Issuu

CONTENTS

Hannah Walsh, All Star .................................................................................................................................................

6-19

Nicholas des Cognets, Black Metal Grind Thrash Magic Methcore or Why hardcore music is all about nature ..........

20-29

Ian McMahon ...............................................................................................................................................................

30-33

Jennifer Lauren Smith, Toyota Carova Equus Ocracoke ..............................................................................................

34-47

Andrew Brehm, Bread ..................................................................................................................................................

48-53

Leah Beeferman, Journeys into the unknown: a series of science architecture tasks and events, space-bound explorations and far-travels, discoveries and misses (near and far), imaginative space-gazing and related investigations, observations, orbits, and other repetitious monitoring tasks ......................................................

54-65

Leah Beeferman, Timed travel: asystematic accounts of regular and geometrical timekeeping, orbital flight, repetitive rotations and other journeys into actual time and slow space ...........................................................

66-67

Andrew Brehm, Chromatically Predigested ................................................................................................................

68-69

Benjamin Jurgensen .....................................................................................................................................................

70-77

Benjamin Jurgensen, Eternal September ......................................................................................................................

78-85

Oscar Santillan and Andrew Brehm, Copper production stills by Ashley Lyon ...........................................................................................................................

86-93

Ashley Lyon ...................................................................................................................................................................

94-105

Hannah Walsh, Satiated ...............................................................................................................................................

106-109

Ian McMahon ...............................................................................................................................................................

110-115

Ana Esteve Llorens, Inhabiting the Studio ....................................................................................................................

116-127

Oscar Santillan, Blink ....................................................................................................................................................

128-135

Oscar Santillan, The Owner of the Flood .....................................................................................................................

136-141

Tim Bearse ....................................................................................................................................................................

142-149

Will Machin, +37° 33' 19.11", -77° 26' 18.86", the end of mitchell st, richmond, va. ...................................................

150-161

Andrew Brehm, Yard ...................................................................................................................................................

162

Andrew Brehm, Elephant ............................................................................................................................................

163

Nataliya Slinko, This Pink Thing ....................................................................................................................................

164-173

Colophon ......................................................................................................................................................................

175

All Star Cheerleading is transitive: they cheer for a team. All Star Cheerleading is existential: they cheer. That’s an important three-letter word. Along with that little word Cheerleading jettisoned its purported function like so much dead weight and, in the process, redefined the term. “All Star” is actually something of a misnomer. It implies that it’s merely an elite cross section of cheerleaders, but the difference isn’t one of degree, it’s a difference in kind, like the difference between Neanderthals and Upright man. Better? Sure, but categorically different. The evolutionary leap is officially marked by the Q94 Rockers of Richmond, Virginia, the first squad completely unaffiliated with a sports team. But evolution is slow and leaps tend to be preceded by long leans. Cheerleaders started out as “cheer leaders,”1 an apt two-word nominalization of an action. The very earliest cheer leaders were just zealous spectators rallying their friends to yell at the first intercollegiate athletic competitions, which were barely more than pick up games at the time. But as organized sports grew exponentially, the crowds did too and the cheerleaders’ job got harder. If you want to get 50 people’s attention, you stand up and yell — if you want to get 150 people’s attention you’d better start waving your arms. Several hundred people and you’re probably going to want to enlist the help of a friend or two, maybe even hold one another up to make yourselves more visible. And, if you’re in front of a crowd of 20,000, simultaneously throwing six girls 20 feet in the air seems appropriate to the task at hand. The ostentatious display of modern cheerleading began as a means to an end, an honest and urgent bid to wrangle the growing crowds’ attention and lead them in cheering on the team. Early cheerleading literature is full of caveats reminding cheerleaders that they command attention only to redirect it to the game. They were never to be the focus of attention, just an amplifier and filter to make the audience’s enthusiasm more potent and well timed. But at a certain scale this model breaks down because a dozen girls, even yelling, flipping, smiling, sign-holding girls in short skirts are no match for the splintered attention of ten thousand fans. So, faced with a hopeless task and not being quitters by nature, cheerleaders adapted. Their role shifted from leading to projecting and the expectation that they should always (and only) cheer to effect the immediate action of the game gave way to the task of affecting a general excitement. If they couldn’t get the crowd to come together and chant in unison at pivotal moments, they could at least create an ambient enthusiasm that might still be a boon to the team, however indirectly. They began to perform for the crowd instead of to the crowd for the team — a small but foundational shift that set the stage for All Star Cheerleading. All Star Cheerleading seems like a less absurd anomaly when the history of cheerleading is traced through it’s changing relationship between style and function. All Star Cheerleading didn’t fundamentally alter cheerleading’s make up, it didn’t even change the relative proportions, it just took a radically new perspective on what was already there.

A “cheer leader” might also be called the “yell leader,” “yell master,” “yell king,” or “rooter king.” Notice that those are all singular

and male? It took a long time for cheerleading to get from the lettered sweaters of late 19th century academia to the pleated skirts of public high school.

Let’s say style is a snowman and function is a cat sitting in front of it (here let’s pause to note that the style/snowman is already much larger than the function/cat). Traditional cheerleading then would be a nice picture of a cat and a snowman. All Star Cheerleading would be on the other side, a snowman that appears to have a mysterious tail. All Star Cheerleaders began arriving on the other side of the snowman in 1982 and have been evolving separately ever since, diverging further and further from a familiar ancestor, like island wildlife or American accents. It’s still a diverse and lawless frontier. There isn’t a single governing body putting on competitions and setting standards, so there is still a wide range of styles and attitudes: from a mash-up of cheerleading and child beauty pageants on one side, to a hyper-athletic dance, heavily influenced by gymnastics on the other. In fact, it’s plausible that All Star Cheerleading will splinter again along these lines and divide into two sub-factions, one motivated by skill and technical ability that will move toward formalization and recognition as a sport (maybe with their own traditional cheerleaders on the sidelines!?), and the other motivated by style and performance landing somewhere between rhythmic gymnastics and child pageantry. Whatever happens will happen fast. All Star Cheerleading is the fastest growing sport for girls in America and it’s development is being swiftly pushed by the dramatic freedom afforded by stepping off the sidelines and onto the stage. All Star Cheerleaders now compete at huge venues where everything is setup for them because there is no other event to accommodate. They perform in front of tables full of trophies, on theatrically lit stages outfitted with carpeted power floors like the ones used in gymnastics. The sound systems, instead of announcing scores and substitutions, are dedicated to blasting the music to accompany the 3-minute routines. The songs are custom crafted for each individual team’s2 routine and they are intense – like Jock Jams remixed by a pre-teen DJ on speed. The catchiest slivers of hooks from top 40, club hits, and rock anthems are packed one after another in rapid fire succession over driving bass into one long climax punctuated with the sounds of cocking guns, boxing bells, cartoon rocket launches, whiplashes, and sports announcers crooning the squad’s name. Sometimes, a short pause is included in the song to accommodate the chanting section of a routine - a funny holdover from traditional cheerleading that really highlights how odd and sort of absurd this new offshoot is. They’ll be performing their hearts out, huge smiles, blown kisses, hyper-extended simultaneous toe-touches, back handsprings, back tucks, back layouts, and then the music will fall away to bass beat and they all clap that forceful, tight clasped cheerleading clap and turn to the crowd: “GO! TWISTERZ!3 GO!”- They’re suddenly, jarringly back to their roots: leading a cheer. Traditional cheerleading was based on the simple idea that if the crowd directed a lot of excited energy at the players, then the players could somehow harness that energy and use it to succeed. In All Star Cheerleading the squad is the only team out there. They’re working hard to generate a lot of excited energy for themselves, which hopefully they’ll be able to harness in order to succeed; which for them, in large part means getting the crowd excited…which will get the cheerleaders excited and help them get the crowd excited… which will get the cheerleaders excited…

Tellingly, most All Star gyms use the terms “squad” and “team” interchangeably.

