mean—I really don’t think I’m very sexy. (Too skinny. Bad posture. And cock nothing to rave about.) Which makes me feel awkward. Self-conscious. Which makes me feel “outside” the situation.

      Once I can relax with someone I have no trouble at all tho. (Once I know they like me too.)

      This really drives me up the wall tho.

      I want to be able to have more fun. Without having to worry about things like that.

      This spring I went so far as to hire a very sexy hustler several times. (Four times.) (($25 a night.)) But, no dice.

      But that, I think, is another story. Having to do with not being able to enjoy sex unless the other person is enjoying it too.

      (Well, maybe it’s not another story.)

      It’s a great system tho. (If only it worked.) A phone call and a little money instead of being lonely and horny. That’s a bargain, in my book. (If only it worked.)

      So now I’m leveling a bit, and now I’m wondering if maybe leveling, for you, isn’t maybe a total bore.

      I don’t know.

      I don’t wonder why I’m telling you all of this. I wonder if you’re wondering why I’m telling you all of this. (?)

      I’m just not convinced that my problems are going to be all that interesting to a stranger. (And I do write for publication.) Except that I do feel like writing about my problems and I do believe in writing about what I feel like writing about.

      That’s my only hope.

      That’s the only think about writing that I really believe in. (For me.)

      Editing. I used to really edit a lot. Slashing details that might possibly be boring. Rewriting for clarity. Trying to pinpoint things. Trying to make the truth much simpler (clearer) than it is. But with this I’m not going to do this.

      If this book is going to be about what’s going through my head during a nine-hour bus ride—that’s what it’s going to be.

      The funny thing about most “gems of truth” that instantly ring a bell is that they’re total nonsense when you stop and think about them.

      And—“the truth”—why is the truth so narrow-minded?

      Like old people who get a sort of wise air about them. They drive me up the wall.

      People are getting together behind me. (Lively talk.)

      The countryside is improving. (More lush.)

      Big red clay rocks.

      Black-eyed Susans.

      A blue State Police car.

      I like it when those dead elm trees get covered with vines.

      Little houses.

      If the secret of life is not stopping I’m a winner. (But it’s not that simple I’m sure.)

      That time of day now when the shadows are really long. And sharp. Relaxing. And beautiful.

      Ass getting a bit sore.

      Another small town.

      Sure would like a cup of coffee: right now!

      That old German man across from me wants to know what I’m writing.

      “A sort of notebook” I think is what I said.

      “Oh.”

      Been writing like a madman ever since Springfield. Probably thinks I’m a genius of some sort. (As opposed to the dope fiend I am.)

      You’re not going to believe this but the German man just pulled out of a bag a cap with a miniature straw basket sitting on top bubbling over with miniature fruit. What’s more—it’s on his head, wobbling along with the movements of the bus. And nobody is even noticing it. Or perhaps trying not to.

      The sun is in my eyes.

      I do look forward to seeing Kenward a lot.

      (You might be glad to know that he just took it off.)

      And the comforts of sleeping with a body all night you know so well.

      The same comforts that drive me up the wall when we see too much of each other.

      The same comforts I’m afraid of. Because comforts do get boring.

      And boring is dangerous. (And boring.)

      My God—this is Vermont already. (Brattleboro.) And the Germans are getting off. More of them than I thought. (Half the bus.)

      Brattleboro. Must be a ski place.

      I wonder what time it is.

      The blond boy behind me wonders if he’s on the right bus. (Nice to know it’s a common fear.)

      “Gee, I don’t know. You’d better go ask the driver. I would if I were you.” (Don’t know why I said that unnecessary, and false, last sentence.)

      “Yeah, I think I will.”

      This bus is number 3087. (You’ll be glad to know.)

      Anne! I love you and miss you.

      And you too, Michael, in a funny way.

      (Funny = abstract)

      (Abstract = less understandably)

      (Less understandably = ?)

      So much for that game.

      Where did I get this voice from? (Bratty.)

      Reminds me of Anne. (Who is not bratty, and yet—) ((Beautiful elements of.))

      And Pat and Ron. And Joe. And J. J. (Tho God only knows why.) And—

      No, I won’t bore you with a whole list. (Of people I especially love.)

      And besides, I wouldn’t want to leave anybody out. And I wouldn’t want to lie either. So—

      (So now you know just how honest I really am.)

      Hope you don’t think I’m just playing games with myself. I’m not. I’m being silly. I’m trying too hard to say “something.” I’m being self-indulgent. But I’m not playing games with myself.

      First Vermont cheese sign I’ve seen so far.

      That big red barn gift shop I’m sure I’ve seen before.

      This may be a total fantasy but, if I could just spend one week all alone with Joanne Kyger—

________________________________________________________________________

      Bellows Falls now.

      Waterloo playing across the street.

      A policeman.

      A family of six eating ice cream cones in a black car. (Why don’t they get out?)

      “Tuttle Street.” You can be sure a lot has gone on (happened) on Tuttle Street and is. At this very moment. Inside each house. Inside each head. At this very moment.

      Entering another town. I bet it’s White River Junction. (My transfer town.)

      No.

      It really is beautiful, Vermont. Makes so much sense to live here. (If only life made so much sense.) But it doesn’t.

      Really fantastic sunsets really do make you feel small. For a moment.

      I must say I’ve done a very good job filling up this “ashtray” ashtray. (So obviously an ashtray it’s almost embarrassing.) ((To say nothing of then labeling it “ashtray.”))

      Corn.

      Cigarette butts. I bet I’m one of the few people in the world who appreciate cigarette butts. (Do works with them sometimes.)

      Another town. (Now surely—)

      “Odd Fellows Block” a sign on that building said.

      Claremont. I can’t believe it.

      8:05.

      Well, if I’m going to be in Montpelier at 10:05 and I still have a transfer to make it’s got to be soon.

      You know that in the back of my mind the fear is arising that maybe I missed it. (My transfer stop.) But I refuse to let myself turn into an old lady.

      And, even if I did miss it, it wouldn’t really matter.

      And if I missed it, I already have, so thinking about it won’t help any.

      A picnic table.

      Outdoor chairs.

      A planter.

      Bicycles.

      Toys.

      The way things seem “sprinkled” around a yard (even tho probably neatly placed) is somehow very moving.

      The sun is a bright pink-orange now, and beautiful. And more amazing, I sense, than I am able to realize.

      That’s not fair!

      Now if this isn’t White River Junction—

      Portland.

      If the next stop isn’t White River Junction I’m going to ask the bus driver about it.

      Cute boy sitting all alone on “The Windsor House” lawn across the street.

      I’m hungry.

      I want to see Kenward.

      My ass hurts.

      Very opal-like now, the sky.

      A lumber yard.

      Portland. I didn’t know there was a Portland in Vermont. (Don’t think about it.)

      This bus is supposed to turn off into New Hampshire at some point.

      “White River Junction” a big sign just said.

      Bad case of dandruff the guy in front of me has.

      A cemetery.

      A trailer court.

      (Right next to each other.)

      Looking surprisingly similar.

________________________________________________________________________

      New bus. New driver.

      Great. Only a 15-minute wait between buses. Just time for a donut and coffee. Not even time to pee. Wash my face. Etc. Or what have you.

      Two giddy French girls on the bus. (Heavy giddy.) Laughing and talking a mile a minute. (In French.) With, I think, a radio. Or—somebody back there has a radio.

