Category: Uncategorized (Page 83 of 1086)

 

‘The marvellously playful and difficult novelist Christine Brooke-Rose, who has died aged 88, was fond of the device of omission. In her 1968 novel Between, she left out the verb “to be” throughout, to stress the narrator’s disoriented sense of personal identity – the year before George Perec’s novel La Disparition omitted the letter “e”. She left out the word “I” from her autobiographical novels Remake (1996) and Life, End Of (2006), instead describing the narrator as “the old lady”. In her 1998 novel Next, which had 26 narrators, each of whose names began with a different letter of the alphabet, she omitted the verb “to have” to emphasise the deprivation of the homeless Londoners in the book.

‘As if to continue the theme of erasure, Britain has all but airbrushed one of its most radical exponents of experimental fiction. When Brooke-Rose published a volume of criticism in 2002, it was not, perhaps, entirely devotion to Roland Barthes’ death of the author thesis that led to her to call it Invisible Author.

‘Many critics hailed her fiction, for all that it was sometimes scarcely comprehensible or pleasurable to those ignorant of the underpinning theory. Ellen G Friedman put Brooke-Rose among those 20th-century experimental female writers – Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein – whose novels “explode the fixed architecture of the master narrative”. Brooke-Rose wrote 16 novels, five collections of criticism and several collections of short stories and poems. Frank Kermode considered that her originality and skills deserved “a greater measure of admiration and respect than we have so far chosen to accord them”.

‘In 1974, Brooke-Rose began writing her first novel, The Languages of Love, much of which was set in the Reading Room of the British Museum. The Sycamore Tree (1958) similarly involved London intellectuals, but her third novel, The Dear Deceit (1960), saw the first stirrings of narrative experiment. In it, a man traces the life of his deceased father backwards from death to birth. Throughout this period, she worked as a reviewer and freelance journalist for the New Statesman, Observer, Sunday Times and Times Literary Supplement.

‘In 1962 she underwent kidney surgery. One result of this was her first truly experimental novel, Out (1964), which was compared to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s formally adventurous La Jalousie (1957). Brooke-Rose was becoming a nouveau romancier: later she scorned that description while conceding the influence of Robbe-Grillet, whose novels she translated, on her reinvention as a writer. Out was narrated by a white character facing racial discrimination in the aftermath of a nuclear war, with pale skin now indicating radiation poisoning and dark skin health.

‘Increasingly invisible in Britain, Brooke-Rose crossed the Channel in 1968 and flourished. She had already that year separated from her second husband; a third marriage, to Claude Brooke, was to be brief. She taught linguistics and English literature at the newly founded University of Paris (Vincennes), a bastion of counter-cultural thought where, in 1975, she became professor of English and American literature and literary theory. After retiring from teaching in 1988, she settled in a village near Avignon on the grounds that French public healthcare is superior to Britain’s.

‘Her critical works included A Structural Analysis of Pound’s Usura Canto: Jakobson’s Method Extended and Applied to Free Verse (1976), A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (1981) and the relatively jaunty A ZBC of Ezra Pound (1971), produced alongside wildly inventive fiction.

‘It was the conceit of Thru (1975) that the students on a university creative writing course collectively construct the narrative. The resulting text included student essays with handwritten changes to typed text, musical notations, mathematical formulas, diagrams, and CVs. In an interview she conceded that this self-conscious deconstruction of narrativity was written tongue in cheek “for a few narratologist friends”. Textermination (1991) was set at a conference in San Francisco, attended by characters from Austen, Flaubert, Eliot, Pynchon, Roth and Rushdie, who petition potential readers with the help of literary critics who “interpret” them for the masses.

‘In Life, End Of, her final novel, the 80-something narrator finds that the world has grown dull, even those parts of it that were supposed to be ring-fenced from stupefaction. As the narrator writes: “Montaigne says life’s purpose is to teach us to die. However, the standard of teaching is now so low that the task is getting tougher and tougher …” The pleasures of writing now become mere palliatives: in a mock-technical lecture from a character to an uninterested author, the author comes to accept that her experiments in narrative are like pain-killers, and that, like life, they no longer matter.

‘Decay is ubiquitous: the old lady disintegrates physically as meaning, too, falls apart. Her legs “flinch wince jerk shirk lapse collapse give way stagger like language when it can’t present the exact word needed, the exact spot where to put the foot”. Never mind: she has Samuel Beckett’s gallows humour and can still pun bilingually. She recalls that Descartes thought the pineal gland to be the seat of the soul, “thus putting de cart before dehors”.

‘Questions remain. Was this last book written to fill a spiritual gap, and to teach us to die? Was the old lady’s life story, ultimately, the author’s? Did the author see her fictional experiments as finally unimportant? Brooke-Rose omitted, surely programmatically, to give us answers.’ — collaged

 

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Her

 

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Further

Christine Brooke-Rose @ Wikipedia
‘Christine Brooke-Rose: the great British experimentalist you’ve never heard of’
Christine Brooke-Rose: An Inventory of Her Papers
‘Celebrating Christine Brooke-Rose’ @ TLS
‘R.I.P. Christine Brooke-Rose’ @ HTMLGIANT
‘The life and work of the late, great experimental writer, Christine Brooke-Rose’
Christine Brooke-Rose © Orlando Project
Christine Brooke-Rose’s ‘The Lunatic Fringe’
‘The Criticism of Christine Brooke-Rose’ @ Waggish
‘Hello Christine Brooke-Rose, R.I.P.’
Podcast: Christine Brooke-Rose and A. S. Byatt, in conversation
Excerpts from CB-R’s ‘Amalgamemnon’
Interview with Christine Brooke-Rose
Anna Aslanyan on the Christine Brooke-Rose symposium
Buy Textermination

 

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Manuscript

 

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Interview
from The Review of Contemporary Fiction

 

In your essay “Ill Iterations,” which you wrote for “Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction,” you mention the difficulties experimental writers face when they are male, but you say also that the differences are compounded when the experimental writer happens to be a female. Will you talk about those difficulties for the woman writer?

