Monday 7 March 2011

THE LIST AS POEM

Lately, working on my trickyselfportrait project, I have found myself writing lists of things in a very literary way, if that makes sense, and so I realized that I was in fact proposing a new gender: 
The List. 
So far I have two examples of this new gender, one, called THE PRETENCIOUS LIFE OF A YOUNG ARTIST, and two, called I AM, posted just today. The list is perhaps the must "ontologic" shape inside poetry, for it allows to display, it allows to list, as it were, a bunch of things, and relate them in multiple ways. It also has a very informal structure, that can be defined by the list itself when its time arrives. Whatever, just for the record it is clear that when I say that I am proposing a new gender I don't really mean it. The list might be the earliest form of poem, all the way from the gilgamesh, the Hanes Taliesin, or any other taxonomic song. I might elaborate more about this later. I have a funeral to attend now

HEIDEGGER AT THE DISCO [OR: I AM (A LIST)]

I am my Facebook profile
I am my unknown Facebook friends
I am my new Mac book pro
I am my unvisited blogspot
my invented resume
the picture someone took of someone and I happened to see
I am my ripped T-shirts
my self-hair-cut experience
my allergy to pollution
my studied spontaneity
my nipples
my not so good sex life lately
my deodorant, but more my lack of it
my elusiveness
my phone not answered
my deep almost kind of tired voice
I am my confessions in a recorder
I am everybody's dark secrets
I am the smell of someone
I am your conversation about me
I am my paranoia
I am my supposition
I am a tree falling in a forest
I am no witness
I am not witnessed
I am french-kissing my reflection in a mirror
I am your fist in his face
a tongue licking an open eye
one thing
one multiple thing
ones
I am ones
I ones was.
I am (in) memory
I am in books
I am Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Paris Hilton, Napoleon, Nefertiti, Ann Boleyn, Darwin, An aztec god, Hernan Cortez.
I am a Spanish colonizer
I am any conqueror, including William
I am History
I am Moktezuma's feather hat in a VIenna museum
David Bowie in depression before the wall fell
I am Berlin Germany and after me a city is gonna be named
I am a tyrant, a saint, a cock-sucker
I am the nicest pair of socks
yellow
I am technicolor
technotronic
pump it up
I am a swedish guy saying he is a mexican artist.
I am he is
I is he am
am he is I
He I is am
    m    e i     i           s     a     h
I am Artaud
I am language
I am context
I am text
I am a guy reading what someone wrote about someone
I am a very cool interest in international politics
I am looking at you with a reproval attitude
I am the Prozac I would never take
I am the Prozac I would
I am a cup of tea with garlic
I am breaking in tears while listening to a salsa song
I am a prejudice against Marcel Proust
Im the only one who could ever teach you
Im the son of a preacher man
I am the black plague
I am the big fire of London
I am the big quake of Mex city
I am Turner painting it and Sickert playing
I am a dead crowd
I am 500 self-portraits and a book round them
I am a present for christmas
I am an army of broken toys
wikipedia
egypt
google
I tube
I am the coiner of the word flow
I pay my rent but avoid taxes
I am deleuze saying "there is desire and the social, nothing more"
I am desire and the social
I am nothing more
I am The Sire
I am hierarchy
I am a horse in Uruguay
and a group of girls talking
I am prostatic cancer
I hate fat people
I am against discrimination
I once went to a demonstration
I am a dropper
I am a quitter
I am a hand sweater
I am a romantic movie about necrofilia
Im into sarcasm
Im into irony
Im old fashioned
I am my sexy underwear, but specially someone elses
I am a Colombian girl talking about sentimental freedom
I am ambiguos
I am only good for being young
Im dancing with myself
Im a bitch, Im a lover
Im a slave for you
Im an aligator
Im a mama papa coming for you
When I think about you I touch myself
Im only happy when it rains
Im only happy when its complicated
I am the pop song history
I am Elvis, and I died in the toilet
I am proud of you
I am greek mythology, but not Oedipus
I am a jam
a jar
a jack
I am Jack
Jack Maldonado
famous Desperado
I hit and run
I through the first stone
I hit other cheeks even harder
Im a monster
I feel guilty
I feel stacy
I feel your breath on my shoulder
I feel, more than I am
I am
I not am
I am
I not am
I am
I not am
I have a stroboscopic existence
I have an answer for Hamlet
I am Heidegger
Ich bin Suzanne Linke
I am Jerome Bel
I am Michael Jackson in his black or white video
I am Prince in his Controversy song
I am Mtv
I am my parents and the TV commercials
I am a tv commercial
I forgot what my father said, I forgot what he said
I forgot what my mother said, as we laid on your bed
I question Identity without questioning the questioning, because it’s cool to do it
Your elbow is hurting me, could you please move it?
I am sitting in a bench in a park eating a sandwich
Some people are born for the gossip, and some people are born four fingered
I am a four-finger gossip
I am french-kissing my reflection in a mirror
I am the frame of representation