Insert here any of these representative names (taken from recent competition rosters): Extreme Supreme Flash, Xquisite All Stars

Charms, Hot Topic All Stars Shining Stars, Cheer Factory, TSC All Stars Impulse, Cheer Starz Flamez, Galaxy All Stars Twilight, Stars of Liberty, Cheer Challenge Fury, Coastal Magic Glitter, Stars of Liberty Sparkles, Cheer Force All Stars Blaze, Cheer Shock Amps, Extreme Supreme Dynamite…

This is how hysteria escalates. In All Star cheerleading there is no energy sink, no 3rd party repository to direct all that enthusiasm at. It just bounces back and forth between crowd and cheerleaders, like glitter between two facing mirrors. Although some teams seem to have a nostalgic streak and still include the chanting section, most major competitions are dropping it from score sheets and focusing squarely on choreography, tumbling and stunts. The basic coed partner stunt is called an Awesome (seriously). A flyer, the girl who is lifted or tossed,4 stands in front of her stunt partner, his hands on her waist, her hands on his wrists. On a count she jumps up, pushing off of his wrists as he tosses her up and catches her, one foot in each hand at his shoulders. They adjust, and on a second count he tosses her again, this time catching both feet in one hand fully extended over his head, where she balances, 8 feet off the ground on a moving, fleshy, 4 inch platform, arms in a triumphant high V, flashing a big smile. This impressive feat is the pabulum of current stunting. An almost inaudibly distant cry from the thigh-stands of cheerleading’s infancy, it represents roughly 100 years of development, but it won’t even get you in the door of most college try-outs and it’s just the jumping off point for All Star Cheerleading. Stunting since the advent of All Star has progressed at a break-neck pace,5 perfectly illustrating the American free market ideal that competition breeds innovation (although the initial lack of both safety standards and nervous and liable athletic directors combined with those sprung floors was probably equally responsible). Stunts in ASC are becoming truly acrobatic. It’s not unheard of to see a pair with a stunt video on youtube that has also posted their audition video for Cirque du Soleil. Now instead of Awesomes, stunt couples are routinely throwing Rewind Heel Stretches which start exactly like an Awesome except instead of jumping straight up and landing first at shoulder level then extending, the flyer does a back flip and somehow lands in her partner’s fully extended (8 feet up in the air!) hand (that’s singular!) with one leg stretched up next to her ear, holding her foot over her head. Take a second and imagine really doing that, from either point of view. Now imagine 12 stunt groups doing this in near perfect unison and you’ve described just a few seconds of a level 6 All Star routine. The other two and half minutes generally includes multiple tumbling passes sampled from the highest levels of gymnastics performed simultaneously in sometimes gasp-inducing proximity; a full-team pyramid section when the entire squad coalesces in the center of the floor to build several combinations of stunts sending girls up in a symmetrical rhythmic succession; and a tightly packed, fast and aggressive dance, full of thrusts and gyrations, and usually put at the end so that they can hit a sudden, floor-thumping tableau to finish. Points are given for each of these sections and also for the transitions between them. Most teams treat these as a necessary evil and try and manage through a combination of strategically planned tumbling passes and cheer runs (a peculiar maneuver where they bend over a little, keep their hands tightly at their sides and run with quick little steps, sort of like when someone has to leave a lecture early and they hurry under the projection screen, a funny “don’t mind me” kind of run). The best teams, though, are interweaving choreography, stunts, and tumbling so tightly that they basically eliminate

It’s becoming more and more common to see male flyers in All Star. The first American all male All Star squad, Premier All Male,

was formed in 2009. Male flyers are still virtually unheard of on high school and college squads. 5

Cheerleading is sometimes literally break-neck. Most famously Kristi Yamaoka fell 15 feet from the top of the stunt during a televised

college basketball tournament and broke her neck but still did the arm motions to the fight song as they carried her away on a stretcher.

transitions altogether. Instead of throwing a stunt, cradling it, moving into the next position, resetting, then throwing the next stunt, they’ve simply started stunting on the move. The bases will throw a flyer 12-15 feet in the air, across the stage, and hustle to the other side of the stage to catch her and immediately load her into the next stunt in the right position. And where tumbling used to land a cheerleader in the general area of the stage that she’d need to be in for the upcoming stunt sequence, now, several girls will start a tumbling pass at the front of the floor and end it 12 feet up, landing on the forearms of girls who are already standing in the extended hands of the bases below. The last vestiges of a breather are getting squeezed out of routines entirely and because of this the best teams are barely watchable. Most things this intense last a fraction as long — Olympic sprints, skydiving, hardcore songs… But All Star Cheerleaders hit an ecstatic climax on the very first beat of the music and then impossibly crescendo for 3 entire minutes. It’s such a concentrated, overwhelming energy, a potent distillation of what cheerleading used to be. It’s exhausting even to watch.

Black Metal Grind Thrash Magic Methcore or Why hardcore music is all about nature

playlist: Neurosis – the doorway 7:35 Gojira – ocean planet 5:33 The Number Twelve Looks Like You – don’t get blood on my Prada shoes Goatwhore – alchemy of the black sun cult 3:30 Dillinger Escape Plan – sugar coated sour 2:24 Lamb of God – black label 4:25 Melvins – honey bucket 3:01

1:37

My uncle Jim was the drummer for the band 10,000 Rednecks with Guns. I saw them at the Rotary Club in Bennington, Vermont when I was maybe eight or nine. The experience now exists as a hazy impression of controlled mayhem. I remember the hot smell of the too-brightly lit hall, and a frantic energy of anger, elation, frustration, and joy. Witnessing the act of balancing all those energies at the very edge of control was profound, like standing to close to a whirring, malfunctioning machine. There is a complexity that is exposed when something is spinning at such a high velocity. When those energies are straining, trying to remain a cohesive whole, you can see the complex mechanism that is holding it together. Extreme behavior stretches structure, allowing a glimpse of the intricate framework that usually exists below the surface of perception. Knowing that kind of logic, that looking through blurred eyes can be as informative as looking through a microscope, has served me ever since. I see examples in all kinds of unusual places, at varying scales. But I am struck by it most when I’m outside the blatant sphere of human industry. Perhaps our predictable and self-aware design scheme inhibits that type of looking. When I am walking in the woods of western Massachusetts, among the wet maple leaves and glacier worn boulders, that’s when I really think about hardcore music. When I am looking at an icicle mounding off the side of an exposed shale cliff. The barely sensed texture of daily cooling and heating cycles, the inevitable power of water expanding into ice and fracturing the solid wall of stone. And layered over this is the rhythm of dripping water, syncing and separating. A moment in a good hardcore song can elicit a similar experience. Every musician who performs at a certain caliber is making art about that dripping icicle in a quarry in Massachusetts, whether they know it or not. Picture a time when you were caught in a summer thunderstorm. Think about the thrashing and blowing rain, a hundred thousand gallons of water carving into muddy earth, punctuated by the perfect crystalline vision of a lightning strike. Now listen to Sugar Coated Sour by Dillinger Escape Plan1. There is a lack of affectation in both those experiences, a loss of the contrived that happens at certain moments which is a rarity in human expression. It is a loss of self. And there is truth in those moments. Fighting to remain vertical in the sweaty bloody mass of other suburban white kids, being physically pushed around by the music, I am standing in front of a thundering waterfall. The drummer pauses for a split-second, arms raised head down sweat dripping from his chin. The wash of misty air pushes at me and I almost lose my footing on the slippery mud. It is daunting, and profound, and amazing. It is stupid, and lonely, and gruesome, and it doesn’t care what you think.

1. “I just remember fading into the next song not knowing what to think. I wasn’t even sure if I liked it. It was loud, bizarre, six minutes long, and had completely ruined the flow of the set. And then the phone rang. Some kid called in to say he hated me and the song I had just played and abruptly hung up.” – Julie Graf remembering the first time she played Dillinger Escape Plan on her radio show. Stylus Magazine 10/25/2007

Toyota Carova Equus Ocracoke

On a clear day, from the air, when the water is still (this happens never, or maybe in late summer, which certainly isn’t now), you can see the shipwrecks speckling the shoals, nestled in the seabed like sleeping ghosts. Any time else, the collision of opposite ocean currents produces a fourteen mile roaring beast—black water crashing white and bursting in spumes, sands shifting in massive fang-like shapes, merciless winds tearing at each other and anything unfortunate enough to intercede. Its is terrifying even from the shore. I had to know the fury here. Escape, and displacement—these things offer something art can only struggle to approach: closeness to an untidied essence, a meeting with raw majesty. A slow crystal forms in the cycle of leaving and returning to a place, growing with each transition between home and away. Isolation in a foreign environment is an experiment in chemistry, maybe, testing combinations of feelings and places, and recording reactions undergone along the way. The first trip was brief, from one dusk to the next. Brevity is an attempt to preserve the mythic newness of a place, staving off the inevitable ho-hum of familiarity. How to pick the moment to introduce oneself to this newness, it being an unresponsive expanse of surf ? A lone openness to possibility, feelings unfettered by plan, honesty connected to the gut. That fragile, initial moment—the greeting—is when curiosity is at its purest and no detail goes unnoticed. Slowing down, I found myself in a place named after a pirate trick, according to locals’ lore: on moonless nights the pirates hung lanterns on the heads of wild horses to create a mirage of ships in the distance. Sailing straight into the beach, the marauders were upon them, holds plundered. Get out of the truck! I sub-commanded myself, thinking of the setting sun. I parked at an empty inn outfitted in turquoise reflective windows that, in the last of the late afternoon light, cast a sick teal glow over the sand and the debris. A plush resort town? Maybe in late summer. The wreckage isn’t just ships, but entire swimming pools, staircases, stilt homes, boardwalks, beach chairs, and gazebos. Nothing is right; everything is over-turned and torn. Many coincidences and unlikely collisions, messes evincing brute force.

