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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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I used to think I was too ignorant to read Jeanne Randolph, but thank goodness I got over it. Sometimes art writers (myself included) undertake to write a parallel text, not meant to describe or explain the art, but rather to bounce along beside it as a sort of responsive sidekick. Some (mine included) may tip into flip flights of fancy or indulgent ruminations. But Randolph, a psychoanalytic theorist, remains ever rigorous. The shapes of her short essays are often unsettling and lead off into unfamiliar territory. Even when it is not about art, Randolph's writing is like art, good art, in that it can shift you into a new position from which to look out at the world.
[Sigmun Freud's] desk, writing tables, windowsills, shelves and tops of cabinets had all been invaded by tiny, ancient figurines. On every surface Freud had stationed the pagan, the supernatural, the demonic and the life-giving beings of antiquity. ... [D.W.] Winnicott would have understood Freud's teeming collection as providing "room for the idea of unrelated thought sequences." Room for surprises, nonsense, non sequiturs, room for the unexpected. Room for the uncanny and the preternatural. Room for the protohuman, subhuman and uberhuman. Room for the extremes of difference that standardized life and standardizing ideologies refuse to accomodate. The relevance of this is completely obvious to everyone who is labelled as a stranger by his or her own society. From the essay "The Metamorphosis of Sigmund Freud" from the 2003 collection Why Stoics BoxIt takes two to tango and two (minimum) to communicate. Sometimes the excitement about looking at good art is the strange detachment of the persons, yourself and the artist, from this third thing: the unique idea that comes into being when both parties have paid attention. Add a third generative element - a writer paying the same kind of attention - and the ideas become thicker, quicker, and stranger.
At the moment when I know that I am the one weilding the power to interpret an object, when I find the interpretation more valuable to me than the function that the object serves, at that moment the object could become cultural. From the essay "Illusion and the Diverted Subject" from Psychoanalysis and Synchronized Swimming, as quoted in Symbolization and its Discontents
Either golden moon or glitter of stars sparkled on alternate bright blue fingernails as they levitated over [the library clerk's] keyboard. Her green eyes followed signals on her video display terminal and she pricked one of these with the lunar nail of her right forefinger. With her left hand she peeled a barcode from a dispenser. She applied the barcode to the back of this book and smoothed it with her palm. She repeated this procedure exactly for the "seventh" book. "This will pass also, " she slurred, obviously unaware of the cosmic implications of what she had uttered. From the essay "Hi-Tech Surveillance and Moral Imagination: A Psychoanalysis" (the tale of the act of stealing a very old library book) from the 2003 collection Why Stoics Box
I liked the first third of Morvern Callar better than most movies I've seen. The camera plays good games with focus and planes of light. The morality is odd, if not amibiguous, and the storyline strikes an unusual balance between horrific and tender.
BIG TIME SPOILERS BELOW:
She leaves her boyfriend's corpse (a suicide) lying in the apartment for days and doesn't tell anybody that he's dead. Next to the body is a blinking christmas tree that emits a loud, low electrical buzz. The lights are cozy and warm looking, while at the same time flashing like some kind of code-red alarm indicator.
She goes to a debauched Scottish party with her friends and dances, smokes, gets fucked up, gets laid. She goes to her flourescent-lit job at the supermarket. Everytime she comes home the body is stil there and the cozy tree lights are still blinking on and off.
She puts her own name on her dead boyfriend's novel and sends it in to the publisher.
Eventually she strips down to her underwear and chops up the body in the bathtub. Somehow this scene is neither camp nor horror.
She hikes up into the mountains with the body in a back pack and buries him. Then she goes off to Spain on the dead guy's funeral money.
That was enough story for me. The film goes on and it's pretty good but the remarkable strange edginess of the beginning fades away into a more familiar type of tale. Still I recommend it a lot - and the mannered, playful camera is really great all the way through.
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1967 Mason Williams Edward Ruscha Patrick Blackwell | 2000 Corinne Carlson Karen Henderson Marla Hlady |
In 1967 three sexy smart artist guys threw a Royal Typewriter out of a Buick Le Sabre and carefully recorded the results. In 2000 three sexy smart artist gals threw a Macintosh Plus Computer out of a Ford Econoline and recorded the results in exactly the same fashion.
The Royal Road Test had a major impact on me when I was a student, and my copy of the book is probably the third thing I'd grab in a house fire (after the two cats). Three guys take on technology, using a flash machine (car) to wreck a clunky one (typewriter). A personal mobility machine to wreck a personal expression machine. Their 'test area' is a piece of roadside in Nevada that looks like US nuclear test sites. Governments throw atoms around and blow stuff up, create mushroom clouds, wreck the lives of millions, and threaten the planet with extinction. We little people can get in our cars and throw typewriters. The captions are wry and the whole 'test' is conducted with poignant, deadpan humour. The epigraph reads:
"It was too directly bound to its own anguish to be anything other than a cry of negation; carrying within itself the seeds of its own destruction."
As our technological equipment supersedes itself, it is perfect that Carlson, Henderson and Hlady redid the Road Test. And I love that it was girls this time who threw the damn machine and watched it smash.