DC's

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Chris Burden Through The Night Softly, 1973
‘The action of the poetically and ironically titled Through the Night Softly consisted of Burden slithering across broken glass in his underwear with his hands bound behind his back. This raw performance put the audience in discomfort by having to view the pain felt by Burden as shards of glass shredded the bloodied front of his body. Burden wanted it to be clear to the viewers how real pain is, and emphasized this by performing live so that the audience had to experience it in person. In contrast to the use of commercials to advertise for upcoming events, Burden purchased late night commercial spots on a local television station, running a ten-second clip of this piece so viewers would get to see it in the detached setting of their homes, thus placing the artwork on the level of our increasingly detached reception of horrific events.’

 

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Daniel Charkow Auto Destructive Shoe, 2020
‘Handmade shoe. Material: fabric and zippers.’

Watch it here

 

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Christian Marclay Record Without a Cover, 1985
‘Record Without a Cover was sold without any packaging, such that the wear and tear on it gradually transformed the sound of each copy. The record’s reverse side is printed with instructions not to “store in a protective package”, which gradually becomes less legible as the record is played repeatedly. The record’s transformation can be interpreted as a form of spontaneous composition, with each copy becoming a distinct performance. Marclay wanted to ensure that “you can’t ignore the medium”, and the evolving sound of the record blurs what he originally recorded with the way in which the record has physically changed.’

 

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Liz Larner Corner Basher, 1988
Steel, stainless steel, electric motor with speed-control mechanism 306 × 94 cm

 

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Janine Antoni Lick and Lather, 1993
‘7 chocolate and 7 soap self-portrait busts. The artist created the sculptures from molds of her own head. Then she licked the chocolate bust until it’s feature becomes blurred, and she took the soap bust into the shower with her, letting the water worn away the feature of the sculpture. Hence the artworks name is Lick and Lather.’

 

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Kurt Kren Self-Mutilation, 1965
‘The theme of Self-Mutilation (also referred to as Self-Destruction) is self-explanatory. Kren’s 10th film of 1965 depicts a man covered in white plaster and dough inflicting pain or attempting to operate on himself. The whole thing is very graphic and deeply unpleasant to watch. That, of course, is the intention; to shock the viewer and challenge perceptions.’

 

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Douglas Gordon Self-Portraits of You + Me, 2006
‘With ‘Self Portraits of You and Me´ by Douglas Gordon, the viewer is denied engagement with the subject (celebrities) because all discriminating facial features have been removed by burning. Frames backed with mirrors were constructed so that the viewer’s gaze is quite literally reflected back out of the photographs through the holes in the images.’

 

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Jonathan Schipper Slow Motion Car Crash, 2012
‘In his 2012 performative work staged over the course of a month, Jonathan Schipper’s Slow Motion Car Crash sees a white Volkswagen destroy itself by slowly crashing into a wall—propelled forward by a pneumatic mechanism beneath the vehicle that moves at a rate of seven millimeters per hour. The car’s movement is almost undetectable to the human eye, and barely evidenced in a time-lapse video of the event. But the car’s form gradually degrades.’

 

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Teresa Margolles Tongue, 2000
‘perforated human tongue with a piercing of a teenager murdered in a street fight, 70 x 20 x 90 mm’

 

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John Baldessari Cremation Project, 1970
‘In 1970, conceptual artist Baldessari rounded up all of his unsold paintings from May 1953 to March 1966, took them to a crematorium, and reduced them to ashes. In what he would later title Cremation Project (complete with documentary film and photos of he and his assistants burning his works), Baldessari effectively destroyed the abstract stage of his career. Having turned to more conceptual works involving text and photography, Baldessari ritualistically closed the door on one style to make way for the next. The artist had a bronze commemorative plaque made for the works’ “burial.”’

 

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Gustav Metzger Various, 1965 – 1992
‘Auto-Destructive Art (ADA) is a form of art coined by Gustav Metzger, an artist born in Bavaria who moved to Britain in 1939. Taking place after World War II, Metzger wanted to showcase the destruction created from the war through his artwork. This movement took place in England and was launched by Metzger in 1959. This term was invented in the early 1960s and put into circulation by his article “Machine, Auto-Creative and Auto-Destructive Art” in the summer 1962 issue of the journal Ark.’