      Really night now. Dark. Blue dark. That kind of blue dark that makes white houses glow. “Arabian blue” I think of it as. But I think I may have made that up. (Cornell blue.) Starry night blue.

      Looking out the window is a bit confusing now as mostly all I can see is myself. My reflection.

      Very little ashtrays on this bus. And very well hidden.

      This little spotlight on me is making me feel conspicuous. (Can “they” read what I’m writing?)

      Just heard someone say “sauna bath.”

      “Insurance.”

      Fuck. Just missed being able to read a sign saying how many miles to Montpelier.

      Wish I didn’t have so many books to do so soon. (Covers and drawings for.) But I do want to do them. And I do want to have done them.

      I really can’t see outside at all now. Think I’ll turn out the light and see if I can still see to write.

      I think if I write big enough I can figure it out later. (What I’m writing.) In other words—no, I can’t see to write very well.

      Actually, there’s not much to see outside right now except endless black trees.

      No stars out tonight.

      I could sure do with a bath.

      The French girls have quieted down.

      “REST AREA 1 MILE.”

      Little modern house all alone.

      Birch trees.

      The moon tonight is either full or so close to full it looks full.

      I want to do some big birch tree cut-outs this summer.

      The French girls are up and at it again.

      Don’t know why I don’t like radios but I don’t. (“September Song” with 100 strings.) For some reason they remind me of the past. (Radios do.) Which, I guess, is why I don’t like them.

      Well, it’s something to write about.

      You know, I think the moon is full. And through these tinted windows, a bright chartreuse.

      A man gets up to go to the bathroom.

      The bathroom! What a dumb fuck I am. There’s a bathroom right here on this bus.

________________________________________________________________________

      As usual it took me awhile to figure out how to open it. (In, not out.) Peed. But no water to freshen face with.

      Barre!

      Well, it won’t be long now.

      This has really been a good bus ride. (With a little help from my friend.)

      Whoever owns that radio is really a genius. (Roller skating music now.)

      I remember those two big weeping willow trees.

      One more bus cigarette.

      “Anne’s Motel” has expanded. New sign too.

      People in houses at night. Always such a shock. Don’t know why. I’ll be doing it soon too. When I get off the bus. Such a real situation. Like a hammer on the head. When you’re outside looking in. People in houses at night.

      How’s that for an ending?

      But, no—we are now sitting at a gas station just a few minutes from Kenward while the bus driver is cleaning his (very dirty I must admit) windows.

      They give “S & H Green Stamps.”

      Off again.

      The sweater store. (A store that sells nothing but sweaters.)

      Radio interference. (Good.)

      The reindeer statues in front of “Howard Johnson’s” which have been slowly sinking into the earth for two years (up to their knees last year) are now on top again.

      House trailers for sale.

      Lots of cars watching a movie.

      More trailers for sale.

      Hey, you know—I’m nervous!

      A new restaurant.

      A new car wash.

      A new furniture store.

      The same old river.

      I guess this is it!

*

More about Joe Brainard here and THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF JOE BRAINARD here.

SJ Fowler, Work in progress: The Revenge of Miguel Cotto for the London Sinfonietta Blue Touch Paper scheme (2012)

The latest VSK Chapbook is LEAVES by SJ Fowler. It is available for online consumption and PDF download here. It begins:

were it not for the spines
would it rather not be fish backwards
is it remarkable how
much pain
the bodies can endures?
the spiny po
               cket puffer grenade
the oligarch, raping his maid
spread, like the kit
they call a test
that happens afterwards a fall

tap a hole right into the humunc
with
a tap, or knife, or screw
whether it would then pour
or been boiled, to sugary, don’t know
but the men thereon
were making most of water
& stuck when a hole in them
like a tree syrup did leak out
& they died

to comparison a human hand
laid out all flat
would rather gone at the start
of Alien
on the eve of the release of Prometheus
                               {bam bam bam bam-bam}
I am Theon Greyjoy
regretti
            ng
an easy way to loose a leaf
to drag bird shaped rocks
from coal, as a cloud
& assuming, nothing
will now abstain from filth
& mischief
a lost dog still must ‘strain its greens’
as fingers that remain attached
were not meant to remain
clean

//

LEAVES was written for and first performed at Evergreen, X Marks the Bökship, London on March 30th 2012, part of an evening of readings, performances and soup around the theme of leaves, curated by VerySmallKitchen for the London visit of Márton Koppány.

//

moving in, as a profession
like marching
& now not to bring sheets
but plenty for the stuffing
the greened
unbroken
& brown flitter, the dropped
water
a mattress made of what isdead
& wonder, as are you a eunuch, of sorts
when they took your cushion
did they remove the pillow cases too?

if one only
leaves were dry
girls
we would do
better?
to gyms, to learn how to fall?
rather to promote & produce
veins
thick & furious as intestinal
parasites
to be a leafed, with rib
                                   bons
run like android wires
from our temple to our dick

//

Continue reading here. More about SJ Fowler’s work is here.

Other work from EVERGREEN by Claire Potter is here and seekers of lice here.

