the sea: wave 3

“In the bedroom, laying, looking up, I watched as the sea moved in from one corner of the ceiling gradually filling the frame. A moderate breeze, small waves, becoming larger: fairly frequent horses. A memory floats across the ceiling in bits and pieces, along with the other drifters: the By-The-Wind-Sailors, the violet sea snail floating on its bed of foam, and the shipworm burrowed into a piece of wood. In their midst a whale bone floats to the surface, and on it a engraving made by an idle whaler during his leisure hours, struggling to battle the soul shattering monotony of the open sea by keeping his mind occupied with the work of his hands. And on it he carved a picture of an unfinished heart shaped room, and painstakingly rendered every tiny detail the he could remember. He worked on it for thirty years.”

What does this sea remember? At times, by the sound of it, the sea remembers quite a lot. At times its good memory does not make for a good story because it goes on and on with long lists of things that have passed through it, or troubles itself with correctly pronouncing the sound of every wave. Hereʼs what itʼs saying:

A red toothbrush, A set of encyclopedias with pages folded over at the corners, An Umbrella, A wooden chair. Sand. Sand. A Building built out of sand as if it were stone. Unread letters. And the parish churches of: St. Leonard, St. Martin, St. Bartholomew, St. Michael, St. Peter, St. Mary, St. Patrick, St. John, St. Nicholas, St. Felix, A Hankie, Laurel and Hardy, Morecambe and Wise, Gilbert and George, Tree.

His heart beating to a memory:

A room,

a girl,

a quiet night after work,

away from the sea,

looking forward,

an adventure.

The Sea, now deep in sleep, mumbled something about when it was little, many years ago. Its mother a glacier, and its father the sun. Its twin, the desert (fraternal), and its godfather the moon who continues to look after it.

I closed my eyes, looking for sleep myself, and tried to breathe quietly. I let my body float belly up, my nose and mouth above the surface but my ears just below it. I listened to the now deafening sound of my quiet breath and my mind was full and moving frantically from one thought to another. To calm myself, I decided to make myself listen to the stories in The Sea (instead of me), and count them. Stories told by all the stuff people have given it, or that it has taken. All the things forgotten in it or thrown to it for losing. Innumerable cast-offs, messages, and yesterdays gone off on an adventure; those things finding some rest in its methodical movements and temperate depths.

These things and their stories drift by in the current, like clouds in the jet stream, headed somewhere the ocean is taking them. They are quiet, but you can hear them if you tilt your head just right and listen for the sounds of the water. I want it to be a lullaby, a drifting cloud atlas of things that once were, or things that are headed somewhere else with the delusion of purpose. Stories of doing things, making progress, something to look forward to. I counted the objects and the stories they told.

#1

The shaved off whiskers belonging to a wrinkled face, remnants of sideburns grown reaching for a remembered gait.

Had I forgotten where I started? Itʼs been so many years and Iʼve gotten good at getting by … but where was I headed when I started this? Now, the things that rile me, the things that seem to draw out the most of my tired emotion, are the things that have to do with how people are to me. Not about whatʼs said, or whatʼs done. I enjoy outright offense and let it pass for low, but search for offense and in those moments where it isnʼt clear enough, where I can pounce on it. Perhaps this is now my only skill? Pouncing where I can point to the slightest whisper of disrespect? Perhaps I would be further along in this if I instead suffered quietly. Instead bit my tongue and knew better. There is a pleasure in that. There is pleasure there?

#2

All three skipping stones you skipped.

Picnic, family, little ones, passing on the art of the skipped stone.

#3

A bingo card with two almost bingos, both needing the number 12.

A last dollar, a last hope. A delusion perhaps, but it seemed possible. It needed to be possible and things that need to be possible sometimes seem as if they are inevitable, that for the story to end right it must be the way itʼll go. Deux ex machina. The way things end. But, of course, the world is harsher than that. Rather, our delusions donʼt allow us the reality and so make it seem harsh, when really it is mechanical. It is. Our perception of it is the thing that is relative to our want. And money can help you make the world seem to be however you want it. One last shot, a last dollar, but the number 12.

