Sonorous Desires

Text I wrote published in MS.USE Magazine

“In these moments of subtle pain, it becomes impossible for us, even in dreams, to be a lover or a hero, even to be happy. It is all empty, even the idea of its emptiness. it is all spoken in another language, incomprehensible to us, mere sounds of syllables that find no echo in our understanding. Life, the soul and the world are all hollow. All the gods die a death greater than death itself. Everything is emptier than the void. It is all chaos of nothing.”

Fernando Pessoa (The book of disquiet)


Meital Covo's Somniloquy (2009) is a sound-based piece that exists in multiple forms: as a film with just subtitles, an installation, a performance, and now as a series of images. It was edited from personal sleep talking recordings, collected during 40 nights in April and May 2009, at 41 Manchester Street, London.

In Kutlug Ataman's installation Twelve (2004), twelve people stand before the camera to talk about their previous lifetimes. In this case, language revels a history, refers to geography and ultimately constructs an identity. Even so, language collapses:

"When two different realities of two different life stories are combined in one identity, the syntax fails to work and the structure of language becomes insufficient. Ataman explains this impossibility by the fact that all languages are dependent on the logic of a single life. When this life is doubled or multiplied, the syntax and grammar become confusing and incapable of ensuring a communication."

(Emre Baykal ,http://www.tba21.org/program/current/92/artworks/660?category=current)

Susan Hiller sometimes uses the voice instead of (or as) the body. The physicality of sound is brought forward and placed in close proximity to the audience. She speaks, whispers or chants (Elan, Magic Lantern and Belshazzar’s Feast). She considers sound to be archaic, thus suggesting that language might not be just about communication. In The Last Silent Movie (2007), extinct and endangered languages are gathered, translated and presented on to a black screen; whilst the translation ensures communication, it also evokes a sense of loss.

Similar to Antonin Artaud’s body without organs [1], the voice in Meital Covo's work floats through the airwaves, boundless and disembodied; it is the exhibition of a voice detached from its proprietor. A voice with more severity than we might care to subscribe to. In a sense, a black well stares back at us.
In Somniloquy the voice in the dark reclaims the day it lived prior to being seduced into sleephood. The idea here is to consider this language that has no place in our culture. To pay attention. If we listen (or read) carefully, we fumble our way to chaos.

This language does not belong to sleephood anymore. The artist hijacks her own voice and we become witnesses to this injustice. In effect, we familiarize, with the tone and timbre of her voice and the intimacy of the room (is it a cinema? is it a bedroom?). The artist sets free the becoming of a body, to make a body out of a voice. Meanwhile what is experienced, is a recording surface, a site from which all flows come and go. Her voice is a sonorous desire to bring together the inside and outside. Even so, we need not trouble ourselves with interpretation, as it is the incapability of interpretation which makes this work be affective.



"Only those who are unable to think what they feel obey grammatical rules. Someone who knows how to express himself can use those rules as he pleases."

Fernando Pessoa (The book of disquiet)

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[1] To Have Done with the Judgement of God (Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu), a radio play by Antonin Artaud (1947)

Canonical Grimaces: Franz Xaver Messerschmidt

Invitation to reverie

"My friend, the great Italian cultural critic Enrico Ghezzi, has written about this very thing, Dadda remembered: the invitation to reverie that a visionary cinema can provide, the invitation to become unconscious. No joke."

Notes from "The painter of modern life" by Charles Baudelaire

Beauty is made up, on the one hand, of an element that is eternal and invariable, though to determine how much of it there is is extremely difficult, and, on the other, of a relative circumstantial element, which we may like to call, successively or at one and the same time, contemporaneity, fashion, morality, passion. Without this second element, which is like the amusing, teasing, appetite-whetting coating of the divine cake, the first element would be indigestible, tasteless, unadapted and inappropriate to human nature. I challenge anyone to find any sample whatsoever of beauty that does not contain these two elements.

Notes from Giorgio Agamben "Notes on Gesture"

(In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures seeks to re-appropriate what it has lost while simultaneously recording that loss)

An era that has lost its gestures is, for that reason, obsessed with them; for people who are bereft of all that is natural to them, every gesture becomes a fate.

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For it is only as a gesture in which potential and action, nature and artifice, contingency and necessity, become indiscernible (in the final analysis, therefore, solely as theatre) that the idea of eternal return makes sense.

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Gesture rather than image is the cinematic element.

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Film images are neither 'timeless postures' (like the forms of the classical world) nor 'static sections' of movement, but 'moving sections', images which are themselves in motion, which Deleuze calls 'moving pictures'.

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Because it is centrally located in the gesture, not the image, cinema essentially ranks with ethics and politics (and not merely with aesthetics)

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What characterizes gesture is that in it there is neither production nor enactment, but undertaking and supporting.

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Gesture is the display of mediation, the making visible of a means as such. It makes apparent the human state of being-in-medium and thereby opens up the ethical dimension for human beings.

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In this sense, gesture is the communication of a potential to be communicated. In itself it has nothing to say, because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as a pure potential for mediation. But since being-in-language is not something that can be spoken of in propositions, in its essence gesture is always a gesture of a non-making of sense in language, it always a gag in the strict meaning of the term, indicating in the first instance something that is put in the mouth to hinder speech, and subsequently the actor's improvisation to make up for a memory lapse or some impossibility of speech.

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The essential 'mutism' of cinema (which has nothing to do with either the presence or absence of a soundtrack) is, like the mutism of philosophy, an exposition of the human being's being-in-language: pure gesturality. The Wittgensteinian definition of mysticism as the showing of what cannot be spoken of, is a literal definition of the gag that displays language itself, being-in-language itself, as a giant memory lapse, as an incurable speech defect.

V

Politics is the sphere of pure means, which is to say of the absolute and total gesturality of human beings

A flat theatre

Varro, De Lingua Latina

A person can make (facere) something and not enact (agere) it, as a poet makes a play, but does not act it (agree in the sense of playing a part); on the other hand the actor acts the play, but does not make it. So the play is made (fit) by the poet, but not acted (agitur) by him; it is acted by the actor, but not made by him. Whereas the imperator (the magistrate in whom supreme power is invested) of whom expression res gerere is used (to carry something out, in the sense of taking it upon oneself, assuming total responsibility for it), neither makes nor acts, but takes charge, in other words carries the burden of it (sustinet)

Oh what a beautiful arch! What an elegant piece of architecture!

A society that has lost its gestures seeks to re-appropriate what it has lost while simultaneously recording that loss

Gilles de la Tourette

With the leg as support, the right foot is raised from the ground in a rolling motion from the heel to the tips of the toes, which are the last part to be lifted away: the whole leg is brought forward, and the foot touches down at the heel. At this moment, the left foot, which has completed its roll and now rests only on the tips of the toes, in turn leaves the ground; the left leg is carried forward, moves closely alongside the right leg and goes past it, and the left foot touches the ground at the heel just as the right is finishing its roll forward.