CBR: Yes, although it took a long time to become aware of them. Once in Paris, quite a long time ago, Helene Cixous rang me up and asked me to write something about the difficulties I’ve had as a woman writer. Naively, I said, “Well, I haven’t had any difficulties as a I “woman” writer. I’ve had difficulties that “any” writer would have; can I write about that?” And she said, “Oh, no.” She wanted something feminist. I was a bit antifeminist in those days, in the early 1970s. I didn’t consciously feel that I had had any difficulties. My later revision of that feeling came from genuine experience. As I look back over my career I realize that, in fact, I did have difficulties, but I took them for granted, as part of the nature of things. From the moment I went experimental, however, when I wrote “Out,” and my then-publishers couldn’t understand it and turned it down, I did actually start having difficulties. And when I wrote that essay for you, I started looking back and thinking about it, trying to fathom it out, and I became aware that the woman experimental writer has more difficulties than the man experimental writer, in the sense that, however much men have accepted women’s writing, there is still this basic assumption, which is unconscious, that women cannot create new forms. They can imitate others, they can imitate their little lives, tell their love stories and their difficulties and so on, and they do it extremely well. I’m not downgrading that kind of writing. But if by any chance they dare to experiment, then they are imitating a male movement, and usually one that’s already dead. In my case, I always get the label “nouveau roman” in English because “nouveau roman” is, from the English point of view, safely dead and no one talks about it anymore. In other words, all one is capable of as a woman is to do what the men do, and not so well. There is an unconscious refusal, really, to look at what I’m doing in any kind of detail. Whereas men experimenters or innovators of any kind do get that sort of attention.

What does the phrase “utterly other discourse” from your novel Amalgamemnon mean for you? Do you feel that you are writing “utterly other discourses”?

CBR: In Amalgamemnon, it doesn’t actually mean that. It doesn’t refer to the writing, it refers to the woman reading and thinking quite other things until she has to switch back to talking to the man. In fact, though, I do feel that my writing is different. I haven’t actually seen other writing quite like mine, but it is very difficult for me to say how “other” it is, or even whether it’s any good. I can’t really judge it, so I can’t really answer that questions. I do what I want to do.

But you did make a conscious decision at one point in your career to write the indeterminate novel, rather than something realistic?

CBR: What a strange opposition. The realistic novel has its own indeterminacies. But anyway, it didn’t happen that way at all. It was much more negative than that. I was simply dissatisfied with what I was doing. I had written four novels, which are really quite traditional, satirical, comic novels. I did experiment with time in one of them, which was written backwards, for instance, so that in each chapter the hero gets younger and younger. But that was still classical irony. They were basically traditional modern novels, if I can use such a phrase, in that the main concern was, like most novels, epistemological, concerned with reality and illusion. But I felt it was too easy. It was great fun, but it wasn’t what I wanted. Originally, when I was very young, I used to write poetry every day, but I soon discovered that I was not a poet; but that urge to write poetry . . .

But you are a poet.

CBR: Perhaps, but I had to get around to it in a very different way. I then thought I had found myself as a novelist, but after those four early novels I realized it still wasn’t what I wanted. So eventually—yes, I do now write very poetic novels, more deeply poetic at any rate than the poems I was writing every day. At the time of this dissatisfaction, I suppose it was Nathalie Sarraute’s The Age of Suspicion, and her putting the modern novel in question, which was the first turning point for me, much more so than her novels, for although I like them very much, I can’t say there’s a direct influence of Nathalie Sarraute on what I write. Whereas Robbe-Grillet did have a direct influence, at least on Out. But I soon got out of it. So it wasn’t a decision to write indeterminate novels as such. It was simply a decision not to go on writing as I used to write. But the other thing that happened was much more important. I had a very serious illness, lost a kidney and had a very long convalescence. I fell into a semi-trancelike state for a long time. I was very much thinking of death as the meaning of life. And I began to write Out, which is a very “sick” novel. I think one can feel that. I imagine a time when the whites are discriminated against; the whole color bar is reversed. But the reason the whites are discriminated against is because they are sick, dying from this mysterious radiation disease to which the colored people are more immune. My protagonist is a sick old man who cannot get a job and cannot remember his previous status. This exactly reproduced the state of illness that I was in, so in that sense of protection it was still a very mimetic novel. But I wasn’t consciously trying to do anything different. I started writing a sentence and fell back on the pillow exhausted. I didn’t really know where I was going, and it took me a long time to write it. I was groping. So I don’t think it was a conscious decision. But then with Such I really took off on my own. I don’t think there’s any more influence of Robbe-Grillet on Such. I would say that Such is my first really “Me” novel, where I don’t owe anything to anyone else.

Can you characterize that “Me-ness”?

CBR: I think Such is more imaginative, for one thing. It’s still, of course, concerned with death since the man dies and is brought back to life. Again, I don’t explain why. I get much more interested, in fact, in the impact of language on the imagination. I suppose it’s really with Between that I discovered what I could do with language. With Such it’s still a fairly straightforward use of language, but very much in another world with this slow return to reality as the man comes back to life, but he then sees the stars as radiation. And having hit on that idea but not really knowing where I was going, I then had to do a lot of work, learn something about astrophysics, for example, since I was using it as a metaphor for the world. It’s in Such that I discovered that jargon, of whatever kind, has great poetry. For instance if you take a scientific law and use it literally, it becomes a metaphor. Of course, this is a schoolboy joke. If the teacher says, “Weight consists of the attraction between two bodies, ” everybody giggles. But if you take it further and use more complicated astrophysical laws about bouncing signals on the moon, for instance, to express the distance between people, then it becomes a very active metaphor. Yet it’s treated as ontological in the world of the fiction, like a sunset or a tree. So this sort of thing, you see, isn’t a conscious decision, it’s a discovery.

Is that how you would define the experimental novel?

