Poem/NonPoem (Kaia Sand's Feb. 7 talk)

Poem/NonPoem

[note: this is the talk I gave on February 7 as a collaboration with Jules Boykoff for the spatial practices curriculum]

Last June, a hooded figure in an orange jumpsuit slogged through the streets of New York, ankles shackled. The primary audience, passersby on a bright afternoon, were not cued whether to read this as an escaped prisoner or an artistic performance. While the orange jumpsuit signified Guantánamo, there were no signs, no megaphones, no aids toward interpretation. This figure might have been an incarcerated person, on work release or recently escaped.

In August, Laura Elrick performed “Stalk” at the Kootenay School of Writing Positions Colloquium. She read her poem, timing the language to hit the sequence of images from a video that showed a black car pulling up, an orange jumpsuited figure trudging out—a figure she refers to as “something ‘not-me’ as ‘me’”— walking, ankles shackled, among the crowds of kissing, shopping, chatting people.

In June, her walk through the city was planned with precision, but submitted to the unpredictability of the city. Yet much was predictable about the reactions of crowds of people.

Homeless woman under a blanket. Fervent believer shouting scripture. Orange jumpsuited prisoner shackled and shuffling. We among the crowds don’t respond, part urbane (nothing surprises us); part safe-sure (less contact, less mugging); part co-habitationally respectful (we can all do our “thing,” living in close contact while retaining partial autonomy). We are among a crowd when the performance is not called “performance”; we have our norms. We are among an audience when a performance is called “performance”; we have our norms.

Are we too urbane in our cities for the “redistribution of the sensible,” as Jacques Ranciere describes as an aim of “dissensus”? Are we always among a crowd, the prisoner—shackled on the street, the prisoner shacked on an island—while we are urbane, safesure, cohabitationally respectful? Elrick’s trudge through New York streets juxtaposed prisoner and public crowd while drawing a contour line—as geographer Cindy Katz terms it—to the prisoner that is not juxtaposed, the out-of-sight prisoner, caged at Guantánamo, for whom we are the same public crowd.

It is through aesthetic distancing, or transformation, that Elrick opens up this conversation, her precise language hitting the beats of the video frames, source text formed into the poem—overhead language from passersby (“oh that’s just the worst/that’s hysterical”); interrogation language that functions like a library of homespun titles (“the ‘Employment History’ approach,” “the ‘Fitness Model’ approach,” “the ‘Cozy Afghan’ approach,” “the ‘Love of Family’ approach,” “the ‘American Pop’ approach”); lyric language that is figurative, slightly distanced, with images that re-present the circumstances (“It has been said that the crowd is a veil behind which the city beckons… Roving through its groves of windows/that pixilated the sun”); self-conscious language that reminds us that this is a performance, a small blonde woman building the figure that signifies man, unknown, confused bits of our knowledge.

In The Aesthetic Distance, Herbert Marcuse asserts that, through aesthetic form, a work is “’taken out’ of the constant process of reality and assumes a significance and truth of its own…the work of art thus re-presents reality while accusing it.” (8) “The aesthetic transformation turns into indictment—but also into a celebration of that which resists injustice and terror, and of that which can still be saved.” (45)

Reading this work by Marcuse reconnected me to an interview in Art Forum by Jacques Ranciere; they each argue for an art that aims for an alternative to “consciousness raising” as a goal, art that moves toward emancipation and disrupts ossified strictures of the sensible.

The aim, Marcuse writes, should be “more than a development of political consciousness," it should aim for "a new ‘system of needs.’" Such a system would include a sensibility, imagination, and reason emancipated from the rule of exploitation.” (36). Similarly, Ranciere speaks of the “redistribution of the sensible” in emancipatory terms, but departs Marcuse on the idea formal distancing.