Wednesday 16 February 2011

SOMEONE JUST DIED TODAY

 Someone just died today. Murdered. He was not my friend; I barely liked him, in fact. But he is part of an important part of my life, at least part of a context, a very important one. Now that context is crippled. I just found out 5 minutes ago, and I just don’t get it.

To give the death, is the title of a Derrida's text I have never red. Even tough perhaps dying could be the only action to do alone, the only moment of individuality in a lifetime, the only possible evidence of a possible identity, when someone dies, he gives his death to those who stay alive. He makes a gift. A terrible yet brilliant gift.

Apart from the sorrow and whatever could cause it in that context, there is something else there. This text is not about love nor about the suffering experienced when a loved one dies: Its not crying a loss, its crying a crash against the real. It's the impossibility to understand how someone has simply quitted existing, how that piece of our own construction, no matter its roll or size, has been extracted, and its not going to be replaced. Dead people are not substituted. The void remains there, perhaps a little bit camouflaged, or forgotten, but there. A death is a pause in meaning, a fracture, when someone dies, things stop making sense, or that sense is proved wrong, proved false. Something just doesn't match; you won't buy it, I won't buy it. And the crack will remain there, as an ever-breathing scar, reminding us that sense doesn't actually make much of it, neither in death, nor in anything else, for anything else will, at last, be subjected to it, decodified by it, swallowed by it, dead.

I’m gonna miss this guy, more than I would miss him if he was alive. It´s not about seeing him, or shearing, it’s about having a bit of certainty; about knowing that that puzzle I once put together and named is still there. The house of your childhood still exists; you still have the same eye color, the same allergy, the same memories, the same not-friends you never see and don’t care about, and that makes you feel that you are sane. Autobiographical puzzles are reference threads that keep us floating, and a death is the strongest way to shake them.

I’ve been slapped in the face, I’ve been hit by a trailer, and its not about the pain. I’m in vertigo. I’m on fire. I’m a knot in a tongue

Whatever. Im tired, and nonsense



SOMEONE JUST DIED TODAY

 Someone just died today. Murdered. He was not my friend; I barely liked him, in fact. But he is part of an important part of my life, at least part of a context, a very important one. Now that context is crippled. I just found out 5 minutes ago, and I just don’t get it.

To give the death, is the title of a Derrida's text I have never red. Even tough perhaps dying could be the only action to do alone, the only moment of individuality in a lifetime, the only possible evidence of a possible identity, when someone dies, he gives his death to those who stay alive. He makes a gift. A terrible yet brilliant gift.

