Nobody’s Intersubjective Spectacles : Voyage Log 0001

Here is the crime. The west was not won, it was taken. Here, a pick pocket, a poncho. I remember border towns, the one my grandmother grew up in. There she lived, dusty, wicked sunsets, there, the tip of her thumb accidentally chopped off. Birdell’s thumb shut in the the passenger side door of her father’s pick up truck while her sister Hiawatha watched. This town exists for me, exists only in my grandmother’s voice, exists only in my imagination. I am its audience.

How far is too far? Storm clouds over the reservation, the sheep wandering, sheep with wool black, white, brown, as kinky as mine. There, she felt at home. Always, somehow, everything was about borders. The reservation,  Mexico (she could clearly feel it spreading out behind her), the limits to her city, a place full of Black settlers, Mexican-Americans, Black-Mexicans, American-Mexicans, the First People, people full of hyphenated identities because so far this America spreads out far below her, all the way down to the tip of Brazil. It always has.

My brother visits this town, or this is the story I tell myself about him in New Mexico. He returned with souvenirs. He purchased his first and only poncho, serape, sarape (something specifically made to sell to foreigners). He wore it everyday for the good part of a year. He was acting like The Man With No Name and he really still is a Black White Mexican Clint Eastwood. I am his audience.

Questions:
What makes a smooth criminal?
Are we still seeking new frontiers?
Are we outlaws stealing old frontiers?
Are we ready to admit what is stolen?

 

D0D

The Prince of Pop. He’s here under the zippered shiny American Apparel jacket. Sweat shop free (TM). There is no face here and the Prince of Denmark appears to be from Seattle this time. Nice skinny jeans. It could be Justin Bieber under that black hood for all I know, but, no, it looks like this Justin can spin, can turn like a dream. This is a person that watched the Thriller video, like, a thousand times. They know the moves.

And what prince doesn’t need a private place to scream? A place to writhe and listen to Lykke Li? A place to think about their dead ex-girlfriend? A place to have a beautiful tantrum?
Is it possible to steal nobility?
What power does a prince have over himself? Over others?
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Vanessa DeWolf

Stealing content
Stealing forms
Kitsch
Dress-up
Campy
What makes kitsch?  What does kitsch need?
Collage processes.

 

NOBODY’S INTERSUBJECTIVE SPECTACLES: Voyage log 001

Why do I steal from my cultural luggage?
I watch the landscapes
I watch movies
I feel myself in the desert, a scorpion battle viewed by children.
I watch Clint Eastwood.  If I must wear a dress it will be the undergarments of The Unforgiven.

Sand gathers at the hooves of my horse.  Sand keeps changing at the edge of the Pacific.  Carkeek Park, is really pebbles.  They don’t the Atlantic of Cape Cod out here.  The light from a cigarette is tiny and afraid of cigars.

 

DØD

The figure in death
The figure in insanity
Hamlet’s untied knot, a tangle so profound it floats.
To play the Dane despite my clarity, seeking that instability and those clear naked words.

A billboard swings into view.  Burma shave lights the story as legible as 75 point font and candy coated.  The car does not need to pause.  The cape of a daughter’s drowning.  As if the devotion to a longstanding love was no more then vinyl theatrics.
After appropriations are complete where resides the realm of the now?

 

ROOM WITH THEMES

We lean in but only one makes it to the center.
There are spaces we do undertake together yet don’t traverse
the lights and the music and the runway in some new configuration
did I take it in my new configuration
the low rumble that penetrates past it all painfully reminding the built-in crescendoes
here the brokenness and we carry together one in dream-walk the other holding onto the bridge
together in the dirt they remember other footprints from some previous world,
it is not their bent spines it is not the serpentines it is that echo of a door opening and a windowing sliding shut.

 

TENSIDES: AN EXCERPT WITHOUT THROWING PLATES

The men sit on all the sides looking over the balcony
Does it matter that the administrative meeting isn’t happening?
Steal the rights to that emotion and there right there with your breath push it out
You’ve stolen so many melodramas, we all have
and we don’t get forgiven for that.  Sitting in the coolness but in desire
What devoted waiting they do?

 

ORA ET LABORA

Those are not my shirts, I’ve bleached it to the toyhouse

They reside like we all do separated by our tasks, by laundry, by doing the laundry, by ignoring it , by pushing the buttons, turning the dial by arriving in the sunshine on the cloudy days by stains and prayers and there they didn’t expect the pleasure of a mischief….isn’t that a wet t-shirt?  Isn’t that metal?  And is she a nun?  at least isn’t that her magical voice singing liturgical opera? My seat is like a pew my laughing is like a teenager with her first period.  I’m trying to carry my suitcase, my beauty case, my lipstick and my clean clean laundry to the golden gates.

 

INQUIRES

If there is nothing new, how essential is it for artists to know who we are quoting from, stealing from? Is it possible to enhance “you-ness” with stolen material?

Stealing
Appropriating
Collage
Imitation
Homage
Synchronicity
Circularity

I often notice the return to the bare-essentials on the stage.  An empty space.  Naked elements of form.  What shifts away from the state of imitation as learning?  Does imitation = craft?  Stealing as play.  Stealing as authorial sabotage.  Stealing without context.  Orientalism.  Precious.  Kitsch.  Nostalgia.  Camp.  Re-contextualizing cliche.  Preconceived > reconceived.  Shifting lineage.  Duchamp.  Source material.  How to score the possibility of stealing so the collaging has depth and life and is simple direct and rebellious/unallowed.  Not processed enough.  Mashup.  Copyright issues.  Not knowing which is the original.  Levels of mental metabolization.

Exhaustion of meanings.

 
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