Driving and searching, petty self-doubts dwarfed by grander doom. The gale is so strong I’m too frightened to traverse a bridge arching over a long inlet. I wait nearly an hour for another vehicle to pass to assure me I won’t blow away when I get to the top. Stunned by the water encroaching on the land, I wonder how they live under such constant threat. The inlet was formed by a monstrous storm and creeps southward gradually, about sixty-six inches a year. The bridge is very long. On the other side, full night. There’s a room for me at the Cavalier. It is warm and dark and huge and can I just tell you, there’s nothing like sleeping to the sound of crashing waves, weather channel on mute.

rhadamanthys: awake? it is very dark on the rainforest floor. when in a primary tropical rainforest a flashlight may be more useful than a machete. norma: i’d rather swing blindly than see the thing that is about to attack. did you pack your camera? yes, i have them both. doing? blissfully nothing. waiting for the snow.

Waking with the sun, coffee as black as the river Styx, I follow another truck off the highway and toward the dunes leading out to the sea. Driving the winter shore, this notion excites me. Halfway up my first sandy mound my pickup shudders and stalls, and stupidly I spin myself into a hole. Do I have a rope? asks a bald man who appears with a chocolate Lab. Disentangling a piece from the nautical detritus on the beach, the bald chocolate team hauls me out from behind. Obstacles. Are they not our primary sources of inspiration, for each act, even each thought? There’s more to the visit than meeting the angry water. Someone at the bar suggests I head north to where the road ends, and to just keep going. Asphalt turns to sand and leads dead into the water. Keep to the harder pack, and he bets I won’t even need to shift into four wheel drive. A weak solution, but a start. Things I see on the way: an electrical box disguised as a cross, draped in white nylon or bleached burlap. Decorative cabbages and windsocks everywhere. A skeleton driving a backhoe, swans upside down in the salt marsh. The strip of land is so thin, itself disappearing despite its notoriety for disappearing other things. I’m surrounded by sentiments I’ll never comprehend: thousands of ill-fated voyages, desperate moments on breeches buoys, woebegone tribes, their anger and fear, a colony that vanished without a trace, the love stories of braves and English girls. The wind is loaded with ghosts. Led Zeppelin plays on the radio, then John Cougar. Banging the steering wheel I think gosh, how much easier it is in music than in art to bend the notes, introduce silences, move people.

norma: what’s different about music is that you can either play or you can’t. rhadamanthys: you can’t fake it in music. what sustains me with it, is that i can spirit myself away inside the sounds. it’s intensely hermetic and universal at once. if I play an A flat it will always be an A flat, yet most of the time I am the only one listening.

The trick is to be alone without feeling lonely. Isolation in a place, made gradually familiar and accessible, becoming an A flat or nothing special, but finding an intimacy. This is where something might start to happen. Several sandy miles beyond the end of the road there’s a dune buttressed by a thick, black dolphin, drying in the sun, petrified in a scream. It is my spot. Wild horses sulk past, uninterested in the carrots I throw in their direction and a black Jeep pulls up. With the usual fear of silence in the face of real human company I rapidly explain what I’m doing with a thousand pounds of clay in the tall dunes as if I knew. His name is Robert and he is a retired firefighter. We talk about oysters and Valentine’s Day and hearts and guts and about them being strewn and with that I have an idea. He leaves me with an icy Miller High Life which I open at the end of the day and drink in the truck with the heat and music both on full blast. The newspapers are soggy at the Jolly Roger and cover stories of natural disasters the world over, as well as the Olympic games. I feel futile so I compose tidy piles of neatly-written notes around my beer, and imagine all my work being done. A former coast guard offers to take me for a fly in his chipper red Cessna before he goes on a relief mission to Haiti. Later, his wife sends a card wishing we could’ve spoken longer. Robert emails his phone number and with it, a stunning pencil drawing of a ghoul in a tribunal. He urges me to call next time and to simply say “I’m here,” promising he won’t try to have a conversation with me over the phone. He can’t text because his thumbs are too damaged from the fire. My nostrils are chapped from snot and strong wind; the oysters are so perfect and so fresh. Five bucks for a dozen, I can never believe it.

rhadamanthys: what strange prehistoric forager dared to crack the first oyster? norma: there is an immense shell midden nearby, left behind by the ancient Croatan. they probably survived entirely on shellfish, fish, and fruit. is there a diet more healthy, more delicious? I would add shaved fennel, but other than that, no.

Another week panics past and I return to the shoals for another siege. I miss an entire pretty day due to a romantic morning at home but greet the swans by four. My driving skills are improving and I’m less terrified of the pea gravel pits and soft sand. Dodging rotten hulks and dead animals, I drive beyond my usual outpost, the ribbon of land getting thinner, the sand getting softer, the sky getting darker. Soon I’m bereft of any hard pack at all and take to driving at the waterline. Overworked, the truck gives up, sinking into a wet spot near a troubled knot of flotsam. I begin to cry as the tide crashes closer and closer. What can I say to calm myself? The afternoon is gorgeous, flooded color. The Atlantic, the winter blue that reminds me why I live on the East Coast, squeaky dolphins showing off, seagulls probably squawking, and in the distance, a merchant ship inching along a rough horizon. Left, right, nothing else. I turn on the radio.

rhadamanthys: did i tell you that i have two 5 gallon poly-vinyl containers of distilled water in my closet? norma: in case some shit goes down?

I am building my survivalist cabinet.

At last, a pair of mustached angels in camouflage pull up in an air conditioning repair truck reading “Stone Cold.” With the lucky rope that I now keep under the seat, they rescue me, then take my tires down to 8 psi, assuring me that I’ll have “no more troubles.” Could deflation end all of our troubles? Pressure has never caused anything but chaos, look at the water. Someone, someone like Rimbaud wrote it down somewhere that the best artists are only very clever thieves, never getting caught for plagiarism by way of contortion and disguise. I just want to gather things and then do nothing with them. Nature morte.

It’s raining so hard and for so long I’m trapped inside either a café, the Cavalier, or the car. Sand and snow destroyed both cameras in the morning. The weather, while being exactly the reason this place holds so much power, is miserable. I’m anxious about wasting time and feeling all the wrong pressures. I know that the worst days are always the best ones in retrospect, but my god, the melancholy. Somewhere almost to the southern end of the road (I volley between the north and south termini now) I find a space-ship in perfect condition. I creep myself out knocking on the window, half expecting an alien or at least a tie-dyed stoner to emerge. Inner space, outer space, the fright of being alone in the rain. I kill some time riding the ferry around, then eating blackened grouper in a damp tavern. The storm calmed down enough to let the sun in for its usual colorful set, but the sea continued to pound the beach, frothing over the dunes and spraying the highway, which isn’t really one—a narrow strip of asphalt that doesn’t matter in storms. Wipers sloshing salt water and snow, I wonder what does matter. The survival of classical humanism, modern behavior that is clear and natural. Love. There is little else. I leave that night, the storm and the ocean still going on. norma: rhythm is a visual thing. rhadamanthys: it can be. I mean, that’s why you have conductors. you can’t keep a beat with a flute. you can, just not in an ensemble. look at this simple depiction of a wave, and understand it. what it does, how it works.