Photo: March Gutt

Take a leaf out of  my book – believe me – I lief would – leaves of grass – leaf thin gold leaf –  leaf mulch  - leafing through something thumbing pages flicked through dog-eared –  turning over a new leaf  – the Manyoshu or Collection of 10,000 Leaves is the first major anthology of Japanese poetry, compiled sometime about 760 AD and containing over 4500 poems – “…your thoughts disheveled like your morning hair” – leaf green is chlorophyll – Indian Yellow was made from the urine of cattle fed on mango leaves, a cruel process finally banned in 1908 – I went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf – Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving? / Leaves, like the things of man, you / With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? – next to humans, leafcutter ants form the largest and most complex animal societies on Earth – they feed on a fungus created from a mixture of the ants’ fluid and freshly cut leaves which exists only in Leafcutters’ nests – each year winged females and males leave their nests en masse and engage in a nuptial flight known as the revoada – each female mates repeatedly to collect the 300 million sperm she needs to set up a colony – to start her own fungus garden, the queen stores bits of the parental fungus garden mycelium in her infrabuccal pocket –  most species of cacti have lost true leaves, retaining only spines, which are highly modified leaves – Clarice Lispector complained that some of the translators of her novels from the original Portuguese removed the prickles from the cactus by translating away her awkwardness –  write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive – you who were the smooth bark, roundness and leaf of my words – Daphne escaping from Apollo’s unwanted advances metamorphosing into a tree, fingers turning to leaves – the tears of the Heliades, sisters of Phaethon who drove the Sun God’s chariot too close to the sun, their tears becoming amber as they became poplar trees – in old books when coloured plates were tippped in, a leaf of tissue lay between the text and the plate for protection, so that each illustration was seen first through a veil – leaves can show many different degrees of hairiness for which botany has a very precise vocabulary – leaves can for example be hirsute, bearded, bristly, pubescent, floccose, glabrescent – glabrescent leaves lose hairs with age – leaves as camouflage covering ghillie suits – on location a ghillie suit is customized with twigs and leaves commom to that habitat – these local additions must be changed every few hours as the leaves and green grasses wilt – leaves are carried by the soldiers as Great Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane and Macbeth is vanquished – the trees are coming into leaf like something almost being said – leaf and stick insects camouflage themselves by their uncanny mimesis of particular leaves – Antonio Pigafetta sailing with Ferdinand Magellan’s circum-navigational expedition writes: “In this island are also found certain trees, the leaves of which, when they fall, are animated, and walk. They are like the leaves of the mulberry tree, but not so long; they have the leaf stalk short and pointed, and near the leaf stalk they have on each side two feet. If they are touched they escape, but if crushed they do not give out blood. I kept one for nine days in a box. When I opened it the leaf went round the box. I believe they live upon air” – leaf-like camouflage is used by many different species including frogs and fish – leaf red is erythrophyll – certain bats are leaf-nosed, having a leaflike appendage on the snout – botanically a leaflet is a division of a compound leaf –  commonly it is a small-sized leaf of paper containing printed matter often for free  distribution – airborne leaflet propaganda is a form of psychological warfare in which leaflets or flyers are scattered from the air – there are six different functions of airborne leaflet propaganda which have been used over the past century – in  Isaac Babel’s1920 Diary detailing his time as a war correspondent with the Red Cavalry he describes the great power of Soviet Union leaflets brought to them by defectors from the Polish army – later he finds a Polish leaflet –  “Touching, sad, without the steel of Bolshevik slogans, no promises and words like order, ideals and living in freedom. Victory will be ours!” – but it wasn’t – Duchamp’s wedding present to his sister Suzanne was the instruction for a readymade – she was to hang a geometry book by strings on the balcony of their apartment “so that the wind could go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages” –  wind in the leaves – The Unhappy Readymade – disparaging the seriousness of a book full of principles – in its exposure to the weather “the treatise seriously got the facts of life” – a leaf scar is the cicatrix left on the bark by separation of the leaf stalk of a fallen leaf – Duchamp’s concept of the infrathin refers to the invisible yet nevertheless defining qualities of objects or materials which are part of a temporally defined process – Duchamp believed that the infrathin can only be described by examples, such as the difference between a clean shirt and the same shirt worn once – the lingering warmth of a seat when someone has just vacated it – a leaf‘s thickness of difference – the victor wears a crown of laurel leaves – The Laurel, meed of mighty Conquerors / And Poets sage… The Willow worn of forlorn Paramours –  poisonous leaves – leaves of three, let them be  –  deadly nightshade or belladonna is one of the most toxic plants in the Western hemisphere –ingestion of a single leaf can be fatal to an adult  –  salad leaves  – skeleton leaf – leaf print – leaf line leaves on the line, a common cause of train delays –  in the UK a number of rail companies change their timings and publish special “leaf fall timetables” – the French word for leaf is feuille –  millefeuille is a classic French pastry cake popularized by Carême –  it consists of three pieces of puff pastry sandwiched with cream – classic puff pastry correctly made has 729 layers of butter between 730 leaves of pastry so millefeuille has 2190 leaves  –  feuilleton from feuillet / sheet of paper / little leaf is the part of a European newspaper containing reviews and articles of general entertainment –  on the Beaufort wind scale leaves rustle in a light breeze – in a gentle breeze leaves and small twigs are in constant motion – in a moderate breeze dust and leaves are raised up – I found it out, what love is all about / And every day at three, when school lets out / I see my baby, I get weak in the knees / Ain’t nothin’ shakin’ but the leaves on the trees

 
 
__
 
 
 

LEAF/ LEAVES was written for and first performed at Evergreen, X Marks the Bökship, London on March 30th 2012, part of an evening of readings, performances and soup around the theme of leaves, curated by VerySmallKitchen for the London visit of Márton Koppány. Other work from the night by Claire Potter is here.

More about seekers of lice is here. See also LILMP and CREAMY LANGUAGE.

         It’s true. Bulah and Bill Brown did little more than move from the flats of the their backs to the chairs at the arse-end of the room for years. They’d been packing to go back to Jamaica when she fell down the stairs carrying a box. She had to go in for a double knee operation which took her off her feet and then he wasn’t far behind her with his leg ulcers. After that it was bed to chair, chair to bed, bed to chair, chair to bed. That’s what happens to most of them when they come home; physios attend to people who aren’t about to kick the bucket, it’s just how it is. People end up trapped and they have to carry it. So in place of walking, when they can’t just leave the room, can’t walk away from a situation, they do other things; new skills, routines, new structures – trying to make sense of being stuck.

‘Come!
Yu nah ‘ear meh, mi seh, ‘Come!’’

         I was warned from the outset she was a bit of a nightmare, Bulah, something to be reckoned with as one manager put it. After the operation some years before I’d met her, she started to develop what the plan called as a keen sensibility for order: a neurosis. In practice this meant the placement of things and sequence of events were keys to her mood. If you happened to follow the protocol, you were treated warmly, you’d come fi see Nana, but out of line at all and you were nothing but a damn maid.

         ‘Ok, so once you’ve logged in with the phone let her finish with her papers or whatever she’s doing, then it’s phone-on-bed, table-down-the-bottom and then get the Stand Aid. Don’t bring the Stand Aid in first, she’ll think you’re rushing and she doesn’t like people rushing. And word to the wise, put the harness on from the back – you’ll only catch her with the Velcro.’

‘Ooooweh!
Looord av manna!
Yeh try tek mi eye owt!
Bill! She try fi tek mi eye out!
Damn foolishness! Owt! Yu nah know wha-fi do – Owt!’

         Each slip added new scare stories to her legacy and she knew it. I could see it in her sly side glances. Crafty like a lawyer, she could make use of anything to prove her point, any point, so it was with awe and watchful caution that I began taking tea with Bulah. Bill however, I took to Bill like my granddad, he did the same quick winks. It wasn’t a useful association as it happens.

         For a while I was telling myself it was the fourteenth the last time she looked into my leaves. I liked the sort of anxiety it gave me – the date being the same number as their house – but in fact we had tea on other days after that, I just can’t remember them. Tea on the fourteenth has eclipsed all other teas. It was the reading on that day that brought us the weasel blocking the seal – someone untrustworthy in the home, two figures carrying baskets, and the worst and most sickening of all the symbols in the tea leaves, the sign that eventually sent me under, a rock and a motor in conjunction with a wavy line.

         ‘Just forget about the remote control – don’t keep picking at it. He could have waited, the daughter was coming back at eleven, you know he could have waited. Just try to remember that. No one saw this coming, it’s nobody’s fault.’

         What the seer reads is in accordance with the muscular action of the arm as controlled by the brain of whomever consults the leaves. I looked that up the day I heard the news. It means that the symbols Bulah read in the tea leaves were of me, like a trace of myself in the cup. But not like a footprint, it wasn’t an impression of me, an outline, and not containing either, not like flaked dead skin, but somehow behind things. At base, that’s what I couldn’t shake, this behindness, the code of it, what happened when the symbols were combined and how I fitted into that. A symbol of a tree means a tree, it means one tree, but two symbols of trees, three symbols of trees – well that’s something else isn’t it, that’s a place. Somehow an unlocatable woods is created through combination of two symbols of a tree. That’s what did me in the end. This thinking. I just couldn’t distance myself from the structures, from all the associations; things just kept on unpacking.

         The rock, motor and wavy lines being in conjunction warned of some forthcoming alarm in connection with a motor expedition, but the episode would be in the distance, would be remote.

         ‘Twigs and stems! Woman yu likea chil – look-fi pichas in thee fyah!’

