"Making Words - Moscow Poetry Club" is a collaborative project bringing together visual art and poetry, especially created for the 53rd International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, under the Artistic direction of Daniel Birnbaum. The starting point of "Making Words" was a performance that took place in September 2008, during the annual visual arts festival Action Field Kodra in Thessaloniki, the fruit of a collaboration between the Moscow Poetry Club and ArtBOX with poets Vassilis Amanatidis and Evgeny Nikitin. For the 2009 Venice Biennale, director Daniel Birnbaum invited us to further develop that initial idea. The project consequently evolved into a collaborative platform which included two visual art works: "Common Cause" by Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina and "Poets Machine" by Yioula Chatzigeorgiou, as well as the Making Words Platform, designed by architect Giannis Epaminondas. All three installations were presented at the Giardini – in the open space between the Brazilian and the Greek pavilions. During the Biennale preview (3-6 June), the Platform was used as the stage for performative readings of poetry, mostly by the poets themselves, in their original language – launched with a reading by Daniel Birnbaum. During the Biennale, the Platform, incorporating a documentation of the preview performative readings, and "Common Cause" remained at the Giardini until the end of August 2009, when they were disassembled and transported to Thessaloniki, to be presented in the context of the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art. Intro
In September 2008, a poetry performance took place in the frame of the annual visual arts festival “Action Field” in Thessaloniki, Greece. This project was the outcome of the collaboration between Stella Art Foundation’s Poetry Club and ArtBOX.gr. Poets Eugeny Nikitin (Russia) and Vasilis Amanatidis (Greece) presented live readings of their work within the context of a visual arts exhibition space. After the event, the recordings of the live reading performance were played back within the exhibition space for the duration of the festival. The project was received with enthusiasm by art critics and the public alike.
Daniel Birnbaum’s decision to include this project in his exhibition “Making Worlds”, in the 53rd Venice Biennale opened up new dimensions. This invitation became an opportunity to collaborate with more institutions in order to further expand upon the relationship between art and poetry. For this iteration, the Greek element was represented by poets Vassilis Amanatidis (Greece) and Daphne Nikita (Cyprus). Architect Giannis Epaminondas was invited to design a Platform - stage for the poetry readings; artists Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina were commissioned to produce "Common Cause" - an installation inspired by the project's theme; finally, artist Υioula Hatzigeorgiou was commissioned to produce her work "Poets Machine", a mechanism that transforms the poets’ voices into water surges projected onto the Platform’s surfaces. After its presentation in Venice, “Making Words” is presented in Thessaloniki (Greece), within the framework of the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art. Here, the artists produce new versions of their works, that are presented alongside a documentation of everything that happened in Venice, and a two days’ programme of performances and actions by Greek poets. The poetry performances programme is curated by Vassilis Amanatidis and Daphne Nikita, always in collaboration with Moscow Poetry Club of the Stella Art Foundation. Lydia Chatziiakovou, Christos Savvidis Co-Curators of the Project Poetry must be made by All! Transform the World!
Fare Mondi, Making Worlds, 세계만들기, Φτιάχνοντας Κόσμους, Sozdavanje Svetovi, Domhain á gCruthú, Stvaranje Svjetova, Facere de Lumi, Pasauļu Radīšana, Karoutsel Ashkharhner, 世界を構築する, Að búa til heima, יוצרים עולמות, Dünyalar Yaratmak…
It is perhaps not so easy to translate the title of this year’s Venice Biennale into every language, but if Édouard Glissant, the major theorist of creolization is right, the translation act itself is a way of making the world richer. With every language we lose, the imagination of the world is impoverished. With every translation of a poem into another language, our collective imaginary universe is enhanced to a new level. “The world is becoming creolized,” explains Glissant, “that is to say that the cultures of the world are furiously and knowingly coming into contact with each other, changing by exchanging, though irremediable collisions and ruthless wars – but also through breakthrough of moral conscience and hope.” The most productive collision is that of a poem being transformed from one langue to the next. The Moscow Poetry Club, a truly polyphonic contribution to the Biennale, will let the languages collide, and thus adds an entirely new dimension, many new dimensions, to Fare Mondi, Stvaranje svjetova, Creaza lumi, Skapa världar, Dünyaları yaradarkən, Fazer mundos... Nothing could be more welcome. As Lautréamont exclaimed: “Poetry must be made by all.” I want to add: Transform the world! Daniel Birnbaum Director, 53rd International Art Exhibition Making Worlds – Venice Biennale |