#4

(Indecipherable.)

#5

A watch inscribed, “In honor of 50 years served. Thanks.”

End of a pier. Tears remembering a life adding salty water to salty water. A remembrance regretted from this new solitude.

#6

A box of childhood things. A floating casket of what was.

A doll, forced on me by my mother, then loved because of a perceived kindred suffering. A gum wrapper from a piece of gum that Tony (TONY!) gave me at recess one day (still smells of grape.) A magazine picture of a Backstreet Boy that had been in the back pocket everyday of grades 6-8. Half of a friendship necklace heart bought to share with Sheri Ross, the one I stopped wearing without explanation to Sheri, who only noticed a few days later in the lunch line. A matchbox time capsule made at school in the 5th grade. Nothing in it. Wanted to save the moment. Dad left that day. And mom was happy. And my older sister too. Everything was going to be okay.

#7

The rock you used to keep your book open that day.

The novel was a mystery, a who-done-it, and the day was partly cloudy. Clouds floating overhead, sometimes blocking the sun, making you chilly, sometimes not, making you sweat. You were half reading, half watching your lover out of the corner of your eye. Feeling lucky. To be here. To be here with them. To be happy. To have a fish to cook tonight. To have The Sea in front of you, plodding along at your toes.

#8

A worn and rubbed icon of St. Michael Archangel. Or maybe St. Anthony.

A Spanish sailorʼs gift from his mother, set off on an adventure as the sailor sank in the hull of a frigate. He was thinking about what heʼll miss, about the couch, about the smell of the garden in summer, about the way the bed sheets feel after a day spent with hands in soil.

#9

Boots, soles worn through. Money enough for five pair stuffed in the insole.

A bit of a breather. To see wind in their hair with sunshine. A little bit of sunshine. A few days time lived without soot on her face to mark my kiss. A few days time where she doesnʼt mention whatʼs needed, whatʼs been bought, and what isnʼt left. A few days time when they arenʼt embarrassed by their clothes, to see them look at the sky instead of the ground, to get to see the way the Big Wheel makes their eyes big. A few days where we can wake up together in the morning, and get some breakfast, together, no whistles telling us weʼre late. No Bolton sun rising and spreading us out. Something to look ...

Sleep found me there. Then there was the zebra, again, and an anxious search for the drain at the bottom. The place that leads somewhere else. My body was there floating, a By-The-Wind-Sailor, and my mind to, in the flotsam and jetsam of my mind. Was I looking for new happiness, or replaying old trauma?

I woke up and there was sun. The Sea was moving more than last night, but not violently, a sort of slow swelling and contracting that lifted me straight up and then gently dropped me straight down. I kept my eyes closed for a while. Feigning sleep. Wanting to continue this moment. Not wanting to break it.

anti art / gift

The following texts emerged from an invitation to attend the ANTI Festival in Finland (27 September - 2 October 2011) as a visiting writer, and to respond to the festival. After a short introduction below, subsequent posts focus on five of the festival's performance events - by Blast Theory, Lone Twin, Gaëtan Rusquet, Juha Valkeapää and the 100 Year Old Rock'n'Roll Band. These texts were first published as a review essay in Performance Research 17:1 ('On Failure'), alongside a series of photographs by Pekka Mäkinen.  

Since its inception in 2001, the ANTI-Contemporary Art Festival in Kuopio, Finland, has become known internationally for its commitment to site-specific and contextual live art practices. Its ongoing brief has been to displace art from galleries and other conventionally designated spaces, and to root it in public and social spaces, making it available and engaging to new audiences as small invitational frictions in the civic everyday. One of the meanings of the word ‘anti’ in Finnish, I am told, alongside its more familiar oppositional associations, is ‘gift’.

