emancipation in four dimensions

Female same-sex experience is a powerful lens through which to seek out the parameters of contemporary emancipation.

How might the practice of making art enable individuals and groups to seek out, understand or catalyse contemporary modes of emancipation? Each light box in All the Cunning Stunts is a working through and an instance of this question as art practice. When my friend [ ] saw light box pair [14/15] she said ‘there’s a girls with binoculars event in Courtenay Place and I’m invited.’

A street-level girls with binoculars event involves hunting, hiding, looking, wearing camouflage, distracting and being distracted by the extraordinary, or something that stands out, or just the strangeness of the ordinary – the things we take for granted, that we want, or need to own, buy, sell, hold, touch, and believe in.

In these works emancipation resides in a resolve to find alternatives to all-purpose philosophies, behaviours, voices, despotic sub-clauses, even colourful and persuasive bureaucracies that substitute their own Modus operandi in place of emancipation, while still working in its name.

In fact, objects and images in these light boxes work as depots in which voices jostle for attention, sometimes in alignment, in altercation, in curiosity and more often than not in rigorous party-mode.

The traces and out-loud splashes of everyday hedonism reveal emancipation to be always up ahead, in effect celebrating without us. We can’t possibly shake emancipation’s hand, congratulate it on a good year or, as advertising would have us believe, bask in its ‘Out now’ status.

All the Cunning Stunts validates a second look at hedonism because the works readily acknowledge that emancipation is not a place, just as Courtenay Place is not strictly a girls with binoculars event, it merely prompts the conditions of life to make an appearance, to dance, to reveal spectacular fallibility and unbelievable nuance.

The 16 light boxes can further be read as one undulating work. All the Cunning Stunts uses the knowledge and practice of four individuals to track what it is like to ride in the wake of an emancipation that can’t be seen, or even accurately imagined, translated or put to trial, but that is a condition for the perception, declaration and artful practice of everyday extraordinary communal, if not common, life.

What can be said of All the Cunning Stunts is that emancipation is very much something that we are able to play ball with through the practice of art.

invisible communities

A test to see if covering all the faces of on the stage set might work. Image selection still open but I'm interested in keeping it to published/distributed media (albums, magazines, posters, book covers etc) - media that makes, and echos communities.

I miss a community here. I want more visibility. Where are all the gays in my immediate community, on the art scene? We seem a little thin on the ground here. Where are we on the street? I know there is a gay scene here, but it seems so underground. I don’t think I’m looking in the right places. I can’t be.
So I've been curiously digging around online, following one link to another, finding a plethora of bands, albums, interviews, tv series, movies, blog - whatever might lean towards a familiar echo - and finding good company in them. My friend accurately described it recently as the potential of any distributed media to create an invisibly connected community.

one way we could introduce the blog address

Bar Scripts

A draft at this stage. Some censored generic stories from the vault!
Zoom in for this one.

Intervention or enough said?

The JD Set, a collective of four young documentary filmmakers, will be present at the screening of their first full-length feature Katy Perry Dumped Me for a Straight Girl during the Highlight Queer Film Festival. It is rumoured that Beatrice Krill worked as screenwriter on the project, but when asked The JD Set said, ‘we did dial her phone number. But she doesn’t really answer the phone. We bumped into her one night at a party and she was really enthusiastic about what we were doing. After that we lost touch. She has a credit in the film though. We called her ‘Fog, Mist and Wind operator’ even though the film is dominated by clear skies.’

An image to say hi with

Ok, here we go.... first, close your eyes. Close them. Are they closed? Good, we can continue. Imagine all the cunning stunts, see them in all their stunningness. Now open...

Here are the finalists for New Zealand's New Cunning Stunts:

















I am thinking perhaps this image could have mirrored reflections or some such party-like texture applied to the surface of the panels... or perhaps a collection of images from the blog?

This series is all good, so my selection of this one was based on a text image combination I thought could work on its own. But, actually, I am pulled towards thinking about this image (or a working of) as a light-box image.

As is. For sure.

This would need a little bit of a crop. A chop here and there.

Looking through the blog, I saw this image, and I think it could be an option, but perhaps without the text? As it might be a double title kind of situation?

I have a pull towards this image. It feels like a magic mix of cheeky/funny/serious/slick/tactile/awkward/composed. All the makings for one sexy woman... hehehe.

APPLAUSE!

Call 0800 $$$$ now to place your vote or suggest other potentials.

towards the inseperable (test 2/2)

towards the inseperable (test 1/1)

best friends throughout history

All that flirting for nothing

(what do you think of the above for a title?

Could our works open out 'All that flirting for nothing' in ways both humorous, serious, poetic, aggressive, inside-outside, her's as well as a little his, affirmative as well as critical?)

1.