Making Words / Moscow Poetry Club Making Words on on Vimeo. Making Words by Makis Faros on Vimeo. Presentation of the project for the Greek National TV, by Katerina Zaharopoulou (ΕΠΟΧΗ ΤΩΝ ΕΙΚΟΝΩΝ) (in Greek)
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The Making Words Platform
[installation] [device] [platform]
Poets Machine / The Ark of Poetry
The “Making Words” project aspired to bring the pure language of poetry into a visual arts festival, where all the great arts had long infiltrated by means of various projects and collaborations. The problem with this particular poetry project was that a “spatial foundation” was necessary to house it, to make it singular and discernible from the other presentations at the exhibition, but at the same time to identify it by the variation of its own significance. It needed a certain “space” which would be neither closed, permanent, nor conventional and which would bear no resemblance to the national pavillions at the Giardini where the Biennale is held, or with the architecture which characterizes them. It needed a non-pavillion. Perhaps, it needed exactly a Peripteron (with the traditional meaning of the word in ancient temple architecture). An inverted peri-pteron, turned inside-out, with the arcade on the inside and the walls outside. At the same time, a pedestal to recite and to house events, an orchestra and scene, a stage in theatrical terms. Finally, since the whole project had already become autonomous and was ready to tour, a crate was necessary in order to transport the construction. Crate-stage-peripteron: the solution was quickly formed into what we had baptized as the “Ark of Poetry”. A crate / capsule / cocoon, which on the one hand stores and protects the project’s contents, and on the other delivers the weary language of poetry and transports it to the ends of the world like a nomad, a message in a bottle filled with the treasures of Logos. A stage / receptor, on which poets and others present, recite, perform or even act and undergo the anguish of an ancient Greek tragedy. An autonomous peripteron, open in nature, discrete in its presence and suggestive in its utility, which defines a Place inside the vast space of the Biennale’s Public Gardens. The peripteron is the simplest architectural form in syntax: the outline of a cube which acts as a transport crate with steel edges, dressed with wooden lids which, when closed, resembles a wooden crate and, when opened, transforms into a stage for action. Some of these lids / modula open and close using hinges, while others can be assembled to grant the stage with alternate shapes. The steel cube always remains in place as a shelter-refuge-landmark and emerges from inside the stage as the Peripteron itself. This was the background on which visual art with poetry were interwoven: artist Yioula Hatzigeorgiou recorded the reciting in real time and used a self-made mechanism to convert the sound into fluid, watery vibrations, which she filmed and played back on screens placed on and around the stage. This way, poetry was converted into imagery via water: a type of phonography resembling party lights which employ lamps –in this instance screens– discretely framed and accompanied the poetic action. We envisioned the cube with the project’s titles written on its sides as it traveled from one country to the next via boats, trains, trucks and airplanes, like some baggage with stickers, unfolding at each stop into a stage, to transmit / recite and then to refolding, to pick up and move on again… In practice, during the opening of the Biennale the cube functioned as stage as well as scenery. There were poets who appropriated it, who saw it as a pedestal to recite from, as a stage to act out their poetry; they stood and sat on it, climbed, played and used it in every way. There were those who preferred to recite from the ground while standing in front of it without interaction and letting the cube serve as a background. A model of an oven by Makarevich and Yelagina had been set up nearby tallying the stage, with three Jacob’s ladders leading to exaltation. Bread and water were handed out to everyone creating a scene of biblical times. Others held an entire performance, some played chess while someone tore the garment-sack he was wearing, letting the sand which burdened him escape as he freed himself to recite. Another hung her writings like laundry on a rope with clothes pegs. There were modest and moderate ones, dramatic and pompous, intense and calm, practical and concise, narrative, minimalists, out of control and just before the verge… In any case, the cube provided poetic recital with something more than just a lectern: it provided a Place. It defined a background for action, it stood as a receptor with no limitations, it incorporated nature and open space into language and freed imagination and utilization. More so –for us who attended the four-day poetry marathon– it imparted an acoustic afterimage to recital, a memory which prolonged each action and immersed it with the next one, allowing them to amalgamate, compare and coexist. That which would otherwise be lost in the vastness of an unshaped landscape, now obtained boundaries, it became anchored and received form, it multiplied through the artist’s screens and registered in memory as an integrated action with a specific spatial setting. The cube / stage / crate / poets’ machine attracted poetry goers as wells as the unsuspecting curious passerby, into an open festival of language, image and action, resembling a rock concert, a picnic in nature, a performance of ancient theatre and a friendly gathering for chat. In this “museum conformity” of the Giardini, the cube flourished like a bizarre flower, like the remnant of another carefree time and as a promise of a vigorous frequency which transcends formalisms, as well as poetry’s narcissistic isolation. It brought Language into a strictly visual environment, elevating poetry’s potential to collaborate and diffuse with architecture, technology and the performing arts. Giannis Epaminondas Architect |