It’s weeks later and much warmer and I’m numbing to the beauty. I film a little, taping the camera to the bumper, hitting the button and driving in circles. Dune-ocean-dune-ocean-dune-ocean. My favorite broken boat, a small 19th century cutter covered in green mossy algae, has shifted and is barely visible. Today its so close to the dune-line its almost like its sailing in its own slow underworld, eventually to end up in someone’s basement. I don’t take the superfluous picture, respecting its metaphorical ballast and warm company. I wonder instead about the boat of the mind, the agony of progress, the aching heart of the sea-farer facing doom.

rhadamanthys: Speak softly the counterpoint happens between things, not within them norma: the work needs to continue for a long time.

you’ve found that many things can end abruptly. the gull is dropping an oyster from a great height.

GPS SATELLITES VISIBLE FROM RICHMOND, VIRGINIA NOVEMBER 11 2009, 12:10PM NOVEMBER 11 2009, 1:20PM NOVEMBER 11 2009, 2:30PM

CESIUM ATOMS VIBRATE AT A NATURAL RESONANT FREQUENCY OF 9,192,631,770Hz, THE NUMBER OF CYCLES EQUALING ONE SECOND RUBIDIUM ATOMS VIBRATE AT A NATURAL RESONANT FREQUENCY OF 6,834,682,610Hz, THE NUMBER OF CYCLES EQUALING ONE SECOND HYDROGEN ATOMS VIBRATE AT A NATURAL RESONANT FREQUENCY OF 1,420,405,752Hz, THE NUMBER OF CYCLES EQUALING ONE SECOND

TIMED TRAVEL: ASYSTEMATIC ACCOUNTS OF REGULAR AND GEOMETRICAL TIMEKEEPING, ORBITAL FLIGHT, REPETITIVE ROTATIONS AND OTHER JOURNEYS INTO ACTUAL TIME AND SLOW SPACE 20

What characterizes an event, what defines change.

There are two types of time. The first is official: an atomically exact time characterized by nanosecond precision. The other time is slow and variable, though repetitive: it makes narrative somewhere in-between regularity and unpredictability. It is a fictional time grown from fact and science; a slow time intercepting both massive galactic time and minute precision time. Unpredictable and evocative, somewhat anxious and seemingly empty, it requires a thorough attentiveness to detail and sensitivity to the slightest change. These repetitive processes create slow time: a cyclical yet irregular time characterized by long stretches of low activity interrupted by the occasional event in the subtle expanses of space. 21

21 Official time is kept by comparing the atomic clocks on land to those on orbiting GPS satellites.The master atomic clock for the United States, and the systems used to cross-check it against the satellites’ clocks, are kept at the US Naval Observatory (USNO) in Washington DC inside a small building labeled TIME SERVICE.

The sound of time : sound as an audible byproduct of invisible processes also based on frequency. Sound as evidence of orbits, satellite constellations and technology, cyclical monitoring processes, and precision measurements for navigation and identifying location. 22, 25

22 I wanted to record the sound of time, so requested and was given permission to visit the USNO and see the clock first-hand. The master clock is kept in a climate-controlled room with a glass window so visitors can look in from the hallway. To record the sound of time I was allowed to leave my hard-disk recorder on a tripod in the climate-controlled room housing the master clock. I put the equipment in as quickly as possible, minimizing the amount of time the door was open in order to preserve the sensitive

temperature system keeping the clock “on time.” During the twenty minutes it recorded, a USNO GPS expert showed me an oscillator he had built to analyze discrepancies between the atomic clocks on satellites and the master clock, accurate to the picosecond (one trillionth of a second). He zoomed in and out on the waveforms, revealing small inconsistencies to be problem-solved: nanoseconds can get lost inside this complex process of receiving millisecond-long pseudorandom noise codes and data signals via radio frequencies. 23 Atomic clocks keep time by stimulating atoms to produce specific stable and repetitive microwaves of radiation. Once this “natural resonant frequency” has been achieved, a certain number of wave cycles is used to define one second. The atoms used in the two most common and accurate atomic clocks are cesium and hydrogen. Cesium atomic clocks are known for their long-term accuracy, but are less reliable for short-term measurement. Hydrogen masers are the opposite. Therefore, these clocks are typically used in tandem – combined by the “mean timescale” to generate a timekeeping system for maximized accuracy and longevity. There are 45 clocks currently in use at the USNO: 33 cesium clocks and 12 hydrogen masers. For cesium atoms, the natural resonant frequency is 9,192,631,770Hz. For hydrogen atoms, the natural resonant frequency is 1,420,405,752Hz. 24 Maintaining the master clock’s temperature and its consistency with the satellite clocks is crucial: time precision equals location precision. As the USNO website states, “Modern electronic systems, such as electronic navigation or communications systems, depend increasingly on precise time and time interval (PTTI). Examples would be the ground-based LORAN-C navigation system and the satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS). These systems are based on the travel time of the electromagnetic signals: an accuracy of 10 nanoseconds (10 one-billionths of a second) corresponds to a position accuracy of 10 feet.” 25 Elsewhere in the TIME SERVICE building are several other time-related machines: one cross-checks outputs of various time-keeping systems for cross-platform consistency; another provides the official telephone time to any caller dialing in (202-762-1401 or 202-762-1069 although “time may be delayed on long distance calls”); and several respond to requests from servers across the internet for the official network time. I put contact microphones on these other machines in the TIME SERVICE building to get different time machine soundings. Each has a slightly different hum, from the pleasantly abrasive to the rhythmic to the background bassy undertone. These hums were most likely produced by the fans keeping these machines cool, rather than by any moving parts or timekeeping processes. I had been told on a previous recording trip to an engineering lab that this was true of much modern equipment.

In the imagined space of slow time (a space of journeys into the unknown, where control panel dials – providers of status and overall position – are sent, repetitively rotating), sound is used to render the fluctuations and events that create a more discernible narrative. It makes accessible the otherwise invisible tenor surrounding this space architecture: expanding the orbits, cyclical monitoring processes, signal broadcasts, and time travels into the gradual shifts, changes, movements and pauses, which, in turn make up slow time, actual time.

September That Never Ended From The Jargon File (Version 4.4.7)1 All time since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhythms of the Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This coincided with people starting college, getting their first internet accounts, and plunging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. These relatively small drafts of newbies could be assimilated within a few months. But in September 1993, AOL users became able to post to Usenet, nearly overwhelming the old-timers' capacity to acculturate them; to those who nostalgically recall the period before, this triggered an inexorable decline in the quality of discussions on newsgroups. Syn. Eternal September.

Raymond, Eric, ed. September that Never Ended. http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that-neverended.html (accessed May 15, 2010).

eternal september milled foam, epoxy, mdf, paper mache, acrylic & enamel paint

irl milled foam, epoxy, mdf, acrylic & enamel paint

sink mdf, epoxy, acrylic & enamel paint

Seeing the Liberty Bell

On July 3rd 1996 there was a group of tourists from Annecy-le-Vieux standing in the queue outside of Independence Hall. Together, their grandfathers cast fifty-five replicas of the Liberty Bell in the Paccard Bell Foundry. We were separated by at least 30 people, but the queue’s complexity lined us up every few minutes. Ted Turner had just spoken on behalf of the United Nations Foundation. He didn’t mention raising bison on the largest privately owned plot of land in the United States. The girls from Annecy-le-Vieux saw him speak, but his southern drawl kept them from understanding the scale of his endeavors. They were into Jane Fonda, underdressed for a state park, and too young to be smoking. Due to drought the year before, The National Park Service banned smoking on most parkland; States followed suit. My Grandmother had been evading smoking bans as sport since the mid 80's. When we became aligned with the girls from Annecy-le-Vieux she relit a half smoked Doral and enjoyed it undetected. The tallest girl in the group had her belly button pierced, displaying it proudly below a cropped tank top. The hair on the small of her back was dark and directional. While she sat on the railing, beads of sweat formed just above the waist of her rolled shorts. I was reciting state capitals and Mom put her hand on my shoulder. We were about to see the Liberty Bell.

Everything My father (b. 1950) and I (b. 1986) recently took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment. The scoring showed us to be of the same personality type, INTP. According to the assessment booklet, “The MBTI instrument measures your preferences on four dichotomies: extraversion–introversion, sensing–intuition, thinking–feeling, and judging–perceiving." extraversion – E / introversion – I / sensing – S / intuition – N / thinking – T / feeling – F / judging – J / perceiving - P

IiNnTtPp The two Meyers-Briggs personality types combined above are set in Calisto MT, one upper case and one lower. Calisto MT is a typeface designed by Ron Carpenter (b. 1950) in 1986 for the Monotype foundry.1 The font was designed to be used at all sizes, for both body and display text. Calisto MT is recognizable, in part, because of the disproportionately large x-height of its lowercase characters. X-height is the average height of a lowercase character, without ascenders or descenders. Generally the x-height is one half of the capheight, or the height of a capital letter.2

1 2

Calisto. http://typedia.com/explore/typeface/calisto/ (accessed May 15, 2010). Kunz, Willi. Typography: macro- and microaesthetics. New York: Arthur Niggli, 1998.

case mod for alexis / rory mdf, epoxy, acrylic & enamel paint

Gilmore!

