Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Bergen, Session #4 - On Stuttering


On Stuttering

Readings:
Christof Migone, "Utter the Stutter" (see: "Sonic Somatic", Errant Bodies Press)
Michel de Certeau, "Vocal Utopias: Glossolalias"
Works:
Isidore Isou - Lettrism sound poetry (1950)
Gil Wolman - Ultra-lettrism (1967)
Vito Acconci - "Waterways: four studies of saliva" (1974)
Richard Serra - "Boomerang" (1974)
Alvin Lucier - "I am sitting in a room" (1970-)

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"The threat to coherence, to the established course, to smooth flow, proliferates in the mouth that utters – site where the run is at its most vertiginous." Migone, p. 4

"No abyss is as familiar as one's mouth; the unheimlich mouth. An internalized abyss which we presume to control, but which always exceeds such tidy precepts." Migone, p. 4

To remind of the corporeality of language.

"The solidity of language's rationality seems to be contingent on language's ability to evince itself from its mode of production." Migone, p. 4

"But where we can locate the formless, the nameless? Is the unnamable within language, or outside?" Migone, p. 5

Bataille:
The formless.
The heterogenous.

Excess as liberating force; as that which exceeds representation, and the name. To force a space for the unnamable.

Spit / Spittle / Stutter: the introduction of the formless within language, from the gaping mouth.

The Other.

"If one conceives the body as porous, it becomes impossible to think of an individual without a collective, impossible to keep your distance, impossible to delimit the outside from the inside." Migone, p. 10.

"Porosity is both the somatic and metaphoric condition of possibility of this intimate stranger, wantonly crossing our borders by erasing them." Migone, p. 11

The stutter, as the foreign tongue. As the foreign of one's own mouth.

To communicate the incommunicable.

The stutter as a sign of weakness, within a society that demands fluency. To amplify the stutter as a break within such a paradigm, as a counter-vocalization.

"The intent of this formulation is not to mystify but to resist and repel any move which subsumes excess and noise into a system of dictionary." Migone, p. 16

The double-mouth: glottis within the mouth; double-speech: stutter within word.

The stutter as creative act.

The remainder: to impede any totalizing system or schema. Stutter as Noise.

Friday, October 19, 2012

Voice, Text, Collectivity


Course: Voice, Text, Collectivity
Post-Graduation in Visual Arts
UERJ – Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

 Prof. Ricardo Basbaum

The course will establish conversations and discussions around some of the relations between the production and emission of voice, as a sonic operation – through speech, reading and its derivations – and processes of production of discourse (written, printed, recorded). Such operations will be confronted with the collective dimension of voice emission – choirs, refrains, demonstrations, public speeches, collective conversations, group dynamics – in the sense of investigating dialogical and polyphonic practices. We will work from texts around the sonic and musical processes proper to the XX and XXI centuries, in their experimental dimension, combined with questions from the field of phenomenology, contemporary art, collective association and discoursive production. Relevant pieces from artists and creators from within the field of sound art will be discussed, together with the audition of the works, whenever it is possible.

Topics referred:
- the encounter with the artwork and objects of the world: phenomenological and post-phenomenological field, clash and shock, body, speech, writing;
- sonic works and the modern and contemporary fields: visuality, installation, performance, intervention, experimentalism, intermedia – the "sonic turn";
- dialogism, polyphony, collaborative, participatory and post-participatory processes.

Obs: The classes will be developed in collaboration with Prof. Brandon LaBelle, from the Bergen Academy of Fine Arts, Norway - including possible collaborative practices between students from both institutions.

* * * * *
O curso estabelecerá conversas e discussões em torno de algumas das relações entre a produção e emissão de voz enquanto operação sônica – seja através da fala, leitura e suas derivações – e processos de produção de discurso (escrito, impresso, gravado). Estas operações serão ainda confrontadas com as dimensões coletivas da emisão de voz – coros, refrões, manifestações, comícios, conversas coletivas, dinâmicas de grupo – no sentido da investigação de dialogismos e polifonias. Serão trabalhados textos acerca dos procesos sonoros e musicais próprios dos séculos XX e XXI, em sua dimensão experimental, combinados com questões do campo da fenomenologia, arte contemporânea, associação coletiva e produção discursiva. Serão ainda debatidos trabalhos relevantes de artistas e outros criadores dentro do campo da arte sonora, acompanhados de audição das peças, sempre que possível.