Watch here

 

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Urs Fischer Francesco, 2017
‘Swiss artist Urs Fischer captures the passage of time in his remarkably life-like candle portraits. Made from 3D body scans, Fischer’s sculptures closely resemble their muses: He has crafted candles of artist Julian Schnabel, restaurateur Mr. Chow, and art collectors Bruno and Yoyo Bischofberger, among other figures, carving out their features and rendering their clothing in colored wax. Fischer’s candles burn progressively over the course of a few months, prompting the viewer to confront life’s slow decay and the march towards mortality. As the sculptures burn from the head down, they become disfigured, parts of their physical form dripping down in long, thin strips of wax—until all that is left is a puddle on the floor.’

 

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Nam June Paik One for Violin (Solo), 1962
‘Nam June Paik’s 1962 work One for Violin (Solo) predated what the Who did by two years.’

 

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Tom Laduke Various, 2009 – 2010
‘In Auto Destruct, LaDuke’s dark, narrative paintings present layered scenes in which imagery surfaces and materializes briefly as we direct attention to it, only to become subliminal again when we focus elsewhere.1 In each canvas are at least three layers, one superimposed upon the other. LaDuke brings together appropriated film stills with images of his studio and art historical masterpieces. Both the filmic “ground” and the intermediate layers, derived from photographs taken of his studio, are laid down in muted hues of transparent, airbrushed acrylic. Optically, the filmic and studio layers intermingle yet vie for preferential treatment, although typically the filmic wins out. Perhaps this is because the ratios of the paintings approximate those of film and television screens and so we see them more readily. Or more likely, we have viewed these images before, either in the films themselves or reproduced as stills. Because they are already lodged in our memory, the filmic imagery passes a kind of “truthfulness” test. Meanwhile, the art historical source material sits heavily on top of the paintings’ surfaces, rendered piecemeal in thickly applied oil paint. Almost utterly reduced to scattered, expressionistic blobs that for the most part refuse to coalesce into a recognizable image, the masterpieces passively nag at us to “re-member” them.’

Auto Destruct 1

Auto Destruct 2

 

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Yoko Ono Smoke Painting, 1961
‘To make the painting, Ono would take a blank canvas made of cloth and place a fire near the canvas, until the canvas slowly burned away. In her first showing of the painting, she used a candle to burn away the canvas, but her original conceptualization of the work suggests using a lit cigarette.’

 

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Raphael Montahez Ortiz De-Struction Ritual: Henny Penny-Piano-. Sacrifice- Concert, 1967 (2014)
‘In 1960 the New York destructivist Raphael Montañez Ortiz first took a sledge hammer to a piano; the preferred object of his ritualistic wrath (as of 2007, the still-living artist has destroyed around 80 more). For Ortiz, who penned a manifesto in 1961, destruction is a much more metaphysical matter, motivated by a protest against death and steeped in a kind of Bataillian rhetoric of sacrifice and transcendence.’

 

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Keri Smith Wreck This Journal, 2007
‘This is a book that is designed to be ruined by the owner. I know it doesn’t technically destroy itself, the book is basically a set of instructions which asks the reader to inflict damage, so it’s participatory.’

 

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Kobayashi Eitaku Body of a Courtesan in Nine Stages, 1870s
‘“Body of a Courtesan in Nine Stages” is an example of kusozu, the illustration of a decomposing corpse, that was popular in Japanese art from about the 13th to 19th centuries. Kusozu was inspired by Buddhist beliefs that urged followers to meditate on the temporary nature of life and the physical world by contemplating postmortem changes. The below panels illustrate nine stages of death that include: (1) dying; (2) newly deceased or fresh; (3) skin discoloration and bloat during early decomposition; (4) leakage of blood in early decomposition; (5) skin slippage, marbling, and leakage of purge fluid during early decomposition; (6) caving of abdominal cavity and exposure of internal organs during advanced decomposition; (7) animal scavenging during advanced decomposition; (8) skeletonization; and (9) extreme decomposition. Though the painting maybe religious and/or scientific in nature, according to the British Museum it also has erotic themes. Because the subject matter is a courtesan, the curator notes for this piece at the British Museum say that this handscroll also falls into the genre of erotic art, or shunga. The word shunga means picture of spring in Japanese. The word “spring” is a common synonym for sex.’