A Rory Gilmore1 inspired real person fiction2, femslash3 poem written in loose4 Sapphic verse5.

teen thespian resisting private fictions soon denying indiscrete friendish acts of naked birthed milfiness, screaming Rory sensual oneness

Rory Gilmore, short for Lorelai Leigh Gilmore, is a fictional character on the serial teen dramedy The Gilmore Girls. The show premiered on October 5, 2000, and ended its seventh season on May 15, 2007. The show features two female leads, Lauren Graham as Lorelai Gilmore and Alexis Bledel as her daughter Rory. The main action of the show takes place in the fictional Connecticut town of Stars Hollow, or in reality, Midwest Street on the Warner Brothers back-lot. Midwest Street was built in 1945 for the film Saratoga Trunk and has been the main set for several television shows and movies, including The Waltons, and The Music Man. For The Music Man, Midwest Street was dressed as River City, Iowa, a fictional town based on Mason City, Iowa. In the musical sequence for “You Got Trouble," Harrold Hill alerts Ewart Dunlop of the threat imposed by the Pleez–All pool hall next to his own Dunlop Market. Dunlop Market recently became Doose’s Market, owned by Taylor Doose the town selectman of Stars Hollow. 1

In later episodes of The Gilmore Girls, due to Rory’s attending college, the show prominently features a replica of the Yale campus. Rory’s Yale, located on soundstage 14, across the lot from Midwest Street, was built specifically for the filming of the fifth through seventh seasons. Many of the buildings on the actual Yale’s campus are Gothically styled, but were built in the twentieth century. These buildings were aged with acid washes and other faux techniques to increase their authenticity. Alexis Bledel attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts for one year, while her characters have attended Yale University (Rory Gilmore in The Gilmore Girls, 2007), The Rhode Island School of Design (Lena Kaligaris in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants II, 2008), and The University of California, Berkeley (Ryden Malby in Post Grad, 2009). In the final episode of The Gilmore Girls, (original Air Date: May 15, 2007) Rory is hired by an online magazine as a reporter to follow the 2008 presidential campaign. Her first assignment is to cover Illinois Senator, Barack Obama’s, announcement of his candidacy for President of the United States (May 2, 2007). Real Person Fiction (RPF) or actorfic is a type of fan fiction in which real people become characters in established fictional environments. The “real people” most often involved in contemporary RPF are actors and musicians. RPF narratives are often of the slash variety, a type of fan fiction romantically involving two characters not involved in a studio script. For example, in alternate second and third seasons of The Gilmore Girls, Milo Ventimiglia might replace Jess Mariana as Rory’s love interest.

Femslash or saffic is a type of slash fiction where two female characters are paired in a homosexual relationship. This differs from RPF in that the characters paired are fictional, with the possibility of their ideology, sexuality, and environment shifting. For example, a Rory Gilmore/Buffy Summers femslash narrative may involve Rory becoming aroused by Buffy slaying the forces of darkness in front of Stars Hollow’s own Dunlop Market.

hey–yo!

Sapphic Verse is a style of Greek lyric poetry named after Sappho of Lesbos. Sappho was a Greek poet who developed a distinct lyric style based around a four line stanza. A Sapphic stanza consists of three eleven-syllable verses followed by a five-syllable verse. The first three lines share the same meter: trochee, trochee, dactyl, trochee, trochee. The fourth line has a unique meter; dactyl, trochee. Sappho is most known for her name and birthplace which have become adjectives for female homosexuality.

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

Satiation A professor of mine once introduced phonetics as the physics of language and went on to explain that when we speak we are actually physically extending ourselves into the world. That is startlingly poetic. The etiquette of scientific inquiry keeps linguists from openly acknowledging that, which is why I love linguistics and can’t be a linguist.

Phonetics treats language as a thing, systematically ignoring meaning in favor of form. In Thing Theory Bill Brown writes, “As they circulate through our lives, we look through objects… but we only catch a glimpse of things. We look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful... A thing in contrast, can hardly function as a window.” This is also an apt description of the relationship between language and sound. Phonetics clamps its eyes shut, presses its nose firmly against the window and attempts to describe the glass by touch.

Repeat “thing” over and over until it loses meaning. That phenomenon is called semantic satiation. It’s the fast and loose way to bring the window close to your face. Unlike phonetics though, you keep your eyes open and oscillate between looking through and looking at with every foggy breath. If the usual structure of art or language is (for example): Artist – idea – object – viewer Speaker – idea – utterance – listener Then maybe a satiated art or utterance might look like this:

This latter structure pulls the artist and viewer, speaker and listener, so close together. It is intimate, more akin to emotion or sex than language. It’s powerful and direct and necessarily honest—it’s too simple a structure to accommodate irony or deceit. This is not a new impulse: Abstract painting, Modern Dance, Minimalism… But an ism can’t help but function as a window. This satiated structure has a swift momentum because it’s efficacy rests on confounding our brain’s natural tendency to elide and categorize. It cannot be pinned to a single art historical moment but can be traced through it in it’s dogged pursuit of the radical, the novel, the strange, the uncanny…

109

Phoneticians transcribing languages they’re fluent in are continuously distracted by the dual temptation of meaning and a phonetically inaccurate orthography. Similarly, when transcribing new languages, phoneticians are often seduced into hearing phonemes common to their native language and being deaf to unfamiliar annunciations. It’s a heroic feat of concentration to keep your brain from making assumptions in the face of meaning or familiarity. I am committed to a satiated art. Art is capable of this type of direct communication, unique in the realm of intentional acts and rarely stumbled upon in any case. A central concern in my work is finding a way to complicate this structure enough to steal it away from the grasp of our interpretive attention, to rescue it from elision while maintaining the integrity of its simplicity.

In language, transitive terms incite a reader or listener to action. “I toss” makes us look for what’s being tossed. If a thing is humbled, we look for what has made it so. “A

is humbled.”

That is my ideal work. An Awesome is an attempt to render that sentence. A cheerleader is so commonly objectified, seen as a symbol or a sexual body. But, it’s difficult to watch a body delicately balance for a minute and a half without imagining a wobble in your own torso. That bodily empathy recognizes her outside of symbolism or intended “use,” but instead as a thing, a body like your own. Blue sky and sun act as the prepositional object of her humility and as a reinforcement of her thingness in contrast to the atmosphere’s intangibility and vastness. A transitive verb saves a thing from a suffocating insularity, it asks a viewer to look through the window. “Humble” in particular can imply the profound, a romantic notion probably best seen in the soft focus of fogged up glass and something that’s hopeless to represent directly. Transitivity’s invitation to relative understanding is a fitting complement to “thingness,” an adjective often invoked we are stopped short by comparative definitions. This is the dance I want to inspire, a series of back and forths, swaying hips, coy glances, sometimes satisfying, sometimes unrequited. In Barthes' terms, a satiated, “writerly” work that culminates in more than mere pleasure but in that orgasmicly tinged French term “jouissance.”

110

Despite extensive planning, the process of fabricating large-scale installations can become hectic, with decisions being made in a flurry of activity. These chaotic moments of construction intrigue me. What role do they play in the outcome? How do these spontaneous events permeate the finished work? In an atmosphere of intense pressure, different levels of decisions are made and new ways of constructing develop. Ideas are forced to change and recalibrate, and sacrifices are made. Moving from the tunnel vision that accompanies the original conception to and through to where the completion of the finished piece is on the line, one can become distracted overlooking the potentially valuable ideas that present themselves along the way. Some are lost, passed over without a thought, or noticed and then forgotten. In an exchange that took place in 2004 between Huang Huanyi, a student in China and me, we both set out to draw up plans for one of our sculptures, exchange them, and each recreate the other’s work. There were many fascinating components to this project, but most significant was the realization that the basic task of trying to draw up a set of plans for a specific work provided a mechanism through which lost ideas might be recovered. Reexamining a work in this way is quite different from looking at images and simply reflecting upon the project. Here the goal of drawing and explaining the process step-by-step forces one to examine more carefully the various moments of the project’s realization. Each step is reinvestigated in order to recount it on paper, and in completing this task certain rocks get turned over, revealing early ideas, absurd attempts at–≠≠≠ construction, and unpredicted visual elements that never ended up in the finished piece. Although the drawing begins as a technical reinvestigation, it becomes a stimulus, jogging the memory into uncovering some of the opportunities lost along the way. It is a task of slowing down and picking apart the process of constructing a work. These drawings are about reflecting back on the actions taken to construct a work, providing a type of documentation, rather than a schematic. They are the residues of an intense reflection.

