welcome, double agent

It’s 1939. Outside of the night kitchen, flows the Rio Grande. Inside, a slender, black-haired woman is standing with her back to the viewer. This turning away from the camera provides an opportunity for her to pass. She passes into any race or combination there of. But perhaps more salient is that she turns away from the photographer. His name is Russell Lee and he is on the government payroll. As part of the Works Progress Administration, it’s his job to document the tenement farmer in Southern Texas. And his object? She steps to the side.

And so, where then is our gaze forced to land? Mine remains on the reflection of the naked bulb on the window. I don’t go so far as to identify it- but let it linger somewhere between electric artifact, another white excess, and ball of lightening. I know it’s the punctum- that accidental field of the photo that unintentionally punctures the viewer- but to enter its vortex is a grave prospect. It would make this problematic picture an aesthetic experience, with no narrative in sight. And as much as that may pleasure my senses, I think I can do better than that.

Acting as visual editor, I selected this particular photograph for the last pages of the “Passing” issue of Women and Performance, but I never wrote about it in the accompanying text ( visual_selections_passing.doc. ) The image ‘passed over’ depicts a blindingly white kitchen and the back of a woman. The kitchen is so clean, it spooks. Here, a homely structure becomes something more akin to a kitchen’s doppelganger – a stand-in, a stage set- with disconnected plumbing. And although it feels spooked, there is no ghost; the unremitting light ensures something that is haunted by power rather than unbelievable vestiges of folklore or the human dead. The architecture of control vibrates here- even before I provide context

Let me explain what informs my reading of this picture- a picture that consciously attempts to revise the gaze of its viewer. The dirty and unruly US immigrant and its native equivalent- the sharecropper- was a type of image not only produced by 20th century newspapers and government agencies, but fixated on. However, this fixation was not static nor did it stop at seeing: to clean the poor was to control the poor. By forcing showers, shaving their hair and burning the clothes of people, clean or dirty, crossing the border (El Paso, 1910), shame became a weaponry inside and outside of gleaming facilities. Government hygiene initiatives and commercial companies joined ranks; by painting surfaces white and filling the bathroom and kitchen with, what else, white appliances, they convinced the public that they brought errant subjects closer to the right sort of whiteness (a whiteness that paradoxically controls itself and lets itself be controlled), a type of whiteness that has been historically fused with middle class aspirations.

Given this legacy of judgement and intervention , perhaps it is not so strange that the government photographer’s visual access has been limited by his object; he is shown a kitchen where only a single dish is prepared. The very absence of the remains of cooking and eating indicates that the demands of assimilation are performed and produced by the sharecropper, regardless of race. And without the visual remains of spent meals, we can hardly envision unruly bodies that get hungry, eat, and leave messes. And the woman, who refuses the camera, and we presume cleans this kitchen, uses her body and this architecture to participate in modernity’s project. She commandeers its own instruments to deflect its gaze from real people and tender interiors.

(This aesthetic organization of power, accumulated in Lee’s photograph and dependent on control, surface and lightness/whiteness, is hardly an anomaly. Moreover, it does not disappear after 1939 or 1964 or 1992; rather it is just the location that shifts. You might even frame this behavior as rhizomatic- the manner in which it travels underground and horizontally, continously propogating itself. I begin with Lee’s South Texas photograph. I close with West Texas’ Chinati Foundation. But I’m curious about all the other iterations surfacing from Del Rio to Marfa.)

So, as we were blinded by the light and the way it translates the surface of the room within Lee’s photograph, this phenomenon can be repeated, for example, when a person wanders through Donald Judd’s cavalclade of shiny boxes at the Chinati Foundation. Every milled aluminium surface reflects the vacationing spectator without any record of who repairs and maintains the work and I think many viewers seem relieved that they have found an architecture that never questions the history of the structure of looking it encourages.

So when some writers wax positive about the manner in which Judd’s work has no content and resists analysis, I’m wondering what is behind their desire for historic oblivion and the banishment of critical thinking. Is there something about the way in that which is apparently pure thing makes no claims against entitlement that is beguiling? No questions? No demands? This begins to sound like sex work in abstract – we don’t see any bodies, but we know we are using them and we’d like them to take it without a murmur of protest. By paying good money to see the pure thing, perhaps these sort of viewers believe it is thir right to pass out of a capitalist consciousness into a moment of being that seems closer to an American bastardization of transcendence. The fictions of Passing. From one race to another. One class to the next. Of passing out of responsability into a baseline rapture.

