the difficulty of writing. therefore words become physically written entities. are animated by the postures and movements of the hand. the word becomes image. is placed in perspective. the natural rhythms of speech and of reading contorted. a video on writing:

act 1:
the street is where it finally played out, no confining corners of a room, simply a street and a doorstep and a door. a door that remained closed. closed that night and all the nights after. closed for several years. there were a few words there on the street, an evening chill picking up, words uttered from mouths tightly locked into position, not once breaking out into smile, no more spontaneities. now i remember it was an iron. the last object that passed between us. an iron. your iron. my iron. no ironing board. the irony. an iron with no more spontaneities. all those years summed up into the exchange of a single iron. a pink iron.

act 2:
you entered the studio that day and it filled the room. eyes locked and we understood. a kind of understanding that was hard to come by in those days. “we paid people 50 kuai to cry”. leaving the party early i cycled to the apartment that night, shared by several, it was only you there, you and a dvd menu on loop, the same jingle over and over again, you kept emphasizing the word ‘taken’, ‘taken’, ‘taken’ – i guess it was the opposite of what i was getting – the other word that night ‘transgressive’ – you and bataille – he and whitman – i couldn’t do it – sorry bataille – sorry whitman – i couldn’t do it – so much for ‘transgression’ — whenever i revisit the room, you are both there, bataille and whitman, bataille, whitman and me and the king-size bed. the torrent of words finally gets me writing on afternoons alone in the house, just before the onset of twilight.

act 3:
a gallery space, half emptied out, i keep going back there, the mounted and framed photographs are placed on the floor, leaning against the wall, a few are supported by the pillar in the middle of the space, you try to get them to leave, to let them leave us behind, but there is simply no subtle way of doing it and you mutter at them clumsily, they leave, we are left, the afternoon sun is slowly disappearing, the lights are left off, we talk, walk around and shout, until we settle behind the reception counter, a chair and a wall for support, we can do this but we can’t do that, what do you want from me? don’t ask that of me! she tells me his knees were shaking all the way on subway ride back home, i was never shown shaking knees. now, i only ever meet you in that gallery space. we don’t exchange words just glances and parts of our bodies in a deafening silence, the afternoon sun perpetually setting.

act 4:
an early spring evening, i keep trying to leave: “i have a party,” “a party to go to,” “a housewarming party”, but something keeps me at your side all night, first we sit at the “less important people table” and are seated next to each other, after more guests stream in we are both upgraded to the “more important people table”, again placed next to one another. what luck! finally settling into a comfortable position we continue our conversation, your leg brushes against mine a few times, i recall her remark about “woody men”. and i can’t stop staring at the eyes. can’t stop. the whole night – no rooms here, but the chambers of eyes to revisit “an intense fiery sadness” i describe to her later “inside the palest of blue”.

.

gliding over surfaces

what is sustenance but rhythm, and if it’s not there forced anyway, never listening, because one thought that rhythms should be maintained, like obligation, quitting all those times but never actually good at transitions. oh! all a front!

Posted by 丫 | reply »

archival stuff: the elbows

pending other posts, possible posts, about loss and grounding, and journeys, and drifting, always drifting, of course. an old image from the last days with the scanner at 12 warmington tower. i left london for beijing the day after. to return and to leave. a last one from this series before the year ends. this series that brought together and parted. a conversation with the silence of one. a silence that had started then and is still a silence today. before the year ends. the elbows. the scratches are from a long bout of forgetfulness resulting in negatives and prints being left at the konica place on dongsinandajie for nearly a year. upon returning i had still forgotten and was lucky that the staff had still remembered. scratches possibly from the tea flask of the guy with glasses, or a pair of scissors, an ice-cream wrapper, a pencil, the edge of the drawer, a quick doodle of a bunny rabbit, a paper clip, shopping or to do lists, an enlargement order, the order of a ballerina portrait to be printed on stone, slate stone, or bassie en adriaan or weiwei and her husband who also grace the interior of this store. not far from tiananmen. tiananmen. we spoke of tiananmen today. here. away. “yeah, you know that market, behind there, behind tiananmen square.” “i can’t remember the name.” “the wholesale one.” “no, not tianyi.” “just a second, let me ask.” ….”xidan.” “i went back in august this year and bought loads of things there.” “there was this handbag i bought and everyone here thought it must be over a 1000 dirhams or something but it was only 70 kuai.” we speak of inflation at the dinner table. the elbows. the elbows resting on the edge. the elbows of a you i have left. a you who was not there on this day. a you who’s elbows are in a far darker place than merely the shadow cast upon us by someone standing behind.

Posted by a | more »

stretching out, levitation

Posted by f | reply »

third spaces

Posted by 丫 | reply »

realistically speaking

You spoke of the beginnings of a new metaphor with which we should look at our present condition, like living in Beijing, realistically. Our metaphors come from bicycle encounters and the emotional outcroppings of the everyday. at the time i could only see flesh as a gliding, swerving in and around vehicles, going without cutting corners. We laughed about the flows.

The flesh as meat——not as skin, as I had previously so imagined——is a space of tightness, of form and intimacy and movement as a squeezing of space. Skin as a gliding over and around, all options open except that one moves merely as a compatriot of gravity, touching, just going. Where do we look, realistically, while on our bicycles, in encounter? Nobody cares. Movement is a question of whomever may 让 first, usually predicated upon size. But let us enlarge our frame of view. To examine our reality here is a fleshy matter, full of scars and circumstance. Situationism could be given, rather, a form of agency. Adjacency. Victorious life proposes a next-to. If we were to give up subjectivity and objectivity, can movement presume, ex-stasis? Flow is always a making up of what came before, along the lines of a scar, reaction and healing. Let us make up for imperial autocracy, let us make up for capitalist pigs, let us make up for the sick yellow man! And so we are stuck in a striving or a being, reactionary.

But Vitanza’s scar is a middle place between flesh and skin, along surfaces and imbedded within. Realistically, we find ourselves covering over, working through, both as a form of being and of representation, as spectators and actors, as lifeforms headed inevitably towards death. Is such certainty a place of flesh or of skin? We fall asleep with the TV, we learn to love and hate our lovers. This affect is of flesh and skin, multidirectional, surfaces and interiors all at once.

Scar as both a place and temporality, a contextification. It is the grounding memory of affect, a node upon the flow of the body, or movement ex-stasis. Flashbacks of life in times of death should tear our bodies from such ecstasies; these are the groundings we can never break away from, realistically.

I slipped and hurt myself today, on or off cycles, wet pavement. In the midst of mutual shock, she snapped at me. I’m sorry, I said.

…in the sign of the scar—where foreground and background collapse—negotiating between life and death, skin and scar, public and private, I will hallucinate on a series of cultural objects that would provide us with exemplary ways of “living on” in the scar of the sign as Dasein. But as I do that, note that I do that semiotically across the images being unfolded over there. Da Sein. But. Of Sign. The episode of “Scar Tissue.” I am trying to situate myselves, through a series of interruptions, corruptions, eruptions, between over there and here. Becoming be-tween. Ec-static. Perhaps after a while you, too, will situate yourselves in between there and here.

–Victor Vitanza, “Design as Dasein”: Scar, … to be accompanied by video

Posted by 丫 | more »

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