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Common Cause II
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Giardini, Venice, Italy |
Making Words / Poets MachineYioula Hatzigeorgiou’s “Poets Machine” is a work-in-progress that engages with poetry. The project unfolds on multiple levels: it is a wooden cube that can be transformed into a platform for the presentation of video projections and poetry performances; folded, it serves as a crate for the transportation of the project and its props to various destinations; it is also designed to generate a series of interactive projections that transform the poets’ readings into water surges through a mechanism designed by the artist; finally, the project also unfolds virtually as an interactive website – which doubles as an archive documenting the project’s evolution. In her text, Maria Marangou describes Hatzigeorgiou’s contribution as “A participatory work, humble by nature, inducing references to the spectator it addresses, free from narrative connotations. In a way, the piece remains open to host another work on its surface, preserving the autonomy of a semiology of poetry, that is entirely its own”.
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Giardini, Venice, Italy
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Texts
Poets Machine – Commentary in the name of a machine
Dr. Sotirios Bahtsetzis, art theorist, curator
“Sarah, Sarah with what does the world begin? - With speech? - With vision?”
(Jacques Derrida)
In the text “What is a dispositif?”, Gilles Deleuze attempts a personal reading of this concept in the same manner with which it develops in the work of another great philosopher of this era, one to whom Deleuze dedicated one of his monographs. According to Deleuze’s interpretation of Michel Foucault’s work, the nearly untranslatable term dispositif becomes a focal point of expression for present philosophical envisagement. According to Foucault, the dispositif (which can be rendered in English as a system or deployment) consists of the interaction between a heterogeneous set of “discourses, institutions, laws and regulations”, which through a specific historical figuration, produces forms of authority and knowledge.[1] To be more precise, the “deployment” includes all the technologies that support this production and formation of authority and knowledge. The other term used often and along with dispositif is apparatus, which is perhaps more appropriate at revealing the “technological” substance of these processes. In this case of course, one needs to comprehend the term technology on a greater scale, not just as applying scientific knowledge to create objects that would benefit us, but –as Martin Heidegger did when he used the neologism “Ge-stell” to describe the technological method of organizing and regulating life– as a fundamental anthropologic component of the modern world.
Architecture is an example of these personal and social technologies. According to Deleuze, when conceived as technologies, architecture like painting and every other system of visual representation function as “machines which make us see and speak”[2] and somehow comprise a type of visual machines and mechanisms which produce verbal enouncements and discourse. (For example, the “prison-mechanism” is a “visual machine used to see without being seen”.) Reversing Deleuze’s dictum, we could say that every visual machine, like architecture and painting, function like Foucaultist machine-prisons, but also that, according to Foucault, prison is not necessarily a negative concept but more likely a necessary state of human subjectivism. Similarly to the importance of a shell for a snail’s survival, the human subject at the end of anthropocentric thinking –or as an anime director would say, “A Ghost in the Shell”, needs these repulsive, perhaps, and often paranoid prison-machines of surveillance, restraint and conservation. And art has provided many such examples like the machine in Kafka’s correctional colony, Morel’s invention in Casares’ homonymous short story, Roussel’s machines in “Locus Solus” and Jarry’s “Supermale”, Duchamp’s glass paintings, Burroughs’ devices in his book “The Electronic Revolution” and numerous architectural fantasies –a constant progression of Piranesi’s “carceri d’ invenzione”–, the machine is always the vessel of this painful process of subjectivism. Accordingly, the term dispositif becomes revealingly explicit in regards to this aspect of interpretation since its etymology refers to the term disposition, to the mental state, to a physical disposition.
