August 2015

on memory, Minus Workshop to come

a friend sent me this link while I was preparing this image for the next Minus workshop

with which it connects through a third and a forth element. The first is the notion of memory, the subject of this week’s workshop, in particular, the anamnesis or Doctrine of Recollection, that Plato writes on in the Meno.

This dialogue, Meno, has the import of initiating the ‘Platonising’ of Plato; in it, the ‘aporetic dialogue’ of Socrates is surpassed in the direction of the Platonic dialectic. Socrates’ role, as he performs it in Plato’s works, has been up until this writing, to ask questions in order to achieve his interlocutor’s agreement in his own destabilisation and, in assenting to participation in the Socratic method, to arrive at the final recognition of his own ignorance. In the Meno, Socrates’ method goes beyond the assertion of non-knowledge in the place of knowledge, or the opening up of a hole where his addressee had assumed there to be solid ground (an aporia), to enabling the latter’s discovery of the truth, a truth relative to Socrates’ leading questions, but a truth which, in this case, the boy, Meno, recognises as being the case. Meno asks, How can I recognise that which I do not already know? Socrates returns that the answer has merely been forgotten, and, in being recognised as true it is coincidentally being remembered.

Then there is μετεμψύχωσις, metempsychosis, as a further explanatory armature and the question as to its necessity, that is, to explain how one might have forgotten a significant truth, so as to be enabled, by a good teacher, like Plato-Socrates, to recognise it upon its recollection, the truth must have been already within. The truth was in you, and all the teacher had to do was lead you to see it: and in seeing it, know it. (Again, this connects to the epistemological function of dramatisation in Gilles Deleuze.) The truth was in that part of you which opens up onto an eternity beyond mortality, your soul or subjective essence. In a past life, this truth was known to you so that now, once again, you are able to know it again. (Truth has therefore precisely the repetitive quality of a performance.)

St. Augustine will take issue with the use of the Doctrine of Transmigration (of souls) to explain the Doctrine of Recollection, because by saying that in order for a truth to be remembered in a subsequent life you must have known it in a previous life Plato simply pushes the problem further back into the past, and further: how in the previous life did you recollect a forgotten truth unless you knew it in another life before that? And how else in that life now further back in time than that there was always and will always be a life in which the truth was known before that? And so on, in infinite regression.

St. Augustine, it will be remembered, is the first to write his own life, inspiring a tradition of what James Olney calls ‘life-writing’ that extends to Karl Ove Knausgaard today. (Olney names Samuel Beckett, counter-intuitively, as coming at the end of this tradition, in, he writes, its ‘ruins’.) Here is an article on Knausgaard’s monumental life-writing, My Struggle, entitled, so as to clarify the connections Augustine embodies between memory and this kind of narrative, Total Recall. It is a title, like that of Knausgaard’s work, with strangely fascistic undertones, which completes the circuit back up to the video to which my friend sent the link, embedded above.

These considerations are brought to mind because of a conversation at the last Minus Theatre workshop about, of all things, climate change. M. said that they haven’t proven climate change yet, adding that perhaps it has happened before, and we have forgotten; perhaps we overcame it the first time, and we have, this time, not only forgotten its occurrence but also forgotten how we overcame it. C. said she thought this applied to just about everything we encounter: we have forgotten it, and in coming across it once more, we remember it again.

The next day, I was reading Proust and Signs, Deleuze’s book on what he refers to as The Search, where he argues against the orthodox reading of Marcel Proust’s work that holds it to be centrally concerned with memory. No, he writes, The Search is not so much through or impelled by memory, or compelled by its involuntary return, as it is a search for truth, an apprenticeship in writing, such as is also overtly the case with Knausgaard, articulated through signs, signs of sensation, worldly signs, signs of love, and artistic signs, signs which require or demand the interpretation of the writer, the life-writer.

So I was reading in Proust and Signs, and it struck me, as if for the first time, that in our method in Minus, called a ‘theatre of the individual life’, where we steal or grab asignifying symptoms (they are not signs because we do not take them in order to interpret them, even as the word ‘symptom’ would seem to imply the contrary in its medical, biological, application (in fact, it does not, a symptom only has meaning, only signifies once a medical expert, a doctor or specialist in biological life, has interpreted it, when it becomes, exactly, a sign, the sign of a disease, for example)) from one individual who leads the action, who is the lead, that is, it struck me that what it might be helpful to say at this point, where a performer does not know, cannot decide, what gesture, detail of expression, intonation, or bodily disposition, to take, that, like Proust, and like Plato, she might remember it from the actions of the lead, that these movements, might cause her to recall something. And, of course, she would re-member that movement, gesture, nod or involuntary tic, by stealing and using it herself.

Finally, in pursuing these connected thoughts, I have in mind another kind of metempsychosis than that involving the soul in leaping from one life to the next. It would happen inside what Catherine Malabou calls the ‘plasticity’ of the single life, its plastic interior. Which doesn’t yet invoke the violence Malabou, and the video above, and I intend. Malabou is assisted here by the French, la plastique, having the sense of explosive. Because the mind, the neurobiological substrate, that chooses a new consciousness in command, is subject to a traumatic change. So that, and in Gilbert Simondon we find this also, the subject exceeds the self and even a succession of selves, selves possessing their several mortalities, over the single mortality, the absolute excess of which, no self will suffer. From ‘life’ to ‘life’, then, a spirit, like an animal spirit, for being rather zoepolitical than biopolitical, continues in the human, humans which comprise each of us. Its violence overcomes the limited life of any self we care to name, and of any juridico-politically constituted person. This im-personal ‘individual’ (highly inadequate term) is that which in Minus we dis-organise and re-member.

