[-empyre-] Bio-Fascism: Eclipse of the Social /Decline of Politics -- question marks

Fri Apr 24 19:49:38 AEST 2020

dear Christina and all

what a breathtaking tour de force through your painting-sculptures and what you, at the end of your beautiful response, refer to as "materiality and performance, 
repetition and reweaving/redrawing."

This also answers some of my questions to us all, about concrete examples of "thinking through materials" and less good ideas (which I consider "art as virus" to be, even if Burroughs or Laurie Anderson sang about it); Christina you also took us through a show that is in quarantine, something museums would like to offer now, virtual tours with zoom effects where you can get a little closer to a painting without being in the room/space of collective experiences.(museums often don't quite write as well as you do, Christina!).  Thank you for that, and all you say about how the translations of Sor Juana's enigmas, but also the poetics of an (indigenous) land and its shapeshifts, inspired you and motivated you:  I noted that one of your wonderful physical works hangs in the doorway (Eleggua comes to mind; and as my Cuban friends told me, this trickster plays a role in every aspect of our lives, offering us opportunity and just as likely throwing an obstacle in our way). 

Exit Doors.  (I'm reresding Mohsin Hamid's novel "Exit West," and can recommend it warmly)

More to talk about for sure, about these black exit doors, passages  -- and those "very materials of performing drawing, compelling us not to settle." 
I feel like you in this respect, only now beginning to learn how to draw and paint, so my attempts are compellingly modest yet.

Today, a newspaper here in my region recalls WPA (under Roosevelt), federal art and federal writers projects (Ralph Ellison wrote "Invisible Man," then,
and Zora Neale Hurston composed "Their Eyes were watching God"; Oswald de Andrade had already written a different kind of manifesto, Manifesto Antropófago, that might resonate from the south), and I wondered this morning what/how our emergency relief acts will act, what public art and murals we will produce, where we will gather to perform or enjoy rituals, demonstrate our "temperaments and affiliation with a notorious bodies of enigmatic writings -- perhaps resisting derivations, or repeats," and (Christina) yet echoing.

I am unable to respond much now to high theory, and may be forgiven, but our DAP-Lab ensemble's last dance, in December, was drawing the climate crisis into its thinking through material, and if you have time & a dark chamber, here is the link:

"Mourning for a dead moon":   https://youtu.be/I66-b21y8oE

with regards
Johannes Birringer

ps. 
(thanks also for the reference to Joanna Newsome's "Divers" album and this song you chose ("Time, as Sympton, of Love"). When I refered to Dor Juana's visitors/lovers, I meant Father Antonio, her confessor, and Maria Luisa, Countess of Paredes, her lover, the one she dedicated her poems to).

________________________________________
From: Christina McPhee <naxsmash at gmail.com>
Sent: 24 April 2020 08:18

dear Johannes and all,
Thanks so much for your queries about my Shapeshifters drawings. I apologize, I've been away designing a book for days on end and nearly disappeared into the computer.

The works Johannes is referring to were introduced in week one; the link to images is

 http://www.christinamcphee.net/category/projects/1-2-shapeshifters-drawings-2020

 Johannes wrote:

"These are very large 'Shapeshifters' - Christina, and they seem a mixture or assemblage of organic forms or elements and the digital, digital refrains,  can you please tell us more about how Sor Juana's writings or compositions inspired you, and whether you felt the solitude of a monastic cell was also implying something gritty/resilient for you (Sor Juana had visitors and a lover, I gathered from "Sor Juana and the Chambered Nautilus", a theatrical staging and reembodiment I saw last year at MECA, Houston),…”

I started drawing from the Enigmas with small studies over a year ago in March 2019. I had fallen in love with a translation by Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal (2015). Gritty sound clashes in English, against and toward the elegant twisted original in Spanish. Readers like me find her short, tweet length questions rich in possible answers and none.

As for lovers, Sor Juana keeps us on the wrong foot : she asks,  “What can be the favor / that by secret virtue/  if reached is rued/ and if awaited, feared?” (Joanna Newsom: “Time is a symptom of love.”) Temporality is a symptom of eros, an overloading of circuits, intensification between two or more nodes. Stalina writes about this effect in the task of translation: “In essence, to maintain structural integrity employs a series of simulaneous parallels, like a string of double helix carrying Sor Juana’s and my blood to donate to a reader’s pulse.”

https://uglyducklingpresse.org/publications/enigmas/

 Symbolically then, we find tranverse, helix crossings between our love of the Earth, and our overwhelming desire for both future climate change mitigation and human survival, over against how that ‘favor’ — of suddenly clean air and burgeoning wildlife, elk herds on the beaches near Portland, all this — is achieved by a terrible ‘secret virtue’ (the coronavirus’s monstrous algorithms by which it generates new genetic code in our carrier bodies remains obscure)—and, ‘if reached is rued’ (we are in global quarantine for the foreseeable)— and, ‘if awaited, feared?’ — fearing that art and community despite all reasonable efforts (pace Simon Taylor) could all die soon...

