writing// of ocean// of being

here.
feet planted at
your lapping rim.
my circular thoughts
are suddenly washed futile.

this expanse of water
unfathomable.
is frightening
in its vastness.
its roar
ceaselessly crumbling.

here.
tightly clenched
terms, phrases
are untethered.

the rim of the ocean
the rim of the text
teetering

wordlessness

Single day installation

perforated

the night is.

only.

a sort
of night
paper

only
carbon
eyes
holes
seeing you

I netted them under with a sudden phrase, I retrieved them from formlessness with words

net(s) of form
net
formlessness
diffuse

w

write
write
write
how words slipped away
collapsing
times cavern

I miss your voice
and using mine
I am crowned with grandma's oxidised silver
red lips
wearing expectation

I miss bearing frailty
amorphous

who is I
waiting
a self
who does not come

Language and a Subject destined to be in the World

Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following ach other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

-Virginia Woolf

Pipilotti Rist- (Entlastungen) Pipilottis Fehler

XVII- by e e cummings

one(Floatingly)arrive

(silent)one by(alive)

from(into disappear

and perfectly)nowhere

vivid anonymous

mythical guests of Is

unslowly more who(and

here who there who)descend

-ing(mercifully)touch

deathful earth's any which

Weavingly now one by

wonder(on twilight)they

come until(over dull

all nouns) begins a whole

verbal adventure to

illimitably Grow

Architcture by Alexander Brodsky

a reading in process

In reality, the activity of reading has on the contrary all the characteristics of a silent production: the drift across the page, the metamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering eyes of the reader, the improvisation and expectation of meanings inferred from a few words, leaps over written spaces in an ephemeral dance. But since he is incapable of stockpiling (unless he writes or records), the reader cannot protect himself against the erosion of time (while reading, he forgets himself and he forgets what he has read) unless he buys the object (book, image) which is no more than a substitute (the spore or promise) of moments "lost" in reading. He insinuates into another person's text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation: he poaches on it, is transported into it, pluralizes himself in it like the internal rumblings of one's body. Ruse, metaphor, arrangement, this production is also an "invention" of he memory. Words become the outlet or product of silent histories. The readable transforms itself into the memorable: Barthes reads Proust in Stendhal's text; the viewer reads the landscape of his childhood in the evening news. The thin film of writing becomes a movement of strata, play of spaces. A different world (the reader's ) slips into the author's place. This mutation makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment. It transforms another person's property into a space borrowed for a moment by a transient.

-Michel de Certeau 'The Practice of Everyday Life"

The Practice of Everyday Life

And, also as always, one has to get out: there are only lost paradises. Is the terminal the end of the illusion? There is another threshold, composed of momentary bewilderments in the airlock constituted by the train station. History begins again, feverishly.

-Michel de Certeau

chilled hands

walnut heart

The Escape Route’s Design: Assessment of the Impact of Current Aesthetics on History and a Comparative Reading Based on an Example Close to the City of Berlin

Mariana Silva & Pedro Neves Marques

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/61

Stills- How then does the sun return to the earth after the eclipse of the sun

Mladen Bizumic- Global truths vs. Local reflections

Who speaks? What speaks?

Who speaks? What speaks? The question is implied and the function named, but the individual never reigns, and the subject slips away without neutralizing its voice. S/he who speaks, speaks to the tale as S/he begins telling it and retelling it. S/he does not speak about it. For without a certain work of displacement, ‘speaking about’ only partakes in the conservation of systems of binary opposition (subject/ object I/ it, we/ they) on which territorialized knowledge depends
(Minh-ha 327).

In the quote above from the essay “Cotton and Iron”, film-maker and feminist theorist Trinh Min-ha foregrounds the dilemma of cultural representation. In this piece of writing, I will consider two ways in which the politics of representation might be evidenced and navigated in artistic practice.

Trinh Minh-ha poignantly articulates two fundamental issues within the philosophy of language. Min-ha presents firstly the inherent dissonance between the speech act and the subject speaking. Secondly, she highlights the implicated relationship that exists between speech and subject.
Here the subject (speaking or representing) is presented in a double bind of never being able to fully communicate embodied experience, while also being unable to fully displace themselves as subjects from the speech act itself.

