30/4/11

el verdadero dia de la danza

Los españoles construian sus catedrales arriba de templos aztecas para asegurar el peregrinaje de los conquistados. Con la danza de calendario ha pasado más o menos lo mismo:



Se nos ha dicho que el dia de la danza es por el cumpleaños de Jean-Georges Noverre. Que bonita idea. Alguien que le dio un poco de forma a lo escénico, que narrativizó la danza, que estableció cánones que aun ahora siguen siendo un dolor de cabeza, aun empotrados en la mentalidad de más de un coreógrafo, más de un crítico, más de un bailarín. Igual me pregunto que ocurriría si tuviéramos algun registro de sus famosas obras. No importa, esos son otros temas, vine aquí a hablar del origen real:

El verdadero dia de la danza, oculto en el calendario bajo el conveniente cumpleaños de Noverre, se festeja en conmemoración a la masacre de mas de 80 bailarínes y unos cuantos académicos, que bajo la organización de Michel Blondy, resolvieron exigir mejores condiciones de trabajo a su director (el coreógrafo Pierre Beauchamp). Tanto la Académie Royale de Danse, como la Ópera misma, fueron arrasadas en una sola noche, el 29 de Abril de 1685. Luis XIV no vaciló para meter orden en sus bailarines, y Beauchamp, favoríto del rey, no iba a perder su posición por unos cuantos revoltosos. Si Lully estuvo involucrado o no, es algo que desconocemos, pero lo que si está claro es que para el Ballet que él y Beauchamp estrenaron juntos el siguiente año (Ballet de la Jeunesse), tuvieron que traer bailarines italianos y de la provinciana corte de Lyon.

Sí, el 29 de abril se celebra una masacre, un pisoteo de derechos e, irónicamente, en México se celebra trabajando gratis...

14/3/11

THE LIST AS ITS OWN

The list is, if not the oldest kind of poetry, very possibly one of the oldest functions of it. The great poems of the days of old, the Epic, had the responsibility of archiving the knowledge of a culture. They would gather (configure), reality and the way it was perceived by that particular people. How to do this without enlisting what was important for that reality to stand for?
Robert Graves in his polemic book “The White Goddess” shows us how the Hanes Taliesin, inside the anecdote, and even beating down it’s assumed importance relegating it to a mere structural position, contains a list of gods, and it’s relation to sacred trees (and a list of them), and therefore, a list of medicinal plants, a list of days (a ceremonial calendar), etc. We can see, also in a work by Graves, this time “The Greek Myths” how many versions of the Argonauts there are, and how the crew member’s list has become the principal object of discussion around the myth, specially when each one of the names enlisted could give a sacred dynasty to a family or a town. Then we have Gilgamesh, for instance, in which the protagonist enumerates the impurities of Istar, and the narrator does the same with the days of suffering of Enkidu, or ones he has died, Gilgamesh again, in the must beautiful part of the poem, lists the people, lands and animals who should cry for the loss of his beloved friend*. Nearly at the end of the poem, there is also a list of the tragedies that would have been better instead of a flood; and about floods, in the bible, there is a very specific list of all the animals Noah took into his wing or in the Leviticus and the Deuteronomy, a list of pure and impure animals, among, I presume, loads of other listing. Scandinavian sagas use this resource too. The first half of the Egil’s Saga, for instance, is practically nothing but a genealogic list.

I could keep on listing examples forever, but I think my point is clear. It would be foolish to think of listing as a mere descriptive resource, existing only in function of the narrative. The list is an entity by itself, an entity that allows a budget to arise, a configuration to be built, a taxonomy to be structured. All of the things listed in these poems are a sort of extract of the epistemic context they come from. One by one, its components reinforce the system of representations of culture, giving unity to its discourse. Lists, so far, give unity, identity: A list is as much itself as it is what it excluded, and then, we can also find political implications in it.