Deleuze therefore ponders that since Foucault in his work demonstrated the historical conditions through which the various models (the dispositif-technologies) where introduced, such as general hospitals in the 17th century, clinics in the 18th, prisons in the 19th, the concept of subjectivity in ancient Greece and later in Christianity, all that is left for us to do is to inquire about today’s modern ways of subjectivism in continuance to these models.[3] Deleuze’s question is of course a rhetorical one, since he has already proposed one such modern dispositif of subjectivism; cinematography. Recollecting Heidegger’s prophetic realization that “the fundamental incident of modern times is the conquest of the world as an image”, we only need to look around us and to realize that the modern Foucaultist prison-machine is every image found on the internet and television, in every influential printed material, every film that becomes a model of reality and in every advertisement and logo. As Tom Holert characteristically notes while referring to the American television show “The West Wing”, “the television dispositif can be seen as a technology of government which controls life’s tempo, directs our attention, regulates our state of mind, creates jobs and fuels productivity”.[4] We watch television and we realize that the political and visual authorities have disharmoniously intersected on both a symbolic and operational level. It’s not as much about the power of the image itself, but what Camiel van Winkel calls a “regime of visibility”: “Life through visual means is dominated by a constant pressure to replenish the absent imagery, to make an image out of every non-visual practice and procedure… Images are present everywhere, but as a social force they are less powerful than the imperative of visualization.”[5] Foucault left a wise consignation through his study of the history of sexuality, that is, the history of dispositif sex by saying that we shouldn’t always concede to the directives of this modern god. But what about the directives of the image which strive to overlap the directives of sex as a dispositif of subjectivism? The most suitable aphorism for modern man could be “I am seen, therefore I am”. I exhibit myself to another’s view so as to create my image and to gain power over his time and life. We are therefore living in a new medieval era, in an intermediary stage of human evolution in which, as Foucault firmly states, “man seems to be just an image of a face in the sand, being washed away by the waves”. In this case though, the waves are tied to the media. They are the electronic images on our screens which continuously fade and recompose. So much for the image. What about speech and language? Will they be rescued from the regime of imagery? Perhaps the most distorted idea today would be for someone to create a showcase filled with water, containing the preserved head of Danton which would faintly stir with every touch as described in Roussel’s prophetic world. Today, those heads should belong to the producers of true language, perhaps the heads of poets, placed in showcases filled with water and traveling on a wooden ark from country to country, to places where numerous modern images like this exist –perhaps to major art exhibitions– striving with their narrations, voices and speech to clash with the power of images. There is no guarantee that this unequal struggle will be victorious in the end. Nonetheless, let’s imagine such a “machine of poets”. What kind of function can a machine like that perform? Is it initially a machine which belongs to poets as one of their traits (a poets’ machine), a machine which creates poets (a poet’s machine), a machine which operates on poets or is it a machine of poetry for an audience observing its operation? This is a somewhat tricky question since any machine, regardless of its simplicity, cannot function without its operator. As a machine, a bicycle is comprised of levers, gears, numerous metal parts and the rider himself. In their philosophical “engineering”, Deleuze and Guattari indicate that, “the operator is part of the machine not only during its operation, but also after it”. The paradox in our speculation is that although we can rather easily define the mechanical part of what we called a “machine of poets”, it is impossible for us to do the same with its living part. Strangely, our poets and their traits appear as faces on sand being washed away by the waves. It is speech itself, the voices of the poets’ narrations which distorts their recorded images on the screens of the “Poets Machine” and, thus, poetry can exist as a phonemic fabrication only during the moment of articulation even in a language which is unintelligible to us – I remember hearing Greek, Russian, Serbian, English, French and Italian while in Venice. This linguistic Babel refers to the presence of the narrating voice since no translation can reproduce the initial meaning of the words. Either way, as Derrida writes, “God is not talking to us anymore, he has stopped: the words are our burden now”.[6]
Could it be that this improvised “machine of poets” is presented to us as a “machine”, with the ancient Greek meaning of the word, as a machination? The machination is the improvised low technology of the “Poets Machine” constructed using a method which refers to a bricolage, that is, by using simple tools that were not intended to be used in such a way (a jar with water, a video camera). The images it creates are fundamentally insufficient and disrupt our conventional relationship with images by attacking the contemporary “regime of imagery” and the directive that we should replenish every aspect of human existence with that imagery.