 

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Man Ray Object to be Destroyed, 1923
‘The earliest intentionally self-destructive artwork may be Man Ray’s Object to Be Destroyed, which was made in 1923. The original version of the artwork lasted until 1957, when the poet Jean-Pierre Rosnay led a student mob called the Jarivistes into an art gallery, stole Object to Be Destroyed, and shot it with a pistol. Man Ray objected to the destruction, saying that the Jarivistes were futilely protesting against art history, but Ray could not stop the title of his work from turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ray would later make multiple copies of the original work, but retitle it Indestructible Object.’

 

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Zoe Leonard Strange Fruit (For David), 1997
‘Leonard was a vocal AIDS activist in New York during the 1980s and 1990s, an era that witnessed the loss of many in the art world. In Strange Fruit (For David) (1997), Leonard poignantly responds to this tragic history through an installation composed of dried fruit skins discarded seemingly at random on the gallery floor. The title of the work references the iconic anti-lynching song, written by Abel Meeropol in 1937 and whose most famous recording features Billie Holiday, and the installation’s dedication to the artist David Wojnarowicz who died of AIDS in 1992 reveals this strange fruit to be haunting symbols of those victimized by the virus and society at large. The decaying fruit also alludes to the art-historical tradition of the vanitas still-life, a genre of painting in which ephemeral objects such as flowers, flickering candles, and skulls were depicted to symbolize human mortality. Yet, closer inspection reveals that Leonard has sutured the fruit back together with needle and thread, suggesting art’s potential to heal.’

 

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Arcangelo Sassolino Various, 2006 – 2012
‘Arcangelo Sassolino was born in Vicenza, Italy in 1967 where he still lives and works. His works and installations explore mechanical behavior in machines and materials as well as the physical properties and results of forces. Sassolino’s studio location, in the industrial north of Italy where the landscape has given way to industrial factories and an urban landscape, provides an endless resource in mechanical and industrial production. By applying to materials physical natural phenomena such as gravity, speed or pressure, a new potential is unlocked and allows a manipulation in the solidity of certain constituents. The functionality of the machinery used to exert these forces becomes an aesthetic of its own.’

 

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David Hammons Cold Shoulder (1990)
‘Cold Shoulder (1990) comes to mind as one of David Hammons’ more flippant – the work consisting of pimp-style fur coats, shoulder-slung across blocks of ice. Yet the title’s flagrancy, its sheer obviousness, constitutes a large part of the work’s effect, serving as a reminder of how inescapable, how painfully blatant, issues of race and class are in America. So much so, indeed, that the risk is they become almost invisible.’

 

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Pope L. Claim, 2017
‘Art critics noted the stink as soon as the elevator opened. Indeed, the morning of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial preview, Pope L.’s contribution smelled like rotten lunch. For good reason: Claim consists of 2,755 bologna slices nailed in grid formation on the walls of a small, freestanding room within the exhibition. Plastic basins catch the grease run-off along the museum floor. By early April, nearly a month later, the stench had faded considerably and in May, it seemed gone, as the bologna dried—or “cured” per ArtNews—into something probably more akin to beef jerky now. Claim considers the usefulness of race as a social category: Affixed to each piece of meat is a photocopy of someone who may or may not be Jewish. According to the Whitney’s label, the number of slices reflects 1 percent of the Jewish population in New York. Or not. The math, we’re told, is a “bit off”— a deliberate misrepresentation that doesn’t actually correspond to census data, the pictures taken at random. But among the questions it presents, Claim, more than other artwork in the Biennial, stresses the unique problems museums and collectors face as contemporary art grows more ambitious in its materials: how to conserve works made of substances meant to last for several days or weeks. After all, it’s difficult to imagine bologna portraits transcending millennia like a classical marble bust or centuries like a Rembrandt. Getting a sculpture made of deli meat to survive the decade could even be a stretch.’

 

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Michelangelo Pistoletto Respect, 2016 – 2018
‘In October 20th 2016, Pistoletto staged a spectacular performance in Paris, where the artist used a wooden hammer to smash mirrors and invited the audience to participate in exposing the hidden message behind each mirror.’

360 video of Pistoletto mirror smashing art performance

 

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Adrián Villar Rojas The End of Imagination I (2022)
‘A chaotic, multi-textured, debris-like structure created using his “Time Engine” software—an AI and digital world-building process that simulates environmental evolution over millennia before physical realization using concrete, soil, and recycled plastics.’

 

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Charwei Tsai Love Until I Rot, 2007
‘Love Until I Rot was a project where I was approached with the curatorial question: “How far would you go for love?” I responded by making a foot out of cheese, using a mould of my own foot, then tattooed on the ankle the text, “Love until I rot”. The work was to question the concept of everlasting love. In this work, I captured the transformation of the material by filming the cheese foot rotting from heat, as well as the changes to the text.’