CBR: Yes, in a way. People often use the term “experimental novel” to mean just something peculiar, or as a genre in itself (on the same level as “realistic” or “fantastic” or “romantic” or “science” fiction). But to experiment is really not knowing where you’re going and discovering. Experimenting with language, experimenting with form and discovering things, and sometimes you might get it wrong and it just doesn’t come off. When I discovered that there is great beauty in technical language (and this comes into its own in Thru where I actually use critical jargon as poetry), I also discovered that there’s beauty and humor in confronting different discourses, jostling them together, including, for instance, computer language. In Such it’s astrophysics and in Between it’s all the languages, the lunatic, empty speech-making of different congresses, political, sociological, literary and so on, and of course, actual languages, different languages, all jostled together, since my protagonist, who’s a simultaneous interpreter, is always in different countries. Discourse became my subject matter. So discovery is one meaning of “experimental,” and this would be, to answer your earlier question, my “utterly other discourse,” where the actual language is different from the language you and I are using now, or that I find in other books. The second meaning is to see how far I can go with language, with vocabulary and syntax, and this is much more conscious.

Can we assume that we do not need to worry that you’re moving towards realism?

CBR: Were you worrying? Well, I might be, you know. I have nothing against realism. Why not? I think I say somewhere in “A Rhetoric of the Unreal” that realism may come back, but in a new form, refreshed by all this. We already have magic realism and hyper-realism after all. Fantastic realism. The real made unreal and vice versa. Sometimes there is a period of tremendous experiment, and then somehow the old thing comes back again, renewed by all the experimenting that’s been going on. That may be the only useful purpose of such an experiment, I just don’t know. But that doesn’t concern me too much. I also think that the way “experiment” is set against “realism,” the way I and others are said to be working against the “realistic” novel, is a great oversimplification. Even the most experimental, most postmodern writer is still basically realistic. They may not be “imitating” reality, in the sense of reproducing a familiar situation, but ultimately they’re representing something. There’s always a representative function simply because language is representative. There have been very naive attitudes towards representation, and we’ve all become much more self-conscious about it, but I don’t think we can actually get out of representation.

 

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Book

Christine Brooke-Rose Textermination
New Directions

‘In Textermination, the eminent British novelist/critic Christine Brooke-Rose pulls a wide array of characters out of the great works of literature and drops them into the middle of the San Francisco Hilton. Emma Bovary, Emma Woodhouse, Captain Ahab, Odysseus, Huck Finn… all are gathered to meet, to discuss, to pray for their continued existence in the mind of the modern reader. But what begins as a grand enterprise erupts into total pandemonium: with characters from different times, places, and genres all battling for respect and asserting their own hard-won fame and reputations. Dealing with such topical literary issues as deconstruction, multiculturalism, and the Salman Rushdie affair, this wild and humorous satire pokes fun at the academy and ultimately brings into question the value of determining a literary canon at all.’ — New Directions

 