Someone’s cultural background, social status, stile, interests, way of living, necessities, health state, etc, could be deduced by reading her (his) supermarket list, (starting, of course, for the fact that he (she) has a supermarket list, which already tells a lot), but here it is possible to go further. That list would evidently give us the information written on it, but it would also say a lot through the relations that the very order in which things are placed establish. Do sections structure it? Is it random? Why did you put the chocolate next to the movies and not with the food? Etc. When you are writing your supermarket list (if you do) things come to your mind and from there to your writing hand in an order, because lists are successive, consecutive.
This is the must important characteristic of the list. It is the ultimate and simplest configuration inside language, for language is, before anything else, consecutive. Language is a list itself, a list of chained sounds in which internal relations allow representation and meaning to happen.
The internal relations between the successive components of a list produce meaning further than the collection of them would by itself, and then we have Borges...
Lists like the one he uses to represent the universe in his tale “El Aleph”** or the one he talks about in “El Idioma Analítico de John Wilkins”*** (which Foucault would take afterwards as the base for his amazing book Les Mots et les Choses), are not a mere catalog. Through those lists, he not only gives unity like a regular list would intend to do. He destroys it, while pretending to produce it. He gives testimony of the impossibility of an objective catalogue. He puts in evidence how partial and limited budgets, taxonomies, configurations can be. He lists the unlistable and succeeds in his failure, and he shows us it is all about the relation between the elements. It’s taking the successive and fracturing it from the inside: ¿Cómo pude no sentir que la eternidad (…) es un artificio espléndido que nos libra, siquiera de manera fugaz, de la intolerable opresión de lo sucesivo?. (How could I not feel that eternity (…) is a magnificently artful device, that sets us free, at least for a glimpse, from the intolerable oppression of the successive?)****
After thousands of years of unitary lists, Borges proposes a different kind of list, an opposite one. A list that tears apart standardized meaning; disintegrator of fixed realities, quake for representation.
Borges produces abysmal gaps between the successive of his list’s components, or he arranges otherwise impossibly juxtaposed images. Without breaking the form itself, his lists step over consecutiveness, and reach for a place out of it’s intolerable oppression: For eternity, in his own definition.
My proposition is very simple: To take all this potential seriously. To realize that even though its boundaries might have been confused with those of literature and poetry (as much as with those of economy, housekeeping, carpentry, etc) Listery does not owe to narrative, neither to poetry, nor to anybody else. It is an entity of production of meaning by itself, and like that it should be taken. I am not pretending here to “create” a new gender, but simply to acknowledge it already exists, and to give it its place.
BEHOLD THE LIST, BITCHES



*And the beasts we hunted, the bear and the hyena,
Tiger and panther, leopard and lion,
The stag and the ibex, the bull and the doe.
The river along whose banks we used to walk,
Weeps for you
Ula of Elam and dear Euphrates
Where once we drew water for the water-skins.
The mountain we climbed where we slew the Watchman,
Weeps for you.
The warriors of strong-walled Uruk
Where the bull of heaven was killed
Weep for you.
All of the people of Eridu
Weep for you
Those who brought grain for your eating
Mourn for you now;
Who rubbed oil on your back
Mourn for you now;
Who poured beer for your drinking
Mourn for you
The harlot who anointed you with fragrant ointment
Laments for you now;
The women of the palace, who brought you a wife,
A chosen ring of good advice,
Lament for you now.
And the young men and brothers
As though they were women
Go long-haired in mourning.
What is this sleep which holds you now?
You are lost in the dark and cannot hear me

** Vi el populoso mar, vi el alba y la tarde, vi las muchedumbres de América, vi una plateada telaraña en el centro de una negra pirámide, vi un laberinto roto (era Londres), vi interminables ojos inmediatos escrutándose en mí como en un espejo, vi todos los espejos del planeta y ninguno me reflejó, vi en un traspatio de la calle Soler las mismas baldosas que hace treinta años vi en el zaguán de una casa en Frey Bentos, vi racimos, nieve, tabaco, vetas de metal, vapor de agua, vi convexos desiertos ecuatoriales y cada uno de sus granos de arena, vi en Inverness a una mujer que no olvidaré, vi la violenta cabellera, el altivo cuerpo, vi un cáncer de pecho, vi un círculo de tierra seca en una vereda, donde antes hubo un árbol, vi una quinta de Adrogué, un ejemplar de la primera versión inglesa de Plinio, la de Philemont Holland, vi a un tiempo cada letra de cada página (de chico yo solía maravillarme de que las letras de un volumen cerrado no se mezclaran y perdieran en el decurso de la noche), vi la noche y el día contemporáneo, vi un poniente en Querétaro que parecía reflejar el color de una rosa en Bengala, vi mi dormitorio sin nadie, vi en un gabinete de Alkmaar un globo terráqueo entre dos espejos que lo multiplicaban sin fin, vi caballos de crin arremolinada, en una playa del Mar Caspio en el alba, vi la delicada osadura de una mano, vi a los sobrevivientes de una batalla, enviando tarjetas postales, vi en un escaparate de Mirzapur una baraja española, vi las sombras oblicuas de unos helechos en el suelo de un invernáculo, vi tigres, émbolos, bisontes, marejadas y ejércitos, vi todas las hormigas que hay en la tierra, vi un astrolabio persa, vi en un cajón del escritorio (y la letra me hizo temblar) cartas obscenas, increíbles, precisas, que Beatriz había dirigido a Carlos Argentino, vi un adorado monumento en la Chacarita, vi la reliquia atroz de lo que deliciosamente había sido Beatriz Viterbo, vi la circulación de mi propia sangre, vi el engranaje del amor y la modificación de la muerte, vi el Aleph, desde todos los puntos, vi en el Aleph la tierra, vi mi cara y mis vísceras, vi tu cara, y sentí vértigo y lloré, porque mis ojos habían visto ese objeto secreto y conjetural, cuyo nombre usurpan los hombres, pero que ningún hombre ha mirado: el inconcebible universo.