(But I didn’t get to Alberto Giacometti; James Olney writes of Giacometti with Franz Kafka and Beckett: “In advance, they were altogether clear eyed about the impossibility of the task they entered upon, yet they chose the impossible and not once but over and over again.” [here])

Ἀκαδήμεια

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how can Minus ignore an artist whose exhibition this year bore the title, The Image as Burden? (Minus looking at painting, 3)

‘Secondhand images’, she has said, here

 

and this… without connection to… Joe Kelleher’s Studies on the Suffering of Images… in which he directs us to read ‘to suffer’ as to put up with, bear and bear with, to bear one’s own pain, to put up with another’s: the secondhand images… for which we either do or do not take responsibility, in simply regarding. And do we attend to our responsibility? if the image is secondhand? if the pain is not ours? if it is not a pain, but… a life? So, the life of images, as well, the life evoked on the cave walls at Niaux, which I thought was more life than representation or representation as a means to bring to life, to multiply beasts, herds, flocks… which would, counter to the reading of both Alan Read and Joe Kelleher of Marie-José Mondzain of the first self-image of a human–the hand outlined by spat dye also on the cave wall–as at once creating homo spectator, the self-depicting, because absent from its depiction, spectatorial regard, rather bear the import of bringing to life and multiplying humanity, as the work, precisely, of hands…

‘Secondhand images’, Marlene Dumas has said, ‘can generate first-hand emotions.’

…emotions… as intensities to be borne, suffered, first, second, third and fourth hand, and to be dramatised–in the strong sense of Gilles Deleuze, where dramatisation is understood two different ways: epistemologically and ontologically. (This duplicity, while recalling the ambiguity of our suffering images, is taken up by Quentin Meillassoux in Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, when Karl Popper misreads David Hume’s ‘problem’.)

Nuclear Family, Marlene Dumas, 2013

 

The Trophy, Marlene Dumas, 2013

 

The Artist and his Model, Marlene Dumas, 2013

 

How Low Can You Go, Marlene Dumas, 2000

 

Ἀκαδήμεια

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what kind of machine? (Minus looking at painting, 2)

The desire to make it connect before I even write it.
But it doesn’t have to connect, it has to work.
And it has to show how it works.
To be a machine.

 

– Atle Skudal

Ἀκαδήμεια

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in the case of slipping punctuation, I shall not trespass

Sir

Please confirm your receipt of this $174,625,00 proof of payment and that our agreement has been met. Furthermore I hereby confirm that we no longer require your service, and any attempt to enter our property will be treated as trespassing.

Signed
Octavia Costallo
Accountant.

Glamour Crew, Attila Richard Lukacs, 1993

detraque

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Vancouver, 11-12 July, has left a strong impression, for friends & for the food, salmon to caesars to… holy crap!

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on tour

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Berlin, Berlin, so good they named you… poor but sexy, 7 – 10 July. Turkish market, Jewish Museum and the amazing Saskia Boddeke & Peter Greenaway exhibition, Obedience, Tempelhof preserved but succumbing to fashion, the Bauhaus, KaDeWe (!), and earlier there was a beaver in the park… and, did you spot Spinoza?

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on tour

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Berlin arrival, 6 July: from the most expensive sushi train in the world (Copenhagen) to start-up opposite in Kreuzberg, burn-rate 24/7

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on tour

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Minus looking at painters, 1

Minus Theatre workshop 5/8/2015 used Odd Nerdrum’s paintings as material for theatre to copy and learn from, imitate and express.

What we are looking for is what this young girl is holding in a painting by Guillermo Lorca García-Huidobro:

It is a handful of expressive brushstrokes or gestures. Or a handful of paint. Or even tones of paint.

Nerdrum called himself a kitsch painter for being  committed “to the eternal: love, death and the sunrise.” Returning from the repression of modernism sentimentality, passion, pathos and art in its most primitive sense as the virtues of craft.

Jenny Saville’s work is also interesting for the exundancy of the flesh which recalls the powers of distortion Francis Bacon said he gleaned from Pablo Picasso. (Gleaning, as in the film by Agnès Varda, is also an inspiration for Minus.) But here again, it is probably a question of the expressive force of painting causing the flesh to overflow, in which the flesh participates as overflowing. The tension might in Saville’s painting be the stylistic stretch between Egon Schiele and Bacon (which is also between drawing and painting). Here rather in a photographic collaboration with Glenn Luchford than in her painting:

And in its painterly/graphic aspect, where the paint or tone explodes from the head (a theme literalised elsewhere in her oeuvre). And this explosion resembles what Minus is gleaning, or stealing, from the girl above–a handful of capacity or potential:

...
Ἀκαδήμεια
hommangerie
infemmarie
luz es tiempo
porte-parole
thigein & conatus

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Sydney Hermant & Dan Bejar & Carey Mercer

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hommangerie
immedia
infemmarie
porte-parole
textasies

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Start Leaving a Full Life! Dan Bejar: “you want to fail on your own terms”

“At some point I lost interest in creating friction, I guess, in my music.”

– Bejar from here and also this:

…”at some point in many artists’ careers, the ability to discern what’s good and what’s not becomes impaired.

“He writes less than he once did, but the songs “puncture” him more deeply now.”

and:

“You just have to trust your gut, and be like, I’m insane and I like shitty stuff — or maybe this isn’t set in stone.”

– Bejar

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hommangerie
immedia
infemmarie
porte-parole

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