life forces

Over the past decade or so, in her solo and collaborative work in live performance and film, Jane Mason has explored ways in which the movements of bodies and objects can create ‘image worlds’ of great affective resonance and tenderness. These dynamic architectures of memory, loss, and longing combine dance, text, song and music in patterns of images that slowly align and unfold to suggest passage ways through felt times and spaces of a rhythmed intimacy and intensity. Usually triggered by some aspect of her own lived experience, these ‘worlds’ invite a quiet attention to detail, and an active slowing down into present process. Over the years, many of Jane’s images have lingered with me and etched themselves into my imagination – for in their exquisite precision and mystery, paradoxically they seem to invite and activate something of the life forces within our own memories and associational fields.

With its initial trigger in some boxes of photographic slides taken by her father some years ago, Life Forces develops this work of mining, uncovering, transposing and inviting, and opens up new landscapes of be/longing. Developed in close collaboration with a film maker, a writer-performer, a visual artist and a dramaturg, Life Forces offers a meditation on memory’s place in the face of uncertain futures, on place and home and their resilient fragilities, on the utopian impulse to ‘build’ together and to let (it) go, on the arcing electricity of connection and the drift of dispersal, and on transformation and change as the core ground of being, the ‘life force’ that links everything and everyone.

Short text written in the wake of various collaborations in recent years with the wonderful Jane Mason, and in response to her new performance piece Life Forces, prior to a showing of work-in-progress at Siobhan Davies Studios, London, in early July. With Jane Mason (choreographer/performer/writer), Phil Smith (performer/writer), Magali Charrier (film maker/animator), Sophia Clist (sculptor/designer), and David Williams (dramaturg). Tour from autumn 2014

shuttle 21: (in place of an) ending

'It's interesting to think of the great blaze of heaven that we winnow down to animal shapes and kitchen tools' (Don DeLillo, Underworld, London: Picador, 1998, 82) 
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Jean Baudrillard: - 'I went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. I looked for it in the speed of the screenplay, in the indifferent reflex of television, in the film of days and nights projected across an empty space, in the marvellously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts on the road; looked for what was nearest to the nuclear and enucleated universe, a universe which is virtually our own ...

I sought the finished form of the future catastrophe of the social in geology, in that upturning of depth that can be seen in the straited spaces, the reliefs of salt and stone, the canyons where the fossil river flows down, the immemorial abyss of slowness that shows itself in erosion and geology. I even looked for it in the verticality of the great cities ...

Here in the transversality of the desert and the irony of geology, the transpolitical finds its generic, mental space. The inhumanity of our ulterior, asocial, superficial world immediately finds its aesthetic form here, its ecstatic form. For the desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.

The grandeur of the deserts derives from their being, in their aridity, the negative of the earth's surface and of our civilised humours.  They are places where humours and fluids become rarefied, where the air is so pure that the influence of the stars descends direct from the constellations. And, with the extermination of the desert Indians, an even earlier stage than that of anthropology became visible: a mineralogy, a geology, a sidereality, an inhuman facticity, an aridity that drives out the artificial scruples of culture, a silence that exists nowhere else.

The silence of the desert is a visual thing, too. A product of the gaze that stares out and finds nothing to reflect it. There can be no silence up in the mountains, since their very contours roar. And for there to be silence, time itself has to attain a sort of horizontality; there has to be no echo of time in the future, but simply a sliding of geological strata one upon the other giving out nothing more than a fossil murmur.

Desert: luminous, fossilised network of an inhuman intelligence, of a radical indifference - the indifference not merely of the sky, but of the geological undulations, where the metaphysical passions of space and time alone crystallise. Here the terms of desire are turned upside down each day, and night annihilates them. But wait for the dawn to rise, with the awakening of the fossil sounds, the animal silence ...

The form that dominates the American West, and doubtless all of American culture, is a seismic form: a fractal, interstitial culture, born of a rift with the Old World, a tactile, fragile, mobile, superficial culture - you have to follow its own rules to grasp how it works: seismic shifting, soft technologies.