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Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hey, j. The only Julie Decorneau film I’ve seen is ‘Titane’, which I really didn’t like at all. But people have encouraged me to look earlier in her oeuvre, and I mean to. And ‘Raw’ sounds like a place to start. Thanks! Yeah, blood exiting the body’s interior has a real power when it’s not something you’re not accustomed to seeing, I guess. Even with the slaves I corral for those posts,  the ‘no limits’ ones usually say ‘except blood’. My day was kind of spruced up, which in my case means wasn’t boiling hot, which counts, I think. Less sweat = more spruced up? ** Dominik, Hi!!! Glad the post spoke to you. Pitt definitely had some … what do they call that … face sanding (?) somewhere along the way. I hope love fixed your lift. I’m on the 4th floor, so I feel you. Love wondering if Green Day, while aesthetically uninteresting, are admirable in some other respect, G. ** Misanthrope, Do you realise how rare it is that people actually gasp out loud? I guess that’s why causing one is such a goal. Whew, glad ‘Flunker’ didn’t derail anything. Birthday tomorrow. Have a big one. 53 is nothing, man, it’s chickenfeed, enjoy. ** David Ehrenstein, Huh, in a way, yes, but a lot less shy. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yes. Whoop, PT awakens from its thankfully brief slumbers! ** Jack Skelley, Yeah, I was strangely wide awake yesterday. ** Darby 😺, If you’ve been messing up, I sure didn’t notice it. My ear is more like a well except with mud instead of water inside. Right, you’re in the hurricane zone. Sounds fun. Never had the privilege myself. I’m reading a book/novel called ‘Adorable’ by Ida Marie Hede. It’s very good so far. That is soon. No, Breakfast in America is really little. Not a big call here for American breakfast food. Fingers thoroughly crossed about the pet shop job. Well, I can certainly understand why your mom named him Cooper, haha. Dude, you’re not boring, I’m boring. Maybe I’m just hiding it well. The thing I enjoy in life is making things. I haven’t seen any movies lately. I’m watching a documentary about Syd Barrett today. That seems like it would be worth watching. ** Tosh Berman, Hi. Goodness, I inspired you linguistically! Whoa, I’m patting my back, or I guess my shoulder. ** Uday, If woody actually smelled like wood I would consider it, but I bet it doesn’t smell anything like wood. Adler as in Renata? I like her crits. Good luck surviving the excessive constant company. I’m going to find out what all wicking means. I’m betting it means something nice. So I’ll wish you the exact same. ** Lucas, I think a lot of people want to use the Olympics to get a boner or its equivalent, and said people have very conventional erotic tastes. That’s my theory. Well, at least you don’t have to stay with him, so that’s a victory. Yeah, on further thought, anger is not a good creativity creator. When I get angry, I just get frozen. Wow, both of your new collages are just great! You’re so good, pal. Deep bow. Everyone, Go check out two new collages by the fireball of talent Lucas. Here. So exciting! No, I don’t think you told me about your friend having a personal encounter with Leaud. That’s so cool, obvs. ** Joseph, Hi, J. Oh, too long a story for the likes of here, but … Zac and I decided to do something crazy and go to Antarctica. You take a ship there from Argentina, so we traveled around in Argentina and a bit of Chile on the way. Us and a bunch of mostly really rich people voyaged for two days on the ship through extremely rocky waters, literally nauseated and often vomiting the entire time, and then we spent 10 days in Antarctica, or rather on a ship traveling beside Antarctica with mostly daily short visits on land. And one day we got to kayak in the aforementioned bay. Antarctica itself is jaw-droopingly beautiful and utterly foreign in general, but that kayak day was the ultimate. You can only go there during their summer, which is very short and I think falls in our January/February as I recall. ** Steve, He was already a star, just not a gigantic one. He’d already been in ‘True Romance’ and ‘Interview with a Vampire’, etc. when I saw him. Self-distribution would be last ditch. That’s an incredible amount of work. Ideally we’ll find some kind of distributor for the film. ** Harper, Hi. I’m sure I’ve mentioned that I had to stop smoking weed in my teens after my two LSD freak outs because all it did was brings aspects of them back. ‘Against the Day’ is one of my favorite Pynchons. Curious what you’ll think. I did know that about McCartney and Lennon. It’s one of those things that sticks in your head. I’ve never seen that Bernstein piece before. It’s really nice. Thanks! ** Nika Mavrody, Interesting. Huh. Thanks, Nika. ** Diesel Clementine, Huh. The surgeon who repaired my head told me I might be prone to brain tumors afterwards, but not so far. Well, as far as I know, eek. I’m always surprised when people look at my blog on their phones. I can’t even really imagine how that’s even possible. But obviously it is and can even be effective, it seems. Interesting. You’re very good with a tiny keyboard. ** Dev, Hi again to you! Oh, okay, gotcha on the faux-interview. So it’s kind of like an acting exercise maybe? Except with more at theoretical stake? Being from LA, I have had my times with the famous. I’ve even been good friends with famous people, although I was usually friends with them even before they got famous. I even dated a famous person, but I’m sworn to secrecy about that. Anyway, blabla. I think the only Denzel Curry album I know is ‘Ta13oo’. I liked it. Okay, I’ll stream the new one and see if I start bopping around in my chair. Thanks, pal. ** Thomas H, Hi, T. Thank you for the link to the article. I’ll read it once I’m out of here. Well, relief that it sounds like there are people who can keep the venture afloat and going at least. I have friends who are furries. An occasional commenter here and very good writer is a furry. The Flatsos were kind of an invented species that was kind of based on cosplay kids who hung around the building I lived in — which was above the big Emo fashion outlet of the time, April 77 — and who aspired through their makeup and clothes to look one-dimensional, or at least that’s what it looked they were trying to do. Productive day! I need one of those. Yes, Duncan, I’m glad you looked into his work. It’s something else. Best of the best to you! ** Justin D, Hi. I suspect since he’s still making that work that he hasn’t felt like he got to his on bottom on those subjects? I wonder if there actually is a bottom or clear answer or something. I’ve certainly never come close to finding one for me and my interests. The problem is my ear is only kind of annoying. I usually have to be in terrible pain to see a doctor. But, yeah, kind of annoying is getting very old. Thanks for asking. Did ‘The 400 Blows’ live up to its historical hype for you? ** Gabriel Hart, I agree. Good thinking, man. ** Jacob, Well, hello there, Jacob! Roblox “games” … I know that term, but I don’t think I know precisely what it entails. I’ll hunt. Congrats on the double concluding. Yeah, summer is almost history again, thank fucking god. ‘Coder le Monde’ sounds like it’s in French, so I’ll just appreciate your appreciation. Philosophers … well, I’ve never even heard of Mill, Shannon, Rawls, or Carnap, so, if they’re in the definition, I don’t know. I have a feeling that writers I love who I think of as philosophers like Blanchot or Deleuze, for instance, probably aren’t actually? I’ve read Nietzsche, and he must count, no? What do you think? I also don’t give a fuck about Elvis, but that shebang sounds really fun. Elvis fanatics are kind of interesting. They seem like the angelic equivalent of MAGA people or something. Hm, it’s true that I can’t recall seeing impersonators here. The French really, really seem to love tribute bands and artists though. A lot. Bands that pretend they’re like, The Cure, and call themselves The Curry and things like that. That abandoned Mississippi River basin thing sounds really exciting to me. I love that stuff. In fact, I just put together a post about defunct tourist attractions yesterday. Thoroughly enjoy. Good to talk with you, pal. ** Oscar 🌀, Howdy! Beatles references are the great unifier, I guess. Be sure to tell me the day when you remember it because I am going to parade down the middle that street like you can’t even begin to imagine. And since everyone who lives and hangs out there undoubtedly reads my blog, I anticipate that, as I parade, I will be bombarded with shouts of ‘Say hi to Oscar for me’ from the huge crowds gathered on the sidewalk. Apropos of almost nothing, I visited the little town in Florida where ‘The Truman Show’ was filmed. Not on purpose. And it felt disappointingly un-surveiled. My weekend looks like it might be doable on Saturday, but, starting on Sunday when the heat is supposed to go up into the upper 3os, I suspect it will be rather insufferable. And your weekend? Surely, you have plans galore. xo. ** Right. I decided to restore an old post about my favorite novel by one of my favorite novelists Christine Brooke-Rose for your hopeful delectation today. Thus … See you tomorrow.

 

 

‘After being senselessly attacked by strangers and experiencing terror of imminent death, artist John Duncan felt a range of intense emotions: panic, fear, anger and also relief. Such emotional high made him feel so alive that he wanted to share these sensations with others. That was the origin of Scare (1976), where Duncan was knocking on friends’s doors in the middle of the night, while wearing a mask, and shooting them in the face with a gun loaded with blanks.

‘In 1980, Duncan had gone through a horrible break-up. On many levels, he was not equipped to deal with it. According to the artist, he felt as if he failed at something very essential to being human, failed at love. That led to the Blind Date (1980), the most controversial act of his career. “I wanted to punish myself as thoroughly as I could. I’d decided to have a vasectomy, but that wasn’t enough: I wanted my last potent seed to be spent in a dead body. I made arrangements to have sex with a cadaver. I was bodily thrown out of several sex shops before meeting a man who set me up with a mortician’s assistant in a Mexican border town…” Having done that, he proceeded to have a vasectomy.