The festival’s 10^th anniversary programme, ANTI 2011, was curated by joint artistic directors Johanna Tuukkanen and Gregg Whelan in loose relation to the theme ‘Remake Rebuild Renew’. In part, this ‘ANTIversary’ festival offered an opportunity to invite a number of artists to return to Kuopio, and to revisit sites and develop earlier projects for a city in transition. In addition, ANTI was seeking artists’ engagements with and responses to changes in the political culture and material fabric of the city. During the festival itself, most of the expansive city centre square remained inaccessible, fenced off around a cavernous pit. The void sculpted out of the earth during this long-term excavation down to the city’s bedrock fractured the rhythms and flows of the city centre, and left a number of buildings and public walkways propped precariously on its edge; this hole is to be the location of – surprise, surprise - an underground car park. 

In what follows I have chosen to focus on five performance projects from ANTI 2011. Taken together, perhaps they reflect something of the curatorial flavour and dynamic of this most civic, emplaced and human-scale of international festivals. In the print version for Performance Research, my short account of each project sits alongside and in dialogue with photographs by Pekka Mäkinen, who has documented every artist and project at ANTI over the past ten years. As part of ANTI 2011, date-stamped prints of Mäkinen’s images from past festivals were on display in diverse locations around the city. Furthermore, a wide range of images from his remarkable photographic archive of hundreds of ephemeral events hosted by ANTI in Kuopio over the past decade animate a lavishly illustrated new book launched to mark the festival’s anniversary (1). Mäkinen’s fine photographs provide glimpses and traces that perhaps enable us to revisit and remake something of a startling array of artists’ actions, processes, images, encounters, situations and exchanges, each of them now disappeared from locations that are themselves in process.

Finally, I have listed the awards presented to these artists by a roving jury of local children from Kalevalan koulu who attended almost all of the performances at this year’s festival in Kuopio. The Children’s Choice Awards, coordinated by members of the Toronto-based company Mammalian Diving Reflex, were staged in the main chamber of the city hall as the final event of ANTI 2011. 

(1) Johanna Tuukkanen, Laura Tervo, Minna Jaakkola and Gregg Whelan (eds), ANTIVERSARY - Performance, live art and site-specificity: a decade of ANTI Contemporary Art Festival, Finland: ANTI, 2011. The book contains contributions by Jennie Klein, Anna-Reetta Suhonen, Juha-Heikki Tihinen, Helen Cole, Kira O’Reilly, Dee Heddon, Rosie Dennis, Kirsi Pitkänen, Simon Whitehead, Richard DeDomenici, Juha Valkeapää, Eungyung Kim and Shoji Kato, as well as an interview with the festival’s artistic directors.

skywritings: an intro

‘When you are working on relationships that are in process, you’re like a man who takes a plane from Toulouse to Madrid, travels by car from Geneva to Lausanne, goes on foot from Paris towards the Chevreuse valley, or from Cervina to the top of the Matterhorn (with spikes on his shoes, a rope and an ice axe), who goes by boat from Le Havre to New York, who swims from Calais to Dover, who travels by rocket towards the moon, travels by semaphore, telephone or fax, by diaries from childhood to old age, by monuments from antiquity to the present, by lightning bolts when in love. One may well ask, ‘What in the world is this man doing?