 

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Adriano Cecioni Il Suicida, 1865
‘Meaning in Il Suicida is constructed primarily through bodily rhetoric. The right hand firmly grips the knife while the left draws the garment toward the chin, creating a defensive posture of profound withdrawal. The contraction of the upper body, coupled with visible facial tension, conveys a state of hesitation and inner recoil. This juxtaposition of a physically robust, athletic frame contrasted with a vulnerable, defensive stance reveals an internal dissolution that stands in stark opposition to the heroic resolve seen in classical antiquity.’

 

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Bas Jan Ader Fall 2, Amsterdam (1970)
‘This work sees artist Bas Jan Ader vanish beneath the water after he and his bicycle tumble into a canal.’

 

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Jean Tinguely Homage to New York, 1960
‘In 1960, Swiss artist Jean Tinguely was commissioned to create a performative work in the sculpture garden at New York’s MoMA. He produced a 27-foot-tall towering tangle of discarded iron fragments; remnants of a piano, go-kart, and bathtub; motors; wheels. Titled Homage to New York, the work was intended to transfer kinetic energy from one part to the next before destroying itself entirely. But an errant spark foiled Tinguely’s plans: The sculpture caught fire and was ended preemptively by the New York Fire Department a mere 27 minutes into the performance.’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Alex Osman, Hi, Alex! It’s very nice to see you, and thanks about the post. That Residents album is an amazing example, yeah. If I’d only thought of it. I hope everything is great with you. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I can only imagine because I can’t imagine how long it will take for the US to recover from you-know-who. These fucking monsters. And those who believe in them. I know, fingers heavily crossed that we’ll be able to at least slip in and out of Kongeparken, sigh. ‘TEoOS’ doesn’t suck, it’s just … maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood. I will forewarn you that Ewan McGregor gives maybe his laziest ever performance in it. Love also wondering why mosquitos are so passionately in love with his bedroom. When he opened his eyes this morning, there were 15 of them clinging to the walls and ceiling (!), G. ** Tosh Berman, I love confusion, as you know, so no problem. ** Noah Falcus, Hi, Noah! Oh, thank you. I like Park Chan Wook and Miike too, of course. Do you like Nobuhiko Ōbayashi? I do, even though I’m not sure he ever topped ‘House’. I’ll seek the life of Toru Muranishi, thank you. Best Tuesday! ** Bill, Yeah, the Xenakis piece is amazing. I don’t know where that gif came from. I just googled palimpsest + gif, and it was one of the handful that popped up. I read somewhere that the Mutter Museum is doing some big event, but I don’t remember what or when? ** Adem Berbic, Hey. I don’t want to say much about the current film situation yet probably because things went so nightmarish last time, but I will say there probably won’t be French funding. I’ve never watched ‘Family Guy’. Something about it warded me off, but I don’t remember what. My theory absorption has mostly made a beeline around Lacan and Derrida. Why? You got me. Vim, okay? I’ll … whatever you do … scrounge. ** Carsten, You guys did the whole Elvis shebang, eh? I wonder why they don’t have Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard officiated weddings. Well, I guess I know why. Yeah, I just like never get physically worked up, so that may be why relaxing in the classic sense has no balm in its arsenal. My angry body retains its reticent form and just gets stressed inside. My eyes probably look a little weird. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yay! This coming Sunday? Fantastic. Do you need to prep for that in any way, or do you just go in cold? ** DonW, Hi! Including Rourke was kind of a ‘duh’, no? Or a cheeky duh. I don’t think Cher or Madonna or Nicole Kidman would have worked as well. I don’t know what that map is trying to say. I guess that’s why I liked it. Uh, I didn’t go to Vegas very often, no. Maybe once a year or once every couple of years? I’m so happy you guys had such beautiful weather on this portion of your Paris visit, and it seems like you had the requisite fun. Smooth, movie-filled flight back if you’re not already home and fighting the jet lag. ** laura w., I hope coaxing your Masters back into your brain was a positive thing. ‘Submachine’: I’ll go see what that is. It will be interesting to see what happens to whatever’s left of ‘gay literature’ now that Edmund White isn’t around to put his stamp of approval on the newbies. Smoothness on both our ends ideally. ** ⋆˚꩜｡darbbzz⋆˚꩜｡, Hi. I agree, and you put it very well. I feel like a palimpsest most of the time, don’t you? I don’t know what The Divine Machinery is, but, yes, I’ll look it up. And the Stan Jagodic collection. Thanks. Those photos you linked me to definitely intrigue. Luck on the magazine editing club. That’s an exciting prospect. Really helpful writing/editing instruction and feedback can come from even the most unlikely sources. I like the early Tangerine Dream. Early 70s, yeah. I remember they got little too soft and warm later, if memory serves? ** HaRpEr //, I think a human body can definitely be a palimpsest. The human face is a big one even without external factors. It seems like that Mendieta retro will come here, but I’ve assumed that many times before with London exhibitions fruitlessly. I was just reading about that Prairie Princess album, and I wasn’t sure. Hm, okay. ** Thom, Poetry is a great source, or in its best examples. I still read it a lot, and it still fires me up vis-a-vis my fiction. I would think your songwriting definitely informs your fiction. My fiction abilities/interests definitely inform my filmmaking bigly, for instance. I do like Jenny Hval, yes. Books-wise, I quite liked ‘Paradise Rot’. And ‘Girls Against God’. Yeah, she has the gift in both areas. It took ages for Holobiosis to get into my mailbox, but it did! And that is a rare victory for the French postal system. May your heat wither, presto change-o. ** Uday, Only your third, brief attempt made it through. Fucking blog. Sorry. ** Okay. Well, yeah, let things destroy themselves here today so you don’t have to. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Every text takes shape as a mosaic of citations, every text is the absorption and transformation of other texts’ — Julia Kristeva

