[-empyre-] [empyre] COVID Sonata, Movement 1, Allegro

[Kathy High]

Hello Tim,

Thank you for this response and for bringing Beatriz into this discussion. Her work was always prescient and also remains deeply moving still today.

Beatriz and I were close friends and we spoke about her pending death often. And I knew of this work you refer to well. Beatriz's film "Dying for the Other" was one created while she was living in NYC and studying with experimental filmmaker Grahame Weinbren. Beatriz and I talked about her research often as she went into this project. B said she had been influenced by an earlier project of mine from 2004-06 called Embracing Animal where I worked/collaborated/lived with transgenic rats who were used in pharmaceutical/medico research to develop drugs to treat autoimmune diseases. http://www.embracinganimal.com/ 
In Dying for the Other Beatriz tracked the ways that animal bodies (in this case a research mouse) was used against her own body that was also being subjected to cancer treatment and medical research. It is a beautiful and very personal project - one that is very special among B's body of artwork.

Her project The Anti-Cancer Survival Kit was another amazing research project looking into the herbs, foods and plants that were useful as immune boosters - a project very much on people's minds now as supplies of elderberry are dwindling! This project was very much about life and living and a will to live! Which does sit side by side death and dying. I was lucky enough to be the recipient of one of B's beautiful Anti-Cancer Survival Kits. Lovingly assembled by Robert Nideffer and Maria Michails after B's death, the receipt of this kit took my breath away. Massive amounts of herbal research had been conducted in the accompanying reference guide. Growing kits included seeds for cooking such as rosemary, titan parsley, Greek oregano, winter thyme, lexton leeks, and drion fennel. Cooking utensils with the anti-cancer logo burned into the sides. All  these items to encourage positive and healthy consumption to nurture and support our bodies - now ingested in her memory. 

Thank you for binging all that into this conversation, Tim! 

My death tool kit is more about collecting recipes to help us now in this strange pandemic moment to talk about and think about coronavirus deaths. How to comfort each other and mourn together. How to hold the weight of the unfair deaths occurring now to populations who have been historically underserved? How  to understand these deaths as we come to terms with the other impacts of the virus - economic, environmental, racist.

Or as Patty Zimmermann wrote in another recent empyre post "We are all in mourning for losses we can not yet name." 

More soon, and many thanks to all the contributors.
xK

On 4/28/20, 12:44 PM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Timothy Conway Murray" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of tcm1 at cornell.edu> wrote:

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    Hi Kathy,

    Your proposal to create a "death tool kit" brings so clearly to mind the final projects on which Beatriz da Costa labored at the end of her iife (many of our participants might not realize that Beatriz -- a pioneering bio and tactical artist -- died in 2012 at the age of 38 after battling cancer throughout her adult life).  Her projects in one of her last (maybe her final?) exhibitions, "The Cost of Life," included a video tryptich, "Dying for the Other," which screened documentation of her struggles in the months following brain surgery alongside footage of experimental laboratory mice..  She also produced "The Anti-Cancer Survival Kit," which includes a database of research, guidelines for anti-cancer approaches, interactive smart games, guides to therapeutic gardens.  Isn't it uncanny how all of Beatriz's survival strategies would serve the needs of this COVID stricken moment?

    I might mention that thanks to the labors and thoughtfulness of your RPI colleague, Robert Nideffer, Beatriz's archive, including "The Anti-Cancer Survival Kit" will be deposited in Cornell's Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art probably this summer (depending on how much COVID slows down our collaboration).  Then next fall, we will be excited to announce and launch a competitive research grant in Beatriz da Costa's name for travel to Cornell to study her archive and related materials in the Rose Goldsen Archive.   Stay tuned for that, which I'm not sure I've mentioned to you or -empyre- previously.

    Stay well.

    Tim


    Timothy Murray
    Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, Cornell Biennial
    http://cca.cornell.edu
    Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
    http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu <http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
    Professor of Comparative Literature and English

    B-1 West Sibley Hall
    Cornell University
    Ithaca, New York 14853



    On 4/28/20, 9:57 AM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Kathy High" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of kittyhigh at gmail.com> wrote:

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        Dear friends,

        I write this contribution on the heels of just reading Patricia's amazing Movement 1: Allegro... I had started writing something else. But was so deeply moved by P's text and stories that I have started again. Thank you for sharing those vivid moments, Patty.

        I too thank Renate and Tim for making this space. I find at present - it is these spaces of exchange that mean so much to me, and are probably helping me to process much more than I would if left to my own devices.

        Like many of us here on this particular chat I, too, am an academic. I will teach my last on-line classes for the semester today. I will encourage my students as best I can - many of whom are graduating seniors with nothing but an online graduation ceremony to look forward to. Others who will return next year are cautious and wary of engaging in yet another semester with possible online teaching. We all hate it and are not trained or it. It is tiring in unexpected ways. The processing of the little faces in the boxes draws all my energy as does speaking to a screen with little response. How much to talk about the virus? How much to not talk about the virus? 

        Our university is in financial trouble - like so many others. It feels like it is dying. Having mismanaged funds probably and with an overinflated budget, it seems like a mini version of bigger institutions, governments. Everything is being decided top down. None of us can have any input. Our university president took only a 5% pay cut even while they have furloughed almost 300 university workers. We are told that faculty will be "sized" and assessed by their enrollment numbers for their classes. That doesn't bode well for the Humanities and Arts. Sounds like so many other institutions.

        I am thinking these days about time as many of us are. With the uncertainty of when and how we can return to some other life besides the ones in our homes - and what that might look like. I have been influenced by writings in disabilities studies - in particular an article by Ellen Samuels "Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time."  -   https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5824/4684

        Samuels beautifully sums up what time is like for those with disabilities - unpredictable, non-linear and where scheduling is difficult or non-existent: "Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings."

        We float a bit seamlessly now and share some of that crip time space. As someone with chronic autoimmune diseases, I know this kind of time where your body disrupts your expectations and deadlines. Now we all have a kind of time disrupted and out of our control. 

        Besides this we all are surrounded by death or the possibility of death and dying. Tens of thousands have died in our country. And often they have died alone without family to support them. All this made me wonder how we can comprehend this. We are a culture reluctant to even mention the word death much less discuss what it means to us. How do we collectively grieve? I am working a "death tool kit." What does it take for us to start this discussion? What tools do we need to help us? I am not sure what this tool kit looks like yet. But I am working with artist and death doula Marne Lucas to try to figure this out. Marne has been working with other artists at the end of their lives. She helps these artists develop their legacy: https://griefgratitudegreatness.com/episodes/2019/07/30/marne

        My thoughts are really scattered these days as I am distracted and can't find time (oddly). But these are some thoughts to add into this very rich mix. I am deeply grateful to my colleagues writing and contributing thoughts to empyre! 
        Be well.
        Big embrace, Kathy



        On 4/27/20, 9:06 AM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Patricia Zimmermann" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of patty at ithaca.edu> wrote:

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