I cannot evaluate jewelry
You want to write a text about not having the body of text. Write be a text without references measure placement – to be a text that opens up other texts (?). (Or enclose it? Deny the possibility of connecting with other ones?, as if it were denying all linearity.) Reduce each substantive to a sign. You want to deny it’s nature text and call it diagram (foundational diagram, functional diagram). You want to go back to it, to the diagram, and cut out a piece. Zoom in on it. You recognize that there are processes of destruction that you collect, that you look for to transform. The not so new, and shelter the new, but you cannot in your urgent time consider everything, the whole. (Complexities…) The edge of the whole that passes by you (along side, besides), is acknowledged as contingent, it’s a whole that is open by / in cracks. The metaphor of a passage, a world in which we are ourselves the cartographers, those freedoms they give you more world. Not the world but other ones to whom you, self delivered makes another piece.
You open a little more of the diagram, that besides perceptions and intuitions take you back to the sensation of slipping into a site. That’s how you realize connected connective possible worlds. There are spaces that encloses themselves as bubbles there are tear out spaces, they became interstitial, porous, as that rupture that dematerializes and disintegrate. You feel the disintegration with the world, the pleasure in your throat and that wants to come out. Comes out as a scream armed with human minds, all of them are possible to be loved.
(…)
This text is its own pornography. This text doesn’t have legs or manner. You don’t know from where to start. If you want, it might not be art. This text, anyhow, is not yours. But right now it became yours.
(…)
You don’t chew what I gave to you. And I take all of it with my hand. I told you brief things. I told you what I thought. Where does it take me to? When I say I don’t know who’s going anymore. That’s what I say. And the heat, the entropy, or the combustion that burns in front of you, and you take with. What I give to you is not me anymore. When I say “then” I already gave to you. So, o que eu dei para você se torna minha boneca por um tempo. (Mas são as minhasguts agora. Você consegue ver isso?) That’s why I chew up to show to you. How is it to you to eat your own guts.
(…)
(Another day) somebody called me. (Not that old men from the street.) He called me as something found out, scared with his own thing, that he was bringing to show me, straight from his past. Wanted because he wanted. My way would be the plot of the drama. He said he read me. He found the proper words. Briefly interpreted me, and told me what was his goal. Showed me his short tongue. Offered me a coffee. Smoking several cigars. One after the other, quicker then I could say anything about his hieroglyphs. Not even without headstone, nothing old as that old, it was just a fresh recovery, of a gesture I don’t recognize. Gestures over a silver matter, as if was a scrawl in an aluminum plaque, an old plate found in the dawn in the street. In the journey between the bar and home-and-studio. I don’t judge. First, I looked for the secrets. He was looking for the relevance of what he was carrying. The memory should be done, I said, for the same one whose secret he himself didn’t knew if existed. Then, it’s when no one knows if this secret has any bottom. I cannot evaluate jewelry. I told him.
(…)
Today I read a text full of “criticism”. Gush everywhere and slippery words, the text affirmed some uncompleteness not to need to defy itself, it alleged a certain independence from that production from the 70’s. It tried to build up its own independence by disconnecting from any and everything. Wanted to create its importance by drifting some experimental beginning that had anything radical at all, but took resource of empty and cheap signs from a tradition one century questioned. Yes, it could exist Rothko, De Kooning, Others, but not that that was supported by means of a simulacrum. And other concepts. The mistake of Baudrillard. The soup of words washing out a discourse without North (and chance). Radicating concepts. Claimed to be theirs. Opening up a terrain of exclusivity. And exclusion. Media by media exchanged anything by any other as if it was anything else, I was watching, and it melted the plastic but it wasn’t as Alphonsus does.
(…)
I’m not talking about controlled word. Not measured word also. I wanted to avoid the gush that is disguised as madness, as looseness, as ( ), I wanted to find the text that would be made of a continued meaning net, all of it opened as loose cunt, all of it straight upright as a pole. That’s why I went through again texts written by myself – I appeal to their holes that I couldn’t remember. If I find them after they became meaningless it is not because they can be reborn again. But it’s because they never had life. (Has life what wasn’t read?)
(…)
If the history would work through forms – and that’s not what is interesting here -, what is it that the concept of history potentializes? (…) Intensities networks. Potentiality maps, as affective insurgences, contamination modes. Makes me think: a historiography that doesn’t “capture”, but one that operates, before, its own abstract machine. Abstract history. Real history.
(…)
The memory of the text (of the talk)
The memory of the usurpation
The power of conservation
The desire of the uneditable
I’m strength against those strengths
I don’t even capture my self
(…)
The object destruction
destructed
—————
perversion
————–
art field
(…)
Make space for the new. Qualify the new. Find dialogue in my own generation.
(…)
They are so dirty. They don’t want to participate. They don’t want because they are ashamed, but because they have an alive nature filled up with re-uses and they built their own fictions by means of the delirious death matter, from the other. Detachment they are the ones who have, as I saw them dragging pipes five or six blocks down road, as I saw them arriving at the corner of the square with the cachaça and the cognac. (This a bit of gold!) And in the quick cataloguing of those drummings configuring instruments and drums, tamboretes and emptiness (you need some emptiness, inside, after all, to make it resound). Me and my belly in that crossing, of converging traffic lights, illuminated without knowing by the police, closest to the ground then anything else (even closer then that flying thing that scratches like nothing else the black dust of the streets), feeling the cracks between the pieces of granite, the sound comes up before to the inside, and after, to the outside. There is dread, there is hole in the t-shirt, there is symbol, anarcho-punk, there are signs that I don’t know. Noise. Scratched. I felt. I felt on my belly the sight without spectacle, see?