Purportedly, some of the Latina housecleaners and Latino groundskeepers responsible for the daily maintainance of the Chinati Foundation swear that the site is haunted. Its assumed they are talking about ghosts. But I pretend that ghost is just codeword for power. So instead of hearing: “I was sweeping up but suddenly I felt like I wasn’t alone. It felt like there was a ghost moving through me”; I hear: I was disturbed because I could feel power moving through me and so I left. And the leaving bit? That is pure fantasy. There are hardly any jobs in that vast desert that aren’t border patrol or ranchwork.

“Approaching Humility/Its Hard to Be Humble” took place in 2003, on the eve of the anniversary of the September 11th attack on the WTC. As noted below, at that point in time, one could still earnestly wonder what the circumstances may have been if the US president, who is purportedly a Christian, had reacted with what is sometimes deemed as ‘true Christian humility’. A liberal response to this call for mediation via Christianity could often be characterized as a certain puzzlement steeped in secular associations with the Hebrew Bible; whereas the reaction from those raised in evangelical households is more likely to be ‘if only…”. Christian or no, it seemed not only tactical to investigate humility but potentially restorative.

Five years later, as the US economy crumples, it appears more likely that humility may be a state imposed from the top down, opposed to an ethical response originating from within and disseminating laterally.

The night of the lecture the room overflowed. Perhaps there were sixty people in that 19th century classroom. Diane Cluck turned the lights off after Paul Chan’s lecture. She lit a candle and played in the remedial light. Dave Deporis sang after Kathleen Graber’s lecture. His singing was raw and some audience members were visibly uncomfortable. Humility and discomfort were not necessarily at odds; they tag teamed one another.

Above: (exhibited at the event) Drawing created in empty truck bed with weights and lead while artist, Dave Ford, drives the vehicle. He was having trouble finding the time to draw given the work he had to do to survive; so he rigged this system within the commercial trucks he drove for a living. Once the goods were delivered, the drawing contraption could be installed for the return home and within these humble parameters, art work was produced.

Here is the description of the speakers and their lectures (Paul Chan, Kathleen Graber, and Joel Ferree), the musicians (Diane Cluck, Dave Deporis) and the artists (Holly Miller, Dave Ford, Austin Thomas, Goat Island): approaching-humility.doc

James Vicente was instrumental to the planning and orchestration of this event.

A column for Cabinet: An Arts and Culture Quarterly: The Thing

While living in New Mexico, I came across a glass display case at the university’s medical library that contained ephemera from the Tuberculosis retreats located in the surrounding desert in the teens and 1920’s. One panel documented a longer history of TB treatments within the greater US and included a fragile drawing made by a Kentucky TB patient, uncannily similar to the creature in question.

Prepared for the Speleological Oral History Record in April of 1912 by Phineas Hamil of the Kentucky State Cave` Society

In a more southernly county of Kentucky- and before the Civil War- Stephen Bishop, a slave speleologist, of African and white descent, dunked his hands in a sluggish and warm underground stream located within the cave that he regularly described as “grand, gloomy, and peculiar” to the tour groups he led for his master; when his hands emerged from the stream, he held within them a small, blind, luminescent creature from the phylum arthropoda. This freshwater troglodyte was the size of his fingernail. Stephen Bishop knew everything about these caverns –the fugitive slaves that took shelter underground before they continued northward, the paleo-indian mummies, the slender glass lizards, the pistolgrip mussels, the black gypsum deposits. However, he was not familiar with this animal. It was laterally compressed – not unlike whale lice or skeleton shrimp- and when he cracked open its legs they were hollow; its body cavity was an open space where tissue, sinuses and blood loosely floated.