Moreover, the “Poets Machine” reminds us that every live utterance refers to the statutory absence of primal writing, reminding us that every form of poetic speech –as the fundamental expression of this live utterance– is impromptu, balancing between the explicit and implicit, between the absolute and non-language. Regarding the level of language itself, Derrida introduces the aspect of the bricolage and the distinction between the engineer and the bricoleur (a handyman, jack-of-all-trades), saying that “every utterance is generally a bricoleur{…} The engineer who Lévi-Strauss contra poses to the bricoleur would have to create the language in its totality, both syntax and vocabulary. Under this perspective, the engineer is a myth: a subject being the absolute descendant of its speech, creating it whole, being the verb’s father, the verb itself {…} bricolage is a form of fictionalization, we can claim that the engineer is a myth created by the bricoleur.”[7] If we presume that such a linguistic instrument truly exists, then it would be proportionate to every ecumenical, equating, totalitarian and machining speech, and thus it would be a functionalizing alteration. Accordingly, every real machine, like a “machine of poets” is a product of bricolage contradicting conventional systems, compositions and technologies which create and operate such forms of speech.
Notes:
[1] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, p. 194-195.
[2] Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness. Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, ed. David Lapoujade, Cambridge Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 2007, p. 344.
[3] Ibid. p. 352.
[4] Tom Holert, Regimewechsel. Visual Studies, Politik, Kritik, Bildtheorien. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus (ed.), Anthropologische und kulturelle Grundlagen des Visualistic Turn, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009, p. 343.
[5] Camiel Van Winkel, The Regime of Visibility, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005, p. 15.
[6] Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Κ. Papagiorgis, Athens: Kastaniotis, 2003, p. 73.
[7] Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Κ. Papagiorgis, Athens: Kastaniotis, 2003, p. 443.
Dr. Sotirios Bahtsetzis, art theorist, curator
“Sarah, Sarah with what does the world begin? - With speech? - With vision?”
(Jacques Derrida)
In the text “What is a dispositif?”, Gilles Deleuze attempts a personal reading of this concept in the same manner with which it develops in the work of another great philosopher of this era, one to whom Deleuze dedicated one of his monographs. According to Deleuze’s interpretation of Michel Foucault’s work, the nearly untranslatable term dispositif becomes a focal point of expression for present philosophical envisagement. According to Foucault, the dispositif (which can be rendered in English as a system or deployment) consists of the interaction between a heterogeneous set of “discourses, institutions, laws and regulations”, which through a specific historical figuration, produces forms of authority and knowledge.[1] To be more precise, the “deployment” includes all the technologies that support this production and formation of authority and knowledge. The other term used often and along with dispositif is apparatus, which is perhaps more appropriate at revealing the “technological” substance of these processes. In this case of course, one needs to comprehend the term technology on a greater scale, not just as applying scientific knowledge to create objects that would benefit us, but –as Martin Heidegger did when he used the neologism “Ge-stell” to describe the technological method of organizing and regulating life– as a fundamental anthropologic component of the modern world.
Architecture is an example of these personal and social technologies. According to Deleuze, when conceived as technologies, architecture like painting and every other system of visual representation function as “machines which make us see and speak”[2] and somehow comprise a type of visual machines and mechanisms which produce verbal enouncements and discourse. (For example, the “prison-mechanism” is a “visual machine used to see without being seen”.) Reversing Deleuze’s dictum, we could say that every visual machine, like architecture and painting, function like Foucaultist machine-prisons, but also that, according to Foucault, prison is not necessarily a negative concept but more likely a necessary state of human subjectivism. Similarly to the importance of a shell for a snail’s survival, the human subject at the end of anthropocentric thinking –or as an anime director would say, “A Ghost in the Shell”, needs these repulsive, perhaps, and often paranoid prison-machines of surveillance, restraint and conservation. And art has provided many such examples like the machine in Kafka’s correctional colony, Morel’s invention in Casares’ homonymous short story, Roussel’s machines in “Locus Solus” and Jarry’s “Supermale”, Duchamp’s glass paintings, Burroughs’ devices in his book “The Electronic Revolution” and numerous architectural fantasies –a constant progression of Piranesi’s “carceri d’ invenzione”–, the machine is always the vessel of this painful process of subjectivism. Accordingly, the term dispositif becomes revealingly explicit in regards to this aspect of interpretation since its etymology refers to the term disposition, to the mental state, to a physical disposition.
