Magnets
by Kate PaulThis isn’t an expression of a real thing: this is the thing itself. Of course the thing itself the thing itself is never the same. This is how aestheticism can be so much fun.
Kathy Acker
Fußnoten
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Narrative Reflections on Looking, Victoria Sin, 2017, 11 min, Colour, Digital Part 3 / Cthulhu Through the Looking Glass↩
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I Like Dreaming, Charles Lofton, 1994, 6 min Colour, Digital↩
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Rhinoceros, Sebastian Buerkner, 2016, 3 min, Colour, Digital↩
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Her Silent Seaming, Nazli Dinçel, 2014, 10’30 min, Colour, 16mm↩
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Critical Practice, Rachal Bradley, 10 min, Public reading↩
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Liberty Bums, Rachel Reupke, 2017, 3 min Colour, Digital↩
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Ebi Flo (WEAREFAMILY), Evan Ifekoya, 2016, 4’26 min, Colour, Digital ↩
I always look at how people move together.
The word ‘pleasure’ is absent in most psychiatric textbooks.
Dr Bessel Van der Kolk
There is an emotional need for synchronicity with others and there are neural mechanisms for
getting it; exchanges at the frontiers of our faces and hands, the sounds of our voices. There
are also mechanics for fucking up synchronicity for agreed periods of time in screening rooms,
because we want it to be fucked-up, but only with a time-lock. Organised de-stabilisation, which
is probably safe and possibly too safe.
Non-Linear: Magnets [7:35-8:30pm] was a processional meditation on identification, desire, body
rhythms. Meditation as thinking circularly around a subject: ‘On Magnetism’, or, ’On Looking’.
The films did not replicate forged connections but made connections with us themselves,
consensual and intrusive;
first, Narrative Reflections on Looking, by Victoria Sin [7:35pm]1. An
uncomfortable mirroring of what desire and identification take without asking. Sin
appears on screen in beautiful red lingerie drag, lying horizontally [and us
looking] on red silk. There’s a pale red fluff jacket, and grey diamonds, whitish
wig hair. Skin. These filmed surfaces are indexical because they give direct
reference to what it is to touch them. I find my chest moving heavily with Sin’s
chest, which has plastic breasts on, painted nipples - our brains allow us to
understand the sensations of others by firing off replications of them, mirror
neurons, the vagus nerve which is what heartache is in the body -
“Your fly is undone”, says the disembodied narrator. And this is an asynchronous
& coercive moment of humiliation, because the connection we feel in our bodies
with the image is misjudged, wrong, and because humiliation is what happens
when someone looking at another is given too much power by the person being
seen. The next film, by Charles
Lofton, I like Dreaming [7:46pm]2 is suddenly shuddering flat black grey and yellow images of
muscular men on streets, walking, catching sight of the camera, looking back or away. It is
surveillance before the possibility of contact. The narrator tells us an autobiographical story
about cruising and being cruised. He picks up and is picked up by a masculine,
straight-seeming man, who like himself has pale brown skin. Mutual identification is possible but
blocked by masculinity, the narrator finds himself eroticising it, surprised by it: ‘Did he just call
me bro??!’
and
lyrics [I like dreaming]
come up on screen [I like holding you close]
one line after the other [touching your skin]
so it feels participatory [even if it’s in my mind], like karaoke.
Participation here is in societal fantasies which infuse surveillance images of masculine men of
colour, and
a pantoum is a rigid verse style, three stanzas, a rhythmical progression
by means of repetition. Developmental. In Sebastian Buerkner’s Rhinoceros
[7:51pm]3
, a couple, probably heterosexual, enact a ritual of commitment, moving
in together, speaking a pantoum, which is here attachment, co-domesticity, a slap
in the face of personal autonomy. The form is a symbol and it is a shape: ‘Let’s
make this ours’. There are other formal repetitions which make the film feel
sculptural, the recurrence of round shapes used by the couple unconventionally:
egg, balloon, tangerine, but not
jaggedly symbolic like Nazlὶ Dinçel’s Her Silent Seaming [7:55pm],4in which a pomegranate is
put together and taken apart, messily reconstructed. Dinçel productively destroys one of her old films, scratching reported statements from the lovers she has had over the course of her
separation with her husband
{{YOU}}
{{ARE}}
{{SO}} {{WET}}
onto the frames.
There is a
lag in between the sound and the image, a sense of failure to connect,
to be emotionally in sync with
another.