This dilemma of representation poses challenges for any individual or practice engaging in communication. In an interview with artist Amal Kenway, Kunsthalle Wien director Gerald Matt queries how representational issues might be navigated amid “...tendencies towards generalization or geographical standardizations...” (Matt 137). Kenway notes:

I make a point however of presenting something contrary to what is expected, contrary to clichés. I do so by focusing my work on a subjective level, by producing art that looks at the intimate. I believe this is an effective way of changing existing perceptions and misconceptions (138).

Here, Kenway presents a concentrated focus on the subjective and intimate as two ways of subverting generalisation and determinism. Employed as strategies within art production and everyday communication, the subjective and intimate lend agency to marginalised representation.


Matt, Gerald. “Amal Kenawy.” Interviews 2. Vienna: Kunstalle Wein, 2008. 134-144. Print.

Minh-ha, Trinh. “Cotton and Iron.” Out there: marginalization and contemporary cultures. Ed. Ferguson, Russell and Martha Gever. New York:The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992. 327-336. Print.

Contemp(t)orary: Part 1

Contemp(t)orary: Part 2

Allegory and Anthropology

Michael Taussig’s study “The Language of Flowers” is positioned in the discursive context of Medical Anthropology. Taussig evidences the logical schemes of analysis of this academic discipline. At he same time however, Taussig deviates and subverts anthropological convention through his use of content, and form of writing.

Taussig prefaces his essay “History as Sorcery” with a quotation of Walter Benjamin:
Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things (87).

What strikes me here is Taussig’s validation of allegory within anthropological study. Here allegorical representation; the figurative; the symbolic; the emblem, seems to be framed as a fertile and legitimate method of mapping socially and culturally embedded structures. In his study “The Language of Flowers” Taussig draws on peripheral narratives such as The Flower Vase Cut, the Mandrake, and the Acéphale. These narratives are proposed as critical vantage points on Western socially and culturally bound understandings, of violence, humour and art.

Taussig validation of the allegorical is also reflected in the forms of writing he employs. In “The Language of Flowers” Taussig uses juxtaposition, metaphor, pop culture references and self-effacement. These forms are used in such a way as to tentatively claim “I do not understand this. Perhaps I am not meant to. But what I do know…”forms an intellectual montage (191). Subsequently, while engaging in high level Anthropological research Taussig’s writing denies cohesive interpretation and meaning making.

Lastly, as a creative practitioner Taussig’s citation of artists such as Juan Manul Echavarria and George Bataille is enlivening. Taussig’s engagement with their cultural production legitimates their often peripheral work as anthropologically relevant to the academic discourse.

Taussig, Michael. “History as Sorcery.” Representations 7 (1984): 87-109. Web

Taussig, Michael. “The Language of Flowers.” Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2006. 189-218. Print

A-reading-in-process

Amelia Jones’s essay “Meaning, Identity, Embodiment” discusses Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenological theory of perception as it applies to the discipline of Art History. Jones argues that the perception of an artwork intricately conflates the identities of maker, viewed object and interpreter (73). In this sense all three identities produce and project meaning.

In her exhibition essay Speaks Transparent State Sonia Lacey discusses the architectural trope of glass. In the rest of this essay I will trace how the use of glass in architecture, may serve as useful analogy for phenomenological perception.

Firstly, consider a person standing inside a building looking out through a glass wall. They have a sense of being the observer of life passing by outside. However this sense of being solely an observer is an illusion; they are also the subject of observation. While glass architecture may give the sense of sole observation, an individual is always a subject object duality.

Secondly, a glass surface reflects. An observer, whether inside or outside a glass surface, while looking through, may also see something of their own image reflected back on themselves. In this way a glass surface speaks of the conflation of subjectivity and objectivity.

Thirdly, while peering through glass, an observer may occasionally become aware of the surface itself. Modern architecture uses glass to create what appears to be a seamless inside/outside flow. Sonya Lacey comments however:
The ‘see-through-ness’ creates the illusion of uninterrupted and continuous space. Glass frees architecture from a finite reality producing a sense of weightlessness.
At the moment when an inadvertent reflection or a smear on the glass draws our attention to the pane itself illusion is revealed. Glass acts as if it is absence, pure space, but is in fact a barrier.



Jones, Amelia. "Meaning, Identity, Embodiment: The Uses of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology in Art History." Art and Thought. Ed. Arnold, Dana and Margaret Iverson. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 71-90. Print.

Sonya Lacey. “Speaks Transparent State.” Sonya Lacey. Blogspot, 20, Oct 2008. Web. 2 Mar. 2010