Deleuze therefore ponders that since Foucault in his work demonstrated the historical conditions through which the various models (the dispositif-technologies) where introduced, such as general hospitals in the 17th century, clinics in the 18th, prisons in the 19th, the concept of subjectivity in ancient Greece and later in Christianity, all that is left for us to do is to inquire about today’s modern ways of subjectivism in continuance to these models.[3] Deleuze’s question is of course a rhetorical one, since he has already proposed one such modern dispositif of subjectivism; cinematography. Recollecting Heidegger’s prophetic realization that “the fundamental incident of modern times is the conquest of the world as an image”, we only need to look around us and to realize that the modern Foucaultist prison-machine is every image found on the internet and television, in every influential printed material, every film that becomes a model of reality and in every advertisement and logo. As Tom Holert characteristically notes while referring to the American television show “The West Wing”, “the television dispositif can be seen as a technology of government which controls life’s tempo, directs our attention, regulates our state of mind, creates jobs and fuels productivity”.[4] We watch television and we realize that the political and visual authorities have disharmoniously intersected on both a symbolic and operational level. It’s not as much about the power of the image itself, but what Camiel van Winkel calls a “regime of visibility”: “Life through visual means is dominated by a constant pressure to replenish the absent imagery, to make an image out of every non-visual practice and procedure… Images are present everywhere, but as a social force they are less powerful than the imperative of visualization.”[5] Foucault left a wise consignation through his study of the history of sexuality, that is, the history of dispositif sex by saying that we shouldn’t always concede to the directives of this modern god. But what about the directives of the image which strive to overlap the directives of sex as a dispositif of subjectivism? The most suitable aphorism for modern man could be “I am seen, therefore I am”. I exhibit myself to another’s view so as to create my image and to gain power over his time and life. We are therefore living in a new medieval era, in an intermediary stage of human evolution in which, as Foucault firmly states, “man seems to be just an image of a face in the sand, being washed away by the waves”. In this case though, the waves are tied to the media. They are the electronic images on our screens which continuously fade and recompose. So much for the image. What about speech and language? Will they be rescued from the regime of imagery? Perhaps the most distorted idea today would be for someone to create a showcase filled with water, containing the preserved head of Danton which would faintly stir with every touch as described in Roussel’s prophetic world. Today, those heads should belong to the producers of true language, perhaps the heads of poets, placed in showcases filled with water and traveling on a wooden ark from country to country, to places where numerous modern images like this exist –perhaps to major art exhibitions– striving with their narrations, voices and speech to clash with the power of images. There is no guarantee that this unequal struggle will be victorious in the end. Nonetheless, let’s imagine such a “machine of poets”. What kind of function can a machine like that perform? Is it initially a machine which belongs to poets as one of their traits (a poets’ machine), a machine which creates poets (a poet’s machine), a machine which operates on poets or is it a machine of poetry for an audience observing its operation? This is a somewhat tricky question since any machine, regardless of its simplicity, cannot function without its operator. As a machine, a bicycle is comprised of levers, gears, numerous metal parts and the rider himself. In their philosophical “engineering”, Deleuze and Guattari indicate that, “the operator is part of the machine not only during its operation, but also after it”. The paradox in our speculation is that although we can rather easily define the mechanical part of what we called a “machine of poets”, it is impossible for us to do the same with its living part. Strangely, our poets and their traits appear as faces on sand being washed away by the waves. It is speech itself, the voices of the poets’ narrations which distorts their recorded images on the screens of the “Poets Machine” and, thus, poetry can exist as a phonemic fabrication only during the moment of articulation even in a language which is unintelligible to us – I remember hearing Greek, Russian, Serbian, English, French and Italian while in Venice. This linguistic Babel refers to the presence of the narrating voice since no translation can reproduce the initial meaning of the words. Either way, as Derrida writes, “God is not talking to us anymore, he has stopped: the words are our burden now”.[6]
Could it be that this improvised “machine of poets” is presented to us as a “machine”, with the ancient Greek meaning of the word, as a machination? The machination is the improvised low technology of the “Poets Machine” constructed using a method which refers to a bricolage, that is, by using simple tools that were not intended to be used in such a way (a jar with water, a video camera). The images it creates are fundamentally insufficient and disrupt our conventional relationship with images by attacking the contemporary “regime of imagery” and the directive that we should replenish every aspect of human existence with that imagery.