113

116

117

oiduts eht gnitibahnI

Inhabiting the studio sees through

119

hguorht sees oiduts eht gnitibahnI

120

Inhabiting the studio sees through, looks back and forth

121

htrof dna kcab skool ,hguorht sees oiduts eht gnitibahnI

122

Inhabiting the studio sees through, looks back and forth, frames the process

123

124

125

126

127

128

129

130

131

132

133

134

135

136

137

God is the one who took our limbs, fingers, toes and nails apart, but forgot he did it. Mr. Stickgold established that memory is the link between dreams and actual life; dreams are the stage where our characters and actions furiously meet: the hyperreal space that blends flesh and time into life. But the blended memory only makes sense if the awakening is possible. On the eighth day He tried to wake but He could not, actually He has not. Since then, we are still captured in the eighth day, in His dream. There is no Plan anymore, and mystic practices cannot reach the almighty solitude of His endless wandering. The alarm clock must be made out of whispers. Its sound must be the same as dust embracing a windowpane. Quieter. Dust is well known to be the epidermical matter that wraps human absence. But in order to exist, it needs light. Just recently, in the nineteenth century, mankind took it into account, when cinema was invented. In between the projector and the screen -through the darkness- floats this pristine body of light and dust, the movie. For decades, Ecuadorians have been looking for the reels of ‘Atahualpa’s Treasure,' the first film ever made in the country. The only remnant of its 1924’s release the is a newspaper advertisement. In order to take control over the entire Tawantinsuyu kingdom, Atahualpa battled against his stupid brother Huascar. The Incan civil war was full of inventive forms of torture: the defeated Huascar armies were forced to eat their chiefs’ hearts; wombs were carefully cleaned out; trickles from thin calm necks becoming leaking horizons; and wind rehearsing the way it sounds when caressing all things. Atahualpa was taken prisoner by the incoming Spanish conquistadors, who demanded that the king fill an entire room with gold to release him. But the Incan general entrusted to bring the ransom was notified en route of Atahualpa’s assassination. After being baptized into the Catholic faith by his captors and receiving the Christian name of Juan Santos, he was gracefully offered two choices: being strangled or burned. The king died as a coward, under an unknown name and an unknown religion.

138

The general threw the treasure into the lake and fought the invaders back. Once captured and tortured, he was asked about the location of the golden load. It is in a corner on the mountain. Neither the movie nor the corner has been ever found. The general’s name was Rumiñahui, and he knew that the best way to expose the mundane origin of the bearded invaders was to behead those alien animals that most Incas believed to be divine: horses. Horses have been imagined as elongations of human bodies: statements of desire and frustration (the ungoverned conscience of the lost object). Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Giant show horses as manifest flesh where humans place their latent frustrations. Major Penderton, in the first film, and Luz, in the second, both brutally injure a horse owned by one they hate in order to unleash their emotional demands. Yet the wounds arouse our pity for the cowardly aggressor. Since the true wish in both cases is to murder — a wife or a sister-in-law — we are confronted with an old and persistent idea: if something is unbearable to us and unacceptable for our society — like the necessity of homicide — we are allowed to divert it onto nature: atonement through animal sacrifice remains of paramount importance to our imagery. Those wounds are a reminder of our constant lack of self-control: trembling maps. But crimes of passion are always a mistake, and the reason is quite simple: they restore no power to the murderer. While setting up the room where she is planning to kill her husband, the woman confesses to her accomplice, “My only regret is that he’ll never know that I killed him.” The film is Diabolique. If it is possible to recall the most beautiful death ever, it might be that of Bernardo Jaramillo, a heterodox communist running for President of Colombia. One morning in 1990, at the airport with his wife, Bernardo was shot several times by a paramilitary. Then serenely he sought for his partner’s gaze. Hug me. Those motherfuckers have killed me. In The Misfits, old cowboy Gay Langland, his friend Guido, and a feckless stranger, Perce, go to a barren field to capture wild horses. Roslyn — a woman in a romantic relationship with Gay — also takes part in the trip. The night before the chase, she learns that the fate of the horses is not to be ridden, but to become meat. She is the only who sees the fatuity of men’s actions. Roslyn is still young. She looks naked; you can see her generous tits bouncing into her blouse, her blonde hair lightly petting her neck, her blessing voice like blessed sex. The men, expecting to find a herd of horses, find just six, a family. They are: the father, the mother, the little child, the three adolescents. One by one each is lassoed and put down. Except for the colt that stands next to his mother as she lies tied up on the ground. Capturing the horses feeds Gay’s male fantasy of freedom and power, but it turns him into a monster in Roslyn eyes. Later that night, the younger cowboy Perce helps Roslyn to free the horses. But in an attempt to reassert his authority, Gay, the old cowboy, immediately looks to capture back the alpha horse by himself: his redemption is capturing his own image reflected in the horse. And he does so. He regains his humanity just

139

140

141

as he frees the defeated horse. How different is the case of Folco, the lonely kid in White Mane. The wild horse becomes his deep friend, not his mirror, but his equal. Together they run away from ranchers who try to capture the horse, and the chase ends at the beach on the edge of the ocean. Cornered, Folco rides with his friend into the sea. They disappear into the abyss of death. As his body becomes heavier, Folco understands that the world is just another place. In my first year of elementary school I found my first best friend. Memories about him are very fuzzy; I remember neither his name nor his face, only his voice asking me if I wanted to share food that his mother had put in a greasy paperbag for him, and a couple of dull images of us wandering into the undergrowth, where other kids had claimed that nuns were buried. In class we used to sit next to each other, but once, right after recess, he raised his hand and asked the teacher for permission to go to the bathroom. He never came back. I don’t know if I was sad, but after a few weeks I carefully started performing some of his characteristic gestures as my own. That was my opportunity to steal without stealing, and I was very conscious that I was a craven thing taking something that was not mine in the midst of collective oblivion. I never returned them. In 1940 – it has been said that the exact date was March 2, 1940 — the Direzione Generale per la Cinema, made up of heads of Mussolini’s regime, started its collaboration with the CONRA, the political police. To the public, the official mission of the Direzione was to champion fascist films as well as clean up and retouch scripts of their film industry. Their undercover aim was something a little bigger however: they were to exalt Italian cinema to the world’s rapture by dethroning Hollywood. Dr. Alessandro Costa was the scientist leading the team that dealt with what seemed an insurmountable obstacle to their goal: Color. Upon The Wizard of Oz’s premiere, just one year before, color film became an instant condition for commercial success. Since creating their own color film technology would take years, and war against the US felt so imminent, Mr. Costa came up with a different method: he would extract the colors from American reels and inject them into black and white Italian films. After several months and spending millions, on the evening of March 11, 1942, they finally succeeded at isolating and extracting color from an American film. (In a rare short interview for Cahiers du Cinema, Mr. Costa claimed they actually used The Wizard of Oz for the experiment.) The team watched as the color slipped away from the movie source, making it a pale and fuzzy projection, completely useless. There were three colors, each carefully poured into its own mold in an attempt to keep the strains separate and as pure as possible. As the team of scientists cheered, their army was being defeated on the Russian front. The following day, the team came upon a tragic realization: overconfidence in their own process. The molds had not been properly tested and so overnight the colors had eroded the walls; running away, never to be found. With no budget to redo the experiment, and having been furiously accused of professional irresponsibility by the officials, the team was dissolved and the members barely saved themselves from