‘… an insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion …’ — Nathaniel Mackey

‘Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.’ — Walter Benjamin

‘A palimpsest is “a parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another; a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing.” In other words, a palimpsest is a “multi-layered record.” In the Middle Ages, these parchments were created from vellum, which was then recycled due to scarcity. Chemical agents were used in the recycling process to erase the existing text; the new text was subsequently superimposed onto the clean sheet. With time however the traces of old writing reappeared, leading to the creation of a palimpsest. Palimpsests are there therefore the product of a layering of texts over a period of time.

 

 

‘In his 1845 essay titled ‘The Palimpsest’ *, Thomas De Quincey refers to the structure as an “involuted” phenomenon where otherwise unrelated texts are interwoven, competing with, and infiltrating each other. As scholar an author Sarah Dillon notes, this idea, along with the coupling of the word with a definite article for the first time, transformed the palimpsest into a figurative entity, investing with metaphorical value that extended beyond its status as a palaeographic object. The nature of the palimpsest is two-fold; it preserves the distinctness of individual texts, while exposing the contamination of one by the other. Therefore, even though the process of layering which creates a palimpsest was born out of a need to erase and destroy previous texts, the re-emergence of those destroyed texts renders a structure that privileges heterogeneity and diversity.

 

 

* ‘”What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished. And if, in the vellum palimpsest, lying amongst the other diplomata of human archives or libraries, there is anything fantastic or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those successive themes, having no natural connection, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such incoherencies. The fleeting accidents of a man’s life, and its external shows, may indeed be irrelate and incongruous; but the organizing principles which fuse into harmony, and gather about fixed predetermined centres, whatever heterogeneous elements life may have accumulated from without, will not permit the grandeur of human unity greatly to be violated, or its ultimate repose to be troubled, in the retrospect from dying moments, or from other great convulsions.” — Thomas De Quincey

 

 

‘Although the palimpsest does not seek to illuminate the relation between a text and its context, there is a constructive relation that could be drawn between the concept of the palimpsest and that of intertextuality. Kristeva describes the text as a “permutation of texts, an intertextuality,” and by doing so gestures to the idea that “in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another.” Differently put, a text is not merely comprised of other texts, but of ‘utterances’, a product of “the productive violence of the involvement, entanglement, interruption and inhibition of disciplines [and texts] in and on each other.” This notion of a “productive violence” mirrors both, the destructive and the accommodative nature of the palimpsest.

