攝影 photo: Toto LOK
i still come across you from time to time. that smoke that made you blink two times consecutively––it’s digital. at the time, it felt like a border between us, an inability to approach you, regal. an observer limited by a border of mutual non-recognition, perhaps, that was our uncanny solidarity. now, i am touched in your absence. Touch physical, vectors of you, plastic tangerine, plush toy mother, there’s no comparison to what is felt, and those inabilities to withstand it. The world is regal as you are. Perhaps we see it better in absence, digitally. Like a once a year push-button interactive greeting, we could do without it, but doing as non-being won’t exist anymore, tangerine, and that kind of posterity doesn’t say much for the solidarities of the world, now does it?
by the third day of a new year, we emerge into aloneness again. he eats sticky rice cakes and asks, ‘What else other than border is produced during and after a project of solidarity?’ that border is a pixel archive that was accumulating all the while——even in your absence——like toxins seeping deep into the earth underneath pasts past. ‘Happy Holiday’ felt like apocalypse this time, and even that was digital, just another mailing list. Let us understand our being together via our common inclusion within the press release (a release, a notice…an obituary?). It’s all good news, it’s been a very good show, we’re all well-intended and each one can return to hurt alone——all theories, outside within, without inside. Your identities have been crushed, Wendy Tangerine, already lumped into another long list of women defeated, those precious creatures who feel too much (those that stand out, on the contrary, get knocked down for not feeling enough). Was it really that you felt more than the rest of us, or can we blame you for thresholds?
Maybe there are no projects worthwhile beyond our being united in death. Maybe there will be no more than a press release. Maybe there will be no more words to last longer than any of us, words just so untainted because they take to the form and reversal of each one who ‘finds’ them. this is not about selfishness anymore. such particularities, as she said, have been more terrifyingly replaced by the banal. words, words… these words, and the great collaborative achievement of collective misunderstanding. solidarity, as such. the fallacy is precisely that ‘our findings’ set apart, could never be so generalized—oh, value… like meaning, like etymologies for words long forgotten. we remember you totally and not at all.
Posted by 丫 | reply »inadvertent soundtracks for inversion eyes
put your inversion eyes back on, proximity as the coming towards of embodiment, she says “the politics of location”. speaking as:
Ivo Kohler and Theodor Erismann, 1950
playlist:
__”Computer Eyes”, Jakob Boeskov/Timothy DeWit/Matthew Morandi, from The Wire Tapper 34
__”Golden Hours”, Brian Eno, from the album Another Green World
__”Pure”, Blackbird Blackbird, from the album Summer Heart
__”Tigers”, Christy & Emily
__”Talking History”, Xiao Hong & Xiao Xiao Hong, from the Dada Damage Compilation
__”Sullen Ground”, Mount Kimbie, from the album Cold Spring Fault Less Youth
__”Went Missing”, Nils Frahm, from the album Spaces
__”What Time is Love”, The KLF
__”Token Eastern Song”, Nirvana, from disc 4 of The Chosen Rejects: Live Rarities
__”Little Dreamer”, Future Islands, from the album Wave Like Home
__”Wait For Me”, 張曼玉 Maggie Cheung, from the Clean original soundtrack
from the 三行實驗室 three lines laboratory
大伯的太太
参加了三個艺术家舉辦的“三行實驗室”工作坊，每一個參與者寫了一個三行詩給另外一個不一定認識的人，在磁帶上朗讀錄音。每一個人錄完之後，組織者收集了又按照人名重新發給每一個人寫給他的三行朗讀。發完組織者說“好，那我們今天就這樣結束啦，你要自己回家後找方法播放你的磁帶”。當然家裡沒有，不知道要等多久才能聽到這首詩就拿著這個神秘的小磁帶走。
工作坊之後去找我姑姐一起吃飯，她告訴了我大伯過世了。第二天她和其他阿伯去收拾大伯的屋，要準備把他30年一個人住的房子還給政府。他們回來之後給我一個老行李箱，裡面放了一些大伯的東西。其中有一個小AIWA放音機, 外殼壞了但是還能用。聽了你給我寫的三行詩，聽到在那三行之間我和你之間的距離，也許也就是這個地球上的每一個人與另外一個人的距離。
an object ontology, or maths
like the way i told myself that i’d be out of this place before the bottle of shampoo was finished, now one quarter left, a grocery list like your ellipses builds up in its stead. 1 ¥100 China Mobile phone card, a pair of leggings, cherry tomatoes, 1 residence permit, 3 apples, 2 packages of 烤面片 (cumin or chicken flavour), apricots or peaches, 2 bottles of diet Coke, cashews or almonds or walnuts (salted), 绿豆糕, green basil pesto, 2 jars of Ying’er brand salted peanut butter (yellow lid), smoked 豆腐干, avocados, 1 can of Sapporo beer, masking tape, a pair of gardening gloves, multi-vitamins, Whisper brand maxi-pads, 1 big bottle of water, 红薯干, Crest Pro-Health toothpaste, a green stone necklace found in a field, letters and wasted words. Is a list equalising, 你说, like the illusion of a history book or a series of object relations? When a pink iron is held mid-air and knowing glances cross a courtyard, a smile is word is a years-long treatise on spontaneity. it’s not a sum as much as an infinitesimal differential, the derivative of the function that realises slowness.
