Silvia Federici's Bay Area lectures and her new book Revolution Point Zero
Silvia's book, Caliban and the Witch, which I first
heard of at a Nonsite Collective meeting, reframes the utter insanity and failure
of the nuclear family (for the woman, that is) within a historical story of
primitive capitalist accumulation. It made so much sense to me (upon having
a child) that the transformation of world into resource ran concurrent with the
subjugation of woman into the same. It's one of those connective frameworks that
hovers experimentally around one's mind, then suddenly appears as a book,
complexly argued. When she spoke in San Francisco this past Fall, Silvia
asserted a strong and searing series of connections between the daily life of
reproductive work and global financial mechanisms. Reproductive work here is
every act involved in the reproduction of the self, i.e. everyday life—and
that is what has been enclosed and financialized. Revolution at Point Zero collects
her "Wages for Housework" essays from the 7'0s with newer works concerning
globalization. Secretly, I am feeling or thinking that what's coming will be
more like getting back to something, that it will come by necessity, in a
cascade, that it may appear as dissolution, but will uncover connection. The
depth of the connections in Federici's work sound out this potential.
Claire Fontaine
I knew French collective Claire Fontaine more for its
concept (art collective as fake art star) and its writing than its art
production. I was told (incorrectly) that one of its artists had authored the Theory
of the Young-Girl, a text which held me in its problematic thrall during
early 2011, and since have been told that that same artist did author
Tiqqun's Sonogram of a Potential, an account of the current potential of
feminism (highly influenced by the writings Silvia Federici helped to produce
in Italy in the 70's). The collective reworks the readymade and appropriative
practices against privatization and state repression. At their lecture at the
California College of the Arts this past Fall, I liked everything about the artist
representing the collective, who I now know was Fulvia Carnevale, but I think I
liked it best when, after a complex lecture on the history of the readymade,
she responded to curator Jens Hoffmann, who had just chastised her for
presenting too complex a paper, with bemused incredulity—then backed her annoyance
with a complex institutional critique. It's weird that it seemed punk for a
woman to defend herself with a casual flick of dignity, it should seem normal.
Nights later, I arrived with my three year old to Claire Fontaine's smaller, in-gallery talk at the Wattis, and during the question/answer period, asked about the collective's writing practice—I wanted to talk to Fulvia about everything, anything. When she was answering my question to a hushed and attentive audience of 25 people, my child turned to face me directly and began to loudly demand, “SNACK! SNACK!” As I had not come prepared with a snack, I backed awkwardly out of the gallery. So when, nights later, I found myself running across Market Street at night with a stroller to Green Arcade Bookstore to catch what was left of a Franco Berardi lecture, I ran smack into Fulvia at the back of the crowd straining to calm her 10 month old, I thought, “yes.” I thought, “this makes sense because we are living it, we are reading it and we are writing it.” I thought, “I'll have my girl show her boy her light up halloween necklace, perhaps that will help.” And together, we calmed and amused our children for the rest of the lecture. This is what intellectuals who are also writers, who are also artists do, this is what intellectuals do. They raise people.
I'll Drown My Book
Why do women write experimentally? Because the law is not on
their side. In the introduction to Sexual Difference, or Don't
Believe You Have Rights, a document from the Milan Woman's Bookstore
Collective in 1970's Italy, entrustment is chosen to describe the
relationship between women which is not exactly fostering, but more of passing
along of energy or power, one that happens between men all the time, that
drives patriarchal culture with its underlaying homosociality. Entrustment is a
female mediation of the world; it happens between the pages of this book.
Jackqueline Frost at the BAM Re@ds series
David Brazil and Suzanne Stein were invited to curate a
series of younger writers for a Berkeley Art Museum Friday night series in a
little project room off to the side of the lobby where you can take a book and
leave a book. It is a diminutive space and very alive; the spirit of the space
invites permission. Jackqueline, who is one of my favorite writers in the area,
opened the series. When her complex and lovely reading concluded, her friend
joined her and they positioned themselves behind a mixer and circuit board.
With ethereal phrases sung and looped, turning pages of books mic'ed and
looped, a lightbulb crushed inside a garbage can—they raised the spirit of 4AD,
they reminded me of Magik Markers, they paid back the hours of boring boy noise
shows I've sat through, they produced what art often gestures towards but does
not have the courage to produce: catharsis.
Iduna: an opera in one act
Kari Edwards' book was post-posthumously arranged into an
opera and presented at Artist Access Television’s tiny, roughhewn space on
Valencia Street. I walked late into the thickness of a gentle cacophony of
voices, and took my seat in one of the crooked rows. Nearly everybody I know in
the Bay Area was simultaneously reading a different line of text. I do not
believe Cageian avant garde listening practices are sufficient for our current
political moment—I've been told to listen quite enough, thanks. But here was an
insistent collective intoning. But here was variation, overlap, confusion,
swimming language. The artist was gone and so was the piece. I kept wishing to
be able to hear the sound from above.
Everybody's face looked beautiful, and my synesthesia returned. If
revolution happens through resonance, here was a sweet, swirling try.
Dance party after Ariana and Ronaldo reading
John Coletti had this weird squat-like style of dancing that
I am sure has a name and that Lauren Shufran also knew how to do. The
piano shook. There had been a fight and also a declaration of love. My
conversation with Olive began intellectually and ended in giggling. I'm sure
all this could have only happened within an arena paced by Ariana's work and
bookended with Ronaldo's. My work lately aims less at counter-sense and more at
an ascension to the sensory, an amplification of sense, of the senses: I
believe that requires more dance parties.
The Alphabet Effect by Robert K. Logan and The
Uprising: On Poetry and Finance by Franco Berardi
There are parts of each of these books that are hokey,
untenable, exaggerated or irresponsible. Both however, get me a step or so
closer in a set of questions I've had over the past several years about writing
versus image—about abstraction and its casualties—about the representation (or
absence) versus presence. Lately, I just want to raise something up, to
transgress against secondariness, to actually make the object.
“Every
time a word is read, a match between a visual sign and a spoken sound is made.
Matching forms the basis of rationality or logic ” (L).
“The
alphabet by separating the sound, meaning and appearance of a word separated
the eye from the rest of the senses, especially the ear” (L.)
“Neoliberal
ideology pretends to be a liberating force that emancipates capital from state
regulation, but it in fact submits production and social life to the most
ferocious regulation, the mathematization of language” (B).
If both books fail for being overbearing or overreaching,
the myriad of quotable lines are what's valuable about both—little nodes of
highly enriched thought, and at least their failures are predictable.
RGB Colorspace Atlas by Tauba Auerbach
Tauba's work is always linked with language somehow. Here is
my absolute favorite as of yet (every color
imaginable is represented therein)—
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