The only question in this journey is: how far can we go in the extermination of meaning, how far can we go in the non-referential desert form without cracking up and, of course, still keep alive the esoteric charm of disappearance? A theoretical question here materialised in the objective conditions of a journey which is no longer a journey and therefore carries with it a fundamental rule: aim for the point of no return. This is the key. And the crucial moment is that brutal instant which reveals that the journey has no end, that there is no longer any reason for it to come to an end.

Beyond a certain point, it is movement itself that changes. Movement which moves through space of its own volition changes into an absorption by space itself - end of resistance, end of the scene of the journey as such (exactly as the jet engine is no longer an energy of space-penetration, but propels itself by creating a vacuum in front of it that sucks it forward, instead of supporting itself, as in the traditional model, upon the air's resistance). In this way, the centrifugal, eccentric point is reached where the movement produces the vacuum that sucks you in.

This moment of vertigo is also the moment of potential collapse. Not so much from the tiredness generated by the distance and the heat, as from the ireversible advance into the desert of time'.

Extract from Jean Baudrillard, America, London: Verso, 1988, 5-6, 11
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Hello Mick, and Beth,

I'm ending with Baudrillard, not because I necessarily agree with everything he proposes, but because his rhetorical postcards from the road remain provocative for me in terms of driving, the cinematic, the seismic drama of geology, time, 'silence'.

In assembling these virtual fragments over the past three weeks, a kind of ad hoc - and unfinishable - reading companion for your journey, I have often tried to imagine where you are. And I realise I've entirely elided my own embodied movements during that time, a shuttle rhythm of to-ing and fro-ing between work in London and England's (much milder, greener) 'Southwest'.

I have passed Stonehenge six times in different light, and on each occasion have hollered greetings to the pigs on the other side of the road. I've been dazzled by a billowing field of scarlet poppies in bloom. I've watched tiny swallows being fed by their hyperactive parents in their mud-spit nest above a doorway, and cried quietly during episodes of 24 Hours in A&E. And, in the gaps, I've been transfixed by events in Egypt, as well as by the river, the swifts, the bees, the clouds and the sky.

Wishes, to you and the shuttle crew,
 for the journeys home and to come, 
elsew/here ...

Photos: Richard Misrach, drive-in cinema, Las Vegas, 1987; (bottom) William Egglestone

Unhurried departure music: Jem Finer's Longplayer - time lapse film of a live performance at the Roundhouse, London, 12.9.2009 (1,000 minutes in 1,000 seconds). For the Longplayer website, and a live stream link to this ongoing musical composition (currently 13.5 years into its 1,000 year duration), see here

shuttle 4: dusting

'[Dust] is not about rubbish ... It is not about Waste. Indeed, Dust is the opposite thing to Waste, or at least, the opposite principle to Waste. It is about circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing, or going away, or being gone. Nothing can be destroyed. The fundamental lessons of physiology, of cell-theory, and of neurology are all to do with this ceaseless making and unmaking, the movement and transmutation of one thing into another. Nothing goes away' 

(Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002, 164). 

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'Dust is particulate matter, the dispersed, disordered raw material from which everything ordered and coherent arises, and it is to dust that the complex decays.

From the beginning to the end, dust underlies all existence. It is the species of light one sees flickering in a sunbeam, the molecules of gas dashing randomly in all directions. It is the atoms and molecules of matter that can be recombined and reshaped into something new such as the ordered array of atoms in  crystal or in a living cell, and it is the dusts of interstellar space that condensed to produce the sun and its planets and all the galaxies.

Everything that we understand as consistent, the living creature, the machine, the tree, are dust in its coherent phase, part of its continuous evolutionary cycle from order to disorder, from growth to decay repeated in seemingly endless variations ...

Most dust particles have crystalline interiors, but the microcrystal in one speck of dust cannot coordinate its order with that of another grain, and the dust remains chaotic. Yet it is from these dusts that the complexities of our civilisation are built. Dust on one level is chaotic, and orderly and precise on another.

