MRD
Note the roundedness
the purse of birthing lips
warmth, assurance, sanctuary
-including the maternal-
the promise of a kiss
Category: e.things
note_19 D is for danger; live your danger, live dangerous. Victoria Vol. 3
Trying to locate the original manuscript of my novel of 78 fragments, I came across a lot of things. One of them was this; a nicely calibrated collaboration with my dear friend Simon English for Grant Watson’s Victoria which must have been hand-produced in 1998? Unbound, A3, in editions of 200 it seems, a warm and civil experience all around, and in happy company.
D is Guy Mannes-Abbott, Double and Twist is Simon English (Ph GMA)
D or ‘d’ actually, was a very early e.things text from autumn 1997. The circle of what were the first hundred Continue reading “note_19 D is for danger; live your danger, live dangerous. Victoria Vol. 3”
note_18 On the work Abu Dhabi banned from Sharjah (Biennial) 2019? #DXB
Gold-tips in Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace Marina (GM-A, 2013).
(EXTRACT)
IMBECILIC CONTINGENT INTRUSION(4)*
Everything we know about ourselves and our various shared and not well-shared histories affirms that systems of hermetic control never work for long, that consolidation hastens collapse. The more autocratic the regime, the messier the collapse. I will leave all of that to time, which will operate unerringly.
Meanwhile, to demonstrate a simple truth, we are going to plant a forest in DXB’s Terminal 3. It’s easy. Those of us who know the place will return from various ports in carefully staged flights that betray no joint venture. We will all be either prevented from getting on a flight, stopped at and detained at DXB, or held in the Deportees Room for some hours. Two of us at least will get in—to the airport, not the country!—and overlap in the Room on ROLEX time. We will take our allotted hour to find food in the Terminal and head up to our Costa rendezvous. We will have seeds of trees with us. We will be carrying gorgeous presentation boxes of fertilised roals or figs, like the kind from Aliya Dates Farm that I recall from a leather-lined yacht in Abu Dhabi’s Palace Marina.
Gifts, you see. Gifts of the Rolla tree, the put-upon-banyans, these potent embodiments of hopes, wishes and dreams for change. Continue reading “note_18 On the work Abu Dhabi banned from Sharjah (Biennial) 2019? #DXB”
note_14 On reading Agustin Fernandez Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy in DXB’s Deportees’ Room
DUBAI INTERNATIONAL (DXB) Connecting the World
As Nocilla Lab, the third part of Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK, I kick myself for not conjuring the time to review it or celebrate the Trilogy in critique. Also for not yet even trying to read Mallo’s more recent Trilogía de la guerra (Seix Barral, 2018) in its original, despite it appearing last summer. I’m buried, properly, in my own manuscript (RR) which is very close to completion. Horizons lift in 2019 and I will be writing shorter critical pieces, once more, amongst other things…
Mallo’s Dream and Experience are as good as each other in the suggestive vitality of their fragmentary form. They possess rare degrees of necessity and are, in the best sense, a minor literature, which means that you’ve not been reading at all if you’ve not read them yet! Put aside the Jo(h)nathan-literature, knowing you’ll miss nothing if you return to it in the future. Nocilla Lab works towards graphic elements in my 2009 Punto de lecture edition, which I struggled to bring alive with my old (LA) Spanish…
I was (re-)reading Mallo en route to a Residency in Sharjah, January-February 2017, and resisting the serial, fragmentary, and fictive, as ways to make the book I would start writing when I returned home two months later (with further Porting residencies scheduled for Aug 2017 and Feb-Mar 2018). It was not that a series of fragmentary texts with rhythmic associations would not be a natural way for me to write my river (an actual river, more of which to come). Continue reading “note_14 On reading Agustin Fernandez Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy in DXB’s Deportees’ Room”
note_04 “Mr Steinberg is mistaken.” Hannah Arendt: in witness time begins/ Per 1.1.-1.4
“Harold, that girl in that office is nude!”
Another addition to Art_Work is ‘In witness time begins’ (plus footnoting pamphlets called Per 1.1-1.4) from A Thing at a Time at Witte de With April 2013. They emerged from an obsessive focus on a phrase coined by an Italian theorist (and/or his translator); “immobile anaphoric gesture”. But these texts are different from those I wrote a few years earlier using a Slovenian theorist’s phrase; “imbecilic contingent intrusion” in which I could materialise or exemplify what an ici would be (see Essential Things in Art_Work, for example, which exhibited Cerith Wyn Evans’ neon Lacanian loop between the ‘pages’ of my ici2, about Willie Lloyd Turner and his ‘smile’).
note_03 Contact sheet from Essential Things, Robert Prime, July 1999, linked…
In starting to update Art_Work, I came across these little images -poor, poor, poor- but also quite a good impression of that actual exhibition. A little memorial to that way of printing film, too! For more detail and documentation -Gallery Work-List, CDROM cover etc.- click on Art_Work above (more to come). Thanks to the artists, gallerists, collaborators and helpers involved in that show… The odd light in the images was a feature of that wonderful gallery space, as some may recall.
I remember giving a reading there on Warren Street on an enervating late-July day which thus felt all wrong … Except that I read ‘richard one’ for the first time and Angela heard me read ‘sing song’ after she’d read it at a party in the lead-in to the show. Continue reading “note_03 Contact sheet from Essential Things, Robert Prime, July 1999, linked…”
note_02 Figuring Lesser Baghdadis (One to Seven) a “small collaboration” w Ala Younis 2015
“One. Mickey Mouse is not one of the bronze figures that grace Jewad Salim’s “Nusub al-Hurriya” (Liberty Monument”, 1961) in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square…”
On the occasion of Ala’s first showing of her Plan for a Greater Baghdad (2015) at Delfina Foundation in London along with a new work; Plan for Feminist Greater Baghdad (installation view above; photo Tim Bowditch, courtesy DF and Art Jameel), I should share this text of mine (below in page by page pdfs) since it is not yet re-published in book form. It was commissioned as an independent text and explicitly not as a critique of the work itself. This was not because a serious critical piece on the work would not be good to read or write but because I wanted to extend my e.things essay form and write more broadly about subjects that I had some intimacy with over many years.
Figuring Lesser Baghdadis (One to Seven) belonged with another such text from 2015, Labouring One to Seven (Island of Terror) produced for Venice Biennale and e-flux journal‘s brilliant SUPERCOMMUNITY project, now re-published by Verso with an Introduction by Antonio Negri. The latter was explicitly the model for the former. It was also a “small collaboration” to use Ala’s phrase when we discussed it in 2015. Continue reading “note_02 Figuring Lesser Baghdadis (One to Seven) a “small collaboration” w Ala Younis 2015″
NOTES FROM A FRUITSTORE 