***(…) those that doctor Franz Kuhn attribute to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Heavenly emporium of benevolent knowledge. In its remote pages it is written that animals are divided in a) belonging to the emperor, b) embalmed, c) trained, d) piglets, e) mermaids, f) fabulous, g) loose dogs, h) included in this classification, i) that shake like crazy, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, l) etcetera, m) that just broke the vase, n) that from the distance look like flies. (…)
 (…) las que el doctor Franz Kuhn atribuye a cierta encyclopedia china que se titula Emporio celestial de conocimiéntos benevolos. En sus remotas páginas está escrito que los animals se dividen en a) pertenecientes al emperador b) embalsamados, c) amaestrados, d) lechones, e) sirenas, f) fabulosos, g) perros sueltos h) incluidos en esta clasificación, i) que se agiten como locos j) innumerables, k) dibujados con un pincel finisimo de pelo de camello l) etcétera, m) que acaban de romper el jarrón, n) que de lejos parecen moscas. (…)

**** Prologue for the last reedition of the History of Eternity while alive.

23/2/11

pregunta

¿Corre el arte contemporáneo el riesgo de perder la autonomía de su lenguaje al atender obsesivamente a discursos producidos en otros campos?

31/1/11

LA SELVA LACANIANA

ESTE ES UN FRAGMENTO DE LA CONFERENCIA QUE ESTOY PREPARANDO PARA EL CICLO  "LA VERDADERA HISTORIA DE LA DANZA", AUSPICIADO POR EL CENTRO HISTÓRICO DE INVESTIGACIONES DE LA DANZA OI, RAMA ACADÉMICA DEL COLECTIVO AM.

Tal como M. Foucault relacionó el océano con la locura en el imaginario y la episteme de la cultura occidental, llamándolo antiespacio, o no-lugar, Lacan relacionó la selva con el inconsciente. Aunque interesado en un enfoque lingüístico, para Lacan (y esto es sorprendentemente poco sabido) igual que para el mismo Foucault (pero por supuesto, con opiniones opuestas al respecto), la etnología y el psicoanálisis están más relacionados de lo que aparentan, y forman juntos, a demás, el cimiento epistemológico de las llamadas “ciencias humanas” de la modernidad. Para Lacan, el corte transversal con el que, en un solo movimiento, la etnología expone y analiza sociedades cronológicamente contemporáneas, pero culturalmente anacrónicas e incompatibles (al menos en apariencia, y en relación siempre a la cultura occidental, diría Fucault), es equivalente al corte psicoanalítico a través de las capas de representación y significado a lo largo del consciente y el inconsciente. Es decir, de alguna manera, la etnología es al macrocosmos social, lo que el psicoanálisis al microcosmos individual, y las comunidades aún cercanas a lo tribal son en términos etnológicos, equivalentes a un inconsciente macrocósmico de interconexiones socioculturales. Para Lacan, la Selva Lacandona (que evidentemente lleva su nombre), fue tan importante en su reinterpretación estructuralista de la teoría freudiana, como, digamos, las galápagos para Darwin, en términos de trabajo de campo. Su análisis de las comunidades indígenas chiapanecas y la comunicación entre estas, informó directamente su teoría de cadenas significantes a partir de las cuales funciona el inconsciente. A su vez, la influencia lacaniana fue determinante en la cosmogonía lacandona: se insertó el complejo de Edipo en la cultura; y la noción occidental de culpa, que había sido a penas esbozada en el pensamiento indígena a través de un catolicismo sincrético, terminó de ser entendida e incorporada. Estas aportaciones son fácilmente identificables en las tradiciones lacandonas; particularmente en algunas danzas y cantos relacionados con casamientos o bautizos. Desde entonces, el llamado “Sincretismo Lacaniano”, o “Sincretismo Lacandon” ha generado las condiciones para que numerosos movimientos tanto artísticos como sociales emerjan. Entre ellos, la internacionalmente aclamada coreografía mediática del EZLN, surgida a mediados de los años 90 y escenificada a lo largo y ancho de todo el globo a través de medios de comunicación de principal importancia. Las artes escénicas internacionales se han visto influenciadas por las propuestas lacandonas, en las que una estética militar de apariencia matriarcal pero con un protagonista masculino (volvemos a Edipo) es desplegada, siempre bajo el cobijo de una personalidad misteriosa, si bien identificable e incluso estereotípica, que juega con personificaciones de un posible preconciente cultural culpígeno, evidenciándolo. Movimientos como INPEX, en Suecia, o La Fura Dels Baus, en España han retomado este formato.