The sound is a repeated scratching, painful ultrasound - it’s the traumatic centre of the screening, we feel the
disjuncture in our chests; the sound is loud, there are body parts
on screen, penises obscured beautifully by scratches in the frame, the colours are red,
purple, blue, repeated application of lipstick, pomegranate comes apart again…
But Rachal Bradley’s reading, CRITICAL PRACTICE, [8:06pm]5is a pause. She
narrates a toxic relationship between pretentious art school friends.
Although the words speak their eventual failure to connect, ‘the filter of x
and y churned like a dysfunctional search engine’, the form itself is tight, a series
of equivalences, every phrase pinned into metaphor. When the text finishes, a
song [Felt - Sunlight Bathed in Golden Glow] plays in full, and there is the
demand-less intimacy and togetherness that is created by listening in the dark to
a song with a steady rhythm. It is safe,
and softly after, the wafting floral prints in Liberty Bums [8:16pm]6, by Rachel Reupke, are gentler
iterations of Victoria Sin’s red silks. It is a film in which Reupke remembers watching a public
screening of William and Kate’s royal wedding in a park, with her late friend Ian.There is a quiet
association between the viewers and the image, the spectacle of intimacy, of having known
another [but of course] imperfectly. It is productive, tender, like
the positive constructed intimacy in Evan Ifekoya’s film Ebi Flo (WEAREFAMILY)
[8:20pm]7, in which the artist sings to us:
Am I
You me
Or are we?
We are family
We are family
We are fam-il-ee
I got my sisters with me
, question and resolution, repeated, one never fully negating the
other. Evan merges into a CGI leafy background, fluxing, except that there is a
constant gaze between viewer and singer. If it were the end of the screening,
we would have left the room with warmth. Instead, there is Victoria Sin’s Cthulhu Through the
Looking Glass (8:25pm).The Wikipedia entry for the fantasy creature that gives this last film its
name reads, ’simply looking upon the creature drives the viewer insane’.
How long lasting is the disruption of a screening, of practicing identification and its failure?
Victoria Sin sits in front of us with a bouquet, dressed in white, plastic breasts large, partially
exposed, as the narrator describes ripping an image out of a magazine and pasting it onto their
face, sucking their finger through a mouth rip, monstrous.
Kate Paul is an artist and autism support worker based in Manchester.
With reference to:
Complex Trauma: Developmental & Neurobiological Impact with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXr_IB1ELCk
+
Great Expectations – Kathy Acker
(thanks Ralph)
A response to the screening Non-linear: Magnets curated by Shama Khanna on 5 September at Close-up, London.
an ethnographic archive of digital distribution
Often imagined as a pensive white man, wearing clothes in earthy colors, an odd hat and a rugged leather bag with an infamous notebook, Boris Malinowski fit the description of the ethnographer. Yet, his notebooks offer unexpected insights:
“Today, Monday, 9.20.14, I had a strange dream; homo-sex, with my own double as partner. Strangely autoeurotic feelings; the impression that I’d like to have a mouth just like mine to kiss, a neck that curves just like mine, a forehead just like mine (seen from the side)” 8.
One week after his arrival at Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea in 1914, a day after Malinowski began writing his diaries, a lifelong struggle started: homophily, the radical love of the same. In the face of extreme segregation – being all by himself in the tropics, not speaking the language of the indigenous, overwhelmed by ‘insomnia, overtaxed heart and nervousness,’ – he starts to feel desire for himself. It is this specific form of love for the same enhanced by narcissism that emerges when facing the radically different.
After every ‘jungle’ has been conquered by global capitalism in the last century, referring to Malinowski’s experience of homophily appears unfitting. However, autoeroticism has only shifted in the face of technology: From self-love in the face of the other to self-love without the other. Reality is organized in discrete units – ”digital islands of isolation that are drifting further apart each day.“ In discriminating accurately through their binarity, digits surround us with comfort and uniformity. Malinowski’s feverous jungle of endless depth and extraneousness has turned into seamless surfaces comfortably excluding the unknown. Engaged in this cosy architecture we find ourselves in Gated Communities. Personalized interfaces endure into sameness – we are encircled by ourselves.
Malinowski’s diary is both a space for ethnographic exploration and a documentation of homophilic ‘friction’ in its attempt to overcome his autoerotic segregation. warehouse aims to elaborate on this in changed socio-technical conditions. warehouse explores autoerotic segregation ethnographically and archives practices countering homophilies. From June to October warehouse will publish essays, artists’ moving images, interviews and performances on a weekly basis. Malinowski attempted to regulate and organize his struggles through the means of observing and writing on paper – warehouse will do so in offering a diagram of strategies countering homophily through frictional insertions: [entropy], [pray], [home], [adobe], [soft-fiction], [stranded]. A geometry to map a new normal; a topography for overcoming autoeroticism.