‘In the last room of the exhibition, references to the above-mentioned two performances are surrounded by large 4-meter (about 13 feet) photographs, three on each side, of female genitalia, which the artist called Icons (1996) and saw them as objects of veneration. Each photo is copied in a drawing, placed next to it and executed in artist’s own blood. Though smaller in size, the choice of medium delivers a punch, suggesting the magnitude of the human tragedy behind the act. Duncan came from an abusive household, which led him to develop many troubled relationships not knowing how to deal with women. One example of that is in the next room, presented by 3 large tablecloths from the artist’s 3rd wedding. Quotes from his now ex-wife, such as “Fear of Life”, “La Vita è Bella” (Life is beautiful), “It’s All Good” (2013), were traced in his own feces. Nearby, there is a Self-portrait, also from 2013, in mold crusted around the outline of his body after his assistants smeared yogurt on and around him.

‘This attitude of inadequacy, self-shaming and vulnerability comes across in his staged events as well. One of such, Maze (1995), is documented in the retrospective by two still photographs done with infrared cameras. Here, Duncan told people to strip naked and enter a maze, which in reality was just a pitch-dark room. Without telling the participants, he planned to keep them there overnight. It seems that instilling panic and making his performers share his feeling of being exposed and powerless was the goal.

‘Rage Room (2010), which is assembled in the middle of the gallery as a wood-walled roofless container, was proposed as a larger design outlined in the schematic drawing attached to the wall near the installation. Duncan wanted to configure several containers in the shape of a human brain, and at the center locate the Rage Room. The violent anger almost palpable inside it as vicious splashes of cow blood on the walls and smashed furniture on the floor recreate the debilitating resentful wrath.

‘Such state of mind is understandable: after the Blind Date performance, Duncan was shunned not only by the Los Angeles art world, but also his closest friends turned against him. That led to a self-imposed exile to Japan. The only documentation that exists about the Blind Date is an audio-recording. In Japan, Duncan continued working and had dived into audio, exploring the ways of how it affected the body and how one feels. A lot of the work since then evolves around sound. In Japan, Duncan is considered a godfather of Japanese Noise Rock.

‘“These experiences — the acts themselves, the shame that inspired them, isolation in Japan soon afterwards, suddenly in a completely alien culture unable to read, understand or communicate with anyone — all taught me far more that I could possibly have anticipated. As a result, my perception of all existence, including my own, has permanently and fundamentally changed. […] I’ve come to understand the act and experience of learning as sensual, as a form of beauty.”

‘Duncan is a complex and interesting character, sensitive to reactions of others, but not crazy. According to Benjamin Handler, Director of Nicodim gallery and the curator of this exhibition, in the past he attempted suicide a number of times, but in the last decade, he’s been sober, grew more adjusted and comfortable in his own skin.

‘Duncan is a controversial artist, who pushed the boundaries of what could be considered art. Looking at his output challenges viewer’s morals and artistic taste. One either likes it or doesn’t. Emotional response to his work is so strong that remaining indifferent is not an option. So I devised an alternative approach, for myself, to processing and reacting to it – I looked beyond all of it and tried to see a human being, who was creating his art in response to life and growing in the process.

‘“Since Blind Date, all forms of my work are created to raise questions, to find out everything I can about who I am without fear or judgement, and to encourage you to do the same. Think of me as you will.”’ — YABNYC

 

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Further

John Duncan Site
A CONVERSATION WITH JOHN DUNCAN
John Duncan @ instagram
John Duncan @ bandcamp
John Duncan @ Nicodim Gallery
John Duncan – Digital in Berlin
John Duncan: The properties of sound
Podcast: Artist John Duncan Talks About His Art and Travels
Book: ‘John Duncan’
John Duncan Interview by email with Massimo Ricci
John Duncan @ Special Interests
Edge of Vision: An Exchange with John Duncan

 

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Extras

John Duncan Live [Full set] @ Magazzino sul Po, Torino (IT), 2021

MANTRA (2015)

John Duncan – Tap Internal [Touch]

 

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Interview (1994)

 

What are your thoughts about the idea of creation: why does anybody do anything?

For me, the reason why I create things is to stimulate change in some way; in myself first and, for someone who’s listening, hopefully in them as well.

OK, then why change and what sort of change?

Firstly, to become aware that a lot of what I think is what I’ve been taught or told to think. It doesn’t come from me; it comes from something that I’ve been led to believe comes from me. And the difference between the two is so hard to see. I push myself into some sort of action to find out the difference, to find out just how much I’ve been taught and how much is mine.

And what are you left with; how far are you with this process, this change? How far have you affected it? Have you affected it?

In a sense, yes. I know a whole lot more about what I’ve been led to believe, and I don’t accept it at face value like I used to. To get there, I’ve had to commit crimes, among other things.

What sort of crimes?

Assault, necrophilia, to some extent pyromania. I’m calling them crimes because that’s what they’re considered by somebody else, not me. It’s something I felt that I had to do.

Is that not counter-productive? This approach makes it easy for people to stick you into a little box and say, “This man does this”. Where it’s never totally defined what you do, then nobody can really do that. Maybe that’s a more effective weapon – but this is something I’m putting to you as a question, rather than something that I think.

It’s true that people have tried to put my work into categories that create some confusion, but I think what they’re doing is using these labels to escape from thinking about the issues I’m trying to raise.

No question.

This is something I learned in Japan. Before I went there, I made a lot of judgements about people who evaded questions in this way; I felt that it was weak. I don’t think so anymore; I think it’s their perogative. I had been expecting a level of understanding from them that they weren’t prepared to try for, and allowed my disappointment with them to override what the work had taught me personally.

Why was that particularly because of Japan?

When I went there, I also started making a lot of judgements, about the way people were treating me, things that I was seeing, and it turned out that my perception of what was happening was completely different from what their intention was; from what would be considered normal there. Communication through spoken language made impossible. I’d get whatever understanding I could from gestures and facial expressions: I was using interpretations of these from my own culture and often this, too, turned out to be inaccurate at best. In this kind of isolation, it became clear that I was seeing what I wanted to see, that I was doing exactly the same thing that the people I was calling weak were doing, refusing new information by judging it from irrelevant past experiences. For example, when I’d play someplace there, the audiences usually didn’t respond. There may be a packed house, there may be 10 people, and the audience of 10 may be the packed house. After you’re finished, there’s silence; like playing in a church. Then everyone gets up and walks out. The first time that happened to me, I thought, “Good God, everybody hated this!” I thought so for a couple of years, until people started coming up to me and saying they’d been in the audience, heard what I’d done and liked it very much, that they’d thought differently about music after they’d heard it.