         Bill wasn’t keen on it, there was no good in it. He told me to go on about my business, come change his catheter bag, go make him a chocolate. Bulah encouraged my interest she always called it a natural curiosity, but it’s what she said to me that day that’s inscribed the date on me like this, that gave it all more weight. She said it was my doing, the message, and she made it sound so plausible; the mind moves the arm that writes the leaf.

         ‘Right, so you’ve got her in bed and she’s comfortable, now it’s table-up-the-side, teeth-top-right, put the glucose tablets on the near right and the phone to the front in case of emergencies. She does wear a Life Line button round her neck – which she’s got a better chance of reaching if anything does happen – but she just feels better with the phone there.’

         Before Bill died, Bulah read my leaves. She didn’t do it once he’d gone. He had pressed for the backrest to go all the way up, going for the telly button I had wrongly placed just out of reach, and he had fallen, out of the bed, down the gap between the unit and the chest of draws. His asthma attack brought on his heart attack and so he died: trying and reaching. I see him doubled, with legs in the air, stuffed down fleshy into the corner, Bulah crying out and pulling at the cord, grasping at the receiver as he had done for the remote.
 
 
 
__

 
 
 

 
 
 
TEA LEAVES was written for and first performed at Evergreen, X Marks the Bökship, London on March 30th 2012, part of an evening of readings, performances and soup around the theme of leaves, curated by VerySmallKitchen for the London visit of Márton Koppány.
 
 
 
 
 
More about Claire Potter’s work is here.
 
 
 
 
 

friends and enemies

(stockhausen’s childhood)
the french were our enemies
and the english were our enemies
and the italians were our friends
and the spanish were the friends
and the japanese were the friends
and the russians were the friends
(but that changed a year later;
then the russians were enemies as well)
and the finnish were friends, etc.
I did not know what to do with this.

(childhood friends)
the russians were our enemies
and the americans were our friends
and the french were our friends
and the italians were our friends
and the british were our friends
and the communists were our enemies
and the capitalists were our friends
and we did not know what to do about it.

(adult enemies)
the americans are no longer our friends
and the russians are no longer our enemies
but the muslims are our enemies
and the immigrants are our enemies
and the terrorists are our enemies
and the gypsies are our enemies
and we do not know where it all will lead.

•

composition militaire

komm, position!

         ||

•

composition traumatique

ballon
pfff
et: rien.

•

composition post-traumatique

1) ballon
2) ex(ballon)nation
         |
     exbl()tion

ça suffit.

•

it is only getting better/
it is only getting worse/
it is only getting better/
it is only getting worse/
it is only getting
i                          bet

•

human involution
(évolution
eh, vos solutions?)
human beings are not the same
human beings are not insane
human beings are not to blame

continue.

//

In an email to VerySmallKitchen 08/01/12, Cia Rinne writes:

I think that working with visual poetry and conceptual pieces is often like an escape, a sphere where you can neglect rules, concentrate on such – seen in a wider perspective – ridiculous things as language, meaning, and sound, so maybe they are not explicit. I feel that if I want to say something important I should rather do it in a text; although there are many pieces reflecting my other practice, working with the Roma for instance, I would not want conceptual writing to become a mere means for an agenda. It can feel like mere luxury to be working with such pieces when you have knowledge of what is happening in the world however, so I guess a balance is good and necessary both ways.

For more about Cia Rinne see the online work archives zaroum at Afsnit P. An interview with SJ Fowler as part of the Maintenant project is here.

See also sounds for soloists and Ubuweb’s edition of zaroum and notes for soloists here. The two books were released as a single volume in France last year by Le clou dans le fer.

Ariel Goldberg and "Newspaper" (1992) by Robert Gober

July 7, 2011

Dear Robert Gober:

There is a psychic connection between your sculpture of your fake newspapers and the relatively recent flurry of people taking pictures in museums. To visit a museum is something to report on, or to make available to see, for that unknown audience of memory. The impulse seems linked to imitating a newspaper spread. When I see someone posing next to a piece of art, or, their bodies just in front of it, not inside the photo, I see that picture getting discarded. I don’t know how it is that when people are taking so many pictures I still feel that pictures don’t exist.

I thought about staging performers to be photographing in the galleries leading up to your piece. But I cringe at even directing someone to take a picture. I think I need to be directing people in not taking a picture. But are these opposites? The planted photographers would look attached to me, they would probably have been my friends, and I realized I wouldn’t want to be attached to fake photographers. Like, if I was dating and everyone was a photographer, the fake photographer would not be my type. I would rather imagine staring at people photographing. Cameras, at least deactivated on the bodies of people in the museum, happen frequently enough that I wouldn’t have to stage it. And anyway, I still have my whole life to watch people take pictures.

I don’t blame people for photographing; I don’t know if they can help it. Vilém Flusser writes in his book Towards a Philosophy of Photography:

Cameras demand that their owners (the ones who are hooked on them) keep on taking snaps, that they produce more and more redundant images. This photo-mania involving the eternal recurrence of the same (or of something very similar) leads eventually to the point where people taking snaps feel they have gone blind…They are not ‘in charge of’ taking photographs, they are consumed by the greed of their camera, they have become an extension to the button of their camera…A permanent flow of unconsciously created images is the result.

Officially allowing photography was a watershed decision before the 2007 Frieda Kahlo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where your “Newspapers” are in the permanent collection. At the information desk I learn that this coincided with the increasing technology of cell phone cameras. Guards couldn’t tell the difference between when people were taking notes on their phone and taking a picture. Meanwhile, visitors were actually complaining they couldn’t take pictures in the museum, maybe because it was like a violation to their personal experience, like a threat to their memory. The leading defense was, if the museum could sell reproductions of a piece, why couldn’t visitors pose next to it, for their noncommercial uses? Not allowing photography got linked with the sinister motive to capitalize off a restricted picture only being accessible through a postcard, a book, or a t-shirt. What became clear in this struggle for the right to photograph in a museum is how it is the taking of a photo that offers the intended memory. This is a transfer or a gestural reinforcement from something you could hold. It’s like multiple lenders. The photo is an event.

When I went to a talk the other night, the announcements began with saying you cannot take people’s pictures without the express permission of the person being photographed. I wonder how often people might ask a painting, a sculpture, a photograph permission, and how this might seem crazy. Then the next night, I was sitting in the audience at a cabaret style performance and all I could see was the screen of the person in front of me taking photos of the burlesque act. This could have been the friend of the performer, they could have had permission, but I suspected it was the free reign technique.

I have stood guard at “Newspapers,” communicating with the sculpture so to speak, which deters, but also attracts visitors because they think I am a docent. Someone even asked me if I was the artist. They were joking. I ended up talking about how “Newspapers” is really a performance of negligence. And I’m not trying to say people don’t look at art, because that wouldn’t be fair, they are in the museum because in some form, they care about art. People come here to look at art, right?

I’m just curious about what discourages “Newspapers” from being looked at. I’ve been watching how most people don’t read the surface of these stacks, and how what you would read feels a little bit like a puzzle to solve. Stopping to solve a puzzle doesn’t go with conveyer belt flow of moving through galleries, even if it is easy, like a travel size puzzle sold in a toy store, one that loses its pieces in between car seats. Also, “Newspapers” is one of the only pieces on the ground in this permanent collection exhibition, and it’s bunched like waste, good-looking garbage, but still associated with what is ready to be brought to the people who sell trash.