Tópicos abordados:
- embate com a obra de arte e objetos do mundo: campo fenomenológico e pós-fenomenológico, choque, corpo, fala, escrita;
- obras sonoras e os campos moderno e contemporâneo: visualidade, instalação, performance, intervenção, experimentalismo, intermídia – a “virada sônica”;
- dialogismo, polifonia, processos colaborativos, articipativos e pós-participativos: refrões, coros, parcerias, emisões de grupo, manifestações coletivas;

Obs: As aulas serão desenvolvidas em colaboração com o Prof. Brandon LaBelle, da Academia de Belas-Artes de Bergen, Noruega – estão previstas práticas colaborativas entre os estudantes de ambas as instituições.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Bergen, Session #3 - On Laughter




Session #3 - On Laughter

Henri Bergson, Laughter: an essay on the meaning of the comic (Dover, 2005)
Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Non-knowledge (Minnesota Press, 2001)
Alenka Zupancic, The Odd One In: On Comedy (MIT Press, 2008)
Helene Cixous, "Laugh of the Medusa"

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"Let us suppose that that which induces laughter is not only unknown, but unknowable. There is still one possibility to be considered. That which is laughable may simply be the unknowable. In other words, the unknown nature of the laughable would be not accidental, but essential. We would laugh, not for some reason which, due to lack of information, or of sufficient penetration, we shall never manage to know, but because the unknown makes us laugh." Bataille, p. 90.

(Laughter as rupture, as breaking the surface, as putting forth the unforeseen, the limits of knowing: to reintroduce the rapturous)

Laughter and Tears: Sam Taylor Wood, "Hysteria"

"Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo. Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain. Still, this reverberation cannot go on forever. It can travel within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, none the less, a closed one. Our laugher is always the laughter of a group." Bergson, p. 3.

"Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a social signification." Bergson, p. 4.

The involuntary: mishap, tripping up, to err (clowning): to laugh at the other.

Lack of elasticity (rigidity) in contrast to the "living pliableness of a human being".

"Society will therefore be suspicious of all inelasticity of character, of mind and even of body, because it is the possible sign of a slumbering activity as well as of an activity with separatist tendencies, that inclines to swerve from the common center round which society gravitates: in short, because it is a sign of an eccentricity." Bergson, p. 10.

(Chaplin, Modern Times – the dysfunctional worker)

"This rigidity is the comic, and laughter is the corrective". Bergson, p. 10.

(Question the particular politics of Bergson's position)

"Any image, then, suggestive of the notion of a society disguising itself, or of a social masquerade, so to speak, will be laughable. Now, such a notion is formed when we perceive anything inert or stereotyped, or simply ready-made, on the surface of living society. There we have rigidity over again, clashing with the inner suppleness of life. There ceremonial side of social life must, therefore, always include a latent comic element, which is only waiting for an opportunity to burst into full view." Bergson, p. 22.

Masquerading as a performance that disrupts the particular order by introducing an ambiguous body. (see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble)

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Acts of Voicing exhibition - Stuttgart

Württembergischer / Kunstverein Stuttgart

Acts of Voicing deals with the aesthetic, performative, and political significance of the voice from the vantage point of visual art, dance, performance, and theory. The exhibition centers on the agency and performativity of the voice. The aim is to examine the resistive the disciplined, and the disciplining voice—those voices that are heard and others that are not. Fighting to have one's voice heard is as much of a topic as the power to silence someone or to force them to speak.

Acts of Voicing, which evinces specially designed exhibition architecture, not only exhibits works of more than 30 artists but is also conceived as a stage for performances, workshops, lectures, and screening programs. It embodies a series of process-related installations, which are expanded during the course of the exhibition and are thus perpetually shifting the overall scenario. In lieu of a static space, an ever-changing experiential space is engendered, through which the exhibition visitors advance along different planes, even physical ones. Both the exhibition choreography and the way it is displayed accommodate the performative character of the voice.


The political implications of the voice, as explored and questioned by Acts of Voicing—which still resound, for example, in the German words for parliament, suffrage, and voting—hark back to ancient Greece. Aristotle for instance differentiates between the bare voice, meaning the scream that can do little more than express desire and pain, and the meaning-producing voice, which may signify the just and unjust, the good and evil. This difference is—at least in the Occidental tradition of thought—constitutive of the distinction between human and animal, between bare life and political life: that is, between those excluded from the political community and those included.


For the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, in contrast, political agency—as well as aesthetic agency—consists in the constant challenging and redistribution of precisely that order which is responsible for certain voices being understood as speech and others only as screaming. The aim is to prize open the existing orders—whether of a sensate, societal, political, spatial, or aesthetic nature—and to introduce thereto foreign elements that had previously been excluded.


The voice residing both, the inside and the outside of the body, in general is indwelled by a foreign kernel. It seems, as Slavoj Žižek has noted, as though the voice had never completely belonged to the body of the speaker, as if a hint of ventriloquism were taking place while speaking.


Acts of Voicing traces this foreign kernel, that is, this paradox, of the voice—at once familiar and foreign, internalized and externalized, tied to and detached from the body (and words). For it is the gap between the own and the foreign, the inside and the outside voice, that unbolts the space of the political and poetical.
Further information at www.wkv-stuttgart.de