21/1/11

INTERFERENCIAS ROCKED

INTERFERENCIAS was a festival/artistic residency that happened in Mexico (both SLP and Mex City)around november/december 2010, in which around 25 young artists from over the world gathered to collaborate together inside a non hierarchical structure. It was fucking brilliant and a lot of questions arose from that experience. There is going to be a publication, product of what we lived there and reflected after. In the first part of it all of us should write a text using as guidelines a list of questions we built around 4 subjects that awoke interest in our practice:

Starting point What is your motivation/interest/desire? How do you enter your work? Is theoretical research necessary for your work? What importance has the starting point during the process?

Context How does space (architecture and social context) influence your work? When does work become political? Can art go beyond its cultural context? Do you use an external eye during the process? Does the knowledge of who your audience is influence the way you work? How does your economic circumstances effect your work? What is your relationship with the modes of production in which you develop your work? What are the implications of nomadism? In which art field do you position your work? How does art influence a broader context?

Authorship Do we create or make? How does collaboration question authorship? Is it possible to erase the author from the work? Who needs an author? What is your style, how does you signature establish through it? How do you relate to stealing? Are you acknowledging how your background has shaped you?

Points of exit What is a point of exit? When do you see the end? What ends and what starts when you finish a work? Is the product more valuable than the process? How do deadlines influence the process? What do you leave behind?

I sam not sure If I should this before the publication arrives, so I better wait before publishing my text.

We were also asked to give some feedback, also framed in a series of questions. In exchange, I will not write down the questions, but only my text/answer, and this is it:


multitude

INTERFERENCIAS was freaking weird. I had been working like crazy before getting there so I did not really know what to expect, I did not even have very clear what we were going to do. None of us did, apparently. Anyway, my expectations (because I cant say I didn’t have them) were very abstract, and so…

I found myself experiencing relations in two different ways at the same time: one was general; my relation to the group itself as an ungraspable-always-shifting-tidy-multiple entity, and the other way was particular: my relation to differentiated individuals, or to little sub-groups.

Though its inevitable and necessary, I have never been very fund of groups, and especially not fund of forcefully feeling part of one. There is a certain implicit subjection, a certain decline of the personal matters, the personal decisions. This declining does not make them disappear, of course; it just (normally) hands them over to someone (or something) else so you don’t have to take care. This is what I find so fucking fucked up. Of course it’s more comfortable, but it’s also dangerous. I don’t know if the system we came with in interferencias (because we came with a system) could actually work in a “society”. I mean, I think that, at the end, it does, but, hell! It’s slow. In terms of taking decisions, the way we worked is not practical at all; it takes ages, and its very exhausting. Of course everything depends on the circumstances, but even like that I would dare to say: What the fuck, make it slow, make it hard, make it unpractical, but make it cool. In the context of interferencias, no one ever gave up a personal perspective just to please someone, or just to agree easily. No one left its individuality in order to belong, and yet we all did belong, and fit and feel part of. No one handed over his or her personal matters and decisions in order to subject his or herself to an institution, and this is fucking amazing. Am I exaggerating? Am I overreacting/overacting? Am I being a memory-idealist? YES. But I am sure that this that I am writing, though is not precise, is quite recognizable. Lately I have been very interested (or interesting as many of you used to say) in the word multitude, and its etymology that could refer to a large number of people and its implicit multiplicity, to a plural entity, more than to an unrecognizable scummy mob.

