Sunset Debris, Icebergs Off Fogo

Turn your iPad into an avant gallery/library/listening station via UbuWeb, where you can watch experimental films, like Annika Ström's "All My Dreams Have Come True" (2004), above, in which her mother and uncle discuss how to say "all my dreams have come true" in English; and download super poetry, like Ron Silliman's "Sunset Debris." May all your electronic devices stimulate versus sedate (except when you are preparing for sleep, coming down from an anxiety attack, and other exceptions).

Recently saw Ron Silliman read at the Poetry Foundation. Best for hearing Ron read from "Sunset Debris," a long poem in questions. I went home thinking about crafting questions, and thinking about what happens in juxtaposing questions. "Sunset Debris" deftly had Kennedy and I in stitches, then pensive, inward-turning, then pulled us back out again, rolling us through a nuanced, diverse gamut of emotions and considerations, love, trash pick-up, sexual function and dysfunction, and other topics popularly and unpopularly handled via language.

I wish everyone in the world could write/dictate a poem in questions, and then all the questions could be compiled, into the longest poem in the world. What a collaboration. It would take a while to catch up with everyone, prioritizing folks on their deathbeds, so that their questions can be included, and finishing up with advanced and post-toddlers, whose iterations could provide crucial sub-volumes' worth of "why." (A real planning problem: where and when to end?) Even if the world population's contributions ran a single page per individual versus Mr. Silliman's fifty we would end up with a massively cool, endlessly intriguing document of human awareness in time and space. And someone or some people could spend the rest of their lives reading the global magnum opus.

"Sunset Debris" also got me thinking about blindness, blind poets, blind poetics. Wondering what the title would mean/feel to a blind reader/listener; and about the experiences of the blind reading/hearing poetry, sightless relationships with literary imagery, "Sunset Debris" relying less on imagery than many types of poems, but the magic of the title occurs in a brainswirl that includes visuals for me.

Devices==Desires. I borrow Alice Fulton's stitchwork in type to lace together post parts A and B.

Thank you, Frame, for introducing me to one of the four corners of the earth, Fogo Island, and the Fogo Island Arts Corporation. The Arts Corp commissioned studios to house artists in residence and Norway-based architect Todd Saunders is doing a bang up job, perching mind-blowing little livables within Fogo's intimidating natural beauty. (If you enjoy architecture at all, be sure to check Saunders' other work on his website.)

The Bridge Studio, Long Studio and
Bridge Studio interior are pictured above.
Check the Arts Corp website to see more studios
and past and current artists in residence.

Awe-inspiring, craggy, coastal, surreality-in-reality landscape? Check. Shelter as work of art? Check. Solitude? Remote-a-tude? Check. Unique local/international community arts interaction/collaboration? Check. Within hours of my first encounter, I started working on a project I hope to complete during a residency on Fogo. . . Poems about a place I have not visited, a series which I hope to complete by marrying them to poems written from that place at a later date. . .


In conclusion, I had to include "Parasitic Mind Control," as recommended by YouTube at the top of my search list of Annika Ström vids.

Twelve Days of Christmas Books: Frame Publishers (I Diverge)

As soon as Frame Publishers' Frameweb newsletter pops up in my inbox I minimize any paid-work windows and take an invigorating break to check out their new art/architecture/design beauties. Today's brought wind of Jonathan Harris's Balloons of Buthan, in which the artist seeks to measure happiness using balloons as a quantitative measure, on a scale from one to ten. Immediately above, "Restaurant owner Khandu shows his level of happiness." The photographs are captivating, and at the Balloons of Bhutan Web site Harris has created a deeper interactive multimedia exploration, including interviews, audio, and statistics. Each of the 117 participants also wrote a wish on one balloon, and the balloons were strung along prayer flags at the conclusion of the project. While the colorful balloons make for whimsy and cheer, the material does not avoid the more bittersweet stream that courses through the study. One man's balloon wish reads, "I want to go with you so I have a place to live." And when we see participants holding fewer than five balloons, we are able to presume (with an admixture of relief) that Harris hasn't fluffed up the happiness level of the Himalayan characters who are his subject (along with happiness and other more general and elusive states and measures).

Check out Harris's website (linked above) to see his webby/tech-related art/thought and photo projects, and to peek into his handwritten, handdrawn sketchbooks. 

I meet people. One at a time they step inside me and live inside me. Some of them only for a moment, some stay. They set up wherever they want to and take my facial expressions or my leg's resting position and put their own in their place. They lie on my back and press their toes into my Achilles tendons. They appear in every pause and come out when I am in doubt and fill all the empty space. I shake and say to myself for a long time: good, really good. —Talo/The House

(Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris. © Crystal Eye Ltd, Helsinki.)

A month back I saw "Talo/The House" (2002), a three-channel video installation by Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila, at the Art Institute. Ahtila drew on research and interviews with individuals suffering psychotic disorders for her work, which is rendered with high production values, pretty sets and mise-en-scène, to make a dreamlike experience for a viewer, one part Anthropologie, two parts Roman Polanski. The dream bridges the divide between those Ahtila interviewed and the viewer on the bench in a darkened room in the corner of an art museum. I looked Ahtila up and read a NYT piece on an exhibition that came down Dec. 3.

Marian Goodman Gallery was showing two projections: "The Annunciation," enacted by non-actors (all women, excepting one, who had experienced addictions); and "Horizontal," which NYT writer Ken Johnson described as "representing a tall spruce tree rotated 90 degrees . . . six vertical projections, each showing a section of the tree, it spreads more than 35 feet across one wall. With its wind-blown branches heaving and swaying and its trunk whipping up and down, it looks more animal than plant, as if it were a great, arboreal whale." Sounds great. There's never enough (really top) video art around.

So, when that week's Frameweb email came through featuring Pipilotti Rist, my longtime (once?) favorite video artist, I went from, "Oh, I guess I won't unsubscribe," to "Now I definitely won't unsubscribe." The newsletter and website feature an agenda section that trots out mentions of a fine stable of very contemporary artists. I was lucky to catch a Rist installation in Chicago soon after moving to the city (maybe "Sip My Ocean"?), and then saw and loved "Ever Is Over All," a giant-flower-smashing-car-windows number at MOMA a few years later—uncannily, giddily uplifting (a bit of a reenactment below). The "Agenda" covered her first solo show in Italy, ending this weekend.

The divergence . . .  I am actually touting a magazine here, versus a book; a magazine available in a digital format no less (in addition to print, but given the cost of international subscriptions a digital option is a coup). Definitely peruse Frame's books offerings; if you have a serious interior designer on your gift list you can pull out the stops and make his or her season. But for uber-contemporary art lovers who blur the "line" between fine art and applied arts and design, a subscription to ELEPHANT is in order.

"A view of MoMA’s second-floor atrium with Pipilotti Rist’s “Pour Your Body Out” installation." Thanks, NYT.