你说 “小气”, but everything feels imbibed, or imbued, like the lost spaces between words we cannot really understand (“precisely as a function of the differential between their positions”). Ellipses. i try to keep track of the list, and yes, sometimes it feels good to try to do something good for someone else, but it’s always hard to tell when exactly we become barbarians. Rarely is it as simple as a list of objects, where sympathy is the square root of identification, a manner of being rude or respectful. weird + polite forever, it keeps us busy …. 你说?
Posted by 丫 | reply »
the light of day – or, the most intense fiery sadness inside the palest of blue
the difficulty of writing. therefore words become physically written entities. are animated by the postures and movements of the hand. the word becomes image. is placed in perspective. the natural rhythms of speech and of reading contorted. a video on writing:
act 1:
the street is where it finally played out, no confining corners of a room, simply a street and a doorstep and a door. a door that remained closed. closed that night and all the nights after. closed for several years. there were a few words there on the street, an evening chill picking up, words uttered from mouths tightly locked into position, not once breaking out into smile, no more spontaneities. now i remember it was an iron. the last object that passed between us. an iron. your iron. my iron. no ironing board. the irony. an iron with no more spontaneities. all those years summed up into the exchange of a single iron. a pink iron.
act 2:
you entered the studio that day and it filled the room. eyes locked and we understood. a kind of understanding that was hard to come by in those days. “we paid people 50 kuai to cry”. leaving the party early i cycled to the apartment that night, shared by several, it was only you there, you and a dvd menu on loop, the same jingle over and over again, you kept emphasizing the word ‘taken’, ‘taken’, ‘taken’ – i guess it was the opposite of what i was getting – the other word that night ‘transgressive’ – you and bataille – he and whitman – i couldn’t do it – sorry bataille – sorry whitman – i couldn’t do it – so much for ‘transgression’ — whenever i revisit the room, you are both there, bataille and whitman, bataille, whitman and me and the king-size bed. the torrent of words finally gets me writing on afternoons alone in the house, just before the onset of twilight.
act 3:
a gallery space, half emptied out, i keep going back there, the mounted and framed photographs are placed on the floor, leaning against the wall, a few are supported by the pillar in the middle of the space, you try to get them to leave, to let them leave us behind, but there is simply no subtle way of doing it and you mutter at them clumsily, they leave, we are left, the afternoon sun is slowly disappearing, the lights are left off, we talk, walk around and shout, until we settle behind the reception counter, a chair and a wall for support, we can do this but we can’t do that, what do you want from me? don’t ask that of me! she tells me his knees were shaking all the way on subway ride back home, i was never shown shaking knees. now, i only ever meet you in that gallery space. we don’t exchange words just glances and parts of our bodies in a deafening silence, the afternoon sun perpetually setting.
act 4:
an early spring evening, i keep trying to leave: “i have a party,” “a party to go to,” “a housewarming party”, but something keeps me at your side all night, first we sit at the “less important people table” and are seated next to each other, after more guests stream in we are both upgraded to the “more important people table”, again placed next to one another. what luck! finally settling into a comfortable position we continue our conversation, your leg brushes against mine a few times, i recall her remark about “woody men”. and i can’t stop staring at the eyes. can’t stop. the whole night – no rooms here, but the chambers of eyes to revisit “an intense fiery sadness” i describe to her later “inside the palest of blue”.
.
Posted by a | reply »biography
time’sawastin’
the light of day: crossing and cutting
of crosses. crossing. an owl and a cross. a stranger crossing. a reflection crossing through an image. slightly like an orthodox cross. or it is what i want to see. there is a cross here now in my room. somehow it is always here and never there. here. in this room. this room. this. a resemblance crossing. it is silver. it is a gift. it is the cross of aksum. it is small. it is an afterthought. it is coarse. not delicate. it is a time of crossing and cutting. not delicate. where things are played out at night. the young grow old in a breath. you are who you’re not. blink. blink again. the dinner table. the skylight. the washing up. you. slightly above eye level on a lump of blue-tack on the wall behind this screen. (from the drafts folder, written as a reaction to this post and other things at the time, the cross is still here, but the room is different.) (we all have basic needs.)
Posted by a | reply »|
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