http://www.christinamcphee.net/captivating-reason-cautivando-la-razon/

So yes although I had already been studying the poems for a year, it was not until after they were installed in their current un-viewable show in LA, that the force of affiliating to her poetry seems ‘an even more inspiring premonition?’ I think though that we must collectively develop resistances through works of art, as Premesh Lalu was so inspired, by the amazing Francis Darby painting, “The Opening of the Sixth Seal” in the Irish National Gallery. I find Premesh’s  inductive hypothesis, around temporal contiguous events around abolition of slavery in at least  parts of the world and simultaneously the production of this painting of Darby’s circa 1828, very speculative in the best way: “The Danby painting, completed in 1828, converged with the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean and the Cape and coincided with a revolution in scientific communication that proved to be indispensable in the genealogy of race upon which apartheid rested…Would it give us a new perspective on race and how to deal with our concomitant biological fragility?” (This question also reminds me of the installation films of John Akomfrah like“Purple”, 2017.)

 Johannes goes on to tell me: “I was trying to read your "Caminando al tormento" in light of Premesh Lalu refering us to apartheid and less good ideas (thanks for making me look at Season 1 and the performances in Kentridge's & Pahla O.Phala's curation), and the painting by Francis Danby titled *The Opening of the Sixth Seal* (1828)....." http://onlinecollection.nationalgallery.ie/objects/3074/the-opening-of-the-sixth-seal?ctx=35e4b97d-3d9d-4603-ae78-d4f762a24033&idx=1

Johannes is referring to this drawing, “Caminando al tormento / Trekking towards a hellish plight”  : http://www.christinamcphee.net/trekking-toward-a-hellish-plight-caminando-al-tormento/

 Just for fun, here’s the ‘primary text’ from which “The Opening of the Seventh Seal” derives, and is some kind of ur-source for mine. The passage about the sixth seal occurs in the Apocalypse of St John the Divine:

“Then I watched as he broke the sixth seal. And there was a violent earthquake: the sun turned black as a funeral pall and the moon all read as blood; the stars in the sky fell to the earth, like figs shaken down by a gale; the sky vanished, as a scroll is rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved from its place. Then the kings of the earth, magnates and marshals, the rich and the powerful, and all men, slave or free, hid themselves in caves and mountain crags; and they called out the mountains and the crags, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face of the One who sits on the throne and from the vengeance of the Lamb.’ For the great day of their vengeance has come, and who will be able to stand?” (Rev. 6: 12-17, New English Bible).

It is strangely comforting in this time of the ‘rona to read through such open-work, ambiguous, hotshot texts,  such as this sublime example from St John; or the highly virus-resistant while also viral Enigmas of Sor Juana. Stalina, her translator, seems to smile as she writes: “My self-assigned apocalyptic conflict… is that singular mimesis does not suffice…”

http://www.christinamcphee.net/its-offspring-the-fire-su-descendencia-el-fuego/

I think this is where the translator, Kentridge and Phala of the ‘less good idea’, and I concur. Something in the very material of performing drawing compels me, us, not to settle. We have to keep on transforming, maybe like our nemesis the virus, but also ‘like’ ourselves,  our less than perfect, very volatile, nomadic, collective selves.

In looking at them from a distance (they are in quarantine now too, and not with me), my drawings’ indigestibility, or at any rate anomalous character -- even with, or perhaps because of, their affiliation with a notorious body of enigmatic writing -- notoriously resist derivations, or repeats.  Luridly present, if you hit the link, each drawing’s deliberately contrarian, gauche, almost awkward color and a Romantic apocalyptic temperament like Francis Danby’s or John Martin; and intercept weird data scraps from Maya hieroglyphics and Japanese anime.

http://www.christinamcphee.net/that-passion-aquella-passion/

 Shapeshifting could be a useful working concept now.

To back up a minute: I begin this body of work during a residency in November, 2019 at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, on the edge of the Great Plains, in the Powder River country, indigenous land of the Crow and Lakota nations. I return to this part of the West to reconcile the raging present with haunts of memory from my childhood on the Plains. Sere grasslands and brooding hills caress me into a sensation of suspended time. Viscerally, I moved into drawing as a mode of hospitality: to invite my interior life and my body back into this place. I saturated inks into large sheets of kozo washi. Rough-edging the paper, digging the pen nib into velvety fibers, buckling and flexing rivulets of ink, my processes unexpectedly produce low relief sculpture. Each sheet of drawn paper takes on a haptic, as well as optical effect: a topologic matrix.

http://www.christinamcphee.net/bowing-like-a-star-inclinado-como-estrella/

I find shape-shifting through material prompts. It is a poetics and a politics. It resonates across three centuries as waves of colonial power clash with indigenous empire in this place. For the Lakota, shapeshifting is strategy and a way of life. Community regenerates through the principle of Iktomi, "an ambiguous shapeshifting spider-trickster culture hero who embodies what is perhaps the defining characteristic of the Lakota people: their stunning ability and willingness to change" (Pekka Hamalainen, Lakota America, Yale UP 2019).  Iktomi accepts processes of refining ideas into program through materiality and performance, repetition and reweaving. It also assumes that community work, together, as we are trying to do now on this list, can develop vital collective subjectivities, that together we make transformation possible for each other.

Christina