Several years later, Dr. John Croghin, the new owner of the cave and of Stephen Bishop, had twelve wood and stone huts built within the cavern because he believed that the perpetually cool and humid air would heal the botched lungs of tuberculosis patients. Several died, the rest fled to drier climes, but one remained long enough to draw the only extant drawing of Stephen Bishop’s Troglodyte. The last specimen was found that year of experimental cavern treatment, in a silty pond not far from the huts. The creature was hardly breathing and it could not stand the weakest light, averting its so-called face, (which was translucent and smooth, save an orifice for eating) from the candle’s flame. Underneath the drawing, the artist cum tubercular patient inscribed in careful cursive: Croghin’s Troglodyte. Despite Stephen Bishop’s eventual manumission and the departure of other freed slaves in the township to Liberia, he stayed behind and died there. * * *

“The Thing”, a column in Cabinet: an Arts and Culture Quarterly, invites writers to conjure an imaginary history for an object that appears to have no easily locatable proviniance or use. Mary Walling Blackburn wrote the above description of an unidentified organic form for the magazine issue that focused on the Average.

Although this Cabinet column is supposed to give license to fantasy, certain aspects were lifted from the historical record. For example, tuberculosis (TB) was often treated in arid desert climes and Albuquerque was one of the “White Plague” (as it was then referred to) destinations. Another fact cited is that Dr. John Croghin owned and operated an unsuccesful TB sanitarium in Mammoth Cave. Finally, Stephen Bishop, was a flesh and blood slave speliologist who, according to some sources, declined manumission and a second life in Liberia. Contrary to some reader’s perceptions, the quote within the article’s guesswork, is in fact Bishop’s. He often gave tours to New England litterati (as Emerson and Thoreau’s constituents were known to trek here) and lectured with a similar erudition. Bishop was adept at discovering parts of the cave previously unknown to 19th century Kentuckians and locating signs of ancient Native American exploration. The cave was originally a saltpeter mine operated by slaves. (Saltpeter is a nitrate-rich soil used in gunpowder production).

Today, the cave is situated within a National Park and offers an artist residency.

The residency is not situated within the cave. The image above appears to be documentation of a performance in Mammoth Cave where young bearded men enjoy re-enactment drag (AKA Allison Smith). It isn’t. Kleitman, the “Father of Sleep“, the first sleep researcher and author of the seminal text, “Sleep and Wakefulness”, is investigating circadian rhythms. It is 1938. They have set up a bed on the gunpowder floor of the cave. The milky water pitcher, the flowered coverlet, the manner in which he kneels beside his patient communicate a sort of tenderness generally not associated with scientific research.

In regards to the parts where Albuquerque and tuberculosis are cited: The back alleys of Albuquerque often provide a clear view into the backyards of many houses. Situated at the backend of many lots are small inhabitable shacks that were originally built to house TB patients who had travled to New Mexico for treatment. In 1913, 50% of ABQ households contained a TB patient. 90% of these patients had traveled from out of state for treatment in New Mexico.Most of the sanitariums have been demolished. But another telltale remain of TB architecture are back porches with awnings, where patients with blood-filled lungs inhaled cool night air. Conversely, the stone huts in Mammoth Cave was filled with moist air and its patients died within a year.

“The Bull Rider and the Ballerina: Towards a Taxonomy of Falling”, by Mary Walling Blackburn, was published in the Flight issue of Cabinet: An Arts and Culture Quarterly.

Cabinet requested a photograph of my grandfather, a bull-rider and bronc-buster, to accompany the text below. However, the picture album of his rodeo wins and the winner’s belts disappeared with an old British girlfriend decades ago. She was untrackable. And because, ultimately, he had treated her so poorly, it was uncertain as to whether the album even existed anymore. Consequentially, he was represented by a photo that could be any cowboy mannequin read through various heterosexual and homosexual range life mythologies. The generic cowboy hardly communicated my grandfather’s lone dog rage or his ruinous sorrow- because this photo was a stand in- a performing cowboy.

And me, I perform class as well, multiple classes and sometimes many at once. That is what is at core to this text. How is class perfomed and who takes the fall for its inequities, its graceless dismount? How does class warp the form that gravity’s struggle takes?

The article originated in a course entitled, “Falling”, taught by Andre Lepecki in the Performance Studies Department at NYU. Professor Lepecki provided Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theater” but he also spoke of Monk crawling on his hands and knees from his piano to the bar and how that was somehow in correlation to the devastating space between the ecstasy of playing and the depths of the return to “this”, a world after the last note resolves itself. And unforgettably, rising from the remains of syncope- white spectatorship looms. Given this power imbalance, it becomes not unreasonable to ask, who does Monk fall for? Are his falls and resurrections repossessed by the Great White Other? And I wondered about my grandfather’s body, dragged from under a bull, drugged with drink, breaking the beast over and over again. For whose pleasure and whose salvation?