(…)
That debate was a meaningless recuperation, for some, of what happened in the 80’s. We saw a film, if it wasn’t embarassing to show, after all, so many of them had stubble, showing their regularity with the curve and the texture of the stone, the spirits rhythm, the sun in the fake canvas, there was no real painting. They took the boat, to that island, they took globo (television) and it was film globo, look at that, film!! The lipstick red, and she wasn’t the only one. Everything was a bit gross, irritable, it wasn’t because they were slowly outrageous, after all, we are in other times, and in such times, look at that sluggishness, of the dialogue! Different points of view. The vision of the fragmentation is that that acknowledges the differences. E as defende? But then what? Authority of the re-signification. To the other one was a historical position. His trunks. Discourse to break this and that. Now he has the same tenor, does he? To devour. How fresh is this memory of his own immeasurability! How fresh… But also, authority to model a discourse from a production, from their own production, or make it their own, also, from the discourse. Will to gather. Happiness, infantilism. Anyhow, after all, pleasure “is (was) imperative to the work”.
(…)
I am an industry. See how I produce a series of, a volcano of manifestos. Extracts, cuts, processes. Analysis. The other, about the other. They did, they said, or they didn’t said. I would call myself a culture industry, not if they didn’t do what they did with that, with the term. Co-opted. Wrong, unfair, anti-aesthetical. Not a person, not collectivity. Productivity, productivism, performativity, reproductivism, performativism, culturalism, classe cultural, capitalism, cognitivism, cognitive capitalism, … What I always wanted, truly, was built up a force against all conservativities. I made an uncertain line between clouds, conservation – experimentation; reproduction – differentiation; authorship, identity – dispersion. Since the beginning. Rupture events. I had in mind, but it wasn’t so clear at the time. A blurry and porous strategy, possible and impossible, invisible machine, truly, an errant diagrammatic body, a fatal doubt about a participation. Perceive and scream, in a short and fragile answer, program that pushes away outside of itself whatsoever creates a terrain of exclusivity, of property, of unequivocality. Sign control? Decoding. A lot I wanted to eradicate, and as a war mission, in the middle of the battle field, I would be able to remove the war-like powers and put in trenches, only trenches, to make think from above the earth, from the intensive struggles, from the ways of defending another thing, matter: expression.
(…)
Who is this you that placed yourself in front of the whole thing? From the extensive moment to your body, organs in reception, deserted in this place without subject or object. Who?
Who is this you that acts, that requires a close sight and places yourself as a sage just as the other one that elaborated the first concatenation? Who do you become, looked after by theory, who would be an archivist in the poiesis of the Archive?
You adopted a montage tool, adopted an open problem. You abandoned yourself in front of the incomplete thing, because you don’t know about other forms. Formalised. I try not to extinguish the possible relations between the times, what can be understood also as subjects of analysis. A decade selected to elaborate the doubts about it (1970). More hypothesis about the dynamics of an art field in Brazil (nowadays). Brazil big thing. Could select another way. I propose, then, to “signal”. (Procedure that no one ever understood.) (My sister said, that I like to say “understand”.) To approximate, to signal, strange affects to an action between the expressed matter, what I “should” do and the historiography incited by the events themselves. I pointed that they are not framable in that “institutional critique” (Fraser), comprehension that would eradicate the heterogeneity of a production that enacts, in other ways, the making-political of a field.
Analyzed events. Archive of emergency. The experience of the art thing (piece). Production, “effected”, assemblage. Investigation, conditions, epistemology (of the arts).
(…)
What happens in an art class? You wait to listen to it all, what the other teachers say. Its a Forum. Radical Education Forum. They have a common background, and then maybe me too. But here… I have to find again this common other, common ground, and think about Jorge and Lenha in a class room. What do they do to people? How they became more generous, they are much more generous, then the general researcher. The severe researcher, the analytical researcher, is itself the archivist acting and manufacturing, nominating fields, but rather, within the participants and interlocutors of their own (parts, parcels, strata). Desafio. I want to listen to. We, me and you, we make ourselves artists. Então você pensa em tudo o que já pensou em desconstruir sobre ser artista para dar suporte a esse território.
territory = meaning
(…)
Being an artist means to take risks. Not knowing what you are doing. Not knowing if the knowledge is applicable to that. Knowing that it is risk, yes. That is it a line of indetermination. Takes risks. And how did I took mines, less and less, since I started to write that way. (One truth, about systems.) I should forget. That’s it. Should invent less should. Said that, I said, I seat down to write manuscripts.
Without being this or that. Without capturing myself. Without wanting to be one body. Love yourself (also).
(…)
Cristina Ribas
*published in Escritos de Artista, Michel Zózimo (ed.) 2013. Porto Alegre.