When Beatrice Krill's best friend came out to her folks they took her to Disneyland. Beatrice's parental unit (consisting of one parent who did the job of the two or more standard units) had ceased with the holiday thing a long time ago, but Beatrice's own coming out lent the no-holidaying policy a far more imposed air. In fact, this air possessed a quiet aggression that would slip in and out of subterfuge, often taking Beatrice's breath away. While this was going on, Beatrice became much closer to her aunt. Her aunt seemed to understand that every person on the planet had a sexuality and did not assume that Beatrice was the only one afflicted. Beatrice's parental unit on the other hand seemed to conflate her 'predilection' for the same sex with something that resembled a conglomerate - part wolf, part irreverent glossy red eye - and not in a good way.

2.

What is it about best friends that makes them so sexy? Eva says as she flicks her cigarette at Sam accusingly. People who know stuff have traced the predicament back even farther than the Ancient Greeks, Sam says. Experts have so far shown that the best friend thing was born out of the effing dance of a particle and a wave; alien forces incapable of acts that didn't in some way correspond. The wave and particle talked, if you will, across space and time in a tedious, um, gay way, and they often had to shout as each shoplifted (Sam picks up a pair of pantyhose and conceals the packet beneath Eva's coat) at alternate ends of the Mall, I mean, universe. One night they discover that in the body is a muscle-listener, tenderness, a tongue tinned, quiet with lowly oxygen. Another afternoon they see that in this observance bells are cast, pores ring, temperature is right and favourable conditions melt to music. Their laughter goes on to show that life, without bells or hands to warm them, is lost in thought, or hope – anywhere close.

This is the cover I am projecting towards/forwards for my next collection of writing/visual what's-it (Marnie, you will recognize z image) . I quite like the idea that 'friendship' between ladies in all its many forms has a place in this show. In a way it already has a place and I'm just shining a bit of coloured refracting and idiosyncratically-tinged light on it...

news of the minute: 'out and proud' objects

(This post relies heavily on the images that might potentially form in your cerebral areas)

http://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/wellbeing/4289463/Out-and-proud

I feel that the projected reader of this article is intended to be other than glbt - or it is addressed to 'dominant' hegemony or perceptions of sexuality (strongly aligned with gender stereotypes, even if there is an attempt being made to dismantle some of them).

It's not really addressed to the glbt reader (or a reader sensitive to glbt experience). Or if it is, then the glbt reader must ghost as a non-glbt reader for a time, or draw on a time prior to their adoption of glbt circumference, or draw on a communal memory of a time prior to glbt-dom, if they were lucky enough to have not needed to adopt glbt radius, pie or square root, and instead were 'born as'). For example it's not saying anything directly about the different lifestyles, beliefs or attitudes that glbt individuals have or lead. Nor how glbt might see the world in relation to other glbt people - not to mention attitudes to war, nationalism, identity, gender, relationships, etc. which are mono-mobilized and for me remain unsung here.


You can be gay and own a poster signed by ye-olde-Bush - and that liberal-meets-conservative contradiction (a hinted-at contradiction seems to be a recognizable form of normative subjectivity in the context of this article) is then mobilized to absorb the homosexual into an 'open' reality that has strict border controls. It's a doubling of 'contradiction' that acts as a means for absorption and absolution...

It's the petty relocation or shuffling of difference in this kind of article or address, which makes glbt experience appear mono-cultural to me.

AND it brings up the power-ambiguity of subjectivity.

If Hito was trying to think through an alternative to the power-ambiguity of subjectivity, proposing the historically bruised (or contingency-bruised) object, what are we left with as far as tools, thoughts, sensations, to live, work and act as or with:

• a community of objects
• objects which circulate a tangible uninhibited humanity
• objects that can/can't possibly breach everyday humanity
• objects that forage on the outskirts of power-as-humanity
• objects of communities; a cancellation or corroboration of non-mono-subjective humanity
• ...?

(phew...)

And a recap re: Sophie Calle via Yve-Alain Bois (Lecture)

Calle conjures the indefatigable reader

There is an overflow of affect (via anticipation) – there is a countdown and then an encounter

And the encounter is entropic

She pretends to be building a character

She makes manifest contingency

And the tragedies of impersonation

I respond:

She would remove her glasses and begin at the farthest point her sight allowed a figure to be defined. The closer the figure got, the harder it became for her to see in any detail the figure as it persisted into near distance. Sometimes she would resort to her prescription lenses to take in the full force of the figure’s advance.

A Test

A image for the mix. Feels a bit raw, but I thought I would throw it in to the pot. See you all tonight at 9pm for some cross-continent exploration.