This article had a second life outside of the magazine. The board that administers the Canadian version of the SAT’s include a passage in the essay section. Callow, stressed, teenage Albertans are forced to analyze my class anxieties in Calgary gymnasiums. Is it fair? Do they remember?

This introduction will fold with the image below-a geometry of Basque sheepherders in Idaho [look closely]… perhaps its the loaner picture I would have liked to accompany the published text. Although his heart exploded, while walking down the street in Houston, my grandfather started here, in Idaho, in a town surrounded by ranches and their sheep, and a town eventually irradiated by Montsano’s chemical operations . I visited long after this article was published.

A geyser was located behind the town hotel; it discharged its spume by a timer installed by engineers. We ate in the hotel’s lunch hall and learned that my cousin, a rancher, had just sold the last of her sheep and she said it was a relief. While we ate, we learned that my Grandfather’s brother was beaten to death by local cops and maybe illogically, we felt new grief for old grievances. I know I imagined his brother’s body flying through the air from the force of their boots and finally, his falling to the ground, which is so green there.

To read the Bullrider and the Ballerina open this file: the-bull-rider-and-the-ballerina.doc

The Brooklyn Rail published the “Fire Manifesto” by M.W.Blackburn (November 2004).

Because I was teaching NYU art students how to write about art, the Fire Manifesto’s original purpose was to provide a quick, rough example of how a manifesto can be light, exploratory, and hopefully, a little bit off kilter- persuading its artist-reader to make her way towards weirder climes. Essentially, the “Fire Manifesto” claims that all art is improved if one simply adds flames. It is obviously one-dimensional and fails to include any real analysis of fire and its relationship to illuminated souls or revolutionary destruction.

Pictured below is the baby of evangelist Billy Sunday, lying naked on a pillow on a table in a room. The baby’s papa has a fire sermon in him we could just as easily call a secular manifesto.

The photograph was taken in Chicago in 1917. The exposure itself plays at sermon- referancing an old faith that made mangers of tenements and hay of newspaper copy. Each object appears to be degrading at the edges- whether it is swollen with a stain, breaking away at the edge or finely glowing. I find myself focusing on the hand raised to the air- a clean human claw testing the temperature. I find my eye floating upward to a pale rag hung on the door and then it just continues to circulate as if the gaze, too, could be a divine presence.

(The photograph remains in the Library of Congress.)

At the same time that I was writing the “Fire Manifesto”, I was working on an autobiographical essay, “C or F”, about a fire I had witnessed as a child in the desert and a preliminary exploration of the summers I spent with my biological father, a fundamentalist Christian, and his family. Somehow, each text careens close to fire without immolation. This is a problem.

Here is “C or F” (June 2004):

C or F
(Corrupted Hearts) (Fire) (A Memoir in Minor)

We stood in our yard while the desert burned. We stood in dirty bathing suits. The fire came down the hills towards us, my brother, my sister and I, and we watched. We looked straight through the dark to the bright sky directly above the smoke.

There were no trees to obstruct the view. There was endless sunshine. There was a hose in my hand. My brother and I had been flooding good water into every available ant hole. On the hills, helicopters flew in place over the burning houses; they treaded air. And my siblings beside me, small and sun burnt and strong, their hair blew around and it was the color of fire.

The yards flamed. Wild rabbits ran through burning creosote and cholla cacti. Their rabbit ears were singed and they were separated from father and mother.

Later, walking on the blackened earth, our eye stopped at the fine soot line where the flames had ended and the yellow grasses began again. Our house, followed soon after- never touched.

My stepmother warned us that the devil had made those shirtless boy children set fire to the desert that day. But it seemed to me that the boys who were burning their parents’ homes weren’t so much moved by the devil, as it was that the hands of god were moving through them- their parents were paying for taking what wasn’t theirs.

But how come the fire stopped short, I wondered? Why weren’t we subsumed?
We, too, had stolen land from an unnamed Native American tribe; to be precise, just enough land to build a three-bedroom track-housing unit surrounded by ant holes.