Reading the wall text, I see it’s on archival paper, that they are constructed to be like newspapers, but ones that don’t yellow. When my eyes jump over the twine, I see the headlines are twisted, combined, and selected. “Protestor thrusts a fetus at Clinton,” “Student killed after objecting to racial slur,” “Bush is sent forth as Champion of family Values,” “Judge Dismisses Case Against Men Holding Hands,” “Vatican condones discrimination against homosexuals.” What that means is the Vatican intended to scrutinize laws intended to protect gays and to oppose them if they promote public acceptance of gay behavior. When I search the New York Times archive I find they have changed homosexual to gay in the headline, but not in the text’s body.

It’s not a subtle world you’ve created at all, once you bend over. Weddings look absurd, all the pots, and rings, and dresses: the gift is presented as a road sign, like an attraction up against this hit parade of who gets a shit taken on them.

I also have stood at other sides of this gallery to watch people interact with “Newspapers.” It’s very uncomfortable to stand still in a gallery longer than a few minutes without a uniform saying my job is to stand here, which is perhaps emblematic of how uncomfortable it is to be an artist, with the rare occasion of time, to do their work. It’s weird to come do my work inside a museum; I am even more aware of the ambient social doubt that a non-canonized, person making art is necessary. So the discomfort is really suspicion. Anyway, if I circled the gallery, and the new people coming in did not know that I was on a loop, that would be maybe less uncomfortable. The incognito artist is, in other words, just a performance artist.

What also feels uncomfortable is listening to people turning on their cameras, the path of beeps to turn a flash off make cameras like portable video games. It’s strange, the limitations on behavior. How just saying no flash, or not on this floor but on those floors, is a reminder of this limp control. Photography has become akin with a sort of lawlessness– it’s like the power you might feel when jaywalking. I wonder if there is, a connection with outdated laws, or the reality of living gay versus the laws about being gay, and how someone photographing, might be exerting this strong desire, one they cannot help, and don’t think is wrong. This isn’t a comparison, but a sort of collision between your piece and the photographic acts.

Anyway, I am writing to let you know that no one really photographs your “Newspapers.” I’ve been visiting your piece for about a month now, once a week, sometimes more, depending how lost I am about what to say, and I’ve seen no one photograph it. It’s in the corner of a room, the middle of the second floor, so those factors might lend to a moment of fatigue. The location of your piece is similar to hitting the gooey bottom of a body of water.

Also, “Newspapers” is right next to René Magritte’s painting of a comb, Ibuprofen, a bed, a feather, and clouds as wallpaper, to indicate a dream. “Personal Values” is the title, which goes nicely with the singeing “family values” codeword in one of your Newspapers’ headlines. In fact, that’s the only curatorial logic I can detect here. To say “Newspaper” is next to a surrealist painting is a way of saying that your piece is often treated in the periphery. Because surrealism, you know, is famous, recognizable, comforting, explanations of the movement make it to high school curriculums.

I don’t think this twisted reality of you being the model for a Saks Fifth Avenue wedding dress is a 1992 version of dream state surrealism. It’s just a prize coined by a hidden layer, for curators, friends, historians, people who bought the audio tour, for artists. It’s an act of withheld information, something akin to a hunt. In all the writing about your work, the “Newspaper” pieces are mentioned the least, maintaining that same periphery the general population of SFMOMA exerts on to it. “Newspapers” is therefore a very successful insistence on what it means to be overlooked. However public a newspaper might be, on a stand, or a screen, reading the news is an intensely personal process. You might as well be getting yourself in the news if you are making fake newspapers, right? Your face is the imaged bride, on the page with the news, as a testament to this. It’s like a where’s Gober when you didn’t know you were being given a where’s Gober.

Only recently I began to understand the desire to be taking pictures in a museum. I had given an assignment of going to this museum and writing about a piece of art, interpreting it. Somehow the assignment that I modified from another teacher had this requirement to take a photo of the thing students would write about, and I didn’t take that requirement out. It was an oversight, or an experiment. I’m not sure which. Anyway, I was helping two students with editing drafts of their essays, and one of them began to reminisce about the first time he saw a Salvador Dali painting at this museum. How that was a really special experience for him because he grew up on the reproductions. His classmate asked, did you take a picture of it? I seized on this question with inexhaustible fascination. My brain was on fire.

Why take a picture of a painting? His explanation took some detours. He had to go to Las Vegas for his sister’s wedding. There was a Manet or Van Gough show there, I don’t remember which. He expressed his need to see this show, and this strong desire was also an announcement to his family of being an artist. This show felt like the opportunity to meet a celebrity, one that you could stare at and they wouldn’t flinch or blink. Objects can be celebrities. The weekend was too busy with ceremony for him to go. He felt deeply deprived and disappointed.

His answer to my persistent question, can it still be a sacred experience without taking a picture, was, I take pictures of everything, everything interesting. To prove this, he scrolled through the photos in his phone. He showed me a photo that I had even showed him, taken from the computer screen I had wheeled into class one day. Actually that photo was of the Vija Celmins drawing right near your “Newspapers” piece that looks like a photo but when you get up close you see it’s a very meticulous graphite drawing. He keeps this picture to make conversation, to ask his friends to guess if it’s a photo or a drawing, and everyone says photo, and then he says no! It’s a drawing!

Why am I so confused about people taking photos–why do I care, right, how does it hurt me? What is difficult for me is to reconfigure my relationship to the camera. I don’t see a camera as something that can help me see someone else’s art better, or for extended or injected time. Or maybe this is my issue with this never-ending conflict, or subsidiary framework, where photography often becomes this bland tool for painting unless it imitates the bigness of painting. It’s some history hang over. I mean, I have no problem documenting art with photography–art that needs documentation that is. And ultimately everything needs a reproduction. So the question might be about when we start employing ourselves to be the reproducers.

My relationship to a camera is not about saving the first time I see something. It is more about the continual times I see something, or the impossibility for there be a precious moment, just a painfully ordinary one. Or entering a place of delay and darkness. To me photography is just an accumulation; it’s versions of people accumulating. Or photography has almost completely shifted for me from mechanical tools to word tools, and that I continue to argue with that idea also.

Anyway, we are at a battleground of what gets called mundane or not. I cannot avoid it here, love and death. I am standing in front of your work, Robert Gober, and people are watching me. They are listening. The museum has hired me to give a talk here. It’s part of a live influx of writers to coincide with the Gertrude Stein Family collection show upstairs. The Stein show costs more money at the door, so the permanent collection feels like a discount. Upstairs, the paintings are shipped from Europe, displayed behind glass, a type of glass you can see your own reflection in if you try to see the texture of the paint. They have extra guards in that show, and photography is absolutely not allowed. But that doesn’t mean people haven’t been taking pictures.

I went to see the Gertrude Stein PBS style biography show across the street, at the Jewish Museum. It leaves out readings of her work, practically denigrating her more experimental works as unreadable because it decidedly focuses on the visual Gertrude, the surface. I found the Félix González-Torrez photo of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s grave under the subject heading of “legacy” in the show. I heard the curator talk about this photo, saying it’s cross gendered queer bonding, creating ties to the past, creating hope for the future, whatever that means. Talk about utopia can be such a bummer sometimes.

I’ve been thinking a lot about subtlety these days. About how in June all the alternative spaces’ art shows have queer in the title and clap their hands, literally, holding applause signs, promoting the work of who is going to say this is queer. And it seems to be the only place for art made by queers this month, the megaphone.