There is a little red star by the paper in the image, connecting to the the text that reads as:
On a Tuesday night in an empty bar in Lisbon I was trying to get her to say something I thought she was thinking. A crush. It had to be a crush. A falling for a pair of hands, fare hair and dark eyes forever fixed inside sheets of paper that are always too small, too shiny and too damn old. It did not really matter, as there is a saying and then a knowing and then there is a shared kind of caring without saying that is always between us. I knew she would never forget her name. I remembered it for a few days but just now I had to google something like swiss lesbian travel writer photographer.

Action around the edges; repetition, distribution of energy and phrasing

Anecdotes

I threw down a small piece of my rib. It landed on the street below my bedroom window through which I could be seen effortlessly standing. The bone was fresh out of a box that I kept in a drawer in an everyday bit of furniture.

I lost track of the small bone by forgetting about it and I would recall it by dropping it from a high place from which I could look out at it discarded as a person or group of people arrived without notice.

Today, the women are on their way somewhere, I can’t know where, and one of the women stops and taps my rib with the soft toe of her shoe. She stoops quickly and unexpectedly as if aroused by sleep, and she points at a spider and says, ‘so rare I could fold it, I mean hold it,’ aligning it with other things from her past that she’s kept deliberately effaced.

The other woman notices me, the woman looking down at her and her companion as she stands attentively below my second floor window. I stand there really no more than a shadow in a space riddled with glass, unseen in just the way a shop window can be photographed behind someone smiling with unreadable assurance.

Though it’s likely that a person being photographed would not become aware of the bit of my rib fallen matter-of-fact on the street due to a unique confluence of angles, angles that tend to fold on the retina, just as a Venetian blind can be drawn and slung over the backseat of a car.

$14 dollars in his pocket and Duchamp's phone number

So AWEsome talking to you all the other night! I will post here the schedule we decided:

04th Oct - 20th Oct: Keep sharing ideas and works via blog

Around 20th Oct: Second skype with Marnie, Liz and (Me myself or I) in NZ and Clare in Netherlands. The aim of this is to brainstorm and work towards establishing a boundary line of interest, both visual and philosophical - towards the firming up of a production schedule.

In the meantime ideas for title are circulated: I like Clare's thought that the title might suggest arrival and departure - within the lightbox context and the work itself - which relates well to articulations in these blog posts - hyperbola, lenses, accurate fictions, and effing dykes use of narrative and web images, which suggest a virtual elsewhere, whilst also participating in the here/now of her blog.

I also find that I'm very much still pondering to what extent (this came up when you were talking Marnie about a Gay Pride march that you and Clare had been to (eek, I can't remember where it was?!)) that a certain public-ness doesn't involve risk. Where does this perception come from, who thinks/prompts it into being, and where is it leading? The good the bad and the ugly of such an assumption...

Oh, and how about that Batrider crew...want to get their albumz fast

And the new effing dykes post is pretty great - about Les Obsession.

And something to sign off with...


Sometimes I would dream that I was adrift in a forest that rose up out of the water already dead and hung as if the stumps were great poles lowered from the sky, the sky itself desperate to be free from the water and the pump of the night in the rain as it fell upon me, the only man there. All around was the burden of the water reflecting a blue and purple sky. My friend in the flood didn’t need to save me, or I him, but his presence was a kind of savage reassurance.

Interlocking girl circles

Hi there,

Firstly, I get the feeling when I walk past the lightboxes that 'text works' could have a real impact in this location - at the same time as the nature of 'text work' can be elaborated, or truncated and work magic with 'image-based' architectures.

I know that we all have drawing and text elements in our practices, with real performative twists. That's not to say we have to start or end here, I just like the observation when thinking about our different practices.

I think this project presents a great opportunity to develop some ideas together, perhaps in pursuit of a collaborative outcome. At the moment that 'outcome' is one that I'm as yet (naturally) unable to quite imagine or give a diagrammatic sketch of, though I'm very keen to exchange ideas and works in the first instance so that there is a real sense of validity and purpose to the works we present in December. I think it's a great idea to gesticulate about the process, like Marnie is suggesting, through sharing images and thoughts - I like the idea of the finished works having an undulant quality for sure.

In this light I present a short poem - on the abstract side, but trying to think through the body and the thought and how distance and intimacy might spring up or not - I picture a hyperbola - where the body doesn't quite touch the thought but senses it, refocuses it, nominates it for a prize.


Anywhere close

In the body is a muscle-listener, tenderness,
a tongue tinned, quiet
with lowly oxygen. In this observance
bells are cast. Pores ring. Temperature is right. Favourable conditions
melt to music. Life, without bells or hands to warm them,
is lost in thought, or hope – anywhere close.


I also like these lines and the images they throw open:

cold smoke made to return to a deliberate fire
a wind of miniature anchors drifting on her skin
motivational dark matter: $10 per 2L bag

I also have a compelling need to call this found image 'Interlocking girl circles'...

Lets see if a title can emerge from the posts we exchange in the next few weeks?

Over and roger that,

R