Would you not say that to make something involves a kind of judgement anyway? I remember Brian Eno saying that music, or sound creation, was one of the best ways of working out philosophies and attitudes towards life because you could take a strip of tape, which is a certain length of time, and then within those parameters you could work out any philosophy you wanted to and it wasn’t going to harm anybody. But you still had those parameters; you still had to decide when it was going to start and when it was going to end. So you’re making a kind of judgement and, to my mind, putting something out on a piece of tape or a record or whatever implies a kind of judgement.

For myself, of course; I judge myself all the time.

Where do you draw the line, then? Or don’t you draw one, or don’t you see it as being a line – between judging for other people and judging for yourself. This is why I asked about creation: why does anybody do anything? You can say it’s to try and change yourself and to try and change other people, but that implies another kind of judgement because that says these people should change. It’s a judgement about people you’ve never met, people who are going to be affected in some way by something that you’ve put out.

Yes, but by putting something out I don’t want to make judgements about someone else: I have no right to do that, anymore than they have a right to judge me.

But if you say that you want them to be changed in some way, does that not imply a kind of judgement about the way that they are before they’ve heard your record, or whatever?

Let me put it this way: in a lot of ways I’m asleep. My reason for making work is.to wake up. I know that I’m not the only one who is asleep, so if I put work out then someone else who’s asleep might respond to this. But I can’t tell this person, ‘you are asleep”. I don’t have any right- to do that because I’m asleep.

What can anybody hope to achieve by doing that kind of operation. This goes all the way along the line; you have the wonderful example of Handel’s Surprise Symphony – do you know that one? He was absolutely sick of London audiences falling asleep during these very long soirees, etc., so he made this piece where, da dum da dum dum dum BOOM! and everyone jumped, “what?!”. What can anybody hope to achieve now, with the fact that if people are asleep – of course, how and whether you know somebody else is asleep are separate questions – but what can anybody hope and expect to achieve if people are asleep anyway? And if you do not have the right to judge and tell somebody else that they’re asleep, what right do you have to make them wake up?

Well, I don’t; that’s the whole thing. For one thing, if someone wants to stay asleep, who am I to tell him he’s wrong?

What if someone wants that person to stay asleep and that person doesn’t know they’re asleep? Does the dreamer know they are dreaming? The old zen story where “I dreamt that I was a butterfly and then I woke up: am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man, or am I a man dreaming that I am a butterfly?”. Where’s the in-point, where’s the button?

That’s why I make work, to find out.

What have you actually managed to find out? What have you encountered?

Well, one thing I learned from Blind Date, having sex with a cadaver, was that I started asking myself a lot of things, such as why would I choose that punishment and what’s the point of such punishment in any event?

Could you say that you saw it as a bigger metaphor, for something else?

Much bigger. I still learn new things about that. One was that sex and death are very connected; they’re the two inescapable events in the life of a human being that bring a human being back down to an animal, into blood and guts. Everything else that we build up, philosophies, societies, technology, government, religion. Is to explain and filter these two things, to try to give ourselves an illusion of diluting their power. And these things are just that, they’re an illusion. Sex and death come back; they take their time but they come back. If we just accept these, really accept them, then there’s a strong temptation not to do anything.

Yes, I can see that. If you say, “that’s all there is.”

So I learned that we need this illusion; I need this illusion of a sense of purpose. I see it as an illusion, one that’s essential for my ‘being’, to have a sense of value.

It also gave me an entirely new understanding of what ‘beauty’ is, and made it clear that my creative actions up to then, of criticising hypocrisy or making issues of social behaviour, were a form of one-dimensional thinking. The sex experience itself, the sense of hopelessness driving events leading up to it and its presentation in public, the co-ordinated attempt by several of my friends and former lovers to have me tried in Mexico on necrophilia charges, the attempt to cast me as a pariah when extradition proved too impractical, my move to Japan, et cetera, et cetera… The entire episode was the opening of a door. Beyond it turned out to be a realm, inconceivably vast. What began as a determined effort to degrade myself beyond anything I thought I could survive became an affirmation of life.

It’s interesting: you say sex and death are the two – I’d say there are three. You missed out birth.

That’s true.

But you say that sex is just meat: there are 2000 years of a certain kind of relgious thought that would say that sex is actually the highest, something that is so far away from meat and bones and blood to be totally unrecognisable from that.

The same thing is true of death.

 

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Show

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BLIND DATE (1980)
‘I wanted to punish myself as thoroughly as I could. I’d decided to have a vasectomy, but that wasn’t enough: I wanted my last potent seed to be spent in a dead body. I made arrangements to have sex with a cadaver. I was bodily thrown out of several sex shops before meeting a man who set me up with a mortician’s assistant in a Mexican border town…’

‘BLIND DATE was performed in order to torture myself, physically and psychically. The sound recording of the session in Mexico was made public to respond to what I saw as a general situation created by social conditions, and to render any further self-torture of this kind, especially psychic self-torture, unnecessary for anyone to perform as a creative act.

‘These experiences — the acts themselves, the shame that inspired them, isolation in Japan soon afterward, suddenly in a completely alien culture unable to read, understand or communicate with anyone — all taught me far more than I could possibly have anticipated. As a result, my perception of all existence, including my own, has permanently and fundamentally changed.

‘These experiences have shown life in all forms to be an incredibly rich, timeless, continuous cycle, with death and corporeal existence interwoven as part of the process. I’ve come to see myself as a microscopic and insignificant part of that process, while at the same time the very embodiment and center of it. I’ve come to understand the act and experience of learning as sensual, as a form of beauty.

‘Since BLIND DATE, all forms of my work are created to raise questions, to find out everything I can about who I am without fear or judgement, and to encourage you to do the same.’