 

 

‘Sigmund Freud alludes to the idea of the palimpsest as a metaphor for the perceptual and memory apparatus in his 1925 essay “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad.'” This article is a brief meditation on a toy writing instrument that contains a “slab of dark brown resin or wax” underneath a thin sheet of waxed paper and a transparent celluloid sheet. The children’s toy allows writing as “a pointed stilus scratches the surface” and ‘magically’ enables re-use of the writing sheet when one severs the contact between paper and slab. Thus, the mystic writing-pad, like memory, “provides not only a receptive surface that can be used over and over again, like a slate, but also permanent traces of what has been written” upon the wax slab, “legible in suitable lights”. For post-structuralist theorists, the palimpsest acts as a useful model of intertextuality, the emergence of texts within a field of other texts, much like the emergence of the fragmented and decentered speaking subject from pre-existing overlapping fields and vectors of language and intersubjectivity. Linguistic enunciation partially overwrites pre-existing language within arbitrary and unstable chains of signification and is, in turn, overwritten. This fluid process thus layers discourse in infinite ways, thereby subverting notions of singular and autonomous authorial control.

 

 

‘In “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Jacques Derrida remarks that “the depth of the Mystic Pad is simultaneously a depth without bottom, an infinite allusion, and a perfectly superficial exteriority: a stratification of surfaces each of whose relation to itself, each of whose interior, is but the implication of another similarly exposed surface. It joins the two empirical certainties by which we are constituted: infinite depth in the implication of meaning, in the unlimited envelopment of the present, and, simultaneously, the pellicular essence of being, the absolute absence of any foundation.” Derrida posits that Freud’s frequent use of writing as a metaphor for the psyche bolsters Derrida’s own deconstruction of phonologocentrism. According to Derrida, Freud’s “Mystic Writing-Pad” reveals not only the primacy of writing but also how humans experience the world retrospectively “through the traces of previous experiences and through the signifiers which are in effect the condition of being”.

 

 

‘In postcolonial discourse, the trope of the palimpsest emblematizes colonial history and its series of writings, overwritings, and erasures. The palimpsest implies that colonial trauma is not just singular and discrete events, but an encompassing and long-lasting pattern of writings and erasures on land, colonial bodies, and colonized minds. One can also relate the trope of the palimpsest and postcolonial interrogations to the genre of memoir, especially its connection to memory (both individual and collective), as well as through the mediums of history and power. Patricia Hampl speculates that the “real job of memoir” is to seek the “congruence between stored image and hidden emotion”. More significantly, Hampl notes the political ramifications of the memoir genre: “Memoir must be written because each of us must have a created version of the past. Created: that is, real, tangible, made of the stuff of a life lived in place and in history. And the down side of any created thing as well: we must live with a version that attaches us to our limitations, to the inevitable subjectivity, of our points of view. We must acquiesce to our experience and our gift to transform experience into meaning and value. You tell me your story, I’ll tell you my story. If we refuse to do the work of creating this personal version of the past, someone else will do it for us. That is a scary political fact.”

 

 

‘The multifarious and diverse vision projected by the palimpsest, despite being the product of an attempt of destruction and erasure, demands a revision of conceptual systems based on the notions of fixity, linearity, centre and hierarchy. It impels us to replace these systems with new foundations that privilege the conceptions of “multi-linearity, nodes, links and networks.” Roland Barthes’s description of the slippery nature of an “ideal textuality” matches that of the palimpsest: “In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable […] the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language.”

 

 

‘The internet, in its obsession with being current, projects itself as a virtual palimpsest. Like webpages, the parchments of vellum constantly get refreshed to reflect current trends, practices and preoccupations. Though many elements of structure and content remain unchanged, there is still an emphasis that the internet places on immediacy, or on the current. The old pages that are written over can consequently, at best, be archived. Webpages are also loaded with hypertext or hyperlinks which ascribe a sense of multi-linearity, characteristic of the palimpsest, to our viewing experience. On a single webpage, it is not uncommon to find several hyperlinks contesting with each other, much like the texts on a parchment of vellum. Furthermore, the constant slippages which are produced as the viewer navigates these hyperlinks resemble the ambivalence engendered by the palimpsest.

 

 

‘Hip Hop is another clear and dominant example of a contemporaneous palimpsest. In the words of DJ and ‘Underground Railroad’ founder Jay Smooth: “You can go back to, throughout the history of music, back to the first –-in Western music–-the first polyphonic music was based on taking a Gregorian chant in a lower register and then singing a new Gregorian chant–-singing a new melody on top of that, in a higher register. You’re basically taking a song and then adding something new on top of it–-that’s the same creative process as hip-hop. The only difference is that in the mid-Nineties we had samplers that let us actually manipulate the recordings, and do it that way instead of other ways. You can look at jazz standards, you can look at what Led Zeppelin did with blues tracks—there are parallels to that all throughout music, but people get caught up in the fact that we’re using the actual recordings. They see it as lazy, but if you’ve ever tried to make a beat as hot as what the Bomb Squad made, or try to make a beat like Just Blaze made, or even the beats that we see as really simplistic, like the beats that Diddy made. If you tried to make a beat that sounded that good you’d find that it’s much harder than you think it is, and I think the amount of creativity and innovation that goes into sample-based hip-hop is very underrated.”