At eight years old, whether I looked at the burnt earth or highway wreckage or silky television footage of explosions and massacres, it simply seemed like some humans weren’t going to wait for hell to punish us; god’s will would move through us like lightening and we’d figure out ways to punish ourselves right here on earth – in this lifetime.

In this lifetime, we lived on Micmac Street in the Mojave Desert. The Micmacs were nowhere to be seen. This was because they are a Native American tribe that lives in the Northeastern Maritime. Their name emblazoned on a Californian signpost was part of my education in dislocation and appropriation. But the tribe wasn’t haunting the space by name alone- it was an emptier transaction than that. The tribal signage was a home school lesson in subtraction that bordered on the conceptual; a simple set of diminishing numerals were swapped for bodies separated from language.

Yet I knew white property, including our property, was suspect and I came to this early. My biological father was the sort of born-again Christian who also adored a sort of property-less and holy pseudo “Super Indian” he had single-handedly conjured. His “Super Indian” combined all the traits of all Native American tribes in one; “Super Indian” was a kind of companion Jesus- his bonus.

My father encouraged us to be like the “Super Indian”. We were to embody “Super Indian’s” love of wilderness, his relationship to animals, and his suspicion of ownership and outsiders. At the same time that we indulged our father’s redface minstrelsy, we felt tremendous guilt for what had been done onto the Super Indian/Jesus in order to ensure our own spiritual and material survival. But when we hiked through fenced properties, we continued to make up pseudo Super Indian names and suck on stones to distract ourselves from dehydration. The signs we ducked under read, “Trespassers will be shot”, and my father always recycled the same gesture, raising his fingers to his lips in the universal sign for silence. Later, we would thank God for our safe passage.

My born-again Christian family spent years, and I spent the summers I lived with them, navigating, this Fundamentalist Christian Imaginary –and in that burning desert, we voiced our fantasies in the form of prayer. Sure we praised piecemeal deliverance but we also prayed for a punishment that swept us clean of sin; a safe passage through a valley of death; a desert void of gunmen and pornographers. But these fantasies, masochistic and unrealistic, were unrequited.

And other visions rose in their deficit: when we hiked, my tall, pretty father always tucked a revolver into the back of his pants, between back and belt. Once he pointed to a concrete fortress in the distance and told us that he was dead sure that pornography was shot there. I imagined porn stars pressing their breasts and penis’ into the newly poured wet concrete driveway, the way we children pressed our hands into a fresh sidewalk.

The Final Fantasy is the Imaginary Fire: my family ‘s house exploding in flames and the blaze stopping short of our very old white Volkswagen bug. All would pile into the car – biological father, step-mother, half-sister, half-brother, foster brother, foster-sister, self, dogs and cat – and because my father had set his racing pigeons loose at the last moment, hundreds would fly in circles above where our home had been. Steam from the earth would rise up to meet them. The heat would touch their wings and they would fly higher. Underneath their formation, we would drive to Lotta Burger – the cheapest fast food burger joint in town – and before we began eating – we would- as always- link hands around the plastic table – bow our heads, shut our eyes – and say grace. Dear Lord thank you for this burger and fries…. and this time we would add And Lord, thank you for saving us from the flames that swallowed our home. We are eternally grateful.

In 2000, Issue 162 of Aperture Magazine contained my brief introduction to a group of New York-based visually impaired photographers; the interviews were conducted when I was then an Assistant Editor at Aperture and was working on the accompanying book, entitled “Shooting Blind”. Some images never entered the book.

At the time, one of the photographers, a woman in her eighties, who died a year later, asked me if I would model nude for her. I couldn’t turn down her request because her enthusiasm for nudity was old-fashioned and innocent and because she was my elder. But the photo could not be included in the book that I was editing and she was in. That was our agreement. I went to her apartment in Upper Manhattan and we took the images with the help of her assistant. The lights were dark and she used a flashlight to illuminate the body, my body. Later, she would have to subject the photos to enormous powers of magnification to see what she had made. I saw the contraption in her bedroom- a beige machine- blowing up letters, mechanically engorging images with volume and light.

Metaphorically, these vestigal images that exist within the body of work but outside of the publication are a strange monstrosity– extra and excommunicated. Although the excised photos are almost eclipsed by what has been disseminated,they still lie in the dark of the editor’s head. They reorganize themselves: here is Victorine Floyd-Flood’s self-portrait- where her bony, dark-skinned face melts against a smear of dimly lit ancient and flower-patterned wallpaper. There is the image of me, stretched out, thin, white, and naked on a couch. My skin is glowing but the head appears severed from the body; a strip of darkness cuts across the throat.