Interferencias was a multitude; a plural entity that did not erase the particularities of its parts, put rather recognized them and even functioned from them. An immense machine, falling apart at every movement, including its dysfunctional system in its production ways and in its “product”. At least “I” learned a lot out of all the communication and organization problems. Couldn’t tell foshizle, but that was perhaps the greatest part of it.

More than “being” we were “becoming”. Always falling out of the expected. My way of seeing art and my own artistic process has definitely been affected by this big time, and I think it will keep going.

In the middle of this cancer tumor (with pieces of shapeless teeth, bone and hair inside it) the interferencias experience was; there was also a space for the tete a tete experience. (Of course, a personal relation inside such a context is not at all what it would be out of it, and so it cannot be tear out the common one) Besides of party, meal, hallway and casual talks –which were very important--, the workshops and the performances were determinant. Having the chance to get to know and relate to the work of others in that way, was the perfect other side of the multitude, it gave a face to the name, or a voice to the face, or a body to the voice, etc. independently of matters of personal taste, the rush of performances, and the tiredness of workshops, the fact of everybody knowing that (let’s face it) want it or not your work is gonna represent you in front of others, and the fact that it actually did, gave a whole other perspective to the collaboration, another layer of understanding (or not understanding) upon what we were doing.

There is also the situation about the people who were invited (oh, little thing). This way of making a people’s curatorship instead of a cv’s casting, apart from the fact of being quite a political statement, worked beautifully, I think (of course I was also invited hahaha).

So, perhaps intuition rocks, but what I can tell for sure, is that:

INTERFERENCIAS ROCKED


10/1/11

FUCK YEAH MANIFESTO

This is a Manifesto I wrote for a site specific piece (called STOP BEING CREATIVE//RESPECT ART) I performed on december 28th 2010 in a small town in México called San Pancho. Since it was very much for that context, some of what is said in here might not be precise or even understandable out of it. Whatever.

FUCK YEAH MANIFESTO


a) FUCK Creativity as a pretension of originality, there is nothing new.

b) YEAH to recycling, taking old instead of new as long as, by doing that, we contribute to the production of meaning

c) FUCK the Author-God. FUCK the Artist-Creator.

d) FUCK moving for moving and doing for doing

e) YEAH to making, yeah to decontextualizing

f) YEAH to producing (through making) the space for different meanings to arise

g) FUCK History and its dogmatization Project. FUCK tradition and its prejudgeful gaze.

h) YEAH to History as a source of inspiration and contrast, YEAH to an archeological gaze upon it, with the critical focus on its modes of production of discourse and meaning, more than on the discourse and meaning themselves.

i) FUCK exoticism of folklore as a patronizing way of neocolonialism.

j) YEAH to analyzing our own social constructions, and the dogmas they conceal. How many prehispanic gods do I have to know in order to feel the same.

k) FUCK laziness of analysis and therefore, FUCK unanalyzed generalization of ideas. FUCK the simplistic (Not any bridge is necessarily good for anybody, and not any wall is necessarily bad).

l) FUCK the notion of inherent. There is no such thing.

m) FUCK representation and its politics of totalitarism.

n) FUCK taking action and then not being responsible for its consequences, FUCK HIT AND RUN, but also FUCK assuming the consequences in a victimistic way, FUCK THE OTHER CHEEK.

o) YEAH to acknowledging the political potential of each one of our actions

p) FUCK YEAH, STOP BEING CREATIVE

q) FUCK YEAH, RESPECT ART

r) FUCK YEAH!!!

16/12/10

WTF MANIFESTO



  1. What The Fuck, Manifestos are trendy nowdays, let´s make one
  2. What The Fuck Yvonne, you still have followers
  3. What The Fuck do you think you are doing
  4. What The Fuck do you "think" you are doing
  5. What The Fuck do you think you are "doing"
  6. What The Fuck do "you" think you are doing
  7. What The Fuck: everybody copies the same shit
  8. Why The Fuck don´t you copy something original
  9. Why The Fuck don´t you copy in an original way
  10. What The Fuck: I feel a certain authorship pride hidden in a poststructuralist pretension
  11. What The Fuck: pretending to be Roland B. but being Jesus C.