There are dilemmas in the mode of traveling, the reasons for the trip, the point of departure and the destination, in the places through which one will pass; the speed, the means, the vehicle, the obstacles to be overcome, make that space active. And, since I have used diverse methods, the coherence of my project is suspect. [...] In fact, it was always a matter of establishing a relation, constructing it, fine-tuning it. And once established, thousands of relations, here, there, everywhere - after a while, when you step back and look, a picture emerges. Or at least a map. You see a general theory of relations, without any point focalising the construction or solidifying it, like a pyramid. The turbulences keep moving. The flows keep dancing’ (Michel Serres in Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and time, University of Michigan Press, 1995, pp. 111-12).
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This is a collection of texts and images about some of those things that 'quicken the heart' in various ways, or at least my heart: contemporary art - in particular, contemporary performance, music, film, writing, and visual arts - people, politics, places, animals, collaborations, encounters, walking, the weather, the sea, Sicily, and so on. So, traces of recurrent fascinations and obsessions, as well as occasional detours and dead ends. A partial register of the present's unfolding, and of some of the shapes it has taken in the past and could take in the future. Perhaps it's part of the delicate and ongoing struggle to work out what Herbert Blau once called ‘some liveable unison between panic and grace’; so much of what I write and am interested in seems to be. I start this blog without any particular 'goal' or focused intention, other than a desire to play in purposeful ways, to share some stuff and allow it to go where it will. And a recognition of this curiously enabling paradox: ‘The things I tell about myself that are true seem most like lies to me’ (Elias Canetti) ...

In the back of my mind, there's also this hilarious dismissal from Don Paterson's The Blind Eye: 'You've made a blog ... Clever boy! Next: flushing'.

At the outset I'm not at all sure what this blog will become; I certainly have a strong sense of what I don't want it to be - in particular, a diaristic accumulation that assumes the stuff of my everyday life to be oh so interesting in itself, or an exercise in self-promotion. My hope is that it's more something to do with the informed wandering of the drift, as a walking-reading-writing practice. In Lights out for the Territory (1997), Iain Sinclair writes: "Walking is the best way to explore the city: the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reveries, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself". This ‘fiction’ can have many functions: poetic, ethical, political, critical, topological …

I sense the linear time-line structure of the blogging format may not be the most important here; it might be much more to do with trying to create the conditions for the emergence of connections and patterns, 'figures' in the writing and images, over times and spaces that are discontinuous, backward/forward, foldable, tearable, re-writable.
 
For the first few weeks in July/August 2008 I will include some slightly older materials alongside the new: to try to provide some contextual 'ground' (for me and for any readers); to allow some patterns and trajectories to start to emerge - perhaps through the 'labels' - and then either linger, morph or disperse; and also to help me to orient myself a little in the unfamiliar terrain of this blogging space. From then on, who knows? 

A word about the links in the right hand column. In my initial hyper-enthusiasm, I included over 100 links, but this had a rather vertiginous effect: an overload. So I'll select 20-30, and endeavour to switch them around from time to time. They will be pretty mixed: artists, activists, writers, film makers, friends, and any other stuff I've found interesting in one way or another. I'll also embed other links into some of the posts themselves. 

Finally, in part I hope to try to use this blog in ways related to one of Annie Dillard's core propositions about writing in her exquisite book The Writing Life (1989): "One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes".
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By way of a beginning, here's part of the introductory text - 'something to do' - from a presentation called skywritings that I've returned to over the past 6 or 7 years in different forms and places in Australia, the USA and England. Perhaps, in its uncertain enumeration and its citational circlings, it gives something of the flavour of what's at play:

"It's something to do with embodiment, emplacement, perception, with ephemerality and unpredictability, with circuits and flows and connectivities, with process, change, multiplicity, and with the works-in-progress that all becomings make of identities. Something to do with relational unfoldings at the present’s speed, with what Clifford Geertz described as deep hanging out, and with the possibility of what Matthew Goulish has called slow thinking. 'To sit, to listen, to be, to observe, to breathe, to think, to remember – the most urgent choreography’ (André Lepecki). Something to do with spending too many days in a studio, too many nights in a studio – and finally feeling like someone in a spacesuit who has been farting for some time but has only just realised that the same old stuff is circulating: a recognition of the need for different wind, for ‘new routes away from home’.