The book that was not a book.
These imaginary archives and manuscripts that only pose as book aren’t unmentionable or unheard of.
Marguerite Duras speaks of the night that is a book. Paul Gaugain continuously declares that his publication,“Avec et Apres” will not exist as the object you presume it to be: “This is not a book.”

And it charms; that he tells us that what we hold in our hands cannot be. And these images also resist common assumptions of what cannot be – that interior vision wends its way to the surface- erupting in images that may be too baroque or sweet or hungry for our tastes. It can embarrass us – a book that is weird and light-pocked and personalized. Although, I’m glad this book does not align itself with the current ‘cool’, I also long for the other book- unsupportable, unpublished.

The original Aperture article by M.W.Blackburn: shooting-blind.doc

The Domestic Struggle Part Two, according to curator Mike Wolf and the Network of Casual Art, is a series of travels, social events and an exhibition intended to draw links with, and speculate about, remote enclaves, marginal and alternative domesticities, caravans, refugia, retreats, marginal travel infrastructures, rural cultural networks, rarefied spaces, and hopeful place making.

The exhibition landed at Roots and Culture in October, 2008. Contrary to the associations (herbal and anthropological) one might have ascribed to the name of the gallery, it is a non-commercial arts space located in Chicago, Illinois. Wolf produced an accompanying pamphlet for “The Domestic Struggle Part 2″, soliciting writing from the participants. Wolf requested a fragment of a longer fictional work, “Begin Civil Twilight”, by M.W.Blackburn because the text’s narrators traversed the state of Minnesota, which is a state that figures largely in the show.

Here is a fragment of the M.W. Blackburn text, porch_ontology.doc, included in Wolf’s pamphlet.

When an email regarding the show was initially sent, a photo, featured below, of Air Force One flying President Bush over Gutzon Borglum’s Mount Rushmore was included, at my bequest. Gutzon Borglum and his gigantic sculpture works in contradiction to the Network of Casual Art; he resists place, displaces the local, and produces enemies with a breathtaking totality.

The National Park Services’ biography of Gutzon Borglum, linked above, will reveal his work prior to Rushmore, which includes a public battle over the gender of angels and a cursory history of Stone Mountain, the site of a botched memorial to major confederate leaders. Stone Mountain, later became a location for Klu Klux Klan gatherings and Mount Rushmore, an embattled ground for the Lakota Sioux who consider the carved open site sacred. Furthermore, Susan B. Anthony was the congress appointed (1937) fifth head never carved.

Arhitentonski Ninja means Ninja Architecture. It refers to the subterranean and marginally legal activities of the now deceased ‘Ninjaliscious’. He was a Canadian who specialized in scaling walls, rowing out to abandoned ships, limning rooftops, and the like. His zine was entitled “Infiltration.” M.W.Blackburn interviewed him for ‘Loudpaper: Dedicated to Increasing Architectural Discourse” (Volume 3, Issue 3, 1997). In June of 2004, Zarez, a Croatian biweekly paper, located in Zagreb, translated the article and republished it as “Arhitentonski Ninja.”

An excerpt from Ninjaliscious’s chronicle of the urban explorer:

“November 1793: Philibert Aspairt, considered by some the first cataphile, becomes lost while exploring the Parisian catacombs by candlelight. His body is found 11 years later.”

“1968: Inspired by the publications of the French resistance that operated through the catacomb network during WWII, Parisian cataphiles begin adopting pseudonyms and communicating with each other through printed paper leaflets they call tracts.”

Utility Pit, graphite on paper, 18″ x 12″, 2006.

Infiltration, An Attempt: January 2008

SK drove me to a series of old WWII munitions bunkers outside of Joliet, Illinois during hunting season. She had forgotten that the preserve was also a hunting ground and we were not wearing orange. In fact, we were wearing black and brown, as if we were a couple of hyper thyroid woodland beasts out for a murderous stroll. Each bunker was dusted in snow and it appeared that we were walking through a great avenue of burial mounds. We ate a picnic on a pile of wood and we failed to infiltrate the bunkers. They had been locked tight since her last visit, but we could hear the volumes of space within when SK knocked on the door. The sound took a long time to return to us. On our return, a man with large bow and arrow strode past. In the parking lot, other sleepy white men unloaded bicycles and weapons.