execution. In fact, about a week after the accident, the CONRA unveiled the existence of the team to the public, exposing them as traitors to the nationalist cause. They were forbidden to talk to the press and their existence sank into obscurity. The consequences were terrible for everyone but particularly to Mr. Costa, who would never go back to his scientific station, even after the war and the regime were over. After his death, his daughter — a leftist flutist exiled in the US — published her father’s memoirs, hoping for recognition of his legacy. Impossible: the few Italians who remembered the incident and had lamented the outcome of the war were hurt. The academy abroad reduced him to an irresponsible fascist collaborator, and dismissed his achievement as an irrelevant one. Despite all of Miss Costa’s efforts -- including an emotional preface describing the years of suffering her family endured -- the first and only edition of the book (gracefully entitled ‘Shattered Suns and Sons’) hardly sold and was rarely quoted afterward. One of the few people interested in the scientist’s life has been the writer Orlando Moretti. According to his accounts, after Mr. Costa was expelled, he spent most of his time at home, training his dog to whistle. In this version, the scientist had successfully trained the dog to blow, and it eventually produced some chords. Supposedly, Mr. Costa kept this a secret fearing the academy would make fun of him. He also loved his pet too much to expose it to any possible media attention. His daughter has disclaimed the story as a mean-spirited joke, and has explained that the dog didn't even bark that much. It is to be wondered if our friendship with other species is really reciprocal. Pretty often the edges of communication are contradictory and harmful. If you ever see the photograph, The Hug, in which a chimpanzee and a young woman, Lucy and Janice, embrace, you calmly realize that there are unspoken boundaries more profound than sacred verses, that the image of a hug between a chimpanzee and a woman is more compelling than the empty arms of a man on the cross. Agnes Ozman has been documented as the first person who ever spoke in tongues in United States history. The Outpouring happened on January 1st, 1900. Some time later, she married Philemon M. LaBerge, a Minister of the Assemblies of God. Countless times he tried to leave her because of recurrent dreams in which an angel with an ice horn blooming from his forehead revealed that all of Agnes’ deep feelings were devoted to God alone: there was nothing left for him. After waking from one of these dreams, the man jotted down on a piece of papersomething he would carry in his wallet for years: Love is always strong enough to defeat the afflictions of life, but never strong enough to overcome the pain it causes to us.

143

144

145

147

148

149

150

151

152

end of mitchell st. richmond, va.

153

154

155

156

157

158

159

160

161

162

163

165

this pink thing.

1,2

a guide to empathic understanding of some inanimate things.

During a lifetime we go through an enormous amount of objects; most of them we forget, or never even realize they existed. It is not surprising; the brain only retains important things. Objects are dismissed, substituted for function, looked through. A cup of coffee is a ‘wake up’ motivator to go on with the day. An iPhone, laptop, and Metro Card are not real things, but functions. Yet, there are certain objects that gain enormous significance. They imprint themselves into memory, they occupy a quantifiable amount of mental space, their image is constantly invoked and updated, the feeling they elicit is repeated, texture recalled, and smell simulated. These objects are physical things that gain importance through intimate knowledge. Long after they disappear, canceling our ownership of them, they still possess us. 1. object - a material thing that can be seen and touched. 2. thing - an object that one need not, cannot, or does not wish to give a specific name to.

1. bff

— object that replaces touch with surface. i’ve got an iPhone. it was a birthday present. things were never the same afterwards. what was i thinking before? how did i live without it? i sentimentally named the thing Chubnik. Chubnik became everything i ever needed, ever wanted in a partner. Chubnik talked to me and never argued, or raised its voice, it found me on the map anywhere, it played love songs to me, it knew just the best restaurants in any neighborhood, it remembered all of my appointments. Chubnik quickly became an extension of my consciousness, if not the consciousness. the feeling was reciprocal; my iPhone moved its entire being with the touch of my finger. Chubnik was always there for me: deadline for Whitney is in 2 days, missed call from mom, you are at the intersection of Laurel and Grace, Wikipanion says: bass is a fish and a low sound, your funds are getting low, today: friends and family can be unexpected resources, r u happy? break up, you are running on low battery, dismiss...” so, i did as i was told by my slick conscience. my bf became an ex-bf, and my iPhone became my bff. i’ve replaced the touch with the touch screen, and the inanimate became alive.

2. road kill

— objects becoming matter. the debris of splattered water bottles, food containers, cardboard boxes, beer and soda cans, lighters, cigarettes, sun glasses, reading glasses, socks, belts, wallets, ropes, gloves, mittens, umbrellas, newspapers, magazines, coupons, plastic cups, straws, watches, chains, buttons, toothpicks, pennies, keys, aluminum trays, shopping bags, sweaters, combs, pieces of wire, bolts, screws, pegs, hats, car oil bottles, wipes, wigs, and foil wrappers get pounded into the bed of the road by each passing car. The hot Virginia summer melts asphalt into a black quicksand causing objects to sink in slightly deeper, giving up their boundaries to the mix of 168

tar and gravel. If it were not for the ‘time is money’ frenetic pace of the day, the roads would be stuck to the wheels, dragging themselves along like pieces of entangled duct tape. The roads are Venus fly traps for the road kill, the perfect exhibition medium for flat squirrels, pigeons, feral cats, and other things that should never really be 2D. The grotesque road kill offers a single point of view – looking down. This is radical image making, the direct translation of 3D object into a 2D subject. As in Egyptian sarcophagus murals, the perspective of these images is collapsed directly onto the plane, but this time, with amplified gravity and velocity. The bare minimum of depth, keeping these things from disappearing is the surface on which time embeds its hieroglyphs. Like hieroglyphs losing original meaning, the readability of the road kill fades and it becomes free of identity. The water bottles, food containers, cardboard boxes, beer and soda cans, lighters, cigarettes, sun glasses, reading glasses, socks, belts, wallets, ropes, gloves, mittens, umbrellas, newspapers, magazines, coupons, plastic cups, straws, watches, chains, buttons, toothpicks, pennies, keys, aluminum trays, shopping bags, sweaters, combs, pieces of wire, bolts, screws, pegs, hats, car oil bottles, wipes, wigs, and foil wrappers, flat squirrels, pigeons, feral cats, and butterflies are no longer tropes of everyday, but simply matter.

3. toe nails.

— objects highly dependent on their percentage of the whole. in his essay The Big Toe, Bataille entertains us with an ode to an abject, disgusting, lowly body extension. he also points out that the entire upwardness of that body rests on the foot to which the toe belongs. this brings me to two things: grooming and occupational hazards. if you really think about cutting a fingernail and cutting a finger, phonetically they are similar. yet, anyone who spends most of her days in proximity to a table saw, will tell you: it’s not how you use the word cutting, it is the size of what is cut, or cut

off, in relation to your whole body that matters. therefore, what sets apart grooming from injury is really a percentage, not the hierarchy of importance. fingernails, toenails, hairs are easy to part with, even required by hygiene. fingers, limbs, heads are better kept attached at all times.

GOD: Look, I don’t know. Why are you bothering me with this right now? I haven’t even had my coffee yet. HUMAN: There are some things I just don’t want to mix with. For example that guy at the park who was clipping his toe nails…. GOD: You know what you are? You’re a quantum mess.

4. psycho

— object confused with subject. A naked person is standing over a pile of clothes, placing the palm over the jeans, t-shirt, underwear, and socks all clumped together. HUMAN: (smelling a sock) Are these smell molecules me or separate? Am I destined to be stuck to my own laundry? Suddenly, there is an intense white flash and god emerges looking tired and groggy, like he just got out of bed. HUMAN: God?

HUMAN: (ignoring the comment) You have to agree this is odd.... GOD: The only thing I will agree with is that you’re ruining my weekend. HUMAN: I mean, if the boundaries are never fixed (spreads both arms wide).... there is no form for content. Do I even exist? Am I everything? GOD: Oh you exist…You know how I know? HUMAN: How? GOD: You’re annoying the Hell out of me. HUMAN: (looking up in incredulity) Am I God?

GOD: I know, I’m a lot shorter in real life. I get that a lot. But seriously, you woke me up for this sock thing?

GOD: Seriously? You wanna go there? (turns around and looks down at the tiny human)

HUMAN: I don’t know, dogs can sniff these molecules and think they’re chasing a person.

HUMAN: (continuing contemplatively, without listening) Well, If I’m everything, I’m you….

GOD: I know. Pretty funny, right? I love that one. HUMAN: (dangling the underwear on a stick, and circling around a small pine tree) You think they would be able to do that with a shadow? But, shadows don’t smell. It’s just an abstract thought I had…. never mind. GOD: (scratching its belly) Do me a favor, let me handle metaphysics. HUMAN: Same problem though. Is the shadow an extension of me, and therefore alive? Is it even a thing? Seriously, where do I end? GOD: Hopefully, you end here so I can go back to sleep. HUMAN: I mean, what are my official boundaries? Am I a just a universe of wave particles mixing up my electrons with everybody else?