Anyway, the photo of what is maybe Stein and Toklas’ grave or maybe is just a camera pointing at flowers, is “Untitled.” González-Torrez subtitles the “grave” giving an estimate of its location in place, name. There is a concept neatly delivered, or the piece readily contextualized. So it isn’t untitled, that’s sort of a joke. Meanwhile, your “Newspapers,” aren’t really newspapers, so there’s the joke. The hope, maybe I should say. You title them “Newspaper,” single, but I’ve actually been re-titling your piece in the plural, just to make my sentences sound better.

On the wall intersecting “Untitled” is a Tammy Rae Carland photo of Félix González-Torrez’s grave. It’s basically a replica, with different color flowers. I don’t know if he was even buried in Oakland. Referent on referent–like phyllo uncooked. I had to iterate my attachment to these pictures by standing longer than I did in front of anything else; they sort of cradled me. Maybe it was the corner.

I had seen the Stein Toklas grave photo before, but only as a slide in a lecture, on an old type of projector, one that shuts you up in a room in the dark and hums. Then I had seen it in books. Instead of taking a photograph of this picture, to commemorate my first time seeing it, I composed a text message, saying right now I stand in front of the González-Torrez grave picture that I know is one of your favorite pictures. I sent the message to the person who showed me the grave photo for the first time, when I was listening to her slide lecture.

I think about newspapers as inescapable reproductions, emanating a disavowal of the real thing. What could we demand, with the situation of someone looking at a photo under the condition it is not a flat thing? “Newspapers” might as well be a grave. It makes me think about the right to determine graves, where they are, if the experience of mourning is so displaced over time. And how much grief is stored up in photos, waiting for us, like an invitation. What is a grave in a time when deaths are unacknowledged? Can newspapers be a grave? Can a reproduced portrait of David Wojnarowicz be another grave, and for who, for the artist who died of AIDS or all the not so famous people? Fake Newspapers are a kind of exhumed gravestone, one that sunk underground because it’s made of the vulnerable. The “Newspapers” are a lot less pretty than framed flowers; unless you have a newspaper fetish, which I kind of do, because it’s my only sense of home.

__

Dear  Ehren Tool:

“Each Image must be in a chain of images, for if it were not in a tradition, it would not be decipherable. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily always work.” (Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images)

To decipher an overlap in positions can’t be comfortable.
Peace is for pussies: this is a quote.
You cannot tell if this is professional because of the bathing suit lines.
Pride risks an invasion of style: looking at patriotism can make you feel less patriotic.
Artillery drops like deer pellets in rotation.

The excuse of an accident.
There is the professional here too, in a spectrum of salutes.
Implants from the care package or the screen.
The portrait studio of badges and pins.
You can fill in the blank of who they are when they do smile.

The official portrait’s meaning is in how it repeats.
We start to recognize them.
They may be dead.
Every picture is of someone that may be dead.
Most people bring their own camera.

This could be considered a placeholder camera.
They are hugging with heads down.
They don’t discuss a plan but recover from one.
That flag is upside down and bedazzled with skulls instead of stars.
Agitation lines indicate what’s shaken is being thrown.

The head does not look attached to the body.
People are scrambling.
Caretakers to the wounded are captured from a movie.
The way a dummy can scare you.
A label too small to read.

This keeps on happening.
This is hungry for a victory.
A commemorative keychain or poster or a t-shirt reapplied here.
Iconic shock leaks permission.
They are aligned full frontal, legs spread slightly wider than hips.

A flag hangs sideways in the backdrop to fulfill the military fetish.
Reverse the pledge of allegiance.
Uniform covers body except for unzipped fly.
The president gives a press conference.
The cue is replaced with a halt.

__

Dear  Ehren Tool:

I’ve captioned your cups, but I will never feel ready to write about your cups. They disarm readiness, or characterize readiness as an apparition. The cue is replaced with a halt. What results is tumbling into many descriptive lists where I’ve become this person trying to organize or talk to the pictures on the cups.

All the damaged cups Ehren Tool gave Ariel Goldberg in 2010

I’ve studied the cups as if round history books. I’ve stored them in different ways in closets, tables, and basements. I’ve thought about when their backside faces the wall, hiding images on them. How even the most minor choice to see one image and not another is enacting the perpetual selection, and abbreviation of a glut to reckon with. The week I decided to photograph the cups, I was stacking them, to make variations of high short rows or long low rows. I was figuring out my favorites and making those images visible for the surface of a photo. At night I’d fall asleep facing the cups. I was living with them at all times in that room, as a peripheral headspace. I’ve taken over 300 pictures of the cups in all sorts of positions.

What I’ve arrived at is how a photograph of the cups doesn’t let you hold a cup, or drink from it. The cups you gave me live in a state of fragility, containing hairline cracks that are small enough to miss. The cups were never precious; you even threw one to the ground in your studio when we met to make this clear. It wasn’t quite like the burning of a letter. When the cup is broken, images on them still work. Not only do the pictures still remain readable, they feel even more relevant with fractures or missing parts. Of course they could get more damaged, more unsee-able but they are suspended. Perverse, banal, or recognizable images are only in the context of something broken.

Images feel at home on broken surfaces. Pictures do or don’t remain. By holding pictures on a cup, a hand is holding multiple unoriginal pictures at the same time. The photos are being rounded and hidden. In order to hold the cup, your hand must cover a picture or pieces of pictures. This contact of a palm or the fingers over a picture compares to holding the edges of a print, to see a framed photo, or glance at a screen. The hand to the photo on a cup is both a silencer and amplifier to a picture. We are actively and inactively remembering and forgetting images all the time. We are carrying images all the time. Photos are watching us take them in.

__

More about Ariel Goldberg’s work is here and Ehren Tool’s here.  A dialogue between Ariel Goldberg and Ohad Ben Shimon is on VerySmallKitchen here.

The latest VSK chapbook is nick-e melville’s EDITORIAL, which is available for online consumption and PDF dowload here. EDITORIAL begins:

ti
ded
ded

fiend kills girlfriend’s mum
over wedding snu

lax

it’s good to pay
for careless drivers

                             over
              steam
first de playwright JB Priestley.
              poet Samuel
Taylor Coleridge

80 Lap
Mixed Lots

RIP

sentencing backlash
as riot moth
is set free

oil stopped

David Mellor famously
warned that the British
press was now “inking
in the loon”.

South Africa
selected art up to 2012
the Big word
Andy Devl

like a nit
George’s plan isn’t quite
stacking up

EDITORIAL began as an installation of the day’s newspapers at the Totalkunst Gallery, Edinburgh 20/21 August 2011, the concluding installation of I AM NOT A POET.

Tippex and marker pens were available, and a score invited “tippex the papers and correct the news.” As the notes to this chapbook explain:

words made from tippex deletions.

words in brackets are words added in tippex by participants
words in bold are words added by participants with black marker, one provided or their own.
words in red are words added by participant(s) in red marker.
words in square brackets describe images made by tippex.

each variation comes from a separate notational revolution round the gallery.

EDITORIAL will be launched as part of Evergreen at X Mark’s the Bökship on 30th March  2012.

A u u with no and thos’

our guid heap

venture
seeing
eering
Go:

outrage as Tussaud’s
defends its right
to say Heil Hitler

Last minute sale
Bank Bargains!

Honeymoon horror
Killer was White

a moral bound
the pup that won
Cilla’s ear

nick-e melville’s work is also part of VerySmallKitchen’s I AM NOT A POET ASSEMBLING.