Jeanette Winterson cites another penetration of public space, but it is not in the league of a man-boy “buildering” the Sears tower with suction cups or a skateboarder mastering a cement ditch. Miraculously, it involves disrupted hunters on bicycles:

“In the late ‘60’s and 70’s she [Rebecca Horn] worked on one of my favourite pieces, Unicorn, where she made a costume for a fellow-student, and sent her walking in the woods, wearing it, at dawn one summer day. It is a cross between performance and installation. It is ridiculous and sublime. The woman is naked, except for her modest bandaging, and ‘there is a large unicorn (einhorn) on her head. ‘She agreed to wear it, albeit grudgingly, as she was very bourgeois.’
Rebecca Horn always laughs when she tells this story, and of the hunters who ‘fell off their bicycles.’ She likes her audience to collide with her work. She likes to unseat us.” Like a ninja? No. Like a ninja-unicorn hybrid? No. But the work does manage to be stealthy and magical. Moreover, it situates itself outside of permanent buildings AND the regular ways a body might rebel against the infrastructure.

“The Language of Explosion: Documenting Nuclear Craters in the American West”, by Mary Walling Blackburn, was published in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory in the issue on “falling” in the autumn of 2004.

The visual phenomenology of the crater has hardly been critically exhausted. For example, the article does not touch upon the photographs of bomb craters, created and photographed during the Vietnam War. On photos posted on veteran’s web sites, the craters take on multiple architectual dimensions- swimming pool, fish farm, emergency room. Where whence exploded bodies lay, soldiers swim. In other flooded craters, Vietnamese farmers raise fish. In the bottom of a dry bomb crater, US soldiers place their wounded men until the helicopter can evacuate. And so on.

To inhabit the crater, swimmer or the farmer, appears to have no truck with death. The swimmer or farmer defies culturally held notions that horror is locationally situated and that to dwell in its remains contaminates. But when they set up shop in craters, is it a cool refution of the past or is it a trembling dare? Does the crater dweller refuse to see a boundary between death and himself? And what of the viewer’s boundaries? How do we reconcile the fact that we notice the swimmer’s body in something that isn’t entirely outside of desire or the desire to laugh?

In the photo below, taken outside of Tay Ninh, the emerging soldier’s legs have been stripped of color; the photographer muses that perhaps the chemicals in the water had contaminated them all. And if we follow through on this line of thinking and realize that environmental cancers are sometimes created by this kind of contamination, we realize that a death by explosion can travel very slowly from a long ways of off. In an interview, Dee Dee Ramone (of the Ramones) describes an uncle who faught for the Nazis in Russia for six years. When he returns home to Germany, he goes swimming in a bomb crater and drowns. Making sense of this enemy soldier’s death is not unlike gaging the distance of the storm by its thunder; we can count the miles between explosive sound and its contact with the body.

Here is the pdf for “The Language of Explosion” language_of_explosion.pdf

“The Library is on Fire: Wood as Cultural Signifier”, by M.W.Blackburn, was published by ctheory (“an international journal of theory, technology, and culture) in January of 2007. The first draft was prepared for a conference, Words, Images, and the Framing of Social Reality, Graduate Faculty department of Liberal Studies, New School of Social Research.

Here is the link to the article

At the conference, a small homemade pamphlet (with an earlier version of the text published by ctheory) was distributed throughout the room. It was illustrated by small watercolors.

The paper was not read aloud; people could read the dense network of theory and observation later. Instead, other examples of burning libraries and perverted uses of wood were relayed and the oral transmission of lost information provided another model for storage, fragments passed from body to body. In that moment, a news story was retold- of US soldiers in Iraq bulldozing an ancient fruit orchard because village interviews had not revealed any data that was useful for the army. One soldier blared jazz music as he carried out his orders –crushing palm, orange, and lemon trees. Another soldier broke down and cried. The villagers stood beside. When the bulldozer was turned off, they gathered the wood for fire.

“Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: “They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn’t capture anything. They didn’t find any weapons.”"

“…Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a
distraught voice: “It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked
me how much my hands were worth.” [from The Independent, October 12, 2003]