Moreover, the “Poets Machine” reminds us that every live utterance refers to the statutory absence of primal writing, reminding us that every form of poetic speech –as the fundamental expression of this live utterance– is impromptu, balancing between the explicit and implicit, between the absolute and non-language. Regarding the level of language itself, Derrida introduces the aspect of the bricolage and the distinction between the engineer and the bricoleur (a handyman, jack-of-all-trades), saying that “every utterance is generally a bricoleur{…} The engineer who Lévi-Strauss contra poses to the bricoleur would have to create the language in its totality, both syntax and vocabulary. Under this perspective, the engineer is a myth: a subject being the absolute descendant of its speech, creating it whole, being the verb’s father, the verb itself {…} bricolage is a form of fictionalization, we can claim that the engineer is a myth created by the bricoleur.”[7] If we presume that such a linguistic instrument truly exists, then it would be proportionate to every ecumenical, equating, totalitarian and machining speech, and thus it would be a functionalizing alteration. Accordingly, every real machine, like a “machine of poets” is a product of bricolage contradicting conventional systems, compositions and technologies which create and operate such forms of speech.
Notes:
[1] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, p. 194-195.
[2] Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness. Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, ed. David Lapoujade, Cambridge Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 2007, p. 344.
[3] Ibid. p. 352.
[4] Tom Holert, Regimewechsel. Visual Studies, Politik, Kritik, Bildtheorien. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus (ed.), Anthropologische und kulturelle Grundlagen des Visualistic Turn, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009, p. 343.
[5] Camiel Van Winkel, The Regime of Visibility, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005, p. 15.
[6] Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Κ. Papagiorgis, Athens: Kastaniotis, 2003, p. 73.
[7] Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Κ. Papagiorgis, Athens: Kastaniotis, 2003, p. 443.
Praxis For Image And Words
Maria Tsantsanoglou, art historian
Director of the State Museum of Contemporary Art - Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki, Greece
& of the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art
Between the early ‘70s and the late ‘90s an art born out of words and context flourished in Moscow. An art based on the soviet communications system, on the methods of publicizing information but also of secretly spreading rumors. This peculiar aesthetic phenomenon of combining word and image, named in 1979 by philosopher Boris Groys “Romantic Conceptual Art of Moscow”, implicated at least two generations of Russian artists.
The conceptual art of Moscow reflects the extrovert complexity of communications in everyday soviet life, and thus differs from the northern American or western conceptual art which reproduces the message in minimalist way, aiming to cause a self-psychoanalytic introversion (Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry, Roman Opalka and others). Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Ivan Chuikov, Viktor Pivovarov, Oleg Vassiliev, Sergei Onufrief, Edward Gorochowski, Igor Makarevich, Elena Elagina, Irina Nachova, Viktor Skersis and Vadim Zacharov, Nikita Alexeev, the couple Zhigalov – Abalakova (TOTART) – they all give their own versions of conceptual art, while the first artists groups with permanent core members since the time of the historic avant-garde are formed. The relationship between word and image implicates in the conceptual art scene both visual artists and poets, who become closely connected with artists, even attempting visual versions of their poems (Dmitry Prigov, Lef Rubinstein).
The creation of a platform that will bring closer the common language of visual art with the different languages of poetry, but also Greek and Russian poets is not a figure of speech and theory. It is a constructed platform, a genuine artistic Praxis.
The 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art sets one basic goal: it invites the viewer to a public dialogue on contemporary art, aiming to reinforce the collective conscience of something that until now has not been clearly inscribed in our active interventions as citizens of Thessaloniki: I am referring to the need for broad accessibility to contemporary culture, but mainly also to the need of safeguarding a contemporary culture of high quality, leaving aside didactic intentions and allegories or attempts to define right and wrong. On the contrary, our intention is to enrich, to deepen and expand the field of what we call “contemporary culture”, aware of the fact that contemporary culture is not precisely taught; it is fluid, it is inspired by the manifestations of the everyday, and thus it exists not only to entertain us and to free us from our problems, but also to pose issues and to help us realize, even communicate, what we have not been able to express until now on the level of the social and political everyday and news. For this, accessibility to contemporary art for all social groups and increased participation to the events are among the basic goals of the Thessaloniki Biennale.