It's something to do with maps and their gaps, with the beautiful absurdity of the World Meteorological Organisation’s 2-volume standard reference work, the International Cloud Atlas. Something to do with the meaning of the word 'oceanography', and the impossibility of 'writing' (-graphy) something as protean as the sea. And it's something to do with Michel de Certeau’s suggestion that “what the map cuts up, the story cuts across”.

It's something to do with that photo of me at the age of 6 – a me I barely recognise - a blur of arms and legs high above the swimming pool, high above the treetops, having sprinted off the diving board clutching my inflatable rubber ring: so brave, and not so brave. With standing on a hill north of Melbourne scanning the sky for signs of rain, the rain that would fill water tanks and the lake from which the animals drink. With rotating 360 degrees on Ugborough Beacon on Dartmoor, just behind my home, and palpably feeling the fish-eye effect of what James Turrell calls ‘celestial vaulting’, the folding curve towards the horizon. With halogen torchlight sweeeping across a field in Victoria, Australia, and projecting the shadow of a cantering horse on to the hillside. With poppies in October, ‘a gift, a love gift, utterly unasked for by a sky’ (Sylvia Plath). It’s something to do with that bloke who kept bees who lived next door to my dad, and with my friend Swen’s conviction that the rhythm of Paignton is blue.

It’s something to do with the little-by-little-suddenly, the make-haste-slowly and the instability of weather systems, and the poetics of the namings of meteorological phenomena: the dew point, funnel clouds in tornadogenesis, the ‘eye’ of a hurricane, dust devils, snow devils, hailshafts, the ‘leader’ and ‘return stroke’ in cloud-to-ground lightning, rain shadows, heat lag, storm tracks, halos, coronas and parhelia (also called ‘mock suns’ or ‘sun dogs’), moonbow and fogbow, sunpillar, the glory, the green flash. Something to do with my friend Myriam who writes to me, from the depths of her continuing illness, that she will try ‘not to be under the weather, but to be the weather’. Something to do with the word ‘twi-light’ and two French expressions for dusk: the sonic event of the word crépuscule, and the transformative threshold of entre chien et loup, between dog and wolf. It’s something to do with Billy Bragg singing Woody Guthrie, and “there’s a black wind blowing through the cottonfield, and oh how funny it makes me feel, baby, sweet thing, darling” ...

It’s something to do with Roland Barthes describing ‘difference’ ... “the very movement of dispersion, of friability, a shimmer; what matters is not the discovery, in a reading of the world and of the self, of certain oppositions but of encroachments, overflows, leaks, skids, shifts, slips ...’. And it’s something to do with Gilles Deleuze’s affirmation of attempts to think life beyond the human – ‘to make life something more than personal, to free life from what imprisons it’.

It’s something to do with a journey I made to “a wreck of a place. There were three gates standing ajar and a fence that broke off. It was not the wreck of anything else in particular. A place came there and crashed. After that it remained the wreck of a place. Light fell on it” (Anne Carson, ‘Short Talks’).

It's something to do with Peter Greenaway's inclusion in his 100 Objects to Represent the World of a cloud and a crashed aircraft, and it’s something to do with one of Prospero’s 24 volumes in Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books, ‘A Book of Motion’: ‘This is a book that at the most simple level describes how birds fly and waves roll, how clouds form and apples fall from trees. It describes how the eye changes its shape when looking at great distances, how hairs grow in a beard, why the heart flutters and the lungs inflate involuntarily and how laughter changes the face. At its most complex level, it explains how ideas chase one another in the memory and where thought goes when it is finished with’ ( Peter Greenaway).

It's something to do with Edmond Jabès’s Book of Questions, in which he writes: ‘The sky begins ankle-high. In walking we cleave the sky of the earth. Elsewhere there is the sky of stars, of the sun’. ‘Is it the same sky?’ ‘Are you the same from head to feet?’

And it’s something to do with: ‘not even the sky but a memory of sky, and the blue of the earth in your lungs’ (Paul Auster)".









© David Williams