Other tippex works by nick-e were part of THETEXTISTHETEXT (co-curated with Gerry Smith), an online version of which is on VerySmallKitchen here.

See a recent interview and reading at The Other Room here.

the man who spent
£15,000 to shed pounds

park boss heck
over light sides

fat spread as city’s tin walls join the strike
tens of 1000s of port
celebrated
man who relishes a fight
everything it touches
turns to ash

the new capital
one world
mastercard will
pay you back hands

charge the bank

Continue reading here.

Ariel Goldberg, Part of the epistolary novel, and performance "The Photographer," March, 2012

The following is an edited version of a correspondence which took place by email between 24 February and 15 March 2012, between Ohad Ben Shimon and Ariel Goldberg.

Ohad emailed Ariel as a follow up to their inclusion in Ugly Duckling Presse’s Emergency Index publication, proposing a dialogue, one of whose public forms would be as a blog post on VerySmallKitchen.

Transcript edited by VerySmallKitchen 18/03/12. The full unedited exchange can be seen here.

OHAD: I was quite happy to view and read your thoughts regarding the intersection of photography with performance and text. It’s nice for me to take photography as a starting point as I was also educated in art school in photography and kind of drifted away from it. I’m more into connecting writing/performance to painting nowadays. But eventually i guess all roads cross.

ARIEL: I started in photography school also, turned to writing as the more practical and versatile tool, but always still deep in photography. Actually I argue my writing is photography. Photography is in such rapid change, I think language is at this moment of really entering the game. Like caption revenge or something.

Photo: Ohad Ben Shimon

OHAD: Your writing might very well be (is) photography, I get that. Presence/absence etc. What is the object of writing/photography? I also used to identify myself as a photographer without a camera for people who didn’t get the picture. It should go on from there to new and yet unknown territories.

ARIEL: Just subbed for a class of 18 year old photo students and I felt like why make supremacy out of photography. It seems like these photographers, and they were very young ones, who knows what they will become, had no hunger for reading/writing as maybe a better lens when the world is over-saturated image wise.

Ariel Goldberg, slide lecture, AND NOW festival, 2011, based on photgraphs of parents Ellie and Ira Goldberg.

Past explaining things, settling into writing as a primary medium may be where I have always been heading. Perhaps there is some idea of not wanting to give up one for the other. Preferably the unknown, as you say.

I have a prompt for this emergency index release party to make a piece “from” something else in the anthology. I’m curious about the medium, if there can be one, of “performance lecture.” Is this a thing? I feel like it is a buzz word right now in the arts crossing over to writing. I’m interested in how a faux-expert operates. As a real expert, tonally.

OHAD: Can we free photography from its contemporary heavy chains of disgust? Can we acquire the sense of innocence that once inhabited this medium? Without getting all sentimental about it or perhaps to exaggerate this sentimentality to an absurd point…

The lecture-performance format deals with a certain academic authority to my understanding. This authority is perhaps the same sovereign authority that the photographic medium has dealt with throughout history.

Predominantly I think a lecture-performance is a way to designate an exchange between an artist and an audience which is neither an academic (lecture) exchange nor a performance in the normal sense of the term. So it’s an interesting case of a double negation. Like the double negation of writing slipping into art. It’s neither writing, nor art. Neither-nor.

Ariel Goldberg, Directed self-portrait, as a bridesmaid, in New Jersey, 2011

Who is telling what to who? Who is listening? Who’s in the picture? Who’s not? Who’s smart? Who’s stupid? Who’s infantile? I sound like Heide Klum in Project Runway. What if we could break all the cameras in the world in one given moment and then glue them all back together to form one uber-camera? What would we see?

I’ve had another talk with a friend last week, also contemplating what you say regarding the realisation that writing is/should be your primary medium. But what the hell is a writer? Is it someone who publishes books? Goes to readings? Is reviewed about? I really don’t know.

For me writing lately comes down to silence. There is a silence when I write. I transform that silence into a certain visible trace in the form of words. Maybe it’s similar to the way a camera brings a certain darkness into light?

ARIEL: I am thinking today about caption errors. About how this seems to be the most dramatic twist, some affirmation of the way blind faith in the surface of an image distorts our experiences (of what?).

I read the news constantly, more so now maybe because I started getting a New York Times weekend edition. So the papers just pile up and it feels like I am a worker, like Bartleby the Scrivener, getting through the stories.

Do you read the news? Are broken cameras caption errors? There are so many cameras going into the garbage heap everyday, it is the most rapidly evolving and consumer cycling technology it seems, if cell phones are included in the pile of cameras. I like to stare at those bins at thrift stores of film cameras. But I don’t want to accumulate them.

If we took this, cameras broken then gluing it back together, and thought about what we would see- light leaks? Literal. We would see the people in the military taking the horrific pictures of the dead bodies their commands are responsible for. This sort of footage of carnage is under constant raps, but so much of it is flowing through the memory cards of the U.S. military.

I’ll tell you what a writer is, in the sense of how it feels in my daily life: I wake up in the morning and I must write. The thing I am making, are pieces of paper with writing on them. Other stuff grows from that point but I guess it’s a crude estimation of my production that I say I am more of a writer.

I must write or I go crazy. It is really actually a compulsion. I must write down the things that seem crucial to observe, minutia in photography, inside my many little systems for collecting then finessing this observation into a piece of writing to redistribute back to the world.

Ariel Goldberg, SFMOMA 2011: "On July 7, I led a group of people up to Robert Gober’s Newspaper piece, discussing, theorizing, and reciting the photographic acts that happen throughout the museum. Evan Kennedy helped by narrating the script up to the piece..."

But it is a struggle. And there is a lot of silence in it. Yes, I agree silence is crucial, something to seek, to cultivate. I guess mostly, a writer is a reader. I guess I identify with the procedures for arriving at subjects or projects like that of a writer, but also that of a photographer, a photographer who doesn’t use film but uses language, because it is much freer. In the economic sense, I think it is important to differentiate between photography and writing.

You write “the lecture-performance format deals with a certain academic authority to my understanding. this authority is perhaps the same sovereign authority that the photographic medium has dealt with throughout history. who is telling what to who?”

For a while I was obsessed with writing the imagined voice of the subject of photographs, as these sort of dredged captions. Then I was also writing the voice of the photographer- who sounded kind of like an asshole. I think with citizen journalism, anyone who is there with any type of camera and catches a crucial picture to document something considered news or history, the sovereign power of photography is changing.

Perhaps more people doing “performance lectures” is just a result of the spread of academia into the arts, which it seems everyone bemoans at every opportunity they get. Bash the M.F.A. or the B.F.A.

OHAD: What motivates me? Kinship. Maybe that’s why I contacted you. I sensed a certain kinship. which is strange. I mean we are total strangers.

I saw Rabih Mroué in Utrecht. I liked his approach. I also sat behind him just before and after his performance in the audience. I thought of talking to him and congratulating him for an interesting performance. But then I thought to myself. Wait. You are Israeli. He is Lebanese. I felt like anything I would say would be disrespectful. Maybe something I did or said would be interpreted by him as offensive. I felt guilt. I rather remain silent and appreciate him from a distance. And so I did.

There is a bit of an element of fooling around in a child-like way in your (and mine) writing/performances. Maybe that foolishness is our way to maintain the innocence we once experienced as related to photography? Maybe photography is a funny medium. A fun-ny medium.