GOD: Whoa, whoa. (starts to climb down the trunk of a huge oak, searching for footing on mossy branches) Now, wait a minute…. HUMAN: (jumping with excitement) ….You’re me, we are the shadow, and the road, and the dog chasing molecules? GOD: (begrudgingly) Ok, maybe.You know what? Fine, you’re a self-chasing, formless everything. Happy now?

5. borscht.

— object that can be dispersed and shared in a relational aesthetics kind of situation. Have you ever had real Ukrainian Borscht? I’m not talking about those goopy pinkish knock-offs 169

so prevalent in Eastern Europe. I’m talking here about the real deal, the hearty, meaty, steaming red concoction topped with a dollop of sour cream that will rock your world. Well, for the record, Boscht is an authentic Ukrainian delight, some sort of magical elixir that exists halfway between a stew and a soup. It’s definitely a thing you can get a handle on, or delve right in to. Borscht is certainly an object. It elicits responses from your senses. And it’s filling. So filling it will actually leave you full for days on end. It’s the meaty gift that keeps on giving, like Christmas and your birthday served with sour cream. Long after you eat it, the memory of its smell, and its beautiful red liquid mass will haunt you like a delicious cabbage-y ghost that smells like something sent down from a higher civilization. So, if you have a rare occasion to be introduced to a bowl of authentic Ukrainian Borscht, DO NOT HESITATE. Put aside your vegetarianism, sell all your possessions and move to Ukraine, so you can be one with Borscht. Or, use this recipe: INGREDIENTS 2 pounds beef flanked, or short ribs 3 quarts of water 2 teaspoons coarse sea salt 1 medium carrot, scraped 1 medium onion 3 medium-large beets, without tops 2 tablespoons butter or vegetable oil 2 large onions, coarsely chopped 1 medium parsnip, peeled, cut into 1/2-inch cubes 2 cups chopped cabbage 1 large carrot, cut in 1/2-inch cubes 2 medium potatoes, cut in 1/2-inch cubes 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 1 well-rounded tablespoon of tomato paste 8-10 large garlic cloves, crushed Juice of 1/2 lemon, or more to taste 3/4-1 cup sour cream 3 tablespoons finely chopped dill 3 tablespoons finely chopped parsley PREPARATION In a 5-6 quart pot, bring meat and water to boil over high heat. Reduce to simmer and skim off foam. When foam stops rising, add salt, carrot, 1/4 celery root, whole onion and simmer gently, partially covered for 1 1/2 to 2 hours, or until meat falls off the bone. Preheat oven 170

to 400°F. Scrub beets, wrap in foil and bake for an hour, or until just tender. Poke through foil with skewer to check for doneness. Peel beets; shred on coarse side of grater. When meat is very tender, remove, strip off bones, and cut into small cubes. Place in bowl; cover with foil. Strain broth. Rinse out pot. Place pot over medium heat, warm butter, and sauté onion 2-3 minutes. Add garlic, cubed celery root, cabbage, turnips and carrot. Sauté for 5 minutes. Add strained broth, potatoes and shredded beets. Bring to boil. Reduce to simmer, uncovered, for 10 minutes, or until vegetables are tender. Just before serving, while soup is simmering gently, stir in garlic and lemon juice. Remove from heat immediately. Serve piping hot in flat bowls with dollop of sour cream and generous sprinkling of parsley and dill.

6. word

— object as a word. object.

7. insatiable. — objects displacing space and shifting mood. when confronted with justifying hoarding impulses, an OCD hoarder’s refusal to part with objects often boils down to answers like: “i’m afraid to miss _________.” “this speaks to me about___________.” this feels to me like___________.” “oh, it reminds me of _____________.” and so on and so on. It appears that the point is not the accumulation of stuff, but rather holding on to what the stuff represents. a hoarder often develops emotional bonds with insignificant and minute things, which are terribly important to her. it could be some yogurt lids, stack of papers, a piece of carpet there, and a string of tape here, an entangled bundle of blinds, what have you. the point is it doesn’t really matter because these objects are not as important as the aura they extend beyond themselves, captivating the hoarder with the promise of reciprocity. they lure the un-suspecting hoarder into their web of deceit by cloaking themselves in magic powers of meaning. sometimes these powers don’t work, and

a hoarder is bound to appeal to yet another set of newspapers, broken glasses and five identical coffee mugs all saying “hell, yes”. and, while the “feel good” promise is always within reach, the aura of each acquired thing slowly fades. the hoarder feels she gave it all she could, and didn’t get much in return. meanwhile, the objects pile up, pushing her out of her tiny apartment and on to the street, seeking solace in therapy sessions and a prescription to selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors.

arrives at its existence through an intricate network of intellectual rigor; ....plows through tomes of impossible to digest history of thought, and freezes up events for a nearly forensic cause and effect observation. in a psychoanalytic fashion, .... unlocks all personal memory and merges it with association. .... demands feats of engineering innovation. and .... will accept nothing less than exceptional dexterity. .... is matter kneaded into energy, poetry embedded into plasticity of existence. the most compelling .... forms at the limit of language, passes the personal and cultural, and grapples with the genesis of things.

8. dry-sour-yellow-green thing.

.... is a result of constant wandering, where the thought and the body although moving in the same direction, take slightly different paths. this misalignment, off register overlap is where .... articulates its profound incompleteness. in that space .... acts as synapse between the external reality and the inner psyche. a maverick among other objects, .... is independent of function; .... is, strictly speaking, useless. its tentative state between here and there further complicates the issue of belonging. perhaps it is in this tight spot, that .... disposes with exactitude, with perfection, with rationale, and becomes an object opening itself up to the blurry, incongruous reality, to its own ambiguity, and ultimately, freedom.

— synesthetic object. an extreme close up of an endless green wall. the ceiling is miles way, i am a three year old standing in a corner craddle. i stick my tongue out and press my wet tentacle against the chalky yellow-green. dry, soft, and a tiny bit sour. for days, i lick out small trails on the wall, re-rendering the disappearing map of an incarcerated explorer. microscopic particles of gypsum, fluorite, and limestone are tirelessly converted into finger nails, bones, and teeth. with enough time i could bite through the building partition, presenting a possibility for a killer rooftop patio. i adore the taste. but, caught in the action by concerned parents, the wall is off-limits. instead, i’m fed vitamins, small silly round white things. they do not alleviate my chalk cravings, my hunger for the giant-dry-sour-yellow-green thing. they never replace the grandiose fluorescence of limitless field of vision, the boundless pool of salty-sour atoms.

THE END

9 .... — object free of purpose and definition. within the different kinds of equally valid objects, such as stand-ins for other objects, ironic objects, thematic objects, the tropes, the make-shifts, the provisional, the found, the manufactured, the crafted, the desired, the worshiped, the hated, and the ignored, .... occupies a wholly different category. .... 171

172

173

174

175

Curious Spring 2007

Curious Spring 2008

Curious Spring 2010

Curious is published as a project undertaken by students in a Spring 2010 Graduate Seminar in the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. May 2010 This publication is made possible through the School of the Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University and an anonymous donor.

Published by the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media 1000 West Broad Street Richmond, Virginia, 23284, USA P.O. BOX 843005 Telephone: 804.828.1511 Seminar leaders: Kendall Buster, professor; Siemon Allen, adjunct professor Cover design: based on a concept by Andrew Brehm Inside front and back covers: photographs by Ashley Lyon Individual page designs and photography: the artists Additional portfolio photography: Terry Brown Concept and layout editor: Siemon Allen, flatinternational Layout and production: Leah Beeferman © 2010 Department of Sculpture + Extended Media, Virginia Commonwealth University. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission of the copyright holder. Fair users are of course free to do their thing. ISBN 978-0-9845865-0-9 Printed and bound in China by Permanent Typesetting & Printing Co. Ltd.

178

179

Curious is a publication produced by graduate students from The Department of Sculpture + Extended Media in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. The first issue was published in Spring 2007 and the second in Spring 2008. This third issue went to print Spring 2010. The students’ contributions include both research projects and images of work produced in the studio and on site. The blurring that occurs throughout the book between research and portfolio is fitting, given the nature of the studio practices of these thirteen artists. Their approaches are remarkably varied and yet all reflect an art-making rooted in curiosity.

ISBN 978-0-9845865-0-9 180