 

 

‘The palimpsest is also often likened to the human brain and to memory. In comparing the palimpsest with human memory, De Quincey emphasized its propensity to preserve over its intention to destroy. The palimpsest is therefore presents a utopian possibility of eternal preservation. Sarah Dillon asserts that this “fantasy” of the palimpsest of the mind results in a “spectralization of the self” which inevitably leads to a “spectralization of temporality”. She further notes that the palimpsest represents what Derrida describes as a “non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present”: The present that the palimpsest projects, is constructed by the unintended presence of texts from the past and the possibility of the inscription of future texts. Therefore, the palimpsest “evidences the spectrality of any present moment which already contains with it (elements of) ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’.”

 

 

‘The emergence of the disunified, spectralized subject mirrors the unruly and fractious nature of the palimpsest, which eventually leads to a descent into the utopian realm of the carnival. The carnival due to its propensity to plunge certainty into ambivalence relies on the mask, which enables fluid identities. It is however important to recognize that just as the carnival must always give way for order, and all masks are eventually discarded, the palimpsest, due to its inherent unruly nature, will also make way for a structure that privileges an ordered heterogeneity. Although this new structure could be perceived of as a favourable departure from the chaos rendered by the palimpsest, it would certainly lack the charm of its predecessor, which through its fluidity, endorses the reveries of the carnival and its lack of order.’ — Chicago School of Media Theory

 

 

Continued

Turning Pages of the Archimedes Palimpsest

Wugazi ‘Sweet Release’

52 secrets in Google Earth

Showgirls – Black Swan : Trailer Mash-Up

Iannis Xenakis’ ‘Palimpsest’

Ray of Gob

Stan Brakhage ‘Moth Light’

X-ray demonstration with Van Gogh Painting

‘Faint But It’s I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)’