ARIEL: I’ve spent some more time with your performances, or the documentation of them, The Mirror Stage in particular, and then when two people come together, giving a reading, and the interview with Chris Clarke.

Ohad Ben Shimon, The Mirror Stage at The Second Act, Amsterdam, 2011

I have this urge to ask a long string of questions and observations which you can choose to answer or not.

I was curious about the image in your the documentation of the mirror stage- how it only shows one image, and the whole performance cycles through many many images. Did you choose that still for the picture on the screen?

Is there hierarchy or can there be of “good pictures” when you are showing them as a mass? Are favorites possible? Is a “good” picture becoming obsolete when there are just necessary or de-facto pictures?

Do you bring a little kit for your performances or are they built from whatever equipment that is there? That lamp, and the desk. I have this urge to use no technology- have no tek needs that is, for upcoming
performances. Or if there is a photo or a text people need to see they hold it.

I was interested in Chris Clarke’s question about integrating “your pictures” after doing performance talks/ readings without images and how you said you experienced a “distrust with photography”.

Photos by Ohad Ben Shimon. From Top: Mitzpe Ramon; Tel Aviv 2009; Dad at the Dead Sea; The Love Parade Berlin.

…and The Mirror Stage is reflective we are striving for a unity a feeling with the audience taking these fragments- there is something about vulnerability. What do you think about vulnerability? Is diary a misnomer? I have been thinking about handing people work, literally,
the page that i first write about something on (and I edit a ton when it transfers into type on the computer). The holding of a piece of writing as performance.

Do you know Stephen Ratcliffe, the American poet’s work? I think it would interest you. How it all begins with a date, as numbers, he writes from the same place, mostly, everyday, a sort of same sounding poem.

Can we make an analogy of anything to photography? Is it that far and wide? Do you prefer to sit than stand while reading to an audience? How much of that do you premeditate?

Do you edit the diary? Really? How many languages do you speak? Forgive me, I am very verbose by nature. I cannot seem to edit this down. I want it to be real/rawe.

Perhaps the reason I am so interested in correspondence, and interviews or other topics for criticism is that I must have something to bounce the photography focus off from or else I’ll get bored with it. I might. I might stop the obsession but it is alive and well now. I am not done. I am not discovering but collecting. Maybe afraid of losing to cope with real losing. Talk about psychology! For motivating procedures for making.

I like getting glimpses of the big time difference between us. How your bed time, or meal time, with when I am reading. Correspondence, even over the internet, guarantees some delay, like the delay I think I am most attached to in photography.

OHAD: I also like the delay very much. The more ‘serious’ photos I take I store the film for about half a year until I’m in Tel Aviv again and I develop them in my favorite lab. It’s the only lab I develop film.

So the status of my analogue photography is always tied to this lab, in which the owner died from cancer about 2-3 years ago and since then his son has taken over. They have nice punk concerts there on Friday afternoons. I once took my father and brother and we had a nice time. We drank arak. Do you know arak? It’s this kind of anis.

Thanks a lot for your reflections about my works. It felt like I had a solo show, you know this specific attention to specific works and details. You don’t imagine that you can actually have a solo show online, depending on the attention of the viewer.

In The Mirror Stage performance there was no real hierarchy… and I was never a kind of fanatic digital photography producer of images. I guess I’m kind of choosing to exaggerate the medium to see where it will break. Breaking the medium by overusing it.

Ohad Ben Shimon & Veniamin Kazachenko, Self Portrait As Van Gogh Sitting On The Chair In His Famous Painting - The Bedroom, 2012.

The camera I used for that performance actually did break. I was with a new friend I just met in Amsterdam. She went on the roof of her apartment. Then she asked for the camera to take a picture of us hanging around the balcony. Then it dropped and never opened again.

Did I mourn it? I still have another one with me. I never buy cameras. I somehow manage to receive them from someone who doesn’t need them. So it’s like a ready made. I treat the cameras I use as ready made.

Today is the International Women’s Day and I was wondering how being a woman is related to your text/performances.. I’m sure it’s quite significant.

It’s nice to discover that our approaches are the same in a kind androgynous way. I mean to say all this technology and monotony and the rest are kind of a-sexual. Until now I only met a few guys who were doing this kind of pseudo news reporter lecture-performance things.

I feel now like I felt with Rabih in a way that because I’m not a woman I might say something wrong in a non p.c manner. Is that a pressure to perform? Ok enough about this guilt-trip thing. So how does being a woman relate to your technique of performance?

No, I don’t have a kit. I try to have only the pieces of paper. I find the rest on site or someone arranges it. I actually want to stop using photographs also. In 2010 I made a performance without images (my pen died). I think conceptually that was stronger.

I like how you take out pieces of my performances. Like you are actually photographing it/me/my voice/the text. I understand you do that often, create a kind of mash from your own writing with the writing of behaving of others. a kind of self dissolving in others, others self-dissolving in you. Authorship issues, etc. But also a kind of fusion. Not necessarily with people but also with inanimate things. Do you want to become a camera? Are you a camera? Wasn’t Warhol busy with this as well?

I don’t usually edit the diary. I manage to fool some people that I speak about 7 languages but in fact I only speak about 2 and a half. Hebrew, English and ok level of Dutch.

ARIEL: I find the morning writing time to be crucial and something to protect. That numbness, a perfect fit for untimed stares out the window, is in some way a judgement or clutter free state, one where obligations or logistics can get suspended, if the time is of course predetermined as protected.

Ariel Goldberg, Potential Implications of Photography on the Surface of Clothing, 2011

I find the establishment of quiet in the morning, allows me to remember my dreams, and even if the smallest conversation happens, like oh no the alarm didn’t go off, there will be a ticket on the car because it is parked in a metered spot, I then cannot focus all morning.

Sometimes even the first ten steps from the bed is a period of time the dream goes away. I find if I don’t have a chunk of time to write with coffee in the morning, about nothing, it is always just the journal then, that my mood is very strange and fractured for the rest of the day.

Sometimes when I am holding the camera I get so satisfied by that feeling of the echo of a camera, the insides of the machine clicking and turning reverberating into my palm, that I then take more, a little string of pictures.

One night recently I set up my slide projector in the studio and shot film pictures of the slides because I wanted to finish the roll of film but also didn’t have time to scan them- it turned out the digital ones I took that night were much better, of course, because it was dark and the border and empty space needed to be excised.

I forgot really that the shadow coming in from the window and then edge of my projection screen would just be black in the exposure. I forgot when i was setting up the shot that what I saw through the viewfinder was not what I would see as the picture. That my eye wasn’t the camera.

It’s so great you ask about the being a woman thing. I actually don’t identify as a woman. I identify as a feminist who is queer. I identify as a little butch dyke. Your questions about it, and the awareness of your questions coming from a male perspective I find really provoking and touching.

OHAD: Travel. Motion. An important component of writing somehow. At least for me. The displacement of the physical body always begs the wandering of the creative ‘spirit’/drive. Maybe it’s no coincidence that the word ‘drive’ is used both in a libidinal sense and in creative forces.

We drive somewhere. We go. We cross. We map and are mapped. We at times conquer something or somewhere or sometime. Some times it has bad consequences (in the form of a national drive) but most often in a personal sense it has good consequences.

More about Ariel’s work here and Ohad’s here.  Ohad’s VerySmallKitchen residency posts can be seen here.