As the universe evolves it creates new dusts for its various eras ... The dusts of our era, though but a transitory formation in an evolving universe, will persist for many trillions of years. Its great miracle, life, is a cycle of ordered dust that strives to perpetuate itself. The great by-product of life, intelligence, is also like dust, with bits and fragments of coherence being produced out of disorder, but all too often lapses back into chaos again'.

(Agnes Denes, extract from The Book of Dust: The Beginning and the End of Time and Thereafter, Rochester NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1989: quoted in Graham Gusin & Ele Carpenter (eds), Nothing, London: August, 2001, 84-6).

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‘Quick: why aren't you dusting? On every continent, we sweep floors and wipe tabletops not only to shine the place, but to forestall burial.

It is interesting, the debris in the air. A surprising portion of it is spider legs, and bits thereof. Spider legs are flimsy … because they are hollow. They lack muscles; compressed air moves them. Consequently, the snap off easily, and go blowing about.  Another unexpected source of aerial detritus is tires. Eroding tires shed latex shreds at a brisk clip, say the folk who train their microscopes on air. Farm dust joins sulfuric acid droplets (from burned fossil fuels) and sand from the Sahara Desert to produce the summer haze that blurs and dims valleys and coasts.

We inhale “many hundreds of particles in each breath we take” … Air routinely carries intimate fragments of rug, dung, carcasses, leaves and leaf hairs, coral, coal, skin, sweat, soap, silt, pollen, algae, bacteria, spores, soot, ammonia, and spit, as well as “salt crystals from ocean white-caps, dust scraped off distant mountains, micro bits of cooled magma blown from volcanoes and charred micro-fragments from tropical forest fires”. These sorts of things can add up.

At dusk, the particles meet rising water vapor, stick together, and fall; that is when they will bury you. Soil bacteria eat what they can, and the rest of it stays put if there’s no wind. After thirty years, there is a new inch of topsoil ...

We live on dead people's heads’

(Annie Dillard, For The Time Being, New York: Vintage, 1999, 123-4).

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Photo at top (Professor Larry Taylor): lunar dust, including volcanic glass beads and agglutinate, viewed under a microscope.

P.S. Some years ago, an artist friend in England (who shall remain nameless here) told me that he had been invited to set a piece of moon rock in a ring; the owner had worked at NASA, I think. One evening at home, in a moment of alcohol-induced lunacy, he decided to crush the rock fragment, roll it in a spliff, and smoke it. Disappointingly, it seems it didn't help him achieve 'escape velocity'. The following morning, he found a piece of rock of similar size and colour on a local building site and used that for the commissioned ring.

tempest-machine

Recently a British performance journal asked me to write a short text in response to the following question: 'What book or books have most influenced you in your career?' Leaving aside any questions and misgivings I might have about notions of a 'career', let alone the possibility of collapsing a life time of reading into what would inevitably be a reductive fiction, this was my response:

One of the most influential books for me in my early forays into performance making doesn’t actually exist. For it’s one of Prospero’s 24 volumes in Peter 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 … It drums against the bookcase shelf and has to be held down with a brass weight’ (Greenaway 1991: 24).

So, an imagined conflation of the complex systems of oceanography, aerodynamics, meteorology, gravity and biology, that also traces the unpredictable trajectories of the dance of remembering and forgetting in the processes of thought. The very notion of such a book excited me, drawing my attention to something of the infinite array of kinds of movement, phenomenal and ideational. It was a kind of wake up call into the dynamic motilities within which we are always already swimming.

In the first Addams Family film, Christopher Lloyd’s Fester lifts a related book from a shelf in the family’s gothic library, then opens it to unleash a storm that strikes him full in the face and fills the room. This magical volume contains a virtual tempest within its covers that can only be calmed by snap-shut closure, replacement on the shelf, return to the orderly and the contained.

All books, all writing should be tempest-machines. Vortices of energetic overflowings, generating new winds away from home. Why else would one write? Why else would one read?

Reference

Greenaway, Peter (1991). Prospero’s Books, London: Chatto and Windus