Titled “Praxis: Art in Times of Uncertainty”, inspired and borrowed by Terry Eagleton’s “After Theory”, the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art documents some difficult, often risky, gestures by the artists: it invites them to talk about the failure of politics to offer the desired peace, justice and prosperity for all citizens, the depreciation of ideology unable to raise its voice regarding the economic and social crisis, that affects mainly those who did not cause it, within the plethora of ambiguous and contradictory views… Noone is that naïve as to maintain that the role that the artist claims for himself can offer solutions to the mentioned deadlocks. However, s/he can proof a “savior” for some people, in relation to the redefinition of a stance towards life that art can insinuate or even expressly suggest:
In any case, Art responds to all the above hypothetical propositions by inviting theoreticians to take a break and enjoy what is happening in the miraculous emptiness between two eras, in the swirl of dispute, between theory and its revision.
Because Art is Praxis.
Maria Tsantsanoglou, art historian
Director of the State Museum of Contemporary Art - Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki, Greece
& of the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art
Between the early ‘70s and the late ‘90s an art born out of words and context flourished in Moscow. An art based on the soviet communications system, on the methods of publicizing information but also of secretly spreading rumors. This peculiar aesthetic phenomenon of combining word and image, named in 1979 by philosopher Boris Groys “Romantic Conceptual Art of Moscow”, implicated at least two generations of Russian artists.
The conceptual art of Moscow reflects the extrovert complexity of communications in everyday soviet life, and thus differs from the northern American or western conceptual art which reproduces the message in minimalist way, aiming to cause a self-psychoanalytic introversion (Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry, Roman Opalka and others). Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Ivan Chuikov, Viktor Pivovarov, Oleg Vassiliev, Sergei Onufrief, Edward Gorochowski, Igor Makarevich, Elena Elagina, Irina Nachova, Viktor Skersis and Vadim Zacharov, Nikita Alexeev, the couple Zhigalov – Abalakova (TOTART) – they all give their own versions of conceptual art, while the first artists groups with permanent core members since the time of the historic avant-garde are formed. The relationship between word and image implicates in the conceptual art scene both visual artists and poets, who become closely connected with artists, even attempting visual versions of their poems (Dmitry Prigov, Lef Rubinstein).
The creation of a platform that will bring closer the common language of visual art with the different languages of poetry, but also Greek and Russian poets is not a figure of speech and theory. It is a constructed platform, a genuine artistic Praxis.
The 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art sets one basic goal: it invites the viewer to a public dialogue on contemporary art, aiming to reinforce the collective conscience of something that until now has not been clearly inscribed in our active interventions as citizens of Thessaloniki: I am referring to the need for broad accessibility to contemporary culture, but mainly also to the need of safeguarding a contemporary culture of high quality, leaving aside didactic intentions and allegories or attempts to define right and wrong. On the contrary, our intention is to enrich, to deepen and expand the field of what we call “contemporary culture”, aware of the fact that contemporary culture is not precisely taught; it is fluid, it is inspired by the manifestations of the everyday, and thus it exists not only to entertain us and to free us from our problems, but also to pose issues and to help us realize, even communicate, what we have not been able to express until now on the level of the social and political everyday and news. For this, accessibility to contemporary art for all social groups and increased participation to the events are among the basic goals of the Thessaloniki Biennale.
Titled “Praxis: Art in Times of Uncertainty”, inspired and borrowed by Terry Eagleton’s “After Theory”, the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art documents some difficult, often risky, gestures by the artists: it invites them to talk about the failure of politics to offer the desired peace, justice and prosperity for all citizens, the depreciation of ideology unable to raise its voice regarding the economic and social crisis, that affects mainly those who did not cause it, within the plethora of ambiguous and contradictory views… Noone is that naïve as to maintain that the role that the artist claims for himself can offer solutions to the mentioned deadlocks. However, s/he can proof a “savior” for some people, in relation to the redefinition of a stance towards life that art can insinuate or even expressly suggest:
- If art reacts against the unifying plethora of theories and through the familiar method of abstraction is lead to a clear presentation of basic concepts, such as love, poverty, pain, justice, beauty… then it will point the attention of theoreticians, critics and public towards the vital human problems.
- If art restores, deconstructs and transforms the theories which, from the ‘50s until now, classified and still classify it in schools, groups, techniques and methods, starting from the heroic era of the movements and manifestos, then Art will assume the innovative role of classifying theory and not being classified by it.
- If art involves and suggests ideas that cannot be reconciled with the socio-political reality, then it will animate protests, mass demonstrations and –why not– even revolutions.
In any case, Art responds to all the above hypothetical propositions by inviting theoreticians to take a break and enjoy what is happening in the miraculous emptiness between two eras, in the swirl of dispute, between theory and its revision.
Because Art is Praxis.