Three short video collage vignettes of the Milwaukee Noise Festival 2007

3d video mapping in the Jerusalem Light Festival 2010

Bruce Lee’s Kung Fu Ping-Pong

Tim Hecker’s ‘Palimpsest 2’ co opted by Christian zealot
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p.s. Hey. ** Carsten, Hey. No, I love Eggelston’s photographs, but I don’t know that film. And since I also don’t have anything to play DVDs on, I guess I’ll keep my eyes peeled when I’m in the shadowy realms. I have a couple of other friends who did the Vegas marriage thing. I think they’re all divorced now. Coincidence? I hope ‘Elvis’ showed up. I think I don’t know how to relax and unwind. When I’ve tried the standard methods of dawdling and spacing and ‘taking it easy’, I get antsy and bored in a flash. But I fear we’re the weirdos in that equation and always will be. ** Noah Falcus, Hi, Noah. Greetings and a warm welcome. Yes, I actually did a post about Yoshihiro Nishimura a few months ago. Let me see if I can find it. … It’s here. So, yes, I’m a fan too. Who else do you like and recommend? I’m always hungry. Take care, and great to meet you. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Are you made thinking of Ronald Tavel? He wrote the scripts for some of Warhol’s best films. I don’t think Sonbert wrote for Warhol, but I’m not completely sure? ** Fionn, Hi. What is it that you don’t like about older films? Is it because they’re shot on film, and you don’t like that look/quality, or … ? Nice about Stockholm. Cool city. I quite liked ‘Nocturama’. See what you think. Bonelo’s work is kind of uneven, yeah, I think. ** Laura, All thanks to the cat. I’m so sorry about your shitty day. Surely you must have had your quota of shitty days by now. Brains are so weird, indeed, and god love them. Or some of them. I would say avoid screenwriting instruction books like the plague. Just write a poem in script form. Thanks, obvs, about the sentence. Yeah, it’s not bad, is it, haha. Oh, it’s Dead Kid’s Ass, no gender. I think that’s the key. I’m good because it’s seemingly fall here finally, and that’s delicious, and otherwise just beginning the new film and doing some last escorting for the current one, usual business. Rev up and come back soon! ** Steve, I’ve never heard of Predator Pee. Hm, I feel suspicion. Let me know if that functions. Everyone, Here’s Steve with an important announcement: ‘On my latest “Radio Not Radio” show, take off to library music, field recordings, dub, prog and more! The show features John Cameron, Ichiko Aoba, John Cage, Phoebe Bridgers, Robert Wyatt, Ysa C, Mad Professor, Kofi, Dawn Richard, Ayra Starr, Moving Gelatine Plates, Roy Montgomery & Martha Skye Murphy, Dis Fig, Original Koffee, Kinact, Saul Williams, The B-52’s, L’Rain, Sam Kidel, Kate Carr, Arca, Waakya, Kinact & Team Work. Here’s the link.’ Well, there’s the crazy architecture of the Strip hotel buildings, which is probably the big draw. And all the flashy, retro entertainment stuff, and the Sphere and all of that. And how was ‘Apaches’? ** Adem Berbic, Thanks. It can’t possibly go even remotely as badly as the last experience. It was more like the Iran war than like ‘Apocalypse Now’. I just found a stream of ‘Camp Miasma’ so I’ll be watching it and will report my findings and see how they meet with yours. I like ‘Castration Movie’ and I think a few other people here do too. ** Dominik, Hi!!! You’re back in the saddle! Yay! I guess the degree to which you found Hungary nominally improved makes sense. The coming change does seem like it’ll take a while to blanket the place. So, good news. Paris has finally admitted the fall into its realms, knock on wood, and it feels even more glorious than it probably is. Surely Vienna will get its portion any second now. I’m good, just doing the usual stuff. It seems we have a producer for our new film, and I feel at least tentatively over the moon about that. Sadly, I’m fearing we won’t get to Kongeparken because we’ll be in and out Stavanger so quickly and with festival duties while we’re there. But we’re kind of hoping we’ll meet someone with a car who’ll want to drive with us to it for at least a few hours. Sure hope so. I hope love’s reading experience is suiting someone with the name of love. Love wondering why ‘The End of Oak Street’ appeared to have the makings of being fun but wasn’t, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, I have never wrapped my mind around the apparent greatness of opera. But that might be mostly because they’re very long and I smoke cigarettes. Congrats on the win! And on the money well spent assuming that will continue to seem to be the case. ** laura w, Vegas is great by default because there is no place on earth like it. And thank goodness. I guess it’s like an amusement park without the rides, or I guess just walk-through rides since the theme hotels might count. And they do keep adding ludicrous shit like that new huge guitar-shaped Hard Rock Hotel. Nice on the book scores. I adore ‘The Past and the Present’ to death. See what you think. Helped or hurt … I don’t know. I guess ultimately I don’t think it has hurt my work? I think my readers are maybe even less queer than not at this point? It doesn’t interest me because I don’t categorize things in that way, but I can’t do anything about it. I do get irritated when my books are in the ‘gay’ section in bookstores. But ‘queer’ is such a better and more apt term than ‘gay’. That just seems kneejerk and dumb. I guess that’s how I feel? ** HaRpEr //, I try to do my little part in helping experimental filmmakers meet and greet people who don’t think to go shopping in that realm. And seeing experimental films when I was teen kind of made me whatever I am. I wish I could see that Mendieta retrospective, partly because, and I know it’s kind of blasphemous to say, but I’ve never found her work interesting. But seeing a bunch can make all the difference. That doesn’t sound like masochism, no, perhaps even the opposite. ** Uday, There are no Sonbert gifs. Trust me, I looked. There are a few today? I’m doing a post on Andy Warhol’s films soon, and I think there will be a lot in there. The person with the robot soldier making dreams is inherently interesting, no? Every once in a while I’ll see an Antoine Monnier doppelganger here in Paris. Usually from afar. It’s always a rush. So gotcha. ** Thom, I like what you sound like you’re up to with the new writing. It sounds highly worth making a sincere effort at nailing. The best fiction writers often use poetry as their fiction’s circulatory system. Curious what effect ‘LotF’ has on an adult. Probably not the same because you’re not a kid like the kids in it, but worth a try. Yes, Holobiosis did arrive, and I’ve been enjoying it thoroughly, and I’ve been forgetting to tell you that. Great! The temperature here is remaining so kind and friendly. Wow. Yours? ** Okay. Have a palimpsest or several, why don’t you? See you tomorrow.