Jacques Ranciere defines a “work of art” as "belonging to a certain regime of identification, a certain distribution of the visible, the sayable, and the possible. Politics,” he writes, “has an aesthetic dimension: It is a common landscapes of the given and the possible, a changing landscape of the given and the possible.” He pursues this question: “What landscape can one describe as the meeting place between artistic practice and political practice?” (259)

I am interested in how he seems to be looking less at distancing, and more at encounter, at works that are not easily classified as art, as politics. His examples still seem to be recognizable art objects (a photograph, a video, an installation), but Paul Chan writes an accompanying piece that offers examples that seem more like creative acts emerging from social movements. Or, at least, we can’t tell the difference. He describes how Czech resistors to the Soviet invasion in 1968 painted street signs black, or threw pornography at the soldiers. Dissensus.

I’ve been considering both as tactics—what I’ll refer to as poem/non-poem as a placeholder—compelled by the stages of Elrick’s “Stalk.”

And I’m interested in how the “poem/nonpoem” dynamic plays out in Landscapes of Dissent. Some actions, such as PACE, retain the conventions of poetry readings; the poem retains its look of poem-ness, is printed on a broadside, and performed by the poet. But other projects, such as Sidewalk Blogger and our Agit-Truth sign project, slide into other conventions, shed some of the gestures of the aesthetic form—especially through toying with sloganeering—and lose their aesthetic framing.

When is it tactically interesting to bring some aesthetic distance through formal transformation or framing? Isn’t that the option we most often take? When is it tactically interesting to pursue the landscape where aesthetics and politics meet, and allow the two to be translated through and into each other?

Looking over Amy Balkin's Invisible-5, which she presented for nonsite last autumn, I was struck by how her website embraces varying tactics. One of the first links I followed took me to a definition of environmental justice and information about the non-profit, GreenAction. I value the way these were direct ties to social movements, without ambiguity, alongside work that maps a landscape where aesthetics and politics meet.

This past year, I've launched a couple of poetry walks titled Remember to Wave, inspired in part by David Buuck's BARGE. I hoped that aesthetic distancing, or engagement, or estrangement, might be transformative to the "tour guide" in ways that might alter listening. So a tour was framed as poetry. And poetry was taken out of its usual spaces. I built chimes that were an homage to a nearby public art installation by Valerie Otani, and sounded these each time I began to read. I performed discrete sections: found texts, lyric sections, an improvisational choral ode by all the walkers. My first performance took place last September with an audience that was much-comprised of poetry-reading-attenders, but the next iteration was for a local walking club comprised of people who gave me their bemused attention and speculated helpfully on the surroundings.

As I think about future projects, particularly as I organize around the economic crisis and the opportunity to put forth solutions and make demands, I've been thinking on the level of tactics. For example, I've beginning to build a poetry walk or multi-media project around repossessed houses--unsquatted houses, to use Aaron Vidaver's term--particularly in an area just east of Portland called Happy Valley. I am interested in the ways aesthetic forms and framing might create some space to view the way shelter is distributed in this nation. I also wonder how this Happy Valley poetry & art project might make more direct ties to social movements in the way Amy Balkin's work does. With, say, ACORN?

I've also organized a couple of “Econ Salons” that used the form of the poetry reading and partially gutted it, reinserting economists in the sets occupied by poets or musicians. Might this shift audience? Insert pleasure? Change expectations? Change listening habits? Mix up cultures?

How might the creative choices of a poetic act matter in the strategy of the social movement? How might there be micro-levels of aestheticizing, while the overall framing of an action is outside poetry? I am grappling with how the poets and artists might comprise culture events (readings, concerts, etc), but also work at the level of publicity, panels, solutions that emerge from an inexpert status. How do we determine tactics other than puppets and protest? How do we determine the tactic?

***

sources

“Art of the Possible: Fulvia Carnevale & John Kelsey in Conversation with Jacques Ranciere” Art Forum. NY: March 2007.

Chan, Paul. “Fearless Symmetry.” Art Forum. NY: March 2007.

Elrick, Laura. “Stalk.” 2008.

Elrick, Laura. “Stalk.” (video), 2009

Elrick, Laura. “Notes on Social Poiesis,” 2008.

Katz, Cindi. “Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction.” Antipode, 2001 (need more publication info).

Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension. Boston: Beacon Press, 1977.