Apart from the sorrow and whatever could cause it in that context, there is something else there. This text is not about love nor about the suffering experienced when a loved one dies: Its not crying a loss, its crying a crash against the real. It's the impossibility to understand how someone has simply quitted existing, how that piece of our own construction, no matter its roll or size, has been extracted, and its not going to be replaced. Dead people are not substituted. The void remains there, perhaps a little bit camouflaged, or forgotten, but there. A death is a pause in meaning, a fracture, when someone dies, things stop making sense, or that sense is proved wrong, proved false. Something just doesn't match; you won't buy it, I won't buy it. And the crack will remain there, as an ever-breathing scar, reminding us that sense doesn't actually make much of it, neither in death, nor in anything else, for anything else will, at last, be subjected to it, decodified by it, swallowed by it, dead.

I’m gonna miss this guy, more than I would miss him if he was alive. It´s not about seeing him, or shearing, it’s about having a bit of certainty; about knowing that that puzzle I once put together and named is still there. The house of your childhood still exists; you still have the same eye color, the same allergy, the same memories, the same not-friends you never see and don’t care about, and that makes you feel that you are sane. Autobiographical puzzles are reference threads that keep us floating, and a death is the strongest way to shake them.

I’ve been slapped in the face, I’ve been hit by a trailer, and its not about the pain. I’m in vertigo. I’m on fire. I’m a knot in a tongue

Whatever. Im tired, and nonsense



Saturday 29 January 2011

what is a tricky self portrait?

I found this unposted post from april 2009. wow I really have been thinking about this for quite some time. a little changed, but not so far from where I am now, perhaps I would not write it like this today, but I sure recognize it, and me in it. scary. I always think that I change a lot


How sure are we that we look the way we think we do? How original, how authentic can we really be?. How do we know that when we talk about ourselves we are not in fact talking about some one else we have unconsciously copied? The "I" concept is quite an object of discussion, and yet I hold on to it and pretend to create a self portrait. Is it really possible? I can recognize tons of influences in my life, and perhaps not one thought purely mine, so I decided that the best way to talk about myself is through other voices. I mean to cynically copy/paste ideas, some roughly, some mixed, some camouflaged. Some even unconsciously copied, and through that procedure, to create a tricky self portrait, that is nothing more than an attempt of a self representation through conscious or unconscious piracy
man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth

Friday 28 January 2011

OF SUICIDE CONSIDERED AS SELFPORTRAIT

There is this beautiful tale by Thomas De Quincey called "Of Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts". If we spoke in terms of what happens in art today, we might not be so worried about the tag "fine"on it ("it" being artistic murder), without which, some of the ironic taste of the phrase would be lost. And yet, murder could be considered as one of the possible platforms in which art can be produced, if we think with (I think it is) Deleuze, that art's aim is to produce new (or at least different) experiences. Apart from the obvious legal issues, there is yet a little obstacle to make that kind of art, and that is imposition. A form of art that bases its modes of production in imposition or produces it in any way supports a totalitarian politics implicitly. In the current times, in this contemporary society, that can not be accepted. There lays an apparent contradiction, and so, I reformulate: Art's aim is to produce the possibilities for new experiences, but the experience itself can only be produced by the relation between that possibility and an active participation of the spectator. All forms of murder, even, so to say, "consensual" murder, are, in the very core of the action, an imposition.
But suicide, instead... Suicide is to self-portrait what murder could no be to a way of art. A question left: self-imposition? For you to decide; perhaps a "self-imposition" is not inherently political, since it (obviously) does not (inherently) involve others.
If we think of our identity as something multiple, shifty, un-unanimous, product of external and always partial processes of subjectification instead of thinking about it as a subject by itself, the classical concept of a self-portrait is an impossible task, except in the frame of a prefabricated mask built in representation. There, the portrait would be the mask of a mask.
Perhaps death is our only "ontological certainty", as it were; and therefore, the only moment when we could think of identity as such. Being conscious of the production of it, and further, actually producing it ourselves could give our "being moment" not only the flashing light of what any death is by itself, but also an unfolding presence of a being, being presented independently of representation. A selfportrait in flesh, in the words of Bowie. If we accept these ideas, the only possibility we have to practice the selfportrait is, inevitably, suicide.