 

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Under the Influence of Torture (2014; Video: Michel Le Libraire)
‘A torture device based on the Apollo Chair used by Iranian secret police SAVAK is set, with the victim (Bryan Lewis Saunders) strapped to it, his head inside a metal bucket to amplify his screams to his own ears, on top of a 1000W subwoofer mounted onstage. He attempts to recite the Rules of the Geneva Convention from memory as Duncan powers oscillator frequencies through the subwoofer and touches a 5 million Volt taser to both Saunders’ exposed skin and the metal chair he’s strapped to. The event ends when the victim, shaking in uncontrolled tremors, stops reciting to scream and is carried offstage.’

 

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OUT (1979)
‘Reichian exercise performed under a Los Angeles freeway bridge.’

Watch it here

 

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The Garden (2006)
‘Hydrochloric acid is constant inside Building 18. All metal corroding. Workers told to enter in pairs with no protection. When one passes out, his partner drags him outside and returns to the job. Workers never told what they’re dealing with. Bicycle tires leave rotting rubber on the road. Surviving family members say over 800 employees died. Toxic waste from the plant hauled away by tanker trucks with “milk” painted on the side. Dumped in the river nearby. Kilometers downstream, rocks a meter below ground stained blue, green, pink. Tankers sequestered as evidence. The company begins to fail. To save it an immense incinerator is built to burn toxic waste. Smoke released directly into the atmosphere.’

 

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HORROR OBSOLETE: ENDLESS MARDI GRAS (2017)
‘Image sequences interwoven between drone images of destroyed cities and visually amplified pornography to contrast the illusion of human affection with the reality of its absence, to cut between alluring promise and total despair, punctuated by sudden, stark narration and edited to the soundtrack of Mantra.’

Watch it here

 

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The Grateful (2009)
‘Unexpectedly, the entire theater goes completely dark. For several seconds everyone sits in silence, blind. Duncan and the chorus members, sitting throughout the audience, begin to to whisper to themselves. In a moment, continuing to whisper, they stand up in the dark and undress loudly enough for the strangers sitting near them to hear. Nude or semi-nude, they turn to the strangers and start screaming. Some stand up and scream back. Cellphone camera strobes flash throughout the audience. Screaming and strobes continue for several minutes. Then whispering again, Duncan and the chorus move through the crowd to the exit to end the event.’

 

_________
Maze (1995)
‘Seven participants and I are locked naked and completely blind overnight. The other participants have no knowledge of what to expect, or information about how long the event will last.’

 

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See (2002)
‘John Duncan’s SEE is a video installation made up of four separate and simultaneous projections of sequences taken from the John See Series, a series of adult movies he directed in 1986-87 during his stay in Japan. On entering the dark exhibition space, the viewer is assailed by immense flashes of images and sound cut-ups… In those moments in which the sound is softer, a voice emerges, whispering Japanese phrases until it is drowned once again by the wave of louder sounds.’

 

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Caged (2021)

 

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BUS RIDE (1976)
‘A small amount of fish extract is poured into the ventilation system of a Los Angeles city bus shortly before the bus begins its standard route. Set in buses with windows that cannot be opened, the subliminal odor acts as a subtle aphrodisiac on the unsuspecting passengers. A normally passive commuter kicks a stranger, a pregnant woman, off of the seat they’re sharing in order to put up his feet. This causes a fight among the other passengers, half of whom side with the commuter. A group of normally quiet ultra-polite children, going home from a school specializing in disciplined behavior, tear college career ads from the inside of the bus, shred them and attack each other with the scraps.’

 

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JURASSIC (2022)
‘A 60 minute edit by John Duncan of Stephen Dwoskin’s 1974 feature film Dyn Amo, focused on a group of performers onstage in a run-down strip club, filmed by Dwoskin when polio still made it possible for him to balance on crutches hoilding the camera waist-high. Duncan’s edited version emphasizes the particular attention Dwoskin gives to the performers’ faces, from cynical contempt to naïvely lost to sweaty staged hostility, as they put on a show for a seriously jaded audience that remains invisible. Featuring a soundtrack by John Duncan.’

Watch it here

 

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Voice Contact (1998)
‘Event with live action and 4-channel surround-sound audio for single voluntary participants, nude, alone and blind, in a direct confrontation with actual vs. recorded voice in a completely dark, 5-star luxury hotel suite stripped of furniture. All clothing and possessions given to a uniformed guard stationed at the suite entrance. Rendered blind and vulnerable — by choice. The surround sound constantly changes, making the suite seem to fluctuate between a large hall and a smaller, intimate space, making echolocation impossible.’

 

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Rage Room (2010)
‘Informed by the seismic shift in his livelihood after Blind Date, Rage Room was created as a prototype for the center room of a seven-level structure based on the architecture of the human brain, constructed from 495 shipping container modules, designed to reflect or invoke specific states of mind. The core container—Rage Room—is dedicated to abject rage, and has been recreated at the center of Nicodim’s gallery space. The walls are bloody, furniture is smashed and broken on the floor.’

Watch it here

 

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The TOILET EXHIBITION (1985)
‘Solo installation of A1 poster-size collage-images of war atrocities and pornography, mounted on the doors inside stalls of mens’ public toilets in the fashion, financial, government and entertainment centers of Tokyo: Shibuya, Hibiya, Kokkaigijidomae, Shinjuku.’

 

____________
Narcomantic (2012)
‘An 8 hour nonstop all night event that breaks down the boundary between dream and reality for a sleeping audience.’

 

__________
ACCESS DENIED (2000)
‘Stereo sound coming from behind the locked doors of two separate rooms at the top of the villa’s main stairway (one channel per room): a couple whispering, laughing, shouting, having long, slow, repeated sex, with a mixed-shortwave drone in the background, playing back loud enough to echo through the area and be heard from the base of the stairs, encouraging visitors to defy the ‘ACCESS DENIED’ sign on the staircase steps and go up to hear better. Which of course they did.’

 

__________
Downhill (2004)
‘Imagining the mindset of a contemporary slave.’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** jay, If you can find the film somewhere, I second your instinct to rewatch. In the research I did on cannibals for ‘TMS’, I didn’t come across a single cannibal who didn’t express at least a slight disappointment in the meal itself. Okay, good if the blood thing is de rigeur. In type, it brings horror movies to mind, or did to some degree to me, apparently. Maybe something therein about the visual vs. written porn conundrum. I hope you have a very spruced up day. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha, oh, no, Brad wasn’t flirting with me, quite the contrary possibly. But thank you for imagining the possibility. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, paintings need to be seen in general, I think. Sometimes photo realist paintings are better in jpegs. But it’s possible to add the requisite textures and proper colors and stuff maybe. Or I hope so for painters’ sakes in this 80% life by proxy post-internet world of ours. What was kind of interesting was that I had actually seen Brad Pitt in the flesh years ago in a 7-11 when he wasn’t yet hugely famous, and he had a quite visibly acne scarred face, and now let’s just say he doesn’t. I had to look up mukbanger. I’m out of it. But I will certainly follow love’s budding career. Love eating a muckburger, which is what my insufficiently coffeed-up eyes thought you were saying at first, or rather a very, very delicious muckburger, G. ** Lucas, Hi. I’m still holding out hope for my ear’s self-healing abilities, but my faith is definitely waning. No, but I peeked through a hole in the fence around the skateboarding stadium and saw a little slice people cheering. I will for sure go see the ParaOlympics skateboarding in a couple of weeks when the prices are much lower, sadly. Yeah, you’re obviously so right about your dad. I hope you can channel the anger into something creative or … I don’t know. I emotionally divorced myself from my parents in my early teens for all kinds of reasons, and after that I just thought they were ignorant and intellectually limited and kind of sad really. People that life was gradually leaving behind. You’re right to be angry, needless to say. I guess just keep knowing you’re the one in the right, and he’s just an embattled fortress of a person or something. I talked to Zac. He won’t be back until next week, but we talked about everything, and he’s 100 in agreement with what I think we should do, so hopefully next week we’ll start to de-sink the ship. Thanks, pal. Hang way in there. ** _Black_Acrylic, It’s fun. Well worth a watch if you can find it. ** Diesel Clementine, Oops. I’m glad I wasn’t the ‘Beautiful Room’. I have yet to place a VR set on my head that didn’t make me take it off within 30 seconds. Yikes, your childhood brain condition. As you might know, I got hit on the head with an axe when I was 11, so I can sort of somewhat relate maybe. I only know the band Death in June. Thanks for the archive.org-occasioned educational field trip. The truncated version of your comment had plenty going for it, no worries whatsoever. ** Charalampos, I’ll have to go do a visual mix and max with those two to see if I agree. I’m blurry without the props. I do like it. Thank you for the gift of synchronicity. Greetings from the many loud helicopters flying over Paris. ** Thomas H, It is really fun and good. It’s hard to locate and see, but it’s worth the hunt. Maybe it’s because I grew up near the Rose Parade and always went to watch them being built and always went to look at them parked afterwards and wilting that I think that parades aren’t parades without floats. But I do think parades are parades without marching bands, so my opinion is obviously quirky. The French don’t prize shitty deserts. It’s very hard to find them here. Even their donuts are too laden with fanciness. I’m so, so sorry about your friend. Is there no one to take over the gallery? Could people organise a benefit or something? Worst comes to worst, maybe there’s a university or LGBTQ archive that would accept and preserve the works? I don’t know, that’s very sad. I’m so sorry. ** Uday, Hi. Woody, interesting. Yes, I suppose if I did spritz myself, it could be woody. I basically swore off writing non-fiction about, oh, 17 years ago, so, no. Other than the non-fiction part of ‘I Wished’. I was never so good at non-fiction, and I write too meticulously to be an efficient non-fiction writer on deadline all of that. Thanks for wishing to know. What’s happened to you since you lost blood? ** Nika Mavrody, Is that true about Dostoyevsky? How interesting. Thanks! ** Steve, Hi. No, I don’t know why. The book is very good. I’m early into it, but I think it’ll come up with Baldwin’s reason at some point. Like I said, keep saying, the festival circuit is a total racket if you’re an actual filmmaker making actually interesting films with no clout behind you or friends in those high places. What sucks is there’s no other clear, productive way to get your film out without having spend large amounts of time basically inventing another way. But I’m pretty anti-festival right now. Or anti-so-called-big festivals. It was invigorating: your track. Everyone, For Gay City News, Steve interviewed GOOD ONE director India Donaldson here. ** Joseph, Oh, right, the hurricane. That’s been a top news story even over here. So it does sound impactful and taxing. You know how it is: I remember when people would read there was a big earthquake in LA and call me to ask if I was alive and okay, and I’d be, like, ‘Earthquake, really?’ I think the only time I ever kayaked was in a huge bay full of icebergs in the Antarctic, but it’s in my top five ever greatest things I’ve done without a pen in my hand or an open WordDoc. Great you’re finished editing. Late-September! Whoa, so soon. Very nice. Excited! ** Harper, Being a medical marvel sounds appealing. Or a least being contextualised as one does. Whew. My LA roommate smokes weed every waking minute, but he’s mellow, and I wouldn’t even know what he’s like when he’s not stoned, and he vapes it so the apartment still smells fresh. Glad ‘Out 1’ hooked you. I used to wish Leaud was my boyfriend. ** Bill, Right, local legend as well as international less known legend. I’m still on the fence and mostly on the other side of the fence about ‘Longlegs’. May ‘Flunker’ do the opposite of flunk you. ** Oscar 🌀, Best cat ever, it sounds like. Did you know that The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ was originally called ‘Hi There Oscar’, and, in fact, that’s what Paul McCartney is actually singing when it sounds like he’s singing ‘Helter Skelter’ but George Martin was so against that uncommercial title/chorus that he used an early, primitive equivalent of AI to revise McCartney’s voice until it said something else, which turned out to sound like ‘Helter Skelter’ to undiscerning ears, but it’s really just gibberish with ‘Hi There Oscar’ as its internal organs. Do you ever wonder if you’re a robot that’s so sophisticated that it doesn’t even know it’s a robot? I don’t. 22 degrees … sigh, yum. We’re supposed to be getting our last heatwave of the year this weekend. So be glad you went home. xoxo. ** Today my galerie presents a show by the very intense artist John Duncan, and